WOULD it cost more, though? Let's go back to Octiana: you're not just buying the octopus tentacle geograft, but also a human torso/head morph with accompanying textures. Would it have been MORE work to create a set of octopus tentacles that could work with any character skin than it was to make Octiana the way she is? Or would it just be DIFFERENT work? Compare the above mermaid examples with the G8 Aguja/Alascanus mermaid sets. The G8 mermaids are full characters, with separate human and "mermaid" skin textures, not just for the human part, but for the mertail itself and several of the other geografts. That's a lot of extra texturing work that wouldn't have to happen if the geografts had transparency around them rather than skin texture. 

A geograft CANNOT have a transparent edge. The edge of a geograft is always a hard line that has to line up with the mesh that it is attacehd to.

As such it cannot blend from base figure to graft smoothly unless textures are made specifically for it.

There is no decent character maker that would accept a hard line edge as a natural organic look.

If you wanted to pop a different skin on the human part of my Octiana, you would get that same ugly cut like you have on the snake you have shown. So if that is the look you like, then go for it. But for a natural blending. That cannot be done with geografts.

One could argue that the use of geoshells atop a grafted area can maybe work out some limited blending, but that would be a significant amount of extra work and would really limit the design possibilities for the character if it had to rely on that.

 

This is not something that is really possible.

The reason it worked with the centaur is because there was already an established horse figure that has textures, and a human figure that has textures.

This argument doesn't hold water, because there are other geograft figures that don't have the same limitations. Take, for example, the snake tail from Dark Fantasy Add-Ons:

It's certainly not as if there were a wealth of human-sized snake textures to draw on to make this product work. Those textures were all made for this product, and they work with any G3 character. True, the transition looks cleaner on some characters than others, but the bottom line is that it was designed to be usable with any character, any skin. 

 

For something like my lekkulian:

You may have more textures for the human body, but you wont have any other textures that match up the the tentacle geograft I made for it. It is a unique mesh, and it will only have the textures that are made for it. There is no way to match that to any other human character.

That's fine for the Lekkulians, but what about something like Octiana? She's the same sort of half-human/half-creature as a centaur, mermaid, naga, etc., with a clear visual delineation between the two halves. You designed the geograft to be flat across the waist, then created a smoother transition on the character texture. That's not invalid as an approach, but you didn't HAVE to do it that way. Look back at the snake tail: the mesh of the tail goes above the actual geograft, so that the scales overlap with the human skin in different patterns. Other products, like the G2 and G3 mermaid tails, used the same approach along with an opacity gradient, to smooth the transition out even further.

This allows one to use any character they want with the mertails, which is actually a selling point for two of them. As it is, if I wanted to use any texture on Octiana other than the ones you included, the tentacles would leave a sharp line across her waist. I didn't buy Octiana for the character morph or the texture; I bought her because I wanted to use the tentacles, and the way you designed the product unnecessarily restricts how I can use them. You could have made her tentacles more general-use, but you chose to make her a more unified character, which seems to be your general approach to creature design. Now, it is your prerogative, both as an artist and a businessman, to make these choices. Personally, I wish you would make different choices, and that's what this thread is about. But don't try to tell me that they're not choices, because they are. 

Oh, one time geoshell solutions work well is if the geograft has an opaque surface and can plausibly shift to a very different skin.

For example, mermaids and serpent body figures; you expect scales and such to be opaque and look totally different than the rest.

I maybe could have been more clear in my original post that this was exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, but I would have thought the centaur reference would have been a hint at it. 

If your creature uses a geograft, could you please try to make using your geografts less dependant on using your included materials? Without calling out any creators in particular, I've purchased a number of creature products that use geografts, only to find that I'm stuck with however the creator wanted them to look. This is a problem for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I render a lot of non-white people, which means a lot of these creatures are rendered virtually unusable for me. We can turn a Daz person into just about anything we want....as long as they're white. I understand why this is the case, and I'm not accusing anybody of any malice, but it's still very frustrating for me. Daz Centaurs can use any skin you want, even non-human skins, so this is clearly not an impossible request.

You have your answers, but whilst it may not actually be impossible, it boils down to cost - how much extra are you prepared to pay for that ease-of-use?

WOULD it cost more, though? Let's go back to Octiana: you're not just buying the octopus tentacle geograft, but also a human torso/head morph with accompanying textures. Would it have been MORE work to create a set of octopus tentacles that could work with any character skin than it was to make Octiana the way she is? Or would it just be DIFFERENT work? Compare the above mermaid examples with the G8 Aguja/Alascanus mermaid sets. The G8 mermaids are full characters, with separate human and "mermaid" skin textures, not just for the human part, but for the mertail itself and several of the other geografts. That's a lot of extra texturing work that wouldn't have to happen if the geografts had transparency around them rather than skin texture. 

