I keep playing around with G9 and V9, and I just can't get on board.
V9 in particular is great for face renders... But that's it.
There is no advantages over G8 in my testing. If anything it's much worse: bends are just yuck, fewer surfaces to customise, not much more detail, slower load times (even with out any extra morphs etc compared to a fully weighed down G8 model). Really, they could have just released the V9 morph on G8 with an 8K normal and that would have been better. (again just with my tests so far)
What am I missing? How can I get more out of G9? Or should I just bag it and stick with G8? I mean there must be a good reason why they made G9, right?

Daywalker Designs said:

Padone said:

benniewoodell said:

I'm going to have to pick them up and see how well they transfer into Blender through Diffeo and wait to see how they are in Maya after the Maya Bridge is updated for G9.

Again, since G9 is HD based it is harder both to import and use in blender or any other platform. May be the toon figures don't use HD but it would be an exception. Actually G9 imports fine with diffeo for the base jcms and the HD shape via multires, while HD morphs require baking to displacement maps and a whole lot of manual work to make them functional, and displacement doesn't work in eevee.

To export to blender or other apps G3-G8 is much better than G9.

It's not HD based; it has a higher base mesh density than G8 and older did. The only things that have HD morphs that load by default are the Navel and the Mouth.

Padone's definition of "HD based," if I've been paying attention, is something like: "Cannot be used as a convincing naked human without HD." So, yeah, HD based.

Padone said:

benniewoodell said:

I'm going to have to pick them up and see how well they transfer into Blender through Diffeo and wait to see how they are in Maya after the Maya Bridge is updated for G9.

Again, since G9 is HD based it is harder both to import and use in blender or any other platform. May be the toon figures don't use HD but it would be an exception. Actually G9 imports fine with diffeo for the base jcms and the HD shape via multires, while HD morphs require baking to displacement maps and a whole lot of manual work to make them functional, and displacement doesn't work in eevee.

To export to blender or other apps G3-G8 is much better than G9.

It's not HD based; it has a higher base mesh density than G8 and older did. The only things that have HD morphs that load by default are the Navel and the Mouth.

Padone said:

Ryuu@AMcCF said:

However, when I went to test it in Object mode @ 1.0 value, the morphs were all well short of their target values. Furthermore, just simply increasing the value of the morphs aren't achieving the desireed result as the target zones are severely distorted when going >1.0.

The only reason I can think of for this kind of behavior is if you have concurrent morphs, but it means you're using multiple morphs together. If you dial-in a single morph there's no way that it can be different from what you edited, apart scaling the object that will maintain the proportions. If you dial-in multiple morphs then it will be the sum of them for the vertices they have in common. Unless you defined vertex groups with different weights.

Anyway it is really hard in my opinion to catch the issue if you can't provide a test scene.

Big whoops! 

I was about to post this morning:

I did discover that turning off all those little check marks beside all the listed shape keys muted any other morphs, and so I switched off all of them except for "Basis" and the "Neck8 Left Spinal Ridge". So there should not be any other factors other than coming from Blender, itself. After that, I started playing with that "Shape Key Edit Mode" icon and looking at the verticies' coordinates. I found that everything matched up with what I recorded in Excel, but since the morphs were created with the icon off, then Blender must have been giving me a false image the whole time I was moving the verticies arround. 

Funny thing is, when I had started writing that this morning, it really looked like the answer was just that "Shape Key Edit Mode" setting that DaremoK3 pointed out.

However, as it turns out there WAS another influence causing the problems--those "Vertex Group" fields that I had filled in were causing the weight maps for those body segments to interfere.

Before responding to you, I had made some tests, took several screen shots, and had written up a report on what my results were--but before pressing the Post Comment button, I decided to work a little more to finish making the modifications to that left spinal ridge morph to compensate for the problem and to confirm my conclusions. However, when I started working on the belly scales on his throat, the values I needed to compensate weren't making any sense at all. While T/S that one, I accidently erased the "Vertex Group" field for that morph, and magically, it fixed the bloody thing!!

Fortunately, I DO believe in making frequent backups, so my efforts weren't entirely wasted, but this discovery was both frustrating and amusing, so I'm taking a break 'til tomorrow (maybe have some "stress relief" with a little Jack Daniels tonight--so, *cheers!* ). Although, I definitely think I'm finally on the right track, for once.

¡Muchos gracias!

