From a member since 2008 - Shout out to all of those who keep that Carrara fire alive.
ALSO give it up for the actual DAZ family - from the software engineers to Victoria herself!!

There are many posts about a possible Carrara v.9.  These post range from software improvement 'wishlists' to rational and guesses to what is happening behind the scenes at Daz.

Yes, v.9 software improvements would be great - but even better would be the celebration from die hard Carrara fans!
...even an email from Daz (or partner company) about development would send many users into the clouds.

"Carrara don't ever change for me." - you are already great.

Each new software feature adds to the already crowded interface, plus requires more user knowledge.
and..."Don't you dare say node based system."

While software development does take work behind the scenes --
Here are some suggestions that reduce the existing Carrara software footprint and improve function WITHOUT additonal User learning curves:

#1. Make Modifiers able to drag and drop reorder with on/off checkbox.  Requires no new user knowledge.  Improves existing user experience.
#2. Remove Storyboard.  - This reduces software resources and development.  Clears UI space. Requires less user knowledge.
#3. Combine the Primative and Vertex model experience.  - Many of these features overlap.

Keeping new features to a minimum and streamlining what already exists is the key to v.9. 

Its not a wishlist it's a checklist. - CARRARA NEXT

FSMCDesigns said:

It's very possible it's due to changes in Daz Studio over the years. Rigging has changed, properties have changed, lots of older products have issues or don't work at all in newer versions of DS. Any particular reason you can't use a newer figure?

Honestly Im just interested in the history of Daz and their products. Thanks to a friend of mine who had V1/V2 on an old machine and shared them with me, I now have every version of Victoria 1 through 8 and its been fun to load each one in and see the progress that has been made with each version. In all fairness its kind of hard to even find much information on the older models, probably due to the internet being in its early years and that it was just a long time ago. I have so many questions........Questions like who actually modeled the first victoria? was it one person or a group effort.....who makes any of the victoria models? I know its 'Daz Originals' but I often wonder who the actual Genius is? .

I realise I may not ever get the answers to some of these crazy questions, and im ok with it, its just been fun searching and exploring the world of Daz (and Poser)! :)

mortonmccastle said:

The models I want are for Genesis 3. Does that mean they are not compatible with the current version of Daz Studio?

I'm still working with Genesis (the original 1st gen) at the time of writing so... don't worry about age. Just because something is older doesn't mean it no longer works. DS provides support for all generations of Genesis.

However...  do make sure that any props or clothing is made for Genesis 3. Clothing for Genesis 1,2 and 3 will (often) work on Genesis 8 but clothing made for Genesis 8 is highly unlikely to work on older generations. Of course there are no guarantees either way.

I am very new to Daz 3D. I signed up yesterday. I used to spend a lot of time on DeviantArt and I noticed that a lot of people were using the same models, and those people were using the same program - Daz3D.

Daz Studio is an excellent program for building up 3D renders, and it provides support for just about everything, including Poser material (Poser is another 3D program).

I understand that the latest Genesis is Genesis 8.1, and the skip from G3 to G8 was to be consistent with the Victoria and Michael models. Are models called meshes?

Basically every 3D figure, whether it's a Genesis based figure or a prop such as a barrel, wall or a lamp is a mesh. A mesh is a 3D figure that's made up from polygones, which are basically the smallest part of a 3D model. This may be a good read / starting point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygon_mesh

 

I heard that older Genesis (like 2 and 3) clothes are compatible with newer Genesis (8 and 8.1) but meshes are not. Is Genesis 8.1 the current version of Daz Studio? If so, then it sounds like G3 models/meshes will not work.

That information is somewhat incorrect. Clothes are also meshes.

As to Genesis: 8.1 is the latest version of Genesis but that doesn't mean anything. At best it means most artists will be focusing their attention to this because it's "new and hot" yet that only means so much. Like I said above I still use Genesis and Genesis 2 based figures on a frequent basis myself. Nothing wrong with that and it's stil fully supported.

The measurements of the ideal runway fashion model are 72 inches tall and 32-22-33. 

The measurements of the ideal Victoria's Secret model are 69 inches tall and 34-24-34.

I used Measure Metrics to make my figures these exact dimensions (don't ask me how - I don't remember).