Yes. It takes more work to make a product work with more products.

I'm sorry but that transition from skin to snake looks terrible, as an example of a good transition, it is pitifal.

The Dev Load is the same figure, except it loads without textures or eyelashes. Also, it contains the deformers that separate the head and the body, for morph making, but this can be applied to the default load with textures.

I prefer the Dev Load, because I like to start out with a texture-less figure and see how the shape with its HD details look like before applying the textures. But my workflow is the same one I've had since the first Genesis which loaded without textures. It doesn't matter which you use, it depends if you like working with a textured figure with eyelashes, or untextured without eyelashes.

Most of the YouTube tutorials I see use the basic G8 figures for making new morphs, base resolution no lashes etc. But the G8 Dev Load is said to be intended for developers making morphs & content.

So - which do I NEED to use? Why/When?

Thanks!

I was going to suggest autofitting some G3M hair like https://www.daz3d.com/adam-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s or https://www.daz3d.com/thomas-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s.  A bit more extreme would be https://www.daz3d.com/deep-hairline-for-genesis-3 and https://www.daz3d.com/riccardo-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s  though Jian hair looks the closest especially if you use the receding hairline morph.

Jian Hair has a very similar hairline but it has that bang in front that looks weird. I also looks like old man hair to me, too thin and not completely healthy.

I am not interested in the next generation (G9), as someone pointed out already if it is mostly just poly increase to make the figures more realistic I will pass.

More poly for morph/poses/details that means I would need a better computer, I am good with Gen8 thanks.

 

P.S: The only thing that would interest me for Gen9 would be if it has some sort of killer app like Headshot.

Well G9 probably should increase the poly count so that products like Face Gen Artist Pro don't have to delete details, games are getting higher & higher poly counts anyway so that's not the issue it was in the past, but outside of that I'm interested to see what improvements the DAZ can make to G9.

Cornea Morph for the win.  The other responses just might explain it so thanks to all who responded!  Good to know it is common, I will know how to approach this next time.

I was going to suggest autofitting some G3M hair like https://www.daz3d.com/adam-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s or https://www.daz3d.com/thomas-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s.  A bit more extreme would be https://www.daz3d.com/deep-hairline-for-genesis-3 and https://www.daz3d.com/riccardo-hair-for-genesis-3-male-s  though Jian hair looks the closest especially if you use the receding hairline morph.

I do a lot of monster and cross-gender kitbashes, and it'd be super helpful to have have a morph pack with masculine upper body shapes for G8F, ideally HD. 

Right now I'm using the available cross gender morph solutions, but I haven't found a way to cross-morph only the upper torso of a G8F figure. Leaving the waist down as G8F default would make it easier to use lower body attachments like RawArt's Medusa Maker, because G8M's built-in crotch bulge tends to create distortion (and dialing it away with other morphs just causes a different distortion). 

I have a few flat chest morphs, but because they don't add any masculine shape definition there it's hard to get them to look right. 

This would almost certainly be a niche product, but I figured it's worth throwing it out there! 

ok ..I'm still confused. Are the Heads just 5 head shapes or is there more to it? 

They're five full head shapes, similar to a package like this. 

 

has anyone rendered anything wiht the new HD heads? perhaps show some examples. Thanks

Here are the heads with textures, no other head morphs dialed in. I think they have tons of character, but I'm really bad at telling the difference between HD morphs and regular morphs unless the detail is super strong. 

Thanks for the post, very useful.

Can you show a character that you like (with no HD details ideally) before and after applying the 5 morph heads.

I am curious how much they change the original shape, from how they look I'm betting a lot.

Sure! I've only got time to do one but they change the shape quite a bit. I used Kala 8 and applied both Kala and Head 1 at 50%, then both at 100%. 

Continuing with the other heads at 50% and Kala at 50%. They're really nice morphs IMO and have interesting effects on feature proportions. For example, the eyes are small compared to many female characters, and that balances the overall look of the face when added to another morph. I imagine I'll get a lot of use out of these on that alone. 

They are indeed nice head shapes but the HD details are very small in my eyes. There are plenty of other head shapes out there that look better to me and also have a nicer price/packaging.

I am glad that you find them useful though since you are the one that purchased them. I wish you many happy renders with them. :)

ok ..I'm still confused. Are the Heads just 5 head shapes or is there more to it? 

