I've had basically no problem moving to Genesis 81 from Genesis 8. All my Zev0 dials are there, for instance. Same goes for third party dials from other locations.

It's not seamless. Fixing expressions, geoshells not quite working, other scripts not working due to nomenclature (Body/Head versus Torso).

There are workarounds for basically anything that I need done.

Is it worth the time? I like G81 better for the facial rig. Newer skins are a plus, but I have so many that I actively avoid buying new figures, myself.

It really isn't a problem to move to Genesis 8.1, but it also isn't going to change the universe and make everything better.

Me... I mostly use Genesis 3 and Genesis 8.1 now, with some Genesis 2 as well. Pure Genesis 8, I do not bother unless I'm using it as a step (like geoshells to transfer to Genesis 8.1).

Does anyone know if there is a way to not clear the dforce object before using the timeline (in this case a hair item)?  Specifically, I am looking to drape an object using statis pose, then start from that draped pose/morph and go through the timeline.  I have tried saving a morph, but haven't been able to get the mesh to match.  Thanks in advance.

background said:

I expect the PA will stop producing male figures if they can only get 50% of $2.99 for them ( some time in the future).

Well, if there would be materials for the anatomical elements I would gladly paid the $ 9.something which are asked for the product right now immediately.. now... today... not my fault then, when the PA goes broke I'd say 

The Blurst of Times said:

There are some figures where the anatomical bits don't have their own button... you load the anatomical textures when you load the figure textures. Kind of a pain, but at least those guys have their bits.

Of course, lacking anatomical textures is not an issue for me.

I would then use the Torso UV for dangly anatomical bits, free at the other site. It doesn't hold up for uber close up shots of the dangly parts, but who really wants that? (Not me... not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.)

If you do want close-up details, there are geoshell products for additional dangly bit details (to make up for the Torso texture having no separate set of surface details for the danglies). Genesis 8 only, I think, but clever people can deal with that easily.

Or, one may use third party dangly elements, which often (but not always) is a preferred choice for naughty dangly bit renders.

/Nature finds a way.

 The option to use the torso textures for the dangly bits is a wee bit more trickier than just going "copy/paste" and - to my knowledge - needs a script, which, alas again to my knowledge, is only working with the G8M figures, not the G8.1M ones, due the texture zones gotten renamed on the figures...

For the same reason the G8M "3rd party dangly bits" don't work with G8.1M figures unless updated by their maker(s). Which not haven't all done, or only in form of a new product, which asks for a new money transfer...

And yes, it seems I am not clever enough to deal with this problem on my own...

Which is the reason why for me a G8.1M figure not coming with dangly bits textures makes it a "no buy" for me... independent from how great the figure looks and how much I would like to buy it if it was just a complete figure...

Love this but am not crazy about the hands so wanted to make sure before I got it that the hands themselves have a dial to be made back and forth to normal nd s Slim man.

I see those black eye shapes on his forehead can be removed as one of the promos has it without them, if they for some reason cannot be removed pelase let me know also.

thanks a lot

https://www.daz3d.com/the-slim-man

Most characters I bought were g8 (for the skins is whjy I bought them) but for older ones do they always come with skin material? and do they always have a seperate head morph indepedent of the body?

Sometimes the materials is quite confusing to tell from the description, they say so many iray materials or materials but do not indicate that they are for the full body, is there a way to tell by seeing the description which materail is the full body skin itself? Some chacters do not come with skin material correct? Just don't want to ever buy one wit hno skin and when it says 

• 01 Full Body and Head Morph-does this mean that the head cannot be morphed seperatly?  Or must they be klisted seperatly in order to be sure the head can be morphed on by itself?

 thanks

frank0314 said:

PerttiA said:

Seagate is the one I trust when it comes to HD's, with the exeption of external ones with their own power source.

