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"I'm hearing excuses and deflection"
I'm seeing someone ignoring my post, and being pretty rude about it, and assigning statements I haven't made about G9.
I'm thinking because they can't address the issue I have with Genesis 9, because in the two years it's been out I have yet to see anyone successfully address it.
I havent read this thread in its entirety, nor more than 1 or 2 pages. You mentioned that there was an issue with making male chests. Do you have examples, so i can make sure I dont fall prey to whatever the issue is when I make G9 characters. Perhaps whatever the issue is can be fixed readily with morphs and blendshapes.
If you're not prepared to answer my question - something that involves you taking a moment to look at a picture I have already made and then type a couple of sentences - why on earth should I go to the time and effort to remake the image with a male character? (Which would be a considerable investment of time and effort to properly convert the same figure to multiple bases. As I have repeatedly asserted, converting things between figures well is not trivial. At least with Nicky I already had her converted to all these generations).
Particularly seeing as it seems like I would only be giving you the choice to ignore the question again.
You refusing to rise to my challenge and me refusing to rise to your challenge are not even close to equivalent.
The challenge was not posted for you specifically, but you chose to engage with it by expressing disagreement.
Ahem. Please keep the conversation civil and on the topic, not making comments aimed at other posters. I am not removing any of the previous posts as there was some useful discussion in most of them, but we will be less tolerant of further problems in furher replies.
OK, so if it was easy, then you killed the point of your argument.
Who cares about cross gender stuff when there are tools available to get by on the few occaisions when it is needed?
Why have a figure that's more difficult/time consuming to work with within the confines of a vast majority of your work?
Honestly, I would have transitioned to G9 - I really wanted to, and tried, as I still use Genesis 3 mostly.
But working with females most of the time, the mesh isn't friendly to us mere mortals that are unable to morph in HD. The mesh doesn't flow with the female anatomy in the chest.
Daz could mostly fix my gripes with G9 by giving us mere mortals access to SubD morphs, especially over the ZBrush bridge. Is anyone listening? DO IT!
...
Really?
I said it was easy for me.
All the conversion work to put the clothes on horses and bunnies? That was me. These are not ready made centaur-compatible products. I made them compatible. I made the tools to make them compatible.
In comparison to the other things I know how to do, moving stuff between humanoid bases is easy. Tedious, yes, but certainly not difficult.
But that doesn't mean I don't want it to be easier for other people as well.
Just going to start by saying this is my own opinion and my issue with G9. The figure isn't flawed or broken. I believe it does what it's intended to do, and a lot things it does well. I attached some pictures highlighting the area I find problematic. Textured pictures use the G9 Masculine 01 skin.
For me, it's the torso mesh. The mesh is very uniform and regular, especially compared to previous generations, except for the breasts. The mesh to sides, under, and between is denser than the rest of the torso. It's also shaped to give a contour to the breasts. I feel those two things combined gives an overly defined contour that can't be dialed away when a male-presenting shape is applied. It can give a 'fall-off' or chiseled effect with some characters.
I've bought several products and used free shapes people have shared with no luck getting it to go away.
Male shapes and making the breasts smaller just makes that rounded W shape denser. My speculation as a non-modeler - I don't think it can be addressed without making the overal mesh of the whole breast area a consistent size. Or a geografted chest without the rounded W shape so densely defined. One was made for a female shape. I reached out the vendor to see if they would make a male version I could purchase, they declined.
OK, but for giggles, now flip your argument...
It's Tedious, but not impossible to work with the G9 mesh for respective male and females (especially chest area) for the vast majority of use. It's easier to convert a clothing item to another gender for the minority of folks out there that desire to do it.
You have pointed out that it is certainly possible to do the conversion for the minority of users that have the desire to do it. That's cool - no one is saying they shouldn't do that. What many of us are saying is that it shouldn't be at the expense of what the vast majority are doing. Which is what a single mesh trying to do it all is - it's literally a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.
No, I've shown that it is possible for me to do that.
Other than that, I have stated that it is hard or even impossible for most users to carry out a conversion that matches the level of quality you get with native compatibility, and I have stated that from a position of having provided really quite ample evidence of my experience in the specific field of asset compatability.
