I've been a huge proponent for more diversity in Daz's products for a good decade(!) now and for all my grievances with Daz as a company, I will give credit where credit is due.

They have made a huge effort to increase the diversity of their "core" characters and it's really shown with Genesis 8/8.1. Not just in race/ethnicity, but in age (Kids 8.1 when, tho), gender identity, and body types. Heck, we've gotten same-sex couples (explicitly romantic) poses as well, which would've been unheard of 10 years ago. Hard to believe that only a few years ago, every major bundle/core character was usually some sort of variation of a Caucasian person and/or female. 

The PAs also deserve credit as well for diversifying, too. It's nice to have gone from "Victoria with a spray tan passed off as BlPOC" to characters that are diverse.

I think a huge part of it is the changing landscape of Daz's demographics and their attempts to branch out into the mainstream (i.e. gaming), which, whether you like it or not, is going in a more progressive-minded and inclusive direction. If that's not your cuppa, well, there's other places out there that are stuck in the early 00's mindset. (won't name names, but uhhh...La femme est si blanche)

At the end of the day, everyone wins with this new direction Daz has been taking. If only others could follow suit.

The jewerly seems to come from this character:  https://www.daz3d.com/fwsa-finley-hd-for-victoria-7-and-her-jewelry

Also, keep in mind that during G3F brow packages were offered and people were able to remove brows that came with a character with Brow Remover and replace them with ones that they preferred. (But the link I gave is for a product released after the product page for the hair.)

Jonstark said:

My personal spending habit is to pick up any good fantasy or sci-fi scenes, as well as a few contemporary ones.  I prefer older sets over newer; I'm going to be working on textures anyway, and they often are just as good or better than the newer stuff in every way that matters when working within Carrara.

Clothing and Characters:  I buy up massive amounts of V4/M4, Genesis1, and some Genesis2 stuff.  Nothing above Genesis2 for me, thanks, at least if I can help it.  The older stuff is often humungously discounted, very high quality, and the new stuff has nothing to offer me.  Occasionally DAZ will bribe me to buy some crappy V8/M8 stuff with a package deal (buy 1 new release, get $40k worth of Genesis1 stuff for just 1 penny!).  But I don't have much use for the newer, pricier "emperor's new clothes" at all.

I've always been the same way - even going back to generation 3.

Lately I've started grabbing some of the Genesis 3 and 8 stuff and converting it, but a lot of my favorites come from legacy content - truth be told. Some of the new stuff is undeniably awesome though!

Let's take a look at my Genesis 1 Rosie 5.2

Her outfit consists of:

• Platina Armor (metal bikini) - V3 - Awful Soul - No Longer Available - sadly
• ElfAge Light (panty) - V4 - 4blueyes
• Executioner (arm wraps) - Genesis - Age of Armour
• Wildenlander Wild Hunt (boots) - M3 - Luthbel
• Onsi Sisterhood (forearm armor) - V4 - AlphaSeed - No Longer Available - sadly

Hair

• Classic Long and Curly Hair with dForce for Genesis 8 Female(s) - Linday

Textures

• Victoria 4 Elite Reby Sky

Eye Replacements

• EYEdeas 3+ (eyes) - V4/M4 - Arki

Tynkere said:

Kismet2012 said:

I do not know which other figures you may own so I applied Genesis 8.0 skin maps to Victoria 8.  I am attaching renders of the results.  I do not see the purple colour on the eyelids so this may be an option?

I hope something here helps.

Thanks for taking the time to do those renders.  I tried using face texture from 'no makup' V8, lasso lower eyelids, tweak 'selective color' in PS and save as .png file.  

Entry 2... I put a L.I.E. slogan on shirt as suggested.  V8 face is also using L.I.E. for lips, blush, and the lower eyelids.

For the campfire, I'm using an emmisive sphere to rule out if grain on some eye highlights is result of too many emissive lights.  Since it's between the campfire and model, I hid the sphere with a cutout opacity of 0.00010

BTW, decided to nix the first entry because corners of her mouth looked odd.  I have trouble getting convincing facial expressions on V8.

Comments & room for inprovement on both are welcome.  I've been away from 3D since pandemic -- 2 years is long time out of practice!  Need all the help I can get.  

Title: "Pensive"
Contest L.I.E.
App: DS 4.10

 

PS:  What is preferred size for attachments?

You are welcome @Tynkere

I think everyone probably has a preferred size depending on what they are rendering and why.  My personal preference for most images is 1500 on the longest edge.  But I have had images that I have had to reduce the overall size in order to get it to fit on my nVidia card.  It is really about personal preference.  For the forums it needs to be resized to 800.

When it comes to expressions I personally tend to keep them subtle.  I personally find they start to look off when taken to an extreme.  I do a lot of mixing and matching of expressions and then go in to individual features, ie:  eyes, mouth, etc and tweak from there.