I think all the drives are dirt cheap at the moment, I was just looking at the prices for M2 drives and 2TB Kingstons were around 190-200eur including 24% VAT. I think last autumn that was the price for 1TB Kingston SSD or two 4TB external Seagate HD's

Seagate's are the only drives I'll buy. I still have a 1TB external that I bought in 2008 when the 1TB first came out I believe to transfer the files on a WD drive I had in my desktop that fried. The Geek Squad at Best Buy were able to get the files off of it. But, the external is still going strong. I have 4 drives in my desktop of varying sizes and all of them as Seagate's. Every single WD I've owned has fried at one point in time after being only 2 yrs old. I won't even allow a WD in the house. I swear the things are cursed. There are 6 computers in this house and none have WD in them.

I have the same experience with WD, I don't remember one that didn't die under 2 years. Seagate, 10 years no problem, even the first 7200rpm ones that you could fry bacon on (they needed additional cooling though) 

PerttiA said:

daveso said:

magog_a4eb71ab said:

daveso said:

My hard drive went out. My PC does not see it at all. I've rebooted, and it worked for a little bit, got a few files off., then it just went away. Tried to connect using a SATA cable and external power, but it is not seen at all. 
ALL of my programs and data, including DAZ content, etc were on that drive. Considering the drive is not seen internally or externally, is there any way to recover that data?

If its a mechanical drive, you haven't lost anything and should be able to recover most(if not all) of your data. I don't know what the going price is per Mb or Gb, but it use to cost an arm & leg. It should be much cheaper nowadays, depending on how much data needs to be retrieved. However, if its an SSD, you might be screwed. 

its mechanical. I think i have gotten most off once it resurrected itself. I was going to buy SSD, but mechaincal drives are dirt cheap right now and bought a seagate. it goes in today.  

Seagate is the one I trust when it comes to HD's, with the exeption of external ones with their own power source.

I think all the drives are dirt cheap at the moment, I was just looking at the prices for M2 drives and 2TB Kingstons were around 190-200eur including 24% VAT. I think last autumn that was the price for 1TB Kingston SSD or two 4TB external Seagate HD's

Seagate's are the only drives I'll buy. I still have a 1TB external that I bought in 2008 when the 1TB first came out I believe to transfer the files on a WD drive I had in my desktop that fried. The Geek Squad at Best Buy were able to get the files off of it. But, the external is still going strong. I have 4 drives in my desktop of varying sizes and all of them as Seagate's. Every single WD I've owned has fried at one point in time after being only 2 yrs old. I won't even allow a WD in the house. I swear the things are cursed. There are 6 computers in this house and none have WD in them.

All of a sudden when I go Z from DS then export it out and save it then try and use as a morph it does the wrong geometry thing.  Any ideas?

I think the skin is from Onyx for G3F, which is listed in the promo credits for that product. Face morph is probably custom.

This one comes from having replayed Timesplitters Future Perfect a while back:

Gallery Link

Gordig said:

Care to share that knowledge?

I've got a morph/pose/scale slider that adapts Horse 2 to closely match the centaur. (These are my own work, so are theoretically shareable). From there, that shape can be baked into the Horse clothing.

The problem is that while the weight maps for Horse 2 and the centaur are very similar, the bones are differently named and ordered, and doing those swaps with DS's internal tools is a pain.

So I've managed to formulate a strategy that lets me export an FBX to Blender, reorder/name the bones there, then reimport via the MikuMikuDance importer that was made some time ago. The problem is that the MMD formats may preserve most of the rigging (unlike the mess that rigged FBX files turn into), but destroy the vertex order by triangulating everything. However the transfer utility can be used to copy it back over to an original mesh, and then a rigging transfer from the centaur gets all the bone orientations that the MMD format has lost.

It's still not a *pretty* method, but it's not the method that it was with DS's own editing tools where one single tiny mistake in how you copied or parented something ruined the whole thing and forced you to start over.

TL;DR: I morph it, and now have a method that lets me export the rigging to and from Blender largely intact.

therry_e35e822bb8 said:

Victoria is no more special (with all the "pro" morphs etc) as she used to be?

