True, the claws on those dogs look like bear claws!

Is there a morph to make them smaller?

Yes, -100 for longer & +100 for clipped (but they really look shorter, not clipped)

Cool! Thank you! 

Thank you for the nice comments, Novica and L’Adair.  And thanks, Novica, for the help...I’ll give that a try.  I don’t like the claws either, I figured I’d try removing them in Photoshop, but I’ll for sure use the morph to make them shorter.

True, the claws on those dogs look like bear claws!

Is there a morph to make them smaller?

Yes, -100 for longer & +100 for clipped (but they really look shorter, not clipped)

True, the claws on those dogs look like bear claws!

Is there a morph to make them smaller?

No, the gaming industry uses tools like bumps, normal, displacement and so on because it's faster, easier, more accurate and lets them automate more of the process then hi-res sculpting because their old work flow is high-res sculpting to lo-res model plus those various geometry image maps for details.

That approach makes for smaller downloads, lets LOD be a function of GPU capability and not something that requires extra storage and work to create for pre-inclusion, and so many other advantages that I wonder when they are going to come up with 3D models that are nothing more than a set of mercator and/or some other styles 2D projection maps as appropriate for the data that are put together at runtime at a level of detail that the GPU the SW is running on can handle. 

HUH?? I didn't understand a word you just said...

Exactly. The process is low-res, then add in high res details. The normals come from the hi-res details so the mesh can stay low poly. That's why if you think you can sculpt hi-res and get a HD morph, you're absolutely wrong.

Where is G8 better than older figures? Good question. When I saw G8 first I noticed no difference. I bought a heavily reduced Lucas8 and Stefanie8 out of curiosity and was annoyed about the new base pose and the difficulty to use old stuff with them.

The latter problem was solved with the change to 4.10. Any old clothing fits G8 well. It is especially nice that I can use Genesis stuff on G8 much easier than on G3, out of the box.

To the former question, "G8 better than G3?", over the time I felt the difference mainly in the shoulder area in some positions. G3 is better than G2 here and G8 is better than G3. If you make only close-ups or use certain positions it may not be even noticable. And perhaps it depends also on what figure of the G8 family you use, what body morphs and so on.

The thing is that some of the morph packages can overcome the shortfalls in the standard G3 figures and characters. I mean the aforementioned Zev0 packs and I also recently bought the Musculature HD Morphs Bundle which has a nice discount of 70% (still so, I've just checked). Together these add realism to any G3 character but that requires a bit of slider-pushing. That, for me, is great fun but I guess others prefer to buy pre-made characters rather than dialing-in their own creations.

 Iray doesn't care about rigging or morphs - and sends that to the GPU.

Ahhh...thanks...That's what I was trying to figure out, what scene stuff was unnecessary to transfer when rendering. 

BTW, I'm trying to figure out what "uncompressed" means when it comes to textures. Presumably most are JPGs, which by definition are compressed. And I'd think the renderer needs high-res textures to calculate the image. So if you compress the already-compressed JPG textures you're losing definition in your image.

Hmmm.....

It seems this topic comes up every few months and generally the response should be the same. HD is an internal tool that DAZ and PAs use to for selling products in this store. PAs that have access to is can only use it for items sold here and can't distributed outside the store. It's basically their brand and they're under no obligation to give it away or sell it. If you wish to use the tool you have to be a PA with a prduct to sell that uses it. Everything beyond that is speculation. Even without the tool, people need to be able to morph a low poly mesh because that's what it requires to begin with. If you don't have access to the tool, then learning to sculpt on a low poly mesh along with making displacement/normal maps is your only option. 

I think working on LoRez and using normal maps is a really good way to go.  This is how the game industry works and their realism is looking awesome.
 

True, but they do this for a reason which is the game engine usually has a finite amount of resources and in order to achieve a certain level of detail they can't get with straight modeling because it would take away from resources, they rely on the normal maps for the detail. Think of it as a heavily biased renderer, but for textures and mesh. I would much rather rely on the mesh and modeling for render assets such as figures

Not to mention a high res mesh would be a royal pain to animate...

RawArt and DzFire are able to create unique Genesis 8 creatures, so it should be possible to assign G8 rigs to the previous generations.

In that case, it's no longer a Genesis 8 morph but it's a new kind of figure compatible with Genesis 8.

It seems this topic comes up every few months and generally the response should be the same. HD is an internal tool that DAZ and PAs use to for selling products in this store. PAs that have access to is can only use it for items sold here and can't distributed outside the store. It's basically their brand and they're under no obligation to give it away or sell it. If you wish to use the tool you have to be a PA with a prduct to sell that uses it. Everything beyond that is speculation. Even without the tool, people need to be able to morph a low poly mesh because that's what it requires to begin with. If you don't have access to the tool, then learning to sculpt on a low poly mesh along with making displacement/normal maps is your only option. 

I think working on LoRez and using normal maps is a really good way to go.  This is how the game industry works and their realism is looking awesome.
 

