If it weren't for picking up two free genesis 3 pro packs I didn't have, I think I would have passed up Penny 8. I agree with Dim Reaper she looks like blend of Victoria 8 and Alexandra 8, very average looking. But when I am getting $440.00 of product for the price $60.00, then Penny 8 is welcome in my runtime anyday! Shick-Ching! Transaction Approved!

I second this.  Judged on her own I wouldn't bother and imho not worth a Pro package price.  Most of her clothing items also weren't that great to me.  I was definitely more impressed with Monique 8, Alexandra 8 and Ollie 8 when those landed.  But getting two other figures (including Kalea which I actually really wanted) and the amount of content for such a small price made her an instant purchase.  I passed on Aiko for this very reason as well.  There was no compelling need for me to get her and no good deal on added Pro characters for me to get.  

I don't understand why DAZ hasn't just started letting people customize there bonuses from their own wishlist.  It's all digital purchasing so it isn't like having to move inventory in the tradiational sense.  I would think that Penny would be a 100% seller then.  Pick 2 Pro packages that you don't have, or if you have them already pick a set amount of items from your wishlist to equal that value.  Done.

If it weren't for picking up two free genesis 3 pro packs I didn't have, I think I would have passed up Penny 8. I agree with Dim Reaper she looks like blend of Victoria 8 and Alexandra 8, very average looking. But when I am getting $440.00 of product for the price $60.00, then Penny 8 is welcome in my runtime anyday! Shick-Ching! Transaction Approved!

To be honest, Penny 8 is a nice character and looks good, but she's sort of redundant. When I first saw her, I thought she looked too much like Victoria 8. Not enough character in her features. I like my people to have more of a unique look, which is one reason why I loved Gianni 6. He had a distinctively characteristic face. I love Edward 8 and Dylan 8. I really like Olympia 7 and Alexandra 8. These "people" all have distinctive, unique faces. As I said, Penny 8 is "pretty," but there's not much about her that distinguishes her from Victoria 8. I'll probably get her eventually, just to up my DAZ population, but she can wait a while. I think Ollie 8 is fun, but he's more of a characiture than a character and is more suited for a specific art style. Anyway, I don't want to bash Penny 8. I feel sort of sorry for her because so many people are a bit negative about her, but I have to agree that there's not enough about her that's different that I can add to my population. I would like to see more ethnic diversity. We got Benita with the G8 generation, and Darius 8, but we need more cultures represented.

@patrick.dewijs

Sorry but Genesis 3 is the 7th generation, I meant Millennium 3 (2002) and 4 (2006)

Ah sorry, I don't use victoria/Michael 4 or Genesis 2 Only Genesis 3 or 8

She looks like a cross between Victoria 8, Olympia 8 and Alexandra 8. Too repetititve.

 

Same as Genesis 3 with Victoria, Stephanie, Eva, Bethany, Karen, Gia, Ophelia, Lilith, Arabella, Olympia, ...

Those characters at least had (mostly) distinctive faces and body shapes. Penny looks like someone loaded up the G8 base and dialed in a tiny bit of a couple of other Daz characters, maybe a touch of something from the head and body morphs, and BOOM!... Here's your new character. Five minutes work, then all they have to do is keep their fingers crossed that people will buy it without realising they've got basically the same thing already sitting on their hard drives.

Penny herself reminds me a lot of Victoria, and neither base appeals to me at all. However, the Sophia add-on is ethnically ambiguous and could go a lot of different ways with hairstyles, mixing morphs, and a little post work. She's the kind of thing I'm interested in seeing more of. Elaina's different too, and different is good. I hope more (HD) add-ons for Penny come out, broadening her range of photorealistic skin tones and ethnicities.

Well, some things haven't been made for the Genesis series yet (thinking creatures and such here), and if you aren't up against very strict production quality standards, you can still generate some very nice art pieces with the older stuff, even when mixing it with the new.

And thanks to all of those cloth, etc. shaders that are available, plus the wear-them-all autofits, you can pull a lot of older wardrobe items onto newer figures, but that's not quite related your question.  But, if you grab older bundles with 'older' figures, you may want to put those older figures to good use as well for some art piece or other...

Plus, you STILL have people releasing new characters and items for Victoria 4, etc. (mainly on other sites), as the Poserverse is sorta kinda built around those figures.  Sure, you can pull Genesis figures into Poser using various means, but the Gen 4 figures are by no means abandoned...

