Richard Haseltine said:

Unless your issue is Duplicate Formulas, which are a clash between products and won't be fixed unless all content makers get very thorough about using unique names, then naming converntions have no real bearing on load times.

Duplicate Formulas are a big part of what I am referring to.

And this manner of thinking is exactly what I am trying to bring attention to.

Why is it the creator's responsibility to double check the naming? Yes, they should make sure their own morphs don't conflict, but they can't possibly check against all other morphs in the DAZ store.

Keeping a database of morphs and what packages they belong to isn't hard. The data is available; it's in all of the read me indexs. Then it would be a simple comparison as part of the release process.Then merge the new entries into the database.

Don't want to go the database route? Fine. Why not assign each creator a prefix and double check that the prefix is used in the morph name? Then there would only be a conflict with the creator's own work.

Admittedly it seems like things have gotten better, but I don't know if that is because of an effort to avoid these conflicts or just the steps I have personally taken to avoid the issues.

I can accept that load times can't be fixed until a new version of DS comes along, but if no one is worrying about that / mentioning it, then it might well be overlooked.

Load times are an inconvenience. The Duplicate Formulas break things unless you know what you are doing to fix it.

Richard Haseltine said:

Havos said:

Pendraia said:

PrefoX said:

3DRT said:

The new figure looks good, but I'm disappointed by the lack of backwards compatiblity (legacy UV's, morph and pose converters etc) Until there's a tool that allows me to port over my large library of G8 characters, I don't think I'll be investing much into G9.

you can only make bigger improvements without backwards compatibility. its pretty much impossible to autoconvert UV maps, morphs are going to be hard because its a complete different mesh and morphs are targerted to specific vertices. DAZ has put a ton of work into gen9, it is a huge leap and that will pay out in the end.

Alternate maps are possible with genesis. The original genesis had alternate maps for Millenium 3 and 4 figures. It can be done but most likely as a pa product. Daz released the original genesis with millenium 4 mapping included but they haven't done it since.

The original Genesis had UVs for the Millenium 4 figures, but not the Millenium 3 figures. This was because the base Genesis UV was fairly close to the M4/V4 ones. M3/V3 UVs were completely different.

Depending on how close the arm and leg loops of G9 are to those of G8 then in theory G9 could be given a UV set allowing it to use Genesis 3/8 skins. However if those loops are a long way off, that is not going to look good. In that case something like Cayman's legacy UV products that use geografts will be needed.

Victoria 4, Genesis, and Genesis 2 had the same surface grouping. Genesis 3 and 8 also shared a different surface grouping. Genesis 9 has a ne grouping. When the grouping chnages it is not possible to simply remap the model to take older textures - they either need to be baked to new maps or something like the GeoGrafts used in recent tools need to be added to accomodate the overlaps..

Thanks for the info Richard...

Richard Haseltine said:

alexhcowley said:

Like many others, I'm not spending almost $80 on something without knowing what I'm buying. 

The four ethnic groups feature looks interesting to me since I would like to combine the Hispanic facial features with a Black African skin tone. I wonder if this will be possible?

Cheers,

Alex. 

My understanding was that those were part of Genesis 9, not Victoria 9, and so would be free if they were  in Starter Essentials (though it did look as if Jay also had the, presumably non-free, morph packs so we can't take that as read)

That was my thoughts also. I'm not spending yet on Vicki as I want the base morphs before I worry about buying specific characters and I like the look of the ethnic maps.

robertsj_aus99 said:

Yes, I know there is a work around, but I have never been able to get it to work

If this does not work, it means you have the dummy files installed in several places (see note1)

Making the G8 base expressions (and any expressions that are using them) work on G8.1 requires removing dummy/placeholder expressions that are installed to G8.1 morph folders - These dummy/placeholder expression files have no other function than to prevent the base G8 expressions from loading. 

The dummy/placeholder files are located in;

...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Base Pose Head\ (255 files, can be more if you have additional DAZ expression packs)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Expressions\ (24 files, can be more if you have additional DAZ expression packs)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Male 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Base Pose Head\ (255 files, can be more if you have additional DAZ expression packs)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Male 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Expressions\ (24 files, can be more if you have additional DAZ expression packs)

Please make sure you are removing the files from G8.1 morph folders and not G8 morph folders.

Note 1; If you are logging in to DS and letting DAZ Connect (within DS) to install/update your content, you may have these also in an other location that has "\Data\Cloud\" in it's path
Note 2; Do not remove any files from "FACS" or "FACSExpressions" folders

Hi there,

I have trouble making control properties for G8.1 and I also have some little questions about those.