PS: Trippy thing I discovered about that "Shape Key Edit" icon--it somehow seems to allow multiple morphs to be engaged at once while in both Edit, and Object, modes when it's lit up. But it does seem helpful while creating my morphs, so that's a big plus!

benniewoodell said:

I'm going to have to pick them up and see how well they transfer into Blender through Diffeo and wait to see how they are in Maya after the Maya Bridge is updated for G9.

Again, since G9 is HD based it is harder both to import and use in blender or any other platform. May be the toon figures don't use HD but it would be an exception. Actually G9 imports fine with diffeo for the base jcms and the HD shape via multires, while HD morphs require baking to displacement maps and a whole lot of manual work to make them functional, and displacement doesn't work in eevee.

To export to blender or other apps G3-G8 is much better than G9.

Continued

I started making my own tools within Studio onto my figures to help me solve some of the problems I have with animating in the app. 

Suddenly, to my surprise, I'm actually getting quite proficient with my character animations. 

That's the real magic of Studio - it has tools for making tools - and there are so many of them and they're all, each so good at doing what they do, that we can pretty much make tools using imagination while the development engineers at Daz 3d magically perform the tough parts under the hood using tested and true algorithms or whatever... just awesome. Good job folks!

Many of my tools get built right into the figure, and I control them with parameter dials - like a morph. Others might load onto the character using the wonderful "Wearables" system. Sometimes it might be saving the parts of a shader that I want to be able to add to another existing shader with a click, rather that making all of those adjustments each time... but this is only scratching the surface. I'm still a total noob at Studio.

Still, for making my digital movies Carrara is So Much more flexible. In order to animate textures in Studio, I had to buy a plugin - and I see that there are more such products out there. Even with these add-ons, we're not even close to competing with how we can simple animate any aspect of textures in Carrara - even loading avi or image sequences as texture maps.

Nearly everything in Carrara has user-facing controls meant to make animation needs as simple as changing a value. 

Damn that Hair!!! ;)

Richard Haseltine said:

Daywalker Designs said:

I know that Genesis 9 is new, but does anyone know of a morph that removes or reduces the size of the bulge from the male base morph? Dressing G9 Males in the female basicwear looks really strange without something like that.

Like this https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/603561/g9-masculine-chest-smoothing-morph#latest ?

I have that one; I'm looking for one to reduce the size of the bulge from where the Male Anatomical Elements would be.

PerttiA said:

SolitarySandpiper said:

PerttiA said:

SolitarySandpiper said:

a lot of the stuff doesn't come with smoothing modifiers and only has base resolution... the couple of items that do have both hd resolution and smoothing modifiers seem to have no idea that there's a nipple to conform to regardless of any settings i try.

Also i've noticed that there are breast morphs that don't conform either such as 'breasts fullness lower'

in fact its easy to see in real time which items are compatable with whichever morph and with all of the purchases i've made so far non are compatable with Hd nipple morphs.

One can add the smoothing modifier oneself, Edit->Figure->Geometry->Add smoothing (or something similar) just like one can add SubD, Edit->Figure->Geometry->Add Subdivision (or something similar)

i do know about that but i'd be very surprised if items that don't have modifiers will suddenly work when the ones that do have modifiers don't even work!

At at the moment i've spent the past 13 hrs on the problem and i'm spent... i'd put that time aside to learn the new dforce assistant and the camera magic programs but just thought i'd check the clothing items first just in case there were problems.

Anyway thanks for the suggestions but i think they need returning.

Have you looked at hidden morphs in the clothing?

When clothing is fitted to a figure, all the active morphs of the figure are transferred to the clothing (set hidden). One can use these hidden morphs to further adjust how the clothing fits, and if one needs more morphs, dial a morph on the figure to some small value and that morph is transferred to the clothing as well. 

(removed dupe post)

Turns out all these offending items are by the same 2 venders (now black listed) and they had the same issue with their Genesis 8 stuff.

All of my favorite PA's stuff works as expected even when auto fitting Gen8 to Gen9.

Daywalker Designs said:

I know that Genesis 9 is new, but does anyone know of a morph that removes or reduces the size of the bulge from the male base morph? Dressing G9 Males in the female basicwear looks really strange without something like that.

Like this https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/603561/g9-masculine-chest-smoothing-morph#latest ?