No-one has even tried to guess which of the figures in my comparison is which, so I'm not hearing compelling evidence that G9 is easily distinguished by its shaping capabilities compared to the earlier generations.
(And no, I obviously can't post topless versions of the render on the forums, don't be ridiculous. That's as naked as I can post that character, and it's the one character I had G2, G8 and G9 versions of ready to go. I have characters where I have G3, G8 and G9, but the G3 and G8 generations are sufficiently similar that showing that one can take a shape basically proves the other can.)
I think it's G2, G9, G3 G8, with G2 <--> G8 the most likely error if I'm wrong. I haven't loaded the figures to look at them again, nor to pose them as these figures are posed. I'm relying on my unimpressive visual memory. [Render was specified as G2, G9, and G8. I consider G3/G8/G8.1 fundamentally the same model and indifferentiable (by me) in renders.]
It took me about 5 minutes to get the chest the way I like it, but I might not be as picky as some of you guys. lol
My personal problem with G9 is a purely financial one. Having to buy a lot of stuff *again* that I already paid for before to use G3/8 (where at least some if not most was compatible) is beyond my financial means for a pure hobby. And as G3/8 are working good enough, the need to jump on the G9 train for me (!) is zero. Up to now I have seen not many G9 products that I would really NEED, except maybe be for a few characters, which still rather are in the "nice to have" category and make me wish for a G9->G8 figure transfer product.
So yes, the idea behind G9 is a good one, in principle and for many customers, but it's also easy to live without G9. And I am sure that DAZ can live without the little money I usually spent here.
could be that guys care more about moobs, as most of us fear to grow them when getting older.
Hmm, I really dont think it would be an intractable problem to make a simple flat chested morph. That seems like a very remedial level task for anyone who can sculpt things.
It's more sculpting than "modelling", depending how one defines such things. Anyways, I think the mesh density and topology flow arent going to be a bottleneck in sculpting povided the mesh is dense enough. With HD morphs, there is no limit to what you can sculpt, really.
I definitely think the base mesh is dense enough to make a flat chested morph. The topology flow could be a problem with respect to how the shape is bending during posing, but that can be fixed with corrective blenshapes.
That feels unnecessary.
I may come back to this thread with further evidence supporting my claims if I can be bothered.
It wouldnt be a significant exertion of effort to be fair.
There are two workflows that character creators would use to make morphs, one being just moving the base mesh vertices around in sculpting software (either base res or subdivided) and other method being wrapping the genesis 9 base mesh to an object that was freely sculpted. With the second method, it's hard to imagine that you couldnt wrap the genesis 9 mesh, which claims to have 2x higher polygon density, to any g8 mesh (nipples and navel notwithstanding).
If completely smoothing out the pectoral shapes, I suspect (but would need to confirm) that such a shape might need blendshapes to correct crease when the spine bones bend forward.
I firmly believe in the Artist part of Published Artist.
Doing renders is one of my creative outlets, another is wood turning. I sell my stuff at local shows, doing fairly well with it. I occasionally get suggestions to make things that do not interest me or inspire me at all. It's usually something so niche it would only sell to the person suggesting it or easy enough to get elsewhere.
It doesn't have enough of an creative or financial ROI for me to spend time on it. I wouldn't ever expect or demand someone to put time into something that doesn't fullfill them creatively or that think is a product they can market.
This thread is so confusing
If people have specific ideas of how a chest shape "should" look to them, then it is simply that they need a morph to get the look they want, and that can be made with any of a number of the shaping dials available. They could even save that shape as a preset they can add to other characters if they want them to have that look.
All genesis figures from any generation are all very flexible that way. There really should not be any hold up to any generation of figure due to personal proference of body shapes.
Perhaps what is needed is a genesis 9 base male mesh with some updates to the chest, shoulders, hands, arm and feet so that those who want to make figures that are male presenting without struggling with the unisex architecture?
From my perspective, I do spend a fair amount of time trying to make genesis 9 look less female. That is not something I had to do with genesis 8.
I actually like genesis 9. I use it often. But it is more difficult for me to use for this reason. And yes I know you can port figures over and yes this is my opinion alone.
