G1 was brilliant. Honestly I consider G2 and even the later generations a solid step back conceptually. The universal mesh made making exotic characters much less painful... I can see why some PAs didn't like it, beause they had to account for a greater degree of deformation... and it also had the issue that Daz hadn't overtaken poser completely yet, and because of that V4/M4 still held on because of greater compatability.

IMHO, Genesis was the only real genesis. The later are just Micheal/Victoria with a borrowed name.

Only way I'll really get into G9 is if it goes back to a universal figure in some way.

Personally, I think a 1/2 step would be best. Universal core mesh but with two in built gender morphs that are markted as the core figures. Allow shared textures, geoshells, and morphs, but without the promiss of absolute inter-gender intercompatability as the core mesh is just there to serve as a bridge, not as a foundation as it was in Genesis.

I like exotics and one of the things that's always pissed me off is the impossibility of mixing genders due to most "exotic" characters being completely mono-gender.

...I agree and still use Genesis "classic" for the many toon characters that were released for it as well as alien and other exotic morphs.

What hair on Paloma? 

Thanks in advance

https://www.daz3d.com/fwsa-paloma-hd-for-victoria-7

It may not be obvious, but G3 was a significant change

Since G3 the figures also became more industry friendly. It is easier now to use them and animate them in external programs, like Maya, Unreal or Blender.

 

The new twist bones made G3/8 LESS animation friendly. Anyone who animates characters knows this.

In my experience Daz isn't a very animation friendly program on the whole. It lacks a lot of basic fundimental physics features and those that it does have tend to be a bit janky and are half locked behind the PA access barrier.

I'm to the point that the most I do with daz is use it as a character design program then feed the result into blender to do the actual work.

Now if it uses dForce maybe I will change my mind

• dForce autofit
• dForce body and face
• dForce pose adjustment (no figure passing through the surfaces, for example adjust the leg bend when the foot meet the ground)

These days, I wouldn't count on any new features like that not being in some way paywalled or PA limited.

G1 was a major game changer, but enough of the market (and the content creators) was not willing to take up the banner to cut its development cycle short. G1 barely got two full years.

G1 was brilliant. Honestly I consider G2 and even the later generations a solid step back conceptually. The universal mesh made making exotic characters much less painful... I can see why some PAs didn't like it, beause they had to account for a greater degree of deformation... and it also had the issue that Daz hadn't overtaken poser completely yet, and because of that V4/M4 still held on because of greater compatability.

IMHO, Genesis was the only real genesis. The later are just Micheal/Victoria with a borrowed name.

Only way I'll really get into G9 is if it goes back to a universal figure in some way.

Personally, I think a 1/2 step would be best. Universal core mesh but with two in built gender morphs that are markted as the core figures. Allow shared textures, geoshells, and morphs, but without the promiss of absolute inter-gender intercompatability as the core mesh is just there to serve as a bridge, not as a foundation as it was in Genesis.

I like exotics and one of the things that's always pissed me off is the impossibility of mixing genders due to most "exotic" characters being completely mono-gender.

DAZ heights are out of control.

Well, for technical reasons you do want to have the male and female bases the same size

What reasons would those be? Explain at any level you like, I'll keep up.

- which is 180cm for pretty much every generation I can recall, (or 5' 11" for those who think in those terms), which isn't unusual for a male. It impacts things like auto-fit and other cross-model transfer.

They do then seem to have got stuck in that rut, however, building models off that as if that should be the average for both men and women, so a woman that's supposed to be slightly taller than average has to start getting very very tall in real world terms.

That's a side effect of having the majority of your women being either model types or warrior types. The fashion industry considered 5'8" the minimum for a fashion model, and that's 95th percentile for women.

Next generation won't even fit in cars

On that front, I don't believe the figures have been getting significantly taller over time. Lining up all the versions of Victoria I have (4 through to 8), the only one that isn't about the 180cm average of the base figures is V5, who's about 10cm/4" shorter than her other generations.

Victoria is just the "first base" figure.

I only use dynamic clothing on my figures, and knowing that most dynamic clothes will fit most figures, I don't worry too much about which figure a garment was designed for when I download freebies. However, there are so many figures I simply have no experience or access to, that I think it would be helpful to know how figures literally measure up as far as scale goes. For example, I know a dress made for dawn will normally drape fine on victoria ... so is there a comparison chart somewhere that's already done the research for me?

I think releasing Genesis 9 forces Daz to start over and cover their bases again, Victoria, Michael, etc...  After they finish with their bases, what's their objective?  What gap are they trying to fill?  Age, race, gender?  Do they become random with their releases, or does it give them more opportunity to explorer something that they have never released before?
 

When you find out that the IRS won't let you claim Victoria, Michael, Aiko and Josie as dependents.

lol

When you find out that the IRS won't let you claim Victoria, Michael, Aiko and Josie as dependents.