Maybe it is a known issue. So I need to make a control property that includes the scaling of multiple bones of the G8.1F figure + 2 morphs modifier/shape. Then, ERC freeze the thing; I test the slider and it works properly and so I save it as morph asset. It is showing in the directory where I saved the asset: [...]\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\[...]. However, when I load a new character, load a new scene or I even if I restart Daz, the new ctrl prop does not appear where it should. My guest is that the ctrl prop is using morphs that are originaly from the Genesis 8 model or maybe it's the combinaison of the G8.1 and G8 morphs that cause the issue. I must say, I did try to remove the G8 morphs from the ctrl prop in the Property hierarchy tab; saved it back, but that didin't fix it. Still not showing. Any idea?

Then some quick questions:

- Is there caviats in what type of slider you include in a ctrl prop? As in, what if you include let's say a slider that scale a bone, a morph type modifier/shape or a pose modifier/pose. What if you include one of each of those in a single ctrl prop. 

- Can you create a ctrl prop that include another ctrl prop that you previously created? How's the ERC doing in those cases. 

Thank youuu; feel free to answer partially to anything here, have a good day.

Ced

Most likely you had a morph installed that had a non-zero default value, so that it was making a silent contribution to the shape, and that has now been fixed or you currently have a morph with a non-zero default isntalled and that is adding to the intended shape. Does the base figure load with the expected shape?

Richard Haseltine said:

alexhcowley said:

Like many others, I'm not spending almost $80 on something without knowing what I'm buying. 

The four ethnic groups feature looks interesting to me since I would like to combine the Hispanic facial features with a Black African skin tone. I wonder if this will be possible?

Cheers,

Alex. 

My understanding was that those were part of Genesis 9, not Victoria 9, and so would be free if they were  in Starter Essentials (though it did look as if Jay also had the, presumably non-free, morph packs so we can't take that as read)

This is more or less what I thought. Roll on mid-October.

Cheers,

Alex.  

@Imago

sta scritto nella pagina della pubblicità e l'hanno fatto anche vedere ieri nel video... 1 solo sesso indefinito (e dunque niente M o F) da cui poi coi morph lo trasformi in maschio, femmina o un mix. Proprio come il Genesis 1. Ovviamente prima le donne.. poi forse gli uomini e ultimi i maschi bianchi.
Per cui occhio ai pronomi perchè non è un lui (he) e nemmeno una lei (she).. bisogna dargli del loro (them)
Inoltre se hai notato, il corpo femminile è meno "grazioso" del solito, il corpo è più curvy e il seno è più piccolo.. ovviamente capezzoli e altre parti anatomiche non le hanno fatte vedere (e nemmeno accennate)

V9 è il classico morph (stavolta è direttamente HD) aggiuntivo con materiale per creare pelle con vitiliginosa.

Purtroppo il futuro per la DAZ sono render come questi qui: 

PS il displacement crea si dettagli sulle superfici, ma li crea muovendo i vertici... dunque se vuoi avere dettagli fini devi creare mesh con molte subdivision (praticamente come se avessi un morph HD). Le bump (o anche le normal map) invece lasciano piatta la superficie.. di solito viste da davanti generano un buon effetto ma se metti la telecamera vicino alla superficie si nota l'effetto piatto (classico esempio del pavimento con le fughe fatte con le bump).
Io speravo (inutilmente) che mettessero dei LOD.. ovvero come ti avvicini/allontani con la telecamera, il modello aumenta o perde di dettagli (bastava lavorare un po' sulla tecnologia dei morph HD). Metahuman usa questa tecnologia ed è utilissima perchè non ha senso renderizzare una figura da 1 milione di poligoni con texture a 8K quando la telecamera si trova a 200 m (praticamente nel render la figura è un francobollo). Inoltre se devi renderizzare folle di personaggi la GPU non ti va a fuoco inutilmente 

Jason Galterio said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Jason Galterio said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Jason Galterio said:

Is there any changes to the morph loading procedures? To avoid the naming and loading times that happen with G8?

I asked in the chat, but didn't get an answer.

That would really require a DS change.

Really? I don't have it happening with G3 or G2, even when I have just as many morphs installed.

You probably do have more, or at least more interconnections (which are what causes the lag, not just the bare number).

All I am hoping for is that these issues are thought about now...  When standards on the naming conventions can be established.

So that two years from now we aren't dealing with a situation that is 4x worse than the G8 situation.

4x times because it's Male AND Female morphs on a mesh that's twice as dense.

Unless your issue is Duplicate Formulas, which are a clash between products and won't be fixed unless all content makers get very thorough about using unique names, then naming converntions have no real bearing on load times.