The chest of the fashion model will likely be somewhat flat, but if you make her torso narrower, you can dial in a few inches of breasts so that the circumfrence of the chest is still 32 inches.

Here is an iimage of Genesis3Female with the ideal runway model measurements.  The 2nd image is the same figure, but I made the chest narrower to balance them with the width of the hips, and added a few inches of breasts.

The head morph is 100% Chara.  The hair is Chace.  The skin texture is Brittany with the translucency lowered.  The clothing is the Dance Gear leotard.  The third image is the 2nd image model wearing the Ghost Bride outfit.

This body is just the base G3Female body with no character dialed into the body.  I just altered the chest-waist-hip measurements.  There are some really great products in the store for shapiing body parts - such as https://www.daz3d.com/killer-legs-morphs-for-genesis-3-female-s

If you want a figure that looks like a model in a fashion illustration, my choice would be Aiko 6.

Stepanida, Noemi, Misumi, RY Alison, Evangeliya, and RY Adeline are great characters and combine pretty well together too

https://www.daz3d.com/ry-adeline-for-victoria-8

https://www.daz3d.com/ry-alison-for-victoria-8

https://www.daz3d.com/evangeliya-hd-for-genesis-8-female

https://www.daz3d.com/stepanida-hd-for-genesis-8-female

https://www.daz3d.com/misumi-hd--signature-smile-hd-expression-for-genesis-8-female

https://www.daz3d.com/noemi-hd--smile-hd-expression-for-genesis-8-female

They are all very tall like supermodels and while some might be more athletic than you're looking for they combine really well and I'd get face and body morphs too like others said 

Arabella 7 is the model thin frame you probably want. https://www.daz3d.com/arabella-7

She is Genesis 3, but can be converted to 8. If you are not into her skin, then that makes it even easier as you only need to convert her morph. Keep in mind HD morphs cannot transfer, so don't get the HD Add On unless you want to use the Genesis 3 outright. Genesis 3 does have a lot of skinnies. But you should be able dial in Genesis 8 with various morphs. Use the thin morph on some other character instead of the base for example. You can make Victoria 8 model thin with some morphs. Fairy type characters are always on the thin side. Karyssa 8 is SUPER thin, maybe even too thin. If you think her hips are too thin, just use a dial that adjust hips. There are tons of fairy and elvish characters for Daz. Some of the Asian characters by Rarestone, CrocodileLui, and others are pretty thin as well. Some my have toonish faces, but they have the model body, you can use any face. Some of the anime like characters also fit this mold.

Sometimes the promo pics don't really convey how thin a character is. There are plenty of characters that are super thin, but it isn't really obvious in their promos. Karyssa is great example. You can probably tell she is thin, but it isn't until you place her in a scene with other more normal characters that you see just how thin she is. I've bought several Asian characters and have been surprised how thin they are compared to others.

If you need more defined features, several HD morph packs will add them.

Everyone's opinion differs, so just buy the V8 morphs and the Killer Legs morphs and make her the way you want.  I would start with Victoria 8.0.  I find that she is compatible with most poses, as she has been DAZ's "standard."

https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-8-female-body-morphs

https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-8-female-head-morphs

https://www.daz3d.com/killer-legs-2-0-morphs-for-genesis-8-female

 

 

cclesue said:

Any ideas on the dress?

I would say it is the one included in the product. 

Edit to add link: https://www.daz3d.com/vyk-robyn-character-and-outfit-for-victoria-81

If you are ONLY looking for runway type poses that won't push the ancient Victoria 3 based joint geometry beyond what it can cope with, this V3 based but standalone model is old fashioned runway fodder: https://www.daz3d.com/glamorous-vicki-set-for-victoria-3-0. Because it's a standalone figure, and not a morph of V3, alternative clothing is pretty limited, though dForce draping helps these days. To show the figure can be updated to IRay and provided joint limits are observed it can look pretty decent: https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/gallery/older-figures-updated-/2936479/.