They're five full head shapes, similar to a package like this. 

has anyone rendered anything wiht the new HD heads? perhaps show some examples. Thanks

Here are the heads with textures, no other head morphs dialed in. I think they have tons of character, but I'm really bad at telling the difference between HD morphs and regular morphs unless the detail is super strong. 

Thanks for the post, very useful.

Can you show a character that you like (with no HD details ideally) before and after applying the 5 morph heads.

I am curious how much they change the original shape, from how they look I'm betting a lot.

Sure! I've only got time to do one but they change the shape quite a bit. I used Kala 8 and applied both Kala and Head 1 at 50%, then both at 100%. 

Continuing with the other heads at 50% and Kala at 50%. They're really nice morphs IMO and have interesting effects on feature proportions. For example, the eyes are small compared to many female characters, and that balances the overall look of the face when added to another morph. I imagine I'll get a lot of use out of these on that alone. 

You have better options than a 1 for 1 swap unless the Dell you bought is utter garbage. Yould add the SSD, copy your OS and program files and leave data on the old HDD. That would let you buy a 512 Gb SSD instead of a HDD.

Either way this should be seen as the first part of a new system. It would easily transfer to a new rig very easily.

Yes you're doing fine. Morph dials show up normally on the Shaping Panel, sometimes also on the Parameters Panel. Look under 'body' ... or type one of the 5 words in the search box ... something should appear.

I purchased the new product called HD Body Shapes for Genesis 8 Female which adds 5 new HD morph dials, but I can't get them to show up.  I first installed with Daz Connect and then tried a manual zip.  The product shows as installed, but it's only containing files in the /data folder and there are no library facing files to be found.  I don't see the morphs appearing for my G8F so I'm wondering if they are using different names than what the product page says (Athletic, Bold, Casual, Curvy & Slim) and I tried based on the file names under /data.  

Am I doing something wrong?

Ah, ok.

I actually used something like this with my Bocular Man, using a 'face mask' to help blend existing skins with the eyeless horror. (specifically to cover up the normal eye materials, which would really give away what the morph was doing)

Complaint:  Resignation:  (*sigh*) I still hate Microsoft Network Sharing but I'm not going to worry about it anymore.  On those days when it feels like behaving, I'll use it to transfer data from one machine to another.  On those days when it flips its wig, drops the ball, and craps all over the place I'll just use a thumbdrive like nature intended.

Non-complaint:  I'm so f'n glad I don't have to deal with Microsoft networking professionally anymore.  I'll leave it to the young people who don't know anything better.

This is not something that is really possible.

The reason it worked with the centaur is because there was already an established horse figure that has textures, and a human figure that has textures.

This argument doesn't hold water, because there are other geograft figures that don't have the same limitations. Take, for example, the snake tail from Dark Fantasy Add-Ons:

It's certainly not as if there were a wealth of human-sized snake textures to draw on to make this product work. Those textures were all made for this product, and they work with any G3 character. True, the transition looks cleaner on some characters than others, but the bottom line is that it was designed to be usable with any character, any skin. 

For something like my lekkulian:

You may have more textures for the human body, but you wont have any other textures that match up the the tentacle geograft I made for it. It is a unique mesh, and it will only have the textures that are made for it. There is no way to match that to any other human character.

That's fine for the Lekkulians, but what about something like Octiana? She's the same sort of half-human/half-creature as a centaur, mermaid, naga, etc., with a clear visual delineation between the two halves. You designed the geograft to be flat across the waist, then created a smoother transition on the character texture. That's not invalid as an approach, but you didn't HAVE to do it that way. Look back at the snake tail: the mesh of the tail goes above the actual geograft, so that the scales overlap with the human skin in different patterns. Other products, like the G2 and G3 mermaid tails, used the same approach along with an opacity gradient, to smooth the transition out even further.

This allows one to use any character they want with the mertails, which is actually a selling point for two of them. As it is, if I wanted to use any texture on Octiana other than the ones you included, the tentacles would leave a sharp line across her waist. I didn't buy Octiana for the character morph or the texture; I bought her because I wanted to use the tentacles, and the way you designed the product unnecessarily restricts how I can use them. You could have made her tentacles more general-use, but you chose to make her a more unified character, which seems to be your general approach to creature design. Now, it is your prerogative, both as an artist and a businessman, to make these choices. Personally, I wish you would make different choices, and that's what this thread is about. But don't try to tell me that they're not choices, because they are. 

Oh, one time geoshell solutions work well is if the geograft has an opaque surface and can plausibly shift to a very different skin.

For example, mermaids and serpent body figures; you expect scales and such to be opaque and look totally different than the rest.

I maybe could have been more clear in my original post that this was exactly the sort of thing I was talking about, but I would have thought the centaur reference would have been a hint at it. 