This is a very realistic scene.  I am right there with her.  I can just imagine the mosquitos. 

The camper and vehicle in the background really add to the scene.  Love the colourful blanket.  Her clothes look good.  The lights on the vehicles help to draw the eye around the image.

Well done.

I was guessing why Cleopatra doesn't have an HD add-on......all the DAZ originals main characters have one. I already own 8.1 add-ons for Jada, Jacqueline and Victoria, may they work good on Cleo if I buy her? Suggestions?

I've modeled some sandals for G3F/G8F, and have rigged them and saved as a figure/prop asset.  Although the sandals fit nicely, there is a lot of distortion when the toes are flexed, as seen in the first picture.  I'd really like to accomplish the "graceful sole-bend/toe dangle" effect as seen in the second picture, rather than the glued-on sandal look.  Way back, Victoria 3 had a set of morphing sandals which did this effect via adjusted bones in the sandals (V3 only had lFoot, lToe, rFoot, rToe rigging, which made it easier).  Looking at G3F though, there are no JCMs for the toe bend, as compared to the thigh bend.  My idea was to export the crumpled sandal, adjust and smooth it, and then re-import it back in as a morph to be driven by the toe bend.  Is this still possible to do without a proper or dedicated toe-bend JCM channel?

Thanks,

-David

All Genesis 8 characters have the same underlying mesh. A new figure is created by somebody exporting the mesh into a modeling program and reshaping the vertices to create a new morph.

"Mora for Victoria 8" means the artist started with Victoria 8 as a base model. To get the advertised shape, both morphs need to be applied since morphs only store their own individual vertex offsets.

If you applied the Mora morph to the base G8 figure, then you might or might not get a good result, since it's not being added atop the V8 morph.

Texture maps should transfer over fine, though, since G8 figures share the same UVs.

Every now and then,  I will see an item, that has the title like this.
"Mora for Victoria 8"  from https://www.daz3d.com/mora-for-victoria-8
Once I hit the product page, the description says, 
Required Products:

• Victoria 8

Compatible Figures:

Genesis 8 Female
So, what happens if i get this and try to apply to the base Female character? I dont have the Victoria figure in my asset library. Would it still work and appear under 'smart content'? 
In general, any time you have something that says "X for Y", does it always mean, I must have 'Y' even if 'X' is compatible with Genesis 8 as per the store description. Or, do I have limit myself to products that simply say 'X' compatible with Genesis 8 and 8.X?

Kismet2012 said:

I do not know which other figures you may own so I applied Genesis 8.0 skin maps to Victoria 8.  I am attaching renders of the results.  I do not see the purple colour on the eyelids so this may be an option?

I hope something here helps.

Thanks for taking the time to do those renders.  I tried using face texture from 'no makup' V8, lasso lower eyelids, tweak 'selective color' in PS and save as .png file.  

Entry 2... I put a L.I.E. slogan on shirt as suggested.  V8 face is also using L.I.E. for lips, blush, and the lower eyelids.

For the campfire, I'm using an emmisive sphere to rule out if grain on some eye highlights is result of too many emissive lights.  Since it's between the campfire and model, I hid the sphere with a cutout opacity of 0.00010

BTW, decided to nix the first entry because corners of her mouth looked odd.  I have trouble getting convincing facial expressions on V8.

Comments & room for inprovement on both are welcome.  I've been away from 3D since pandemic -- 2 years is long time out of practice!  Need all the help I can get.  

Title: "Pensive"
Contest L.I.E.
App: DS 4.10

PS:  What is preferred size for attachments?

UnifiedBrain said:

Jonstark, happy to see you back!

I also liked the renders.  My own experience is that the V4 Elite shaders are actually terrific for realism (or enhanced realism) if that is the goal.  Victoria 1 skin shaders are scarce and not particularly good.  I don't own V2.  V3 shaders are also scarce, but there are some good ones out there.  V4 Elite through Genesis 3 are mostly excellent.  It is possible to really get the skin differentiation to pop in Carrara.  I haven't yet tried Genesis 8.

And although I applaud your efforts on the procedural skin shaders, to me they will never be realistic.  For toons  and other NPR they can be useful, of course.

An early experiment entered in the 50th Challenge, using V3, V5, and V4 (left to right).

 

Thanks UB!  Happy to be back and seen/posting again.  :)  Nice render!  I'm particularly impressed by V3, because I always thought finding good texture sets for V3 was vanishingly elusive.  The only AAA texture set I can even think of offhand is Danae's 'Milan' over at Rendo.  That one is so good I wish I had a way to put it on my Genesis, but as far as I know there are no available UV sets for Genesis1 that would allow for use of V3/M3 textures.  I think there was an app way back when called Texture Converter that would allow conversion of V3/M3 to V4/M4, but I don't think that's available anymore, sadly...