Beyond fairly limited joint ranges, it's probably better to use a much more sophisticated G8F character. There are a few. For an Easter European vibe, Anastasia. Legs can be lengthened if need be: https://www.daz3d.com/anastasia-for-genesis-8-female

Then there is the very, very leggy and slender Aniyah: https://www.daz3d.com/aniyah-for-darcy-8

The Aniyah body with different head and texture can make any character into a runway model, like this one: https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/gallery/show-us-yer-muscles-girlie/2925860/

FP said:

Byrdie said:

The sweater will probably work well enough though you may need to adjust the materials because they're set up for Poser not iray. The other product however would be useless in Daz because Studio and Poser have completely different lighting systems. That said, they're both free so you've nothing to lose but your time should you decide to download and play around with them.

Why offer a useless or difficult item to use? That's like my next door neighbor giving me a bicycle tire when I don't own a bike. They may have good intentions but it's ultimately pointless.

Possibly because Poser users still come to DAZ for Victoria 4 and accessories, and they are still customers.

Since you are so new, I strongly suggest watching some video's about the models and the characters created for them so you know what they are and how to use them. You will also find video's on fitting clothes, included fitting clothes made for another model.

Buying converters for your preferred model can eventually empty your bank account, so it's best to know what these converters are and how to use them. Again there are video's about this.

My last suggestion is to get the head and body morphs, as many characters created will require these, that is why Parallax mentioned Olympia and Victoria, those are morphs, each model has their own version of these. Each model has their own set of head and body morphs.

When you look in the store and see a character you like, read the information, as morphs made for G8 will not work on other Genesis models without the use of a converter, same goes with clothes and skin textures.

This person has some very good beginner video's you might want to check out.

https://www.youtube.com/c/ParmyBaddhan/videos

Since I'm an old guy I tend to gravitate to older figures. Realistic to me is RY Frida

https://www.daz3d.com/ry-frida-for-victoria--8
 

And RY Martha

https://www.daz3d.com/ry-martha-for-genesis-8-female

Just picked up this figure Izolda the other day from Rendo  by EichhornArt 

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/bcs/?ViewProduct=136734

Anyway I think these are realistic older babes.

 

mortonmccastle said:

Richard Haseltine said:

All versions of Genesis still work - each has its own Starter Essentials, which you will need to get the base figure available so that the character can be used.

Ok, so this thing (Genesis 3 Starter Essentials) contains a Base Figure, and as long as I have that installed and the Base Figure in use, any G3 models I purchase should work. Is that correct? Thank you for the quick answer!

Unless stated otherwise by the artist who you're buying from. Some may require you have Victoria 7, Olympia 7 or Monique 7 installed for example.
Otherwise, just look at them as DLCs for a game. It's all good to go :)

The models I want are for Genesis 3. Does that mean they are not compatible with the current version of Daz Studio? I am very new to Daz 3D. I signed up yesterday. I used to spend a lot of time on DeviantArt and I noticed that a lot of people were using the same models, and those people were using the same program - Daz3D. I understand that the latest Genesis is Genesis 8.1, and the skip from G3 to G8 was to be consistent with the Victoria and Michael models. Are models called meshes? I heard that older Genesis (like 2 and 3) clothes are compatible with newer Genesis (8 and 8.1) but meshes are not. Is Genesis 8.1 the current version of Daz Studio? If so, then it sounds like G3 models/meshes will not work.

If you mean https://www.daz3d.com/animate-belly-dancing-for-victoria-8 then Aniblocks are accessed through the AniMate pane - you need the full version (AniMate 2 rather than AniMate Lite) to bake to the Timeline, as far as I recall.

Actually, more products like this

https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-4-for-genesis-2-female

to bring Michael 4 shape and materials ahead to further generations wouldn't be bad!

chris_63502790 said:

Long time Unity dev here... been using the bridge for a bit, a few issues that would really help make imported models look better or performant.

Hi,

I can't speak on behalf of Daz or the Daz Bridges team, but I will point out that the group working on the Daz Bridges is small, and that they are responsible for all the bridges; not just DazToUnity: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/469326/daz-bridge-support-is-here/p1. ; I agree with you that frequent communication and updates is always a good thing, but in my humble opinion, the updates and communication from the Daz Bridge team has been better than most major software companies, especially for a family of products that was announced less than 12 months ago.