If you are exporting the morphed model and then importing to create a single morph thta is not a good idea - aside from the fact that you wouldn't be able to share the result if you wished, that method breaks the links to the many joint and morph corrections that make the component morphs work nicely. It is much better to keep the separate morphs and to add a custom sldier to set them all at once:

1. Have your dialed shape applied
2. right-click to on the Parameters pane to put it into Edit mode, if it isn't.
3. right-click in the group you want to add the new slider to>Create New Property
4. enter the name and label you want to use, set limits as desired (you may want to have 0 as the minimum)
5. set the new property to 100%
6. right-click on the New Property>ERC Freeze
7. check that sub-components looks like it has no interlopers, if it does deselect them and click Accept
8. test the new slider, if all seems good File>Save As Support Assets>Morph Asset
9. set the new morph to 0, otherwise it will always be applied on loading the figure
10. the entries you chhose for Author and product will be used as folder names in /data/publisher/figure/morphs/, the morph will be saved to the content directory selected at teh top of the dialogue.

I know that Genesis 9 is new, but does anyone know of a morph that removes or reduces the size of the bulge from the male base morph? Dressing G9 Males in the female basicwear looks really strange without something like that.

Ok, found my way around the initial issue by: saving the irises as an obj, reimporting, converting to figure, Transfer Utility back to the genesis figure. The problem now, is that if I fit these to a figure, then save that figure-with-irises as a scene subset, then reload that scene subset, the figure is loaded without any morphs. I do not understand.

Sigh. I said I wasn't going to buy any G9 characters since IK wasn't fixed as I'm just so tired of having to bring characters into Blender or Maya to be able to animate something so simple as a walk cycle without the feet and legs jittering out of place, or something more in depth like the parkour shot I did in my advanced body mechanics class last semester. But those toon characters that were released today look perfect and exactly what I could use. I'm going to have to pick them up and see how well they transfer into Blender through Diffeo and wait to see how they are in Maya after the Maya Bridge is updated for G9. 

mark_7b07771236 said:

Love the product :D

But I didn't come here only to sing praises. So Daz memory leaks... this may not surprise anyone, but it was to me. I have scenes that sometimes fail to render, and a restart of Daz usually fixes it right up. I've disabled CPU fallback - "you either render it the way I intended in the amount of time I've allotted, or you don't render at all" kind of thing. Anyway.

I've noticed that it doesn't appear to shut down Daz for the restart. It says it does, and then waits, but never does Daz actually shut down in a clean manner. It always ends up with the taskkill (see attached). Now possibly I need to give it even more time, although I would say 90 seconds to shut down any application on an I9 12900k should be enough.

Any tips on this?

Daz Studio can take a long time to really shut down. When you close its main window, it looks like Daz Studio may have exited, but the dazstudio.exe process keeps running in the background and cleans up things. Why that takes so long exactly is a mystery to me, but it does seem to be a function of what is loaded in the current scene. If scene loading takes long, then scene cleaning takes long, and that is what's happening when Daz Studio exits. And both take a lot more time depending on how many Genesis figures are in the scene and how many morphs you have installed for these.

A faster processor won't help much. Cleaning up your morphs may help. My Genesis 8 used to take minutes to load, and I have managed to get it back down to seconds by moving a lot of morphs (figures and morph packs) into a separate library that is normally disabled. It is a laborious effort though.

butterflyfish said:

Timbales said:

I can't get a male body that I like the look of. I think the chest area under the breast/pectorals and where they meet in the middle looks too sharply defined by default in comparison to the rest of the muscular anatomy. I'm throwing in the towel for now and will revisit if there are more shaping morphs released that will let me eliminate the issue or let me adjust other individual muscles to balance the definition across other areas. 

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/603561/g9-masculine-chest-smoothing-morph#latest

I think he's having problems even with that morph.

geo shell, geografity and rigid nodes, are thing which really are created to work only inside daz, as really daz only feature, while one of them can 'work" like to 70% to 90% perfect outside daz which is the geografty, the others 2 where really made to be a daz only feature being impossible to work outside daz unless you do a lot of work around even going to the point of being pointless try to use then, specially the rigid node, it' is the worst of the 3 features, while geograft can somehow be "mitigated", and geoshell you can have a work around using only the textures, rigid is just "useless" and don't work at all, the best work around would be using the transfer utility but it also not aways make it work leading to bad placements.

Timbales said:

I can't get a male body that I like the look of. I think the chest area under the breast/pectorals and where they meet in the middle looks too sharply defined by default in comparison to the rest of the muscular anatomy. I'm throwing in the towel for now and will revisit if there are more shaping morphs released that will let me eliminate the issue or let me adjust other individual muscles to balance the definition across other areas. 