I love the posing controls for Genesis figures a lot (the 'added' nodes really improve figure posing options), so I use Genesis figures when I can, but I do still use M4/V4 and occasionally M3/V3 era figures...

And sometimes there's a character that just doesn't have a good replacement in the Genesis family that you want to use anyways...

For celeb lookalikes (for those that like to have fun doing art with those), well a lot of those are M4/V4, and while some of them aren't very good by today's standards, others seem to hold up rather well...

So yeah, it's a 'depends' answer, but I'm not above using anything in my library (newer or older) depending on what it is I'm trying to create... and I'm not opposed to using older figures if they 'fit' the particular piece I'm working on.  I'm mainly a hobbyist though, doing this for fun.

She looks like a cross between Victoria 8, Olympia 8 and Alexandra 8. Too repetititve.

Same as Genesis 3 with Victoria, Stephanie, Eva, Bethany, Karen, Gia, Ophelia, Lilith, Arabella, Olympia, ...

She looks like a cross between Victoria 8, Olympia 8 and Alexandra 8. Too repetititve.

@Karuki

That's my own feelings but I never feels Genesis 2,3,8 figures be "unique".

For example, Genesis 3 Victoria, Stephanie, Eva, Bethany, Karen, Gia, Ophelia, Lilith, Arabella, Olympia, ... it's always the same model with a few of variations.

You know, a few months back when Daz was doing the 'get the previous Pro bundles with the new Pro bundle thing' say Victoria 4-8, etc. Daz offered an extra 10% discount for each pro bundle you already owned.

For you guys that have all/almost all of the free offerings, while it isn't much, I think maybe the Daz sales team should reward you for your loyal buying up to this point, with some extra discount, orange banner coupon, or something...

I'm not quite there yet, but most of the 'related pro bundles' offer with the Penny 8 Pro I already own pieces of... plus I've been passing on those other bundles up to this point as they weren't as compelling as some others, but at least I have choices...

Based on the recent comments, the next time Daz does this, I think they need to expand the size of the 'related bundle' offerings, similar to what we saw recently, and for the really really loyal buyers that already have all of them... well an extra discount instead might be nice...

Also, the last couple of times, I noticed that waiting until Day 2 of the release the new Pro bundle offering seemed to have additional payoffs.  Dunno if that'll be the case this time, but I'm in no immediate hurry to grab Penny.  Also, that extra 10% off thing if you owned the immediately preceding Pro Bundle thing isn't in play today as far as I can tell... I seem to remember Aiko 8 giving me a discount on Ollie 8.

Ugh she looks kinda fat and her forehead is too big, those guys from "daz originals" just don't know how to make figures it seems see Victoria 8 which looked to me like they wanted to make her ugly on purpose. Maybe hire the guy back who made all the amazing 7 figures.

FWSA Vivian is looking quite good but not buying it just for this figure. I like nothing else from the pro bundle so no thank you for me.

fat ??? WOOOOAAAT ????

She's kinda bland.  If they were going for a younger looking Alexandra character, I can almost see that.  But other than that, she's not as interesting as some of the others.  Honestly, she almost look like Victoria 8 after about 3 dial spins.  We got some time before Daz unleashes the 10th anniversary line, so I'm sure they have some more up their sleeves.  But from a diversity stand point, there is only Monique 8 and Darius 8.  Alexandra 8 and Edward 8 brings the "mature" diversity to the table and Ollie 8 and Sakura 8 brings the cartoon/caricature looks.  But other ethnicities at this point will be welcomed.

Ugh she looks kinda fat and her forehead is too big, those guys from "daz originals" just don't know how to make figures it seems see Victoria 8 which looked to me like they wanted to make her ugly on purpose. Maybe hire the guy back who made all the amazing 7 figures.

FWSA Vivian is looking quite good but not buying it just for this figure. I like nothing else from the pro bundle so no thank you for me.

I would have liked a more unique-looking figure, but Penny is a nice addition.  To me she looks to be somewhere between Victoria 8 and Alexandra 8 in terms of looks.  Some nice items in the pro bundle and it's definitely nice to see a return to the "free pro-bundle" addons - I already had the base figures for the Gen 3 figures, but it is nice to have the pro bundle content.  Downloading now and since I'm waiting in for a parcel delivery, I have the morning to try out the new figure.