And yet....
I don't do barechested renders; so, I have no dog in this fight, but I definitely see what the G9-has-moobs-mob is talking about. The G9 moobs are a very real phenomenon that haven't been morphed away yet. I've seen a couple of morphs that purported to fix the moobs which, upon closer inspection, didn't really do the job. It's obviously a design tradeoff decision made when G9 was created that hasn't yet been remedied by any available morph package(s) or combination. However, when Genesis 2 Male had defined pecs that were never remedied by morphs, I don't remember anyone trying to convince those who complained about it that they weren't there.
It would be easier for me to compare if they were all facing the same direction with the same pose. That being said, the middle figure has a fingerprint to me: the unattractive bend/gap near the armpit and upper arm. I think that is a G9 base. Even if I'm wrong on which base it is, I suspect the other figures don't have that issue(which reminds me of the bent drinking straw issues that V4's limbs have), so it does look diferent.
Whichever vendor spends 5 seconds in blender is set to make a fortune on this product i guess
These are some G9 characters I made. I dont see these as intrinsically feminine body types as a consequence of G9 architecture.
I agree - I would guess the middle one is the g9 because of the shoulders/armpits, and also the stomach because of the belly button and overall smoothness.
- Greg
We haven't tried to guess because it's a silly gotchya with three figures zoomed out all in different poses, and doesn't really address the usability at least for what I mentioned.
Also a little overexposed, possibly to hide flaws, if you want to get nit-picky.
Hopefully, Daz will continue to iterate on the concept, improving on the points that people don't like instead of getting back to two different figures because it's very convenient to be able to easily use anything regardless of the gender without jumping through the various hoops on fire placed between the two genders in previous generations: just load them and voila.
Like you said in another message, a piece of clothes not perfectly taylored for one gender is better than no piece of clothing, and plenty are working great on any character, regardless of their gender.
I was not questionning your library size, I was asking if you have characters in mind because I'm not seeing such a strong difference between the two genders that it would warrant your initial phrasing, with no quantifier for masculine characters and a rather strong one for feminine ones.
You'll be happy to discover that they are actually products that can change the UV maps of the chest to move the nipples textures inside Daz Studio and one seems to do what you need (ITF Dev Kit 2). I don't have any of them, so I can't comment on how good or bad the final result looks but you can ask @MimicMolly here:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/656161/
They are plenty of clothes who are the same between genders (morphology difference asside) like a basic pair of jeans, a T-shirt, etc.
Others are designed with how as a society we think each gender should dress, but that's an ever moving target and art & fashion are not exactly the last places where that target is twisted like a pretzel.
Various work clothes are usually also very similar between genders because most works have the same requirements for anyone, regardless of their gender. Sure, difference in morphology should and will be taken into account in the way a piece of clothing will be cut, but that's what full body morphs (or whatever they are called, the body_bs_body sliders on clothes worn by Genesis 9) are mimicking in Daz Studio. And it's not like each gender have one body type to start with: you'll find a lot of variation among one gender too.
As for the ACU, the alternate version seems mostly about difference in morphology and while created with women in mind, in the end, they decided it can be issued to men too if it fitted their body better than the ACU:
https://www.jble.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/257766/army-acu-alternate-uniform-offers-more-fit-options/
The 'formal' uniform also seems to be moving toward a more neutral version instead of the pants for men, skirts for women:
https://www.army.mil/uniforms/#faqs-bar
In the end, I'm not sure US military uniforms is really a great argument to defend getting back to a one base per gender world… or army uniforms in general, considering they are documented cases of women enlisting in various armies around the world long before they were allowed to (so essentially wearing male uniform, which many still had/have to do long after women started to be allowed to serve, see this testimony by @memcneil70 who had to do it when she served in the US military).
I appreciate the struggle is probably very real, and from the perspective of an end user G9 might effectively have all these issues, but the basis for that being inherent to G9 itself and not the G9 library of assets seems quite spurious. Im not discounting peoples' experiences with G9, Im saying their diagnosis for why they experience that is not something i can buy into.
I mean, you have vendors like Rawart saying it doesn't make any sense, and I am inclined to agree with that. Ive never seen anything to the contrary.