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/603561/g9-masculine-chest-smoothing-morph#latest

To fix any ill-behaving (non-zero default value) morphs, do as follows;

1. Open DS and load "Genesis 8.1 Basic Female" (to an empty scene)
2. Right Click at Parameters Tab->Preferences->Choose "Show Hidden Properties" (part 3 zeroes only 'visible' dials)
3. Right Click at Parameters Tab->Zero->Zero Figure (Zeroes the value of all the 'visible' dials)
4. Right Click at Parameters Tab->Memorize->Memorize Figure (Sets the current value of all the dials as their default value)
5. Edit->Save As->Support Asset->Save Modified Assets (Writes the changed default value to the morph files that were changed)

When saving "Modified Assets" DS shows a dialog and asks for confirmation;
"The following file(s) will be permanently modified:" - "Accept/Cancel" - Choose "Accept"

duckbomb said:

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but the lack of geometry is not simply made up by geografts and normal/displacement maps in all cases.  Yes, in many of the rendering scenarios brought up the end result would be indistinguishable from a model with simply higher res, but the beauty of DS is that it's just one tool that people have the freedom to use however they like or need.  I'm not going to kid myself or anybody here, I know that the way I use it is different from what would be considered the 90%, but to me it's the way that I need to use the tool to get the end product I want.  In the end, I ultimately export a SubD4 OBJ and sculpt on top of that even, so having to include geografts or normals to get the detail back that I was able to add before with a morph is piling effort on top of work.

I'm just exhausted by reading comments from people who claim to speak on behalf of every use case out there, especially people who also say that they have access to HD morphs and hardly use them.  I've had multiple conversations here over the years about it, and multiple PAs educate me and post examples of HD vs Normals, and I respect their opinions just the same as I understand why it is the way it is.  All I'm asking is acknowledgmenet that for some, the lack of denser geometry is a really big setback.  In the end, it just comes down to the relationship between effort, time, and quality.

There's ways to make it work, but it's just more work and for some of us a step in the wrong direction. 

 

Edit:  After reading my post I'm going to edit to reinforce the point that I'm not making any slight against any PA.  I know Oso was in here talking about this, specifically, and I honestly respect his opinion and I've followed closely what he was doing with NPR, so to be direct about it this is not an attack on his opinion or the way he presented it.  I think the frustrating part is that I may be part of a uinique crowd that this decision wasn't made for.  You can't make everyone happy, and honestly the way that I work with DS means I spend very little at this store, so from that perspective DAZ made the right call.  It just doesn't make it less frustrating lol.

I don't think the issue is really mesh density so much as it is the lack of mesh density in certain areas, like the nipples and navel, since Genesis 9 has double the mesh density of G8, according to DAZ themselves. Sure, I'm sure you're not alone in wanting a much denser base mesh, but DAZ has to balance what they want with what a new user may have available as far as hardware goes, and going too dense will make renders take significantly longer than most folks want to spend waiting for an image to complete.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse here, but the lack of geometry is not simply made up by geografts and normal/displacement maps in all cases.  Yes, in many of the rendering scenarios brought up the end result would be indistinguishable from a model with simply higher res, but the beauty of DS is that it's just one tool that people have the freedom to use however they like or need.  I'm not going to kid myself or anybody here, I know that the way I use it is different from what would be considered the 90%, but to me it's the way that I need to use the tool to get the end product I want.  In the end, I ultimately export a SubD4 OBJ and sculpt on top of that even, so having to include geografts or normals to get the detail back that I was able to add before with a morph is piling effort on top of work.

I'm just exhausted by reading comments from people who claim to speak on behalf of every use case out there, especially people who also say that they have access to HD morphs and hardly use them.  I've had multiple conversations here over the years about it, and multiple PAs educate me and post examples of HD vs Normals, and I respect their opinions just the same as I understand why it is the way it is.  All I'm asking is acknowledgmenet that for some, the lack of denser geometry is a really big setback.  In the end, it just comes down to the relationship between effort, time, and quality.

There's ways to make it work, but it's just more work and for some of us a step in the wrong direction. 

Edit:  After reading my post I'm going to edit to reinforce the point that I'm not making any slight against any PA.  I know Oso was in here talking about this, specifically, and I honestly respect his opinion and I've followed closely what he was doing with NPR, so to be direct about it this is not an attack on his opinion or the way he presented it.  I think the frustrating part is that I may be part of a uinique crowd that this decision wasn't made for.  You can't make everyone happy, and honestly the way that I work with DS means I spend very little at this store, so from that perspective DAZ made the right call.  It just doesn't make it less frustrating lol.