I agree about procedural skin too; I realized early on that no way would any procedural skin ever come close to an actual texture map version.  Just adding random noise to give skin flaws doesn't address the real issue, which is that human skin is not the same all over.  The skin on the tip of the nose, for example is radically different in roughness and texture than the skin just beneath the eyes, which is different than the skin over the cheekbones, which is different than the skin over the chin... etc, etc. 

The only way to even come close would require someone with a master's artist's eyes/observation powers (far beyond me) to draw on tons of layers for each separate area of the body, each one using a Anything Goos shader to blend into the next area over so there doesn't appear to be seams... honestly it would take a herculean effort and require someone who has an incredible eye for detail to even come halfway close. 

So I regard the procedural skin as mostly not successful. Its one benefit would be getting rid of all the texture maps which would reduce scene size considerably for animators who needed background crowds of people in renders.  So it may still be useful in that way to someone, and it's an interesting thing to tinker with.  :) 

Jonstark, happy to see you back!

I also liked the renders.  My own experience is that the V4 Elite shaders are actually terrific for realism (or enhanced realism) if that is the goal.  Victoria 1 skin shaders are scarce and not particularly good.  I don't own V2.  V3 shaders are also scarce, but there are some good ones out there.  V4 Elite through Genesis 3 are mostly excellent.  It is possible to really get the skin differentiation to pop in Carrara.  I haven't yet tried Genesis 8.

And although I applaud your efforts on the procedural skin shaders, to me they will never be realistic.  For toons  and other NPR they can be useful, of course.

An early experiment entered in the 50th Challenge, using V3, V5, and V4 (left to right).

If this is your first time using them, V4 must have the morph targets initialized before they can be loaded. (This should have been done automatically when installing with DIM or Central, but it will not work with Connect. Long story). If you use the Power Loader (the default action, unless you changed it at some point), you can generated the needed files by selecting "Generate ExP Files" at the bottom of the Advanced -> Parameters tab of the Power Loader: Import dialog and checking those morph packages that you want to use. (Note; this only needs to be done once, you can uncheck the Generate ExP files box the next time).

If you have done all that, you need to load them onto V4. They won't load automatically unless you check the box in the Power Loader before loading, or go to the Poser Formats library -> Pose -> DAZ's Victoria 4 -> Morph Injections and apply INJ Morphs++ V4 after loading a V4 character.

The aren't always at the top level of the hierarchy. For example, all the head morphs are located only on the head, so you must select the head node to see them. Go through the various nodes of the skeleton and you will get a different set of morphs for each.

Hello, I'm going crazy trying to find morphs, but without success. Can anyone help me out? Thank you.

Buongiorno, sto impazzendo nel tentativo di trovare dei morphs, ma senza successo. Qualcuno può darmi una mano? Grazie.

At this point i have tried almost all the suggestions that were given...but to no avail...when i work with the viewport it just keeps crashing.

So right now i am planning to completely uninstall Studio 4.15 and i am going to roll back to 4.14 (if at all possible) to see and hope that i get no more crashes (or at least fewer ones)

The only thing that i dont know if the new Victoria 8.1 will also work in previous Daz versions?...or is it a must to have the latest version of Studio?...

Looks like, at least in the case of Electro hair, the UV is straightforward: a strand is a "plane", tip at the top. Kinda cool.

I spent a while poking around at morph conversions and ultimately decided to try out the commercial route by the late great Dimension3D - GenX2. I had gotten quite a lot of use of his Morphing Clothes utility back in the day... and GenX2 turned out to have a way of porting Laura/Luke and Maddie/Matt to the Genesis line, which was an unexpectedly awesome bonus. So... yes it was worth the investment (this latest sale was good, to boot). Now I can use all my favourite Gen3 heads and skins on G3F, with minimal effort. I don't transfer body morphs because I don't want to deal with JCMs and other rigging adjustments (no FBM conversions are ever 100% usable without all that, it's simply a given).

G3F because it's the only figure that has Gen3 UVs, thanks to Cayman Studio's "experimental" product. And with Agent Unawares' "Transgender" freebie, it's possible to turn G3F into a male figure. Isn't it awesome?

Why "with minimal effort" and not "without effort"... because it does need a bit more work than just running the scripts/plugins. Getting from Gen3 to G3 requires intermediaries (Genesis and G2); their built-in clones aren't 100% accurate; all that introduces a certain measure of error to the morph, so you need to finetune it. Still, all the unpleasant and boring stuff like adjusting teeth position etc is handled by the GenX2 plugin. It even automagically smoothed the transition between the A3R head and everything else. Oldtimers will know what I mean :))) Hallelujah big time.

...incidentally, anyone old enough to remember the days when Gillan joined DP and they covered this quirky song? I've always wondered what it could have been like, to witness the birth of those classic lineups...