True, but they do this for a reason which is the game engine usually has a finite amount of resources and in order to achieve a certain level of detail they can't get with straight modeling because it would take away from resources, they rely on the normal maps for the detail. Think of it as a heavily biased renderer, but for textures and mesh. I would much rather rely on the mesh and modeling for render assets such as figures

So, I'm using a partial A4 (50%) with a base V4 character, currently loaded with morphs++ etc. -- a basic rig I use all the time in Poser Pro 14.

The body and head shapes work fine, and even look the way I'd like.

But there's something wrong with Aiko 4's eyes.  It's like they didn't adjust to the new shape along with the rest of her head or something -- so they're too close together (or too small?) and she looks cross-eyed.

(See attachments.)

I _thought_ there was some kind of simple morph fix for this, but I can't find it anywhere in with the A4 stuff, nor has searching Poser turned it up.

How can I fix this?  Should the eyes be scaled or moved somehow?

Or is that easy "fix eyes" dial somewhere that I can't find it?

Please help!

Thanks.

-- Steve

It seems this topic comes up every few months and generally the response should be the same. HD is an internal tool that DAZ and PAs use to for selling products in this store. PAs that have access to is can only use it for items sold here and can't distributed outside the store. It's basically their brand and they're under no obligation to give it away or sell it. If you wish to use the tool you have to be a PA with a prduct to sell that uses it. Everything beyond that is speculation. Even without the tool, people need to be able to morph a low poly mesh because that's what it requires to begin with. If you don't have access to the tool, then learning to sculpt on a low poly mesh along with making displacement/normal maps is your only option. 

I think working on LoRez and using normal maps is a really good way to go.  This is how the game industry works and their realism is looking awesome.
 

Based on what I've observed, it seems like the process is something like this. If somebody knows better please enlighten me:

• When you hit Render, raw scene data is read from disk into system RAM. On my 64GB system I've loaded multiple scenes until this value gets over 30GB in order to stress my system.
• Once it's all in system RAM, the CPU gets busy, and the Iray code within Studio starts converting that raw scene data into Iray calculations (light bounces and stuff). This Iray data ends up being a fraction of the memory requirement of the raw scene data. In my case, with a total of 19GB VRAM capacity across two GPU's (11 plus 8), the VRAM fills to around 17GB, or 1GB below each GPU's capacity. So VRAM usage is roughly half of the raw scene usage in system RAM. 
• Once it's converted to Iray, the code checks to see what memory is available by summing all the available GPU VRAM. This number varies based on stuff like:
  • Whether other apps are using some portion of the VRAM on any card (like running a monitor, etc.), making the available VRAM  on that card less
  • Some overhead required for the GPU driver and other stuff needed to run and schedule each GPU
  • The total VRAM requirement. Maybe it doesn't need all available VRAM from all cards for the particular scene
  • Other stuff
• Once it sees what's available it allocates/grabs the VRAM, then starts sending the iray calculation code via PCI to the GPU's, using all available VRAM as one big chunk.
• Once the entire scene is loaded into the GPU's and ready to be calculated, the user sees the first grainy Iray render in the preview window. 
• After that, the GPU's just keep cranking, with no more transfer into or out of VRAM.
• When enough calcs have been done to make an updated preview image, a new image is sent to Studio and to the monitor.

I'm especially unclear on the first couple of steps above, since when you load a big scene, before you hit Render, the scene is visible, but doesn't load up system RAM very much. Not sure how that happens...

It seems this topic comes up every few months and generally the response should be the same. HD is an internal tool that DAZ and PAs use to for selling products in this store. PAs that have access to is can only use it for items sold here and can't distributed outside the store. It's basically their brand and they're under no obligation to give it away or sell it. If you wish to use the tool you have to be a PA with a prduct to sell that uses it. Everything beyond that is speculation. Even without the tool, people need to be able to morph a low poly mesh because that's what it requires to begin with. If you don't have access to the tool, then learning to sculpt on a low poly mesh along with making displacement/normal maps is your only option. 

Ahhh, ok. So when Nicstt mentioned above he's been able to import models with further subdivision, he was importing an entirely new figure.

Seems reasonable for Daz to lock that down, at least in my opinion.

You also mentioned: 'Anyone can make a morph of a subdivided DAZ figure in any 3D modelling application,'

Is that true? Every time I've attempted an export from Daz, it forces me to export at Base resolution (if I recall)...or maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe I had to export at base because I planned on re-importing back to Daz. Now it's all becoming clear. :)

You can definitely export the subdivided version. Having forgotten to set resolution to "base" before export is actually one of the most common problems users face when they try to create their first morph.

I think the real real HD tools are withheld from us customers is because they are so easy to use to do even low-res regular modeling with.

I'm not sure I see your point... For HD morphs you do the actual modelling in an external modelling software, like for a standard-res morph. The only thing the HD tool does is import the modified HD mesh back as a morph of the original figure...

A subdivided model is not a secret recipe. Everybody knows what HD models are and many people can build one. This purely about restricting access.

