Message in a bottle for xtrart-3d: Which model are you using?
cbro_ea6d1a5ab2
Posts: 0
in The Commons
This is a message in a bottle, really.
All (recent) products by xtrart-3d use a model I'd LOVE to buy, but the reference is never mentionned.
Does anyone have pointers?
Thanks
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Link to an image ?
Last product: https://www.daz3d.com/x-fashion-bonjour-outfit-for-genesis-9
No idea who the model is, I suppose the most likely answer is "it's a custom model created just for the promo renders of xtrart-3d various products".
But why?
The vendors might want to have a character that they use for their promo as a trademark, so they don't wan't it all over.
Not really. The number of "who/what is in this promo" threads on items where the PA lists exactly what was used in the photo and even has a link to it in the assets used section is far greater than zero. PAs are not responsible for what goes on in the forums. You could just as easily say it would take little effort from customers to stop creating hundreds of "who is this" threads.
You don't have a right to know every asset a PA uses in their promos, nor are they under any obligation to tell you. The one and only purpose of a promo image is to promote the product for sale.
Being a bit cynical, it's actually beneficial for the vendors to have threads on the forum drawing more attention to their products. Free publicity, really.
(Although I'm by no means saying that's the reason any specific vendor does it; I'm sure for many it's just that they want to build a specific brand identity).
Or completely confuse the customer. How many promo images have you seen with facial piercings or something that is not part of the figure and doesn't, in my opinion, sell the figure? Or the hint of a facial mole, which I despise (a personal issue I freely admit) but only have promo images in semi-profile that don't let you know what the skin texture looks like. I don't refer to clothing here. But often large and obscuring pieces of jewelry. I presume that many customers are attracted to a face or a skin, but those are the least well displayed by certain artists.
By the looks of the elbows in the promo image below, it's a Victoria 3 based character, as that's pretty much the same shape of elbow bulge I get when bending a V3 character's elbow that much:
Regards,
Richard.
The textures look like a FWArt, Emrys, Fred Winkler Art character (same PA diff names over the years). I'm hunting through my back catalog to see if I can find her but I'd agree with Richard that elbow is a ringer for V3. I'll holler back when/if I find her!
These are the closest I could find to her:
Tara 2 for Victoria 7 & 8 - Human Version by Kayleyss
FW Brooke HD for Victoria 7 