With regards to your specific itemized issues, I can give you some of my thoughts and possible solutions based on my work with the Bridge source code over the past few months:

1. Unity does not do well with hundreds of materials per model. Sometimes the asset bridge iterates through the model being exported to unity and creates hundreds of materials for a prop/model. It would be very helpful for performance reasons in a production environment, if the asset bridge could realize the same material is being copied over and over and just reference the 1 material rather than creating multiple copies of the same material over and over.

Agreed.  I already have plans to create a material lookup table and merge equivalent materials during the Unity material creation process.

2. Emissive maps are often not generated or the settings for the emissive are wrong in the IrayUberMetal shader. Emission strength, EmissionExposureWeight are often set to 1 or 0 which doesn't cause Unity HDRP to actually create the emissive effect on materials. 

Thanks for reporting this.  I just looked at the "Emission Color" processing code and confirm that this is a bug.  The EmissionStrength and EmissionExposureWeight shader parameters are not being set for IrayUber materials during the Unity material creation process.  I will try to make a hotfix for this in the Unofficial DTU project and then make a pull request upstream to the official DazToUnity github repository as soon as I can.

3. Sliders for adjusting the Metallic/Specular/Height/Normal floats for the IrayUber shaders would be fantastic, trying to adjust the float numbers manually can be a bit of a pain at times.

I agree as well.  You can very easily make this improvement yourself by right-clicking a material, selecting "Edit Shader...", then finding the desired parameter, such as "Metallic", and then finding the "Mode" dropdown and changing it from "Default" to "Slider".  Then click "Save Asset".  I'll put this on my todo list, but I will probably take me some time, as I already have about 2-3 months of work mapped out.  If you would like to submit your changes, that would be awesome -- but please submit .shadergraph files made with Unity 2019, since they don't seem to be backward compatible.

4. Hair looks less than awesome when exporting to Unity HDRP 7.x, Unity has a LTS (long term support) build for HDRP 10.x (v2020.3.17f1) which now includes a native Hair & Eye shader for HDRP. The hair shader is much better than the IrayUber shader. Maybe consider an option to use the native HDRP shaders for Unity rather than the IrayUber ones.

Already on my todo list, as well as support for dForce strand based hair.

5. Now the most important one....A lot of fidelity is lost on exporting models from Daz to Unity, specifically it looks like in the wireframe handling for faces. My guess is that the export is doing wireframe reduction (?) or some other type of mesh base operation which causes a significant loss in model fidelity. So, here's what artists do in workflow for game design in production, we actually use 2 models, one for closeup cinematics/cutscences, and another model for gameplay. The cutscene models are close up and have a much higher tris count. This is fine because, when doing cutscenes, we're not loading a huge unity scene, so the higher tris count is fine and performant in most cases. LODs are typically not used in cutscenes. In gameplay, lower tris models are used since the camera is some distance away. With Daz, model exports are losing a lot of HD face details. I think a lot of it depends on the model, since some of the daz models use layered normal maps to create additional detail and some increased wirewrame tris. My recomendation would be to do what Character Creator does, give us the option on the export tris count (ie max, etc). Let us decide how much you're cutting off the export.

I'm not sure 100% what you mean by wireframe handling, but I think you might be talking about "mesh resolution" or "subdivision level".  Most current Daz3D assets are modelled using Subdivision Surface technology (just do an internet search for "Subdivision Surfaces" for more info).  Currently, the DazToUnity bridge can only effectively export figures at Subdivision Level 0, aka no subdivisions (base mesh).  Usually, Daz Studio renders figures in the viewport at subdivision level 1 or 2 by default.  So that mesh resolution difference from 0 to 1 or 2 subdivision levels may be what you are describing as loss of fidelity.  Although you can specify higher levels of subdivision in the DazToUnity Bridge options, these levels are not fully supported because the extra vertices generated do not have corresponding bone weights calculated for them yet.  There is a solution for the DazToUnreal Bridge using opensubdiv to calculate the missing boneweights.  This is also on my todo list.

EDIT: Just to be clarify: the Bridge currently does not perform any polygon reduction (sometimes also called mesh decimation) or otherwise reduce the number of triangles in a mesh below the base mesh resolution.  It is just outputting the base resolution without the enhanced subdivision detail that is by default enabled in the viewport and render windows of DazStudio.