To copy an explanation of mine from elsewhere: 

Okay, figure generations:

Over time, Daz has produced nine generations of base figure:

- Generation 1 had base figures called (eventually) Victoria 1 and Michael 1. (Originally Victoria was "The Millennium Woman", but that kept getting shortened to Millie, which Daz didn't really like).
- Generation 2 was Victoria 2 and Michael 2
- Generation 3 was Victoria 3 and Michael 3
- Generation 4 was Victoria 4 and Michael 4. (With 4.1 and 4.2 updates for Vicky that changed minor things).

All of these generations had a number of derivative figures that used the base Victoria and Michael meshes and morphed/retextured them to become new characters.

- Generation 5 was called Genesis. This generation was an androgynous one that tried to unify the male and female figures. There were still Victoria 5 and Michael 5 figures, but these were now based on the Genesis base.
- Generation 6 was Genesis 2, but the figures were split back into male and female (too many problems with fitting clothes). Again, there were Victoria 6 and Michael 6, but again these were morphs based on the Genesis 2 Female and Male bases.
- Generation 7 was Genesis 3, again Male and Female. Victoria 7 and Michael 7 remained the flagship figure morphs.
- Generation 8 was Genesis 8, which was when Daz decided to address the confusion between the different Genesis number and Generation number. The base mesh this time is actually very similar to Genesis 3 in shape, with the main alteration being a change from a T-pose to an A-pose.
- And the eighth-and-a-bit generation is Genesis 8.1. This is actually a refinement of Genesis 8, retaining the same vertex count, skeleton, and pose, allowing it to be almost fully backcompatible with Genesis 8 content.