Havos said:

Pendraia said:

PrefoX said:

3DRT said:

The new figure looks good, but I'm disappointed by the lack of backwards compatiblity (legacy UV's, morph and pose converters etc) Until there's a tool that allows me to port over my large library of G8 characters, I don't think I'll be investing much into G9.

you can only make bigger improvements without backwards compatibility. its pretty much impossible to autoconvert UV maps, morphs are going to be hard because its a complete different mesh and morphs are targerted to specific vertices. DAZ has put a ton of work into gen9, it is a huge leap and that will pay out in the end.

Alternate maps are possible with genesis. The original genesis had alternate maps for Millenium 3 and 4 figures. It can be done but most likely as a pa product. Daz released the original genesis with millenium 4 mapping included but they haven't done it since.

The original Genesis had UVs for the Millenium 4 figures, but not the Millenium 3 figures. This was because the base Genesis UV was fairly close to the M4/V4 ones. M3/V3 UVs were completely different.

Depending on how close the arm and leg loops of G9 are to those of G8 then in theory G9 could be given a UV set allowing it to use Genesis 3/8 skins. However if those loops are a long way off, that is not going to look good. In that case something like Cayman's legacy UV products that use geografts will be needed.

Victoria 4, Genesis, and Genesis 2 had the same surface grouping. Genesis 3 and 8 also shared a different surface grouping. Genesis 9 has a ne grouping. When the grouping chnages it is not possible to simply remap the model to take older textures - they either need to be baked to new maps or something like the GeoGrafts used in recent tools need to be added to accomodate the overlaps..

Gator said:

I'll let some experts chime in, as I am certainly not.  I never used the original Genesis.  But it seems the universal mesh wasn't that well recepted.  

To me it seems like a negative to vs. dedicated male and female meshes.  I (and I assume the majority of people) could care less about androgonyous shapes.  I don't care about fitting male clothes to female and vice versa - for the rare exceptions, I'll create my own morphs for it.  

Without dedicated meshes, don't you have more texture stretching and compression issues?

In another thread one of the forum moderators said that working with the original Genesis was "a nightmare" for content creators, but that this isn't the case for G9, which is much easier to work with. The fact that G2 quickly split back into male/female showed that DAZ realized they'd got it wrong with Genesis; the fact that they have gone back to a unimesh for Genesis 9 suggests that they think they now know how to do it right, and that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

DAZ don't always make great decisions, but I don't think they'd simply repeat a past mistake on something as important as a new character generation. I don't think their modelers would let them.

I don't believe that the point of the unimesh is simply to support androgynous characters. From what Jay said, it sounded as if it was done to make it easier to create other characters (i.e. non-human) off the same mesh. It also has the advantage that clothing will work better cross-figure. There'll be limits of course: Michael probably won't look great in a bra for the same reasons that I don't look great in a bra. But between a shared mesh and dForce, clothing that isn't extremely gendered ought to transfer pretty well. Or at least that's what I understood them to be implying.

ETA: Oh yeah, and what Expozures mentioned.  Concerned with loading times regarding morphs as well.

Loading times on morphs seem to be largely a product of having too many morphs installed. My understanding, however, is that morphs are loaded based on the base character. In other words, if you have 10 morphs for G8M, and 1000 morphs for G8F, your G8M is going to load up pretty fast, and G8F is going to take forever. By the same token, once you add G9 to your system, those 1000 G8F morphs aren't going to slow down G9 at all (and G9 won't make loading G8F any worse).

The catch, of course, is that if you have male and female G9 characters, then all those morphs will contribute to slow the load times of G9. When we had G8M and G8F, at least G8M wasn't making it slower to load G8F. So that is a difference. Still, it may take a while before we accumulate enough G9 content for that to be a concern.

Leana said:

Panzer Emerald said:

if a majority of PAs both within and outside of Daz's storefront had issues adjusting their content to properly work for both feminine and masculine bodies for Genesis, I doubt that will have changed for G9.

That was 10 years ago though. It might be easier to do now, since technology used has changed quite a bit since then.

I hope that's the case, but tbh I don't expect PAs who deal primarily with feminine clothing (i.e. Aeon Soul, OOT) to even consider how their G9 clothing will look on a masculine body. That's their prerogative, absolutely, but it will influence my purchasing decisions wrt G9. In the past I would've been really angry and passive-aggressive about it, but these days, I'm just tired and with recent IRL purchases (a new-used car) taking a huge chunk out of my budget, gotta start prioritizing now lmao. 

Also, I hope the unified/unisex base mesh means more beastly/non-human-y morph kits. That was one of the things I enjoyed the most about Genesis and that later generations never quite captured fully. 

ETA: G9 aside, where the heck is an update on Daz Studio 5, that's what I'm wondering.

alexhcowley said:

Like many others, I'm not spending almost $80 on something without knowing what I'm buying. 