DAZ heights are out of control.

Well, for technical reasons you do want to have the male and female bases the same size - which is 180cm for pretty much every generation I can recall, (or 5' 11" for those who think in those terms), which isn't unusual for a male. It impacts things like auto-fit and other cross-model transfer.

They do then seem to have got stuck in that rut, however, building models off that as if that should be the average for both men and women, so a woman that's supposed to be slightly taller than average has to start getting very very tall in real world terms.

Next generation won't even fit in cars

On that front, I don't believe the figures have been getting significantly taller over time. Lining up all the versions of Victoria I have (4 through to 8), the only one that isn't about the 180cm average of the base figures is V5, who's about 10cm/4" shorter than her other generations.

I was thinking that Leisa was one of the more credible mature characters, and Allesandra kept that theme going (Gabi is a bit too WTF for me) useful for a CEO, scientist, librarian, etc. but then I saw one little item that just blew everything for me.

Height: 6' 0" (182.8 cm)

Seriously? That's 99.92 percentile. Less than 1 in 1000. That won't look realistic in a car, at a desk, going through a doorway, etc. Kitchen counters are at the wrong height for her. ( 50% for the US is 5'3.6"). Oh, and the standard weight for a 6' woman is 188 pounds. 

Teen Josie 8 is 5'5", which is 75th percentile for adult women. Teen Raven 8 is 5'6". Fortunately, it appears that all the DAZ teens are 18-19, so they've basically stopped growing.

DAZ heights are out of control. Next generation won't even fit in cars, will bump their heads in doorways,  I'm picturing Victoria 9 coming in at 6'4". What do we use these characters for, aside from the obvious NVITWS?

Is there a product that is specifically focused on this type of conversion with the old Mil 4 figures? Please advise.

+1.  That's a nice concise explanation of why some users aren't totally happy.  The morphs themselves are fantastic.  Have been using the precious Victoria ones all along for all my characters.

Phrased another way.  Not having the beautiful neck deforms applied automatically to all your poses feels like not getting all that was promised.  Which isn't really true.  But you have to redo your poses for the head-neck bends to get them.

Cos neck-head is a dramatic deform area, and there are 3 bones affected, so don't know that PA had much choice but to do it this way to keep their work looking fabulous as they are.

Thanks for saying so, yeah, I've been using these morphs since Genesis 2 and I actually did not use my G/V8 until these morphs were made available, I'm really excited that they applied the morphs to Genesis 8 herself and not just V8! Now I can use these morphs for every single 1st party DAZ character as they're based on G8 rather than just V8!

 

Right, so you just dial the Ultimate Bend Morph setting to 100%, and it adjust everything automatically, right? 

This was how it worked in all the other implementations and it worked fantastic. I'm not sure what folks are upset about.

They are mostly using pre-pose packages, which already have the head/neck posed by the node... (Bones) and for the UNP's neck pose, the morphs are applied to the multi node pose control, which is separate, you can still match the head/upper/lower neck poses using the pose control, basically it's made for doing your own posing outside and/or alongside of using pose packages

+1.  That's a nice concise explanation of why some users aren't totally happy.  The morphs themselves are fantastic.  Have been using the precious Victoria ones all along for all my characters.

Phrased another way.  Not having the beautiful neck deforms applied automatically to all your poses feels like not getting all that was promised.  Which isn't really true.  But you have to redo your poses for the head-neck bends to get them.

Cos neck-head is a dramatic deform area, and there are 3 bones affected, so don't know that PA had much choice but to do it this way to keep their work looking fabulous as they are.

*Resets the clock*

General opinion is that it's about 70% Osuine (from Renderosity) with 30% Victoria 8 and maybe a few other tweaks mixed in. However, no-one has an absolutely definitive recipe for her.

Uh, how would you build something from a base figure and also not contain any original geometry? How exactly do you envision that working?

 

I mean, you could sculpt a new figure and use Daz Studio to rig it and do weight maps... but that's not using a base figure.

that pretty easy

you create a script that modifies the base figure it is not even intended to be a separate figure but unfortunately, it has to be.

consider this idea, as we make geograft resembling victoria 4/genesis 1 and fit it on the genesis 8. this way we get to use V4 textures and g1 morps on G8 with its advanced rigging and morphs.

in fact, it could be theoretically possible to create some monster figure which contains all morphs from G1 to G8 and has compatibility with all textures and geografts

But I wonder if that would be legal.as imagine that if Daz decides that this compatibility breaks their business and demands to cease distribution of such item

My question was more as if Daz can just tell you to stop distributing something they don't like without any reason.

Tessa at work in her ATLAS Armored Suit.(Sorry, can't recall which DZFire vehicle that is at the moment).  Just playing around with this, not sure if it is done or not yet.

 

That is an awesome render!

 

Thanks, I always get GREAT results from the BOSS Pro lights.