On which point, I should note: Mostly, content is only natively compatible with its own base generation. Things such as clothes and hair (being standalone meshes) can make use of tools to refit them to other generations, but figure morphs naturally require their base figure to build upon (just being a set of morph vectors and textures).

~~~~~

As far as some, but not all of my personal favourites that get regular use:
- The base Daz Original "Genesis 8 Female Body Morphs", "Genesis 8 Female Head Morphs" and the equivalent Male versions.The similar expressions are a *maybe*, as they don't natively work on G8.1 (although they can be made to).

These aren't *essential*, but they're extremely useful and also widely used. While the Genesis bases all have auto-follow capability meaning that clothing can try to adapt to any morph applied, clothing still benefits from the author fitting it to a morph, and these are the most widely supported morphs for that. (Particularly useful when it comes to breasts, which are an area auto-follow struggles with).

- "Scene Optimizer"

Most assets these days are intended for Iray rendering, and Iray has the issue that it will only run on a GPU (NVidia only) if the scene fits entirely into the card's VRAM, and instead runs (very slowly) on the CPU. Scene Optimiser helps you downsize textures that are out of focus or distant in order to save memory and thus run (apparently) larger scenes.

- Resource Saver Shader Collection

Does a somewhat similar job to the above, but it does it by providing a heap of generic low-memory shader presets that you can apply to things that aren't particularly in focus.

- SPEX for Genesis

*Bit* of an odd-one-out in most people's essentials lists, but an absolutely fantasic pair of extremely morphable spectacles that can be easily used on any figure generation. The shaders are still for 3Delight, but can be extremely easily updated for Iray.

On which note:

- RSSY 3DL to Iray Converter

Helps a lot with converting 3DL materials to work with the new Iray renderer.

- Fit Control

Adds loads of extra adjustment morphs to clothing.

- Mesh Grabber

Okay, not actually one of my favourites (I tend to export to Blender for the same job), but a lot of people swear by it.

- Ultimate Pose Mixer

Gives a lot of quick presets for rapidly locking off parts of a pose so that they can be preserved while you load another pose preset.

Catherine3678ab said:

Morphs for transferring poses!? I don't think so.

Scripts maybe:  https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/86893/g8f-to-v4a4-pose-transfer

 

Thanks! 

Maybe not what you are looking for, but TritiumCG at DeviantArt has some free celebrity HEAD morphs one of which is Jenna Fischer aka Pam Beesly.

I don't have it so I can't comment on quality and again is only the head morph. There are no textures.

Gallery link

I bought Kimora for her freckled skin... so here's a render where you can barely see the freckles! It only makes sense.

The shape here is Sierra by Jadyn & Sabby, plus quite a lot of Darcy's head morph.

vic3d said:

Since this icons do not work and no corresponding slder is created in parameters then my m4 shape++ (or V4) still must not be working? It deos have the explanation point at it's icon in content library

Don't forget that you need to select the Head node of the M4 or V4 figure to use any head morphs.

Do that and click on Morphs/Shapes - Morphs++ - Nose - do you see the morph list like in my attachment?
If yes, then your installation is just fine, and all you need to do is slide those sliders. 
If no, then you may have a problem.

Took me ages to pose this. I was going off an old photo I took and tried to get the right hand to grip the hilt across her body but I kept running into clipping issues with the right breast. I did use a squish morph but it wasn't quite enough. Still, I was happy that it looks like she is at least reaching for the hilt.

Please stop posting multiple threads on your morph issues - it's imposible to keep track of the issues or of what you have been told to try, or how you have answered questions.

Took me ages to pose this. I was going off an old photo I took and tried to get the right hand to grip the hilt across her body but I kept running into clipping issues with the right breast. I did use a squish morph but it wasn't quite enough. Still, I was happy that it looks like she is at least reaching for the hilt.

Novbre said:

Most of the chracters for sale in Daz are single-dial morphs (or head and body morphs) so are these vendors going back in and recreating those corrective morphs?  Or is there a way to preserve those links? 

~ Novbre

Sharing a morph made by baking others is not permitted, unless they are from merchant resource sets marketed as such (and even then there are usually conditions). The single morph characters, like the individual morphs you are using, are created by modifying the shape in a modelling or sculpting application and importing it as a new morph as you are with your baked shapes, then creating any needed adjustment morphs and fixing the joint placement.

Hello, Ive recently gotten into daz3d and am looking at what a dedicated rendering rig would look like, but am having a hard time finding conversations that arent upgrade talks or internet render farms. Im looking to build a dedicated pc that i can transfer projects to to do the rendering portion so im not bogging down my daily driver with such constant load. My basic findings so far is that you need a nvidia gpu to do iray renders, however it seems like the major workhorse in the rendering is the cpu? Ive checked my advanced render settings and see both my cpu and gpu listed as render hardware, a fairly simple still frame UHD render takes between 15-30mins on my current hardware, with the below readings (im a bit confused on how my gpu is being utilized as task manager says its being used at 7-9%, but in hwmonitor it reads 100% utilization)

i9-10900kf CPU 100% utl across all 10 cores/20logicprocessors 

nivida 3080fe gpu 7-9% utl (task manager, hwmonitor says 100%?) 6/10gb dedicated mem, 0/32 shared gpu mem

ram 14.2/64gb @3600

I'm decently tech literate, but i dont have great knowledge when it comes to hardware, so im hoping to get an understanding of how to proceed here. Say if money wasnt an option what would my priorities be here? Im curious what is done in industry, say pixar/disney, for render farms?

Do I look into those multi-cpu mb and throw together a couple 20 thread cpus with a low end gpu? is that even possible/worth it?

Do i need a top of the line gpu as well or should all the money be put in the cpu? my 3080 confuses me because the util drops to nearly nothing in task manager when i start a render and it seems the cpu is pulling all the weight, so i dont know if such a good gpu is necessary or am i miss interpretting something? 

It doesnt seem like a ton of ram is needed, is this true? and will ram needs change if say the gpu is worse? or more cpus?

Also is there diminishing returns when you approach absurd levels here? Is it even worth going for something crazy on a render rig, say 2x cpus a baller gpu and fat ram, or would a basic rig of a 10 core cpu + whatever nvidia gpu i can find in these~trying times~ + 16bg ram, be nearly as good? I dont want to be spending AMD threadripper money if daz3d renders will only get like a 10% performance buff. I'm doing some quick maths in my head at 1 frame per 30 mins, that if i wanted to do a 1 minute animation @ 30 UHD frames per second on my current rig, im looking at 37.5 days of continuous render time. Is this pretty standard? or could it be improved with a more optimized render rig?

Many thanks in advance for any help or discussion, really enjoying learning about this tech