...and many years later BG covered that cover :P

There's a certain lip contour mismatch, at least when it comes to M3 - I'll need to find out if it gets introduced due to the morph conversion process or if it's an underlying issue of the UV map.

Conversion will also mess up the eyeballs most of the time... but I didn't actually ever plan to use G3F vanilla eyes. Even venerable eye replacers Blackhearted made for GND2 are better than those. There are Arki's EYEdeas (oldie but goldie, y'know), there are Raiya's Look at Me HD eyes... anything but those vanilla ones.

Moving to the G3F base also means I can finally use fibermesh eyelashes and eyebrows with those characters. Of course, with Laura- and A3R-based morphs - the most difficult ones - the lashes need quite a lot of adjustment, but it's still better than transmaps.

This is an "M3X" with Black(hearted) eyes (V3 "dark blue" colour, I like those maps better than M3's own), OnFleek brows (freebie by AprilYSH) and Soto's Lashes Utilities, wearing Army Uniform for G3F.
This uniform has this weird t-shirt that somehow renders with artefacts from certain angles with any sort of relief mapping enabled - that's a first for me... I tried its own maps and a number of tiles, bump, normal - still much the same ( the renders use this tiling normal map: https://polyhaven.com/a/fabric_pattern_05 ). Its own maps - all of them - have baked-in shadows in creases, to boot. I mean... why.

margrave said:

I think the figure is Saskia, but I don't know about the skin

close  but no.

yes look like sakia but the skin tone is different ? i dont know 

the eyebrows are  different.

davidtriune said:

the figure or the face? face is similar to victoria's IMO

The face. I couldn't place her. I'll check out V8. It didn't occur to me it might be that simple.

the figure or the face? face is similar to victoria's IMO

I'm spending about the same, but how/what I buy has changed. With the increase in prices, and the change in style/type of content/figures DAZ is making, there is less incentive for me to buy any of the bundles (only have 3 G8 Pro bundles, and one G8.1 bundle). It's also a very rare occasion that I participate in the "buy this to get a price break on that" sales because seldom do I want any of the "buy this" items, and having stuff I'll never use is not really productive for me.

I tend to only purchase items I'm very sure I will use. Of course, I've been here since 2004, so that is no doubt a huge factor. With Genesis 8 and 8.1 my purchases of pro/starter bundles and the more recent type of bundles, has really dropped off.  There haven't been many that were must haves for me. The product quality/details for a lot of DAZ Originals clothing simply isn't what I want. Again, paying for something I will probably never use to get a couple of discounted items I will use doesn't make sense for me. I'm also not a big fan of most of the new DAZ named G8/G8.1 characters, they just aren't my style. While I do have a bit of interest in some of them, I'm not interested in them at the typical prices when I can get a non-named HD character or PA HD character that I really like for much less.

Victoria for Genesis 8.1 was the first time I didn't get the new Victoria figure since getting Victoria 3. I just couldn't justify the cost for the quality. The character is great, but those tattoos!! While being great art creations, they looked more like body paint than tattoos. I'm just not going the pay a big price for something I have to "fix". The cloths in the bundles are also not as detailed as what I really want. For example, I'm looking for the details/quality of Aeon Soul or Linday. IMHO it seems a bit odd that most of the named G8/G8.1 characters seem to be pushing more toward the realistic end of things, yet many the cloths in the bundles fit better with a more toon/stylized figure (seriously, look at most of the boots, not very realistic details, mats, or shaders).

The only 8.1 bundle I've purchased was Cleopatra, and that was because I inadvertently checked the price in my cart during a store glitch and it was too good to pass up. It's interesting to note though that she is a more stylized figure, and I felt she fit well with her bundle, and the bundle was something I will use. I was very tempted to get the Topsy bundle(s). I thought everything fit well together, but was a bit out of my price range, I did get Topsy for $5 in the sale yesterday .... WooHoo!!

So to make a long story short (too late for that), I probably am not spending a lot less here now, though probably a bit less just due to the current situation and lost income. I am a lot  more discount aware than I used to be. Over the past year I've bought very few items during the introductory sales. Most of my purchases are a minimum 50% off, but usually 65% off or more. There is also less in the store that I really want .I really like fantasy, and fantasy "skimpwear", something DAZ is moving away from it seems.

I've got to add that the PC+ for a day sales have caused me to spend more than I would have this year. Too many really great items to pass on!!!

https://www.daz3d.com/juliet-hair-for-genesis-3-female-s-genesis-2-female-s-and-victoria-4

can help me Does anyone know if this chraracter is available to buy anywhere? 

I KNOW   SWAM's hair products usually use P3Design's characters. but also can't find   this chatarter  in P3Design

Some one know what charater /skin is used in this promos.