The four ethnic groups feature looks interesting to me since I would like to combine the Hispanic facial features with a Black African skin tone. I wonder if this will be possible?

Cheers,

Alex. 

My understanding was that those were part of Genesis 9, not Victoria 9, and so would be free if they were  in Starter Essentials (though it did look as if Jay also had the, presumably non-free, morph packs so we can't take that as read)

Sven Dullah said:

Personally I will play with the free G9 stuff, when available, see if it converts well to aweSurface and go from there. If I like what I see, I might even buy the basic morph bundles and some character morphs and outfits. 

Regarding memory usage etc - that's an IRay curse I'll never have to worry about. Always found the workflow of buying HD morphs and textures for maximal realism to use on the latest graphics card, then buying scene optimizers and stuff to reduce resolution to be able to actually use the stuff, and, in the end, to remove noise, use a denoiser that kinda belongs to the last century tech, for a descent result, a bit counter-productive.

A wise approach imo.
Been revisiting aweSurface to start migrating away from nVidia GPU game.  I wonder if there's even a a topic for 3DL that isn't necro!  : 0 !
As for G9, preordering V9 seems a bit premature.  (Noticed store ad this morning.) Wish they had its measurements and more renders.  Closeup has size and density of facial pores looking a bit over the top for my tastes.  "The grapefuit look" as I call it.  Others might think closeup looks great.
---
Shows how much I keep up with things.  There's an updated version of "Voss Hair" ?   That one goes back a ways doesn't it?
 

AbyssalEros said:

While it was asked in the chat of the stream if there will be gens and it was certified there will be gens coming with G9, I couldn't help but notice that the mesh had NO distinctive polygons for nipples.
Will the new generation still have them (I am not talking about the texture) or are they removed for good (or worse, for artists who want realistic figures)?

From what I've read in another thread, nipples are a HD morph included with the base figure.

Mark_e593e0a5 said:

Leana said:

That's the base price for preordering V9 HD, there's no guarantee it will be the price for all future core characters.

Beside, base price for G2, G3 and G8 core characters was already $45, and G3 and G8 HD add-ons were separate with a base price of $40. If the HD add-on is included with the core figure (which seems to be the case since they're refering to "V9 HD"), it's not that surprising that the base price increases.

It was basically one of the highlights presented by Jay Versluis in the preview session that with G9 there is no separate HD anymore. HD is always included as a morph set. 

Thanks for confirming this. I've not seen the preview video yet, live session started too late my time.

Leana said:

That's the base price for preordering V9 HD, there's no guarantee it will be the price for all future core characters.

Beside, base price for G2, G3 and G8 core characters was already $45, and G3 and G8 HD add-ons were separate with a base price of $40. If the HD add-on is included with the core figure (which seems to be the case since they're refering to "V9 HD"), it's not that surprising that the base price increases.

It was basically one of the highlights presented by Jay Versluis in the preview session that with G9 there is no separate HD anymore. HD is always included as a morph set. 

Muscleman said:

...E non siete contenti? Ora avrete di nuovo una sola figura...

E invece temo che riceveremo un abbondante quantitativo di tessuto biologico vivente, altamente irrorato di fluidi preposti al trasporto di ossigeno nel organismo, in regioni anatomiche normalmente predisposte al rilascio di materiali di scarto del processo digestivo.

Qui si parla di Victoria9... Non di un generico Genesis9 e punto come era G1.   Non c'è alcuna garanzia che la base sia una sola, potrebber benissimo essere G9F con un morph per mascolinizzarla.

Personally I don't think G8.X items are going to bargain bin anytime soon, and I still plan on buying them. Maybe some extra 10% off every now and then compared to G9, because it's still the second newest figure, and Daz really has no reason to lower it's prices yet. Main reason being that until G9 gets more morph packs, clothing etc. G8.X remains far superior to G9. Currently as far as I know, G9 has 1 character, couple of bikinis and an "almost" working pose converter, so there's really not much to play with compared to G8.

That being said, I don't think we'll see much new G8.X only releases after G9 release, but more than likely at least some items will support both G8 and G9. How long that lasts depends on new G9 only sales. If the sales for G9 only items are low, then I assume PAs will keep on supporting G8 figures to make more money, but I'm not sure this works for characters since there's too much differences and might be too much work. Let's wait and see how this plays out. In any case, I still have a quite big wishlist for G8.X, and since I'm not in a hurry to upgrade to G9, I'll probably continue buying items that I can use with my G8.1 figures. I'm not going to pay premium, because it's not the new and shiny stuff anymore, but if the deal is good then why not.

Thanks for the response Han.

What I mean is that the only missing objects are base textures which I haven't bothered re-aligning filenames yet. All the objects for the actual figure morph are installed, and Daz doesn't indicate any morph assets are missing.