Tessa at work in her ATLAS Armored Suit.(Sorry, can't recall which DZFire vehicle that is at the moment).  Just playing around with this, not sure if it is done or not yet.

 

That is an awesome render!

Tessa at work in her ATLAS Armored Suit.(Sorry, can't recall which DZFire vehicle that is at

Wow, gorgeous! Singelhandedly sold me on that character. Did you so any tweaking or is she out of the box like this?

Tessa at work in her ATLAS Armored Suit.(Sorry, can't recall which DZFire vehicle that is at the moment).  Just playing around with this, not sure if it is done or not yet.

 

Wow, gorgeous! Singelhandedly sold me on that character. Did you so any tweaking or is she out of the box like this?

Working With Genesis 2

The Genesis 2 line expands the number of character bases open to users quite dramatically and enjoys some better rigging and morphs, along with the improved efficiency of having separate male and female base figures.

However, we are going to have to go about setting them up a tad differently to the previous figures thanks to some quirks of the Importer and it’s behaviour with Poser 11. First of all, if you export a CR2 from Studio and open that up in Poser, you’ll find that it has no tongue. Grand! The solution to that is to open the figure in Poser using the provided Poser Companion file and then re-saving a new CR2 – sadly, this can also result in a strange bug in the jaws, albeit only in Poser 11, which has a simple fix, given below.

Once again, we are going to want to end up with an obj file for each of the base characters, so that we can use their individual UV mapping. We’ll also want to end up with a CR2 for each character but with just the one pmd file for all the morphs – again, you might not feel the need to bother with doing that but I like to be tidy. While I do have the creature creator morphs, I don’t have much in the way of special creature characters, so I’m not going to work separately on them as I did for Genesis.

Preparation.

You’ll want to create a folder for the Genesis 2 geometries. I created separate folder sets for the Male and Females, each with folders for Figures, Clothes, Hair, and Props.

You’ll also want to create folders in the Characters directory of the Library for the Characters, Clothing, and Hair.

Also, if you are have the Fit Control products for Genesis 2, then you will need to uninstall them again.

So, now you need to navigate to the PCFs for all of the Genesis 2 characters you have and which have their own UV mapping. Find the Genesis 2F Base, open it in Poser and then save it out again, with a pmd file, to the prepared folder. Run this CR2 through the File Optimizer, as you did for the Genesis figures, which will make it Poser native and create a geometry which, again, you’ll save to your prepared folder. Now open the figure again and set the skinning method to Poser Unimesh, uncheck Include Morphs in the Body part’s Properties tab and then add some subdivision. Finally, you might want to edit the dials to an arrangement that best suits you before saving it out once more.

Finally, try posing the head and checking the jaw parts. Some people have found the jaws take on a life of their own in Poser 11 – this is not a bug that I’ve encountered but there is a fix here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/232296/genesis-2-jaw-issue-after-dson-import#latest. I believe it is a bug that only occurs when using shapes created with Generation X.

Of course, you now need object files for all your Base Characters – generating these is best (by which I mean fasted) done using the method employed for the previous Genesis line (the problem of the missing mouth parts is in the exported CR2s, not the obj files generated from them, so this will work fine). Open up Studio and load Genesis 2 Female, then, switching the UV set on the Surface tab, you’ll need to export a CR2 for each Base Character with it’s own UV (save for the Base as you’ve already done that one in Poser).

Back in Poser, run these new CR2s through the File Optimizer to generate the obj files, after which you can delete them, along with their pmd files. Make as many copies of the Genesis 2F Base CR2 as you have Base Characters and name them accordingly, then open them in a text or reference editor and point them to the correct obj file for the character.

You can now re-install the Fit Control products if you have them.

Rinse and Repeat

Now you can repeat the same procedure for the Genesis 2 male.

Materials – Normal Maps

While the Genesis materials applied by the PCFs are perfectly fine, there is a quirk with those applied by the Genesis 2 PCFs. DAZ have a long history of not supporting some of the material options available in Poser, in particular, displacement and normal maps, leaving customers to apply those features themselves. Genesis 2 characters all come with some normal maps which add a little extra detail to the bodies but, true to form, the PCFs supplied by DAZ don’t apply them. It’s not a great problem though – open up the materials tab and open a texture file, navigating to the DAZ textures to find the normal maps, then apply them. When you are done, save out your new material files in Poser for future use.

And that is all there is to say about Genesis 2 – you are now all set up with the bases and converting clothes and hair items for them is the same process as used for the Genesis line.

Table of Products

Below is a table of products that I have attempted to convert for Poser native use. The first column is the product name and store link, the second is the type of product, which will largely be either clothing or hair, the DSON column is to indicate if the product was advertised in store as being compatible with Poser via the DSON Importer, Converted is for a conversion rating (either No, Limited, Good, Excellent), followed by some notes about it.