If your creature uses a geograft, could you please try to make using your geografts less dependant on using your included materials? Without calling out any creators in particular, I've purchased a number of creature products that use geografts, only to find that I'm stuck with however the creator wanted them to look. This is a problem for what I hope are obvious reasons, but I render a lot of non-white people, which means a lot of these creatures are rendered virtually unusable for me. We can turn a Daz person into just about anything we want....as long as they're white. I understand why this is the case, and I'm not accusing anybody of any malice, but it's still very frustrating for me. Daz Centaurs can use any skin you want, even non-human skins, so this is clearly not an impossible request.

You have your answers, but whilst it may not actually be impossible, it boils down to cost - how much extra are you prepared to pay for that ease-of-use?

WOULD it cost more, though? Let's go back to Octiana: you're not just buying the octopus tentacle geograft, but also a human torso/head morph with accompanying textures. Would it have been MORE work to create a set of octopus tentacles that could work with any character skin than it was to make Octiana the way she is? Or would it just be DIFFERENT work? Compare the above mermaid examples with the G8 Aguja/Alascanus mermaid sets. The G8 mermaids are full characters, with separate human and "mermaid" skin textures, not just for the human part, but for the mertail itself and several of the other geografts. That's a lot of extra texturing work that wouldn't have to happen if the geografts had transparency around them rather than skin texture. 

and DAZ instead improve the character pro bundles to instead include the HD morph for the main character which will be different for each pro bundle instead of the same as with the anatomical elements. 

They already did this, kind-of-sort-of, for some of the <name> 8 characters for Genesis 8. Can't remember offhand which ones, but some of the G8F and G8M characters (not the Pro bundle) I bought included the HD morph free. It was advertised as a temporary offer, but I see a few of the characters' store pages are still showing "HD add-on included when you buy".

Let's see... I usually don't get the HD morph, so any I have were probably included in this offer. OK, I have HDs for Alexandra 8, Edie 8, Edward 8, Floyd 8, Mabel 8, Mrs. Chow 8, Mr. Woo 8, and Ollie 8. All older characters with wrinkly features, so maybe that's why DAZ chose those particular ones for the "included" offer.

I baked them in Substance Painter.

It's been a while, but I think the steps are:

Save figure with HD details and subd 4

Save same figure at subd1 (or maybe without any hd details, depending on how the morph is set up and what you want to do; some figures separate base figure from HD details, some don't)

Load the subd1 figure into substance painter, go into the Baking window and set the subd4 figure as 'high def'.

I THINK you then just need to bake normals and then export OpenGL Normals. Something like that.

There are a host of programs that can bake like this. I know Mudbox can. Maybe Zbrush can, but I haven't experimented with it. (I tend to avoid paint/uv stuff with Zbrush with human figures because it's so funky about managing UV mapping)

has anyone rendered anything wiht the new HD heads? perhaps show some examples. Thanks

Here are the heads with textures, no other head morphs dialed in. I think they have tons of character, but I'm really bad at telling the difference between HD morphs and regular morphs unless the detail is super strong. 

Thanks for the post, very useful.

Can you show a character that you like (with no HD details ideally) before and after applying the 5 morph heads.

I am curious how much they change the original shape, from how they look I'm betting a lot.

Sure! I've only got time to do one but they change the shape quite a bit. I used Kala 8 and applied both Kala and Head 1 at 50%, then both at 100%. It looks kinda cartoonish with both morphs fully applied, but at 50% I think the results are beautiful. 

Thank you for this!

You are right, both shapes at 100% is too much as it is normal. Both at 50% is really interesting. I guess my problem with Head 1 shows up here as well and that is waaay to strong jaws for a woman for my liking but it is interesting. What I don't see though are those new HD details the new shape is supposed to bring in. Maybe somebody with a better eye can point them out for me.

I actually bought these mostly for Head 1 because it's hard to find square-jawed female characters. 

I don't personally see a lot of HD difference with them, but they look about the same to me as most HD charas sold in the store so I think it might be a positioning thing. Like folks pointed out early in the thread, these don't seem to really be HD addons for G8 so much as a set of character heads. But because they presented them in the same way they do HD addons, with a clay render only and text that makes it sound like you should dial these in to existing characters to enhance their detail, it's a bit confusing.

BTW, here was my test.

First is Exile at subd4, second is Exile at subd1, third is subd1 with Normals from baking HD details.

The second image is sort of... smoother. It's most obviously different around the nose and forehead. Third has a lot of the quality of the original image, and you can only really see the difference along a few edges, and only if you peer very closely.

That's a super clear example, thank you!