 

The logic behind keeping it locked to specific people fails when you factor that anyone can become a PA. Its not exactly secret if anyone can become a PA and access it. KFC didn't even tell its own employees its secret.

 

It makes even less sense when Daz happily advertises "model, render, animate" on its main page, and proudly boasts Hexagon alongside Daz Studio in order to push this. With Hexagon, a user could create everything they ever need and not spend a single dime in the Daz store.

 

But of course people do buy things. This analogy is more like changing your own oil. Anybody can change the oil on their car, and yet in spite of that oil changes are big business. Everybody from Walmart to local garages offer the service, and there are companies whose entire concept is based on oil changes like Jiffy Lube.

 

And that is how Daz makes money. Anybody can create and render 3D models, but Daz Studio is the Jiffy Lube of 3D. The paint by numbers, ect. Just like millions of people don't wont to bother with oil changes, many people don't want to bother building everything in 3D. So Daz offers just about everything in a premade state for customers.

 

And that is why blocking access to HD for non PAs makes no sense. Opening it up would not cause some wild floodgate of people to stop buying content from Daz. If anything it could actually improve sales because think of all the new HD transfer products that could be sold. HD might attract more artists to Daz, like those who balk at the super low poly models offered here.

I agree with your main point here that there is an argument that restricting the tool isn't necessarily good business sense, but I do think that's a matter of debate (I am not saying that I agree with their policy, by the way). However, I'm not entirely convinced by all your arguments. Clearly, making the tool publicly available would not result in customers not buying products, so we can discount that as a reason. What I think DAZ's reasoning is, is that it would increase competition from artists selling at other outlets (e.g. Rendo). I don't agree that the restriction stifles creativity in DAZ's own market, though. This is how I understand it: if PA who doesn't have access to the HD tool offers a product that requires HD and that product is acceptable to DAZ as commercial, then that artist will be given access to the tool. By the way, I have heard from a PA here in this forum that not all PA's have access to the tool so it is more restricted even within DAZ's own market than you are saying. However, I do agree that it is not a "secret", as I've said above.

I like the analogy of the oil change, though :)

Ahhh, ok. So when Nicstt mentioned above he's been able to import models with further subdivision, he was importing an entirely new figure.

Seems reasonable for Daz to lock that down, at least in my opinion.

You also mentioned: 'Anyone can make a morph of a subdivided DAZ figure in any 3D modelling application,'

Is that true? Every time I've attempted an export from Daz, it forces me to export at Base resolution (if I recall)...or maybe I'm misremembering. Maybe I had to export at base because I planned on re-importing back to Daz. Now it's all becoming clear. :)

I suppose Daz's restricted HD tool does make it significantly easier somehow...by simply allowing you to do it all in Daz itself...or perhaps it just saves you the cost of needing to shell out for ZBrush? Genuinely curious as to the benefit of the HD tool over what we all have free access to.

I agree that Chohole's analogy isn't perfectly cromulent. As Outrider42 says, the "recipe" isn't a secret. What we have is actually a restriction—a restriction of access to a tool that enables the artist to import a morph into DAZ Studio that is based on a subdivided model. The Morph Loader tool that we all have access to can only load morphs that are made at base resolution. Anyone can make a morph of a subdivided DAZ figure in any 3D modelling application, but what everyone cannot do is bring that morph into Studio and apply it as a usable morph to a DAZ figure. This can only be done using the restricted HD morph loading tool.

The tool doesn't save any costs. You still need the modelling application (e.g. ZBrush, which as far as I know every PA creating HD figures uses). None of the morphing is done in DAZ Studio. All the HD tool does is enable you to import and apply a subdivided morph to a DAZ figure.

 

A subdivided model is not a secret recipe. Everybody knows what HD models are and many people can build one. This purely about restricting access.

 

The logic behind keeping it locked to specific people fails when you factor that anyone can become a PA. Its not exactly secret if anyone can become a PA and access it. KFC didn't even tell its own employees its secret.

 

It makes even less sense when Daz happily advertises "model, render, animate" on its main page, and proudly boasts Hexagon alongside Daz Studio in order to push this. With Hexagon, a user could create everything they ever need and not spend a single dime in the Daz store.

 

But of course people do buy things. This analogy is more like changing your own oil. Anybody can change the oil on their car, and yet in spite of that oil changes are big business. Everybody from Walmart to local garages offer the service, and there are companies whose entire concept is based on oil changes like Jiffy Lube.

 

And that is how Daz makes money. Anybody can create and render 3D models, but Daz Studio is the Jiffy Lube of 3D. The paint by numbers, ect. Just like millions of people don't wont to bother with oil changes, many people don't want to bother building everything in 3D. So Daz offers just about everything in a premade state for customers.

 

And that is why blocking access to HD for non PAs makes no sense. Opening it up would not cause some wild floodgate of people to stop buying content from Daz. If anything it could actually improve sales because think of all the new HD transfer products that could be sold. HD might attract more artists to Daz, like those who balk at the super low poly models offered here.

 THIS!!!!!