6. Geoshells, Geoshells, Geoshells.... this is a nightmare for any pipeline workflow, whether exporting to Unity, Unreal, or Charactor Creator. Please, for the love that all that is holy, do something about Geoshell exports. My recomendation would be a material baking process to remap and bake the entire thing on export for 4096k textures for HDRP, yes 4k. 

I agree that the best solution may be baking... but it is not as simple as just simple L.I.E. texture baking.  Please note that Geoshells do something that regular L.I.E. textures simply can not do: they can map textures onto the underlying mesh using a completely different set of geometry, topology, UV coordinates, normal vectors, etc.  This allows geoshells to apply fine texture details efficiently onto areas that would normally suffer from texture stretching, deformations or seams if applied using the underlying mesh alone.  That means that in order to bake the geoshell onto the underlying mesh, you need to project the texture information from one coordinate space onto the textures of a different coordinate space, and that means all the advantages of the geoshell are lost; potentially causing a lot of awful looking textures.  So if the underlying mesh uses a 4K texture, the baked texture using this theoretical geoshell projection algorithm might need 16K to achieve the same quality.  So there are lots of things to consider and, unfortunately, none of the proper solutions that I'm aware of are mathematically, logistically or financially simple.  My current planned workaround would be to optionally exclude them from export, also on my todo list.

7. Add an option to export all the texture files to Unity. A lot of the Daz assets have multiple texture maps for small changes to the look of an asset, a color change from red to blue for example. The export doesn't pick up these extra textures in the folder for the asset, so we have to a) find the texture in daz, b) copy it over to unity manually. It could be great if there was a little checkbox to copy all the textures in the daz asset folder for that model over Unity in like a "SourceTexture" or Misc folder. 

If I understand correctly, you want to be able to select a figure from the viewport for export, then have the option to export all the make-up variations, eye-color variations, etc. at one time.  Instead of selecting the figure from the viewport, it might be possible to do create a function to do something similar by directly specifying the Product Package to export, ex: select the Victoria 8.1 Product off the "Smart Content" panel and export all the texture set variations from that, rather than selecting a figure from the viewport.  The problem is this: since modern Daz figures are made to be vertex order / morph and often UV compatible with other figures within its generation, I don't know if there is a 100% accurate way to do a reverse lookup on the active texture applied to a material and trace it back to the Product Package to which it belongs.  Unfortunately, exporting from the Product Package would require code that processes and converts the asset library data rather than processing and converting the active scenegraph data.  I could possibly make a script-based solution that reads the asset library data for a selected Product Package and instantiates all combinations of texture sets onto as many active figures as needed and then batch export all of them into Unity using the DazToUnity Bridge.  I will consider putting this on my todo list, but it isn't something I can do this year.

8. Instances!!!! In Daz, assets have instances, when exporting it over, there's no mesh for the instance. I get that his is helping Daz to be performant and it doesn't really exist in Daz, but it breaks a model when exporting it to unity and it's additional work for developers to locate the original object that was instanced and duplicate/place it where it belongs. Again, maybe a checkbox that copies that mesh source and creates it on export at the x,y,z cordinate where the instance is supposed to be. I get it might not be "exact" for every Daz asset, but at least it's something that might save us some time in the workflow.

Already on my todo list.  But if anyone wants to contribute this as a script, that would be much appreciated by myself and the community!

9. Make it paid gateway so you can maintain it, it kind of sucks to offer this bridge and then sort of leave it like a ghost town without frequent updates. I know that if this were consistently maintained, I'd gladly pay for it to be improved over time.

I think Daz3D has already committed itself to making the Daz Bridges completely free and open source.  In my opinion, that decision is much better for the community longterm.  However, I do appreciate the need for the existence of a premium or VIP subscription support service for game studios or other businesses which need time-critical help.  I think offering a yearly developer subscription plan that includes priority support separate from the forums, PC+ discount pricing and the interactive licenses for $5 or $10 would be a very big hit.

I took a look at the Enterprise licensing plans and they are actually very competitive, when you factor in the included interactive licenses and number of seats.  If they included VIP support, maybe that could be an option for you.  If you need higher quality integration with Unity Engine, you may want to try the Unity Asset Store Tafi products.