Again, its not about other PA's making these characters, it is about representation. That is the matter at hand. 3rd party characters are obviously a big part of Daz, but they push their DO's hard. DO's get promoted for weeks on end, and will show up in numerous future sales for years to come. They also present the supposed best of what Daz has to offer, and can serve as the base for add on characters as several characters require Victoria or Michael and Company to look right. A 3rd party character can easily get lost in the sea of releases on this site. But a DO will always get attention, just like every DO gets a dedicated thread that is hundreds of posts long, even the lesser received ones.

A great example is Sakura. I like Sakura, don't get me wrong, but there are other anime characters out there, and they are pretty darn good, maybe even better than Sakura. But when Sakura came along, anime suddenly exploded on Daz, and the forums were dominated by Sakura. That does not happen without Sakura being a Daz Original.

If they can make a freakin' centaur as a DO, then they can do more ethnic characters.

Which products, clothes, textures, morphs? Genesis 2 and 3 or 2nd and 3rd generation Daz figures (Victoria 2 and 3 et al)?

I get the vibe that the store is not going to be making anymore Genesis 8 males official characters, I hope I’m wrong but we haven’t even got Gianni  and there are three more potential female characters lined up. 

Heck I'm still hoping they keep up G8 for more than two years (preferrably 4).

Laurie

Unfortunately, a four-year cycle seems somewhat unlikely. From a purely commercial standpoint, they have the example of Victoria 4 as to why they absolutely should not do that; there was (and still is, to some degree) massive resistance to reinvesting in various resources after her five year reign. With a two-year generation, there's less immediate resistance -- especially if you can demonstrate some technological improvements that users can see -- and less long-term resistance as well.

I get the vibe that the store is not going to be making anymore Genesis 8 males official characters, I hope I’m wrong but we haven’t even got Gianni  and there are three more potential female characters lined up. 

I don't get that impression at all. Maybe part of the issue is that there's so much less male content produced that there are fewer opportunities for information to sneak into the public eye, like the fits for Mika 8, Penny 8, Edie 8, and The Girl 8 have recently done. After all, Edward didn't really appear much of anywhere beforehand, he was just suddenly there.

I suspect this may be a short generation (pure speculation, based on nothing more than the fact that the normal cycles for almost all the continuing stalwarts to date -- Michael, Olympia, Darius, Monique, possibly Mika whenever she appears -- have been cut short by a minimum of five months, and up to a year in some cases. But I don't think it'll be quite THAT short.

Gianni and Gia and Lee and Mei Lin are the previously continued figures introduced before Genesis 3 that still have to make an appearance. We've seen one morph for Mei Lin 8 in something, albeit a long time back, and it would be very surprising if she were to appear without Lee in the same generation at this point. Gia and Gianni ... them, I'm not sure about. We haven't seen any sign of Gia as far as I know, and I wouldn't expect to see any sign of Gianni, given the way this generation has worked.

As for what's next: given that she already has a pose set in the store (the Giant and the Princess set with Ollie) and it hasn't been removed, if the next figure isn't Mika 8, it would be very strange indeed.

Genesis 9 in 2019 would sound good.

Honestly , I’m not sure what Genesis 9 could offer to get me to  adopt it right off the start.  Genesis 8 gives me so much of what I want in a figure what with the better expressions, ability to bring my Genesis 3 characters (shapes , skins, and poses etc) over to Genesis 8, and the backwards compatibility for clothes, hair, and even a lot of my lie tattoos.  Footwear is not so good but that’s kinda always been an issue.  

Another thing to consider is that with the way the G8 figures are so versatile, they will be very useful for much more than 2 years and should DAZ hold off on the every two year cycle , it would give the PA’s an opportunity to get really creative With doing new things.  This would be a very good thing for DAZ3D, the PA’s, and the customers. It’s not like there is not a precedent for this.  Just look at how long Michael 4 and Victoria 4 were the newest figures.

Vially, I am mystified by this problem of yours.  How are you applying the Material Preset?  All you need to do is double-click on the Material Preset icon in the Content Library after you have run the 'Prepare Genesis 8 Female' script.  You don't need to bother with the Surfaces tab at all.  It is literally 2 or 3 clicks.

Here is a link to the online PDF ReadMe:
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/45575/45575_legacy-uvs-for-genesis-8-victoria-4.pdf