Hope this helps.  Good luck with your projects.

Also, you may want to consider trying the Unofficial DTU Bridge if you haven't already done so.  I've added a number of bugfixes and quality of life improvements for HDRP, as well as URP and Built-in RenderPipelline support.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/494626/unofficial-updates-for-daztounity-bridge-urp-built-in-pbrskin-anims-dforce

PerttiA said:

Choppski said:

WHen you mention that I need terabytes of storage space--is that for content or is that for running the program? That is, is it because it uses disk space?

Content 

 I can assume that someone already mentioned it, but in case it has not been mentioned, the minimum of 1Tb of space is requested as well as for temporary files created during the rendering process, if I remember correctly, for complex scenes it may take quite a lot of space.

For laptops you can buy external boxes for graphics. I don’t know how effective it is for current graphics, but it looked pretty handy a few years ago. I haven’t checked that again because my dream now is to have a desktop with a thermaltake WP100 case.

In a calculation I saw in one of the threads of this forum there was talk of 8Tb for content. Looking at what I have: a lot of old freebies and about 1500 products, that calculation seems to me a good approximation for a regular buyer who has a lot of hair and clothes that compressed reach 300 or 700 mb. The textures  decompressed usually occupy up to four times their compressed space. 

The store currently reaches 82,000 products (some of them vaulted), of which approximately 50,000 belong to the Genesis 3/ Iray era, taking into consideration that Victoria 7 is the product 21750 and we leave out of account the products inherited from RuntimeDNA. I have no way to estimate how many Gen3/Iray products there are in Renderosity and other stores, I don’t think it’s less than half. So the potential to reach 8Tb is there (and in your wallet through the years)

However, to manage the growth of the library you can think to have in the future a Qnap and buy the disks needed over the years.

Wonderland said:

Most of the poses that come in bundles or in PC club are not sexy. I think most poses here are not sexy ENOUGH. I do cheesecake or fashion model type stuff, (not porn,) and I find the poses here too boring and always tweak them to make them sexier or more interesting, And it’s not just sex appeal, it’s details. Boring hands, feet, awkward positioning... Everything has to be tweaked a lot no matter what. ThoseThings and Rarestone have some interesting poses to start as bases, but most pose sets I just find dull and unrealistic even as cheesecake or supposedly sexy.., I wish they would look at Victoria Secret catalogs, current fashion magazines or celebrity poses instead of old poses from the 1950’s. 

As a retired professional photographer for 18 years, I wish more people would take a course on posing.   One of the BEST instructors there is on this topic is Bambi Cantrel.   Also, the late Monte Zucher was a pro at it.

There are "rules" to good looking poses a lot of people don't recognize just looking at fasion pictures (like in Victoria's Secret ads).  As with any "rule", some get broken with good results, but on the most part they are called "rules" because they WORK.

Here's some examples of posing rules used in photography:

• for women, no back-of-the hand towards the viewer - always use the pinkie or thumb edge
• for men, back of the hand is okay - it's masculine looking
• the leg towards the camera should conceal the crotch area
• for women, hip out to one side, shoulder that is closes the camera lower.
• for men, shift the weight off one foot, but keep the hips parallel to the ground, shoulder towards the camera should up higher
• use the arms to draw the viewer to the face

Those are just a few, but the one I just dispise in many canned pose sets is the leg revealing the crotch.  Even fully clothed it doesn't look "sexy", but "solicitous".

I wasn't sure whether to if I should ask this question here, or in Technical Support, but, as it refers to a product, I think here is best.

As the title says, one of the things I would like to see is Iray textures for some of the older Aeon Soul products (when he/they went by other names in the past).

In particular, I would like to see Iray textures for the old Earthbreaker armor set for Victoria 4 (see attached image).

I have been able to use the base armor in Daz (and even fit it to Genesis 3 and Genesis 8 with a 3rd party app), but of course the textures don't transfer.

Even using various techniques to convert them to Iray (that I know of, anyway), the textures on the armor still come off as 'painted on', instead of the extreme level of detail they have in Poser.

Does anyone know if Aeon Soul has made Iray textures for his older, 'out of print' products, or where to find them?

If not, well, that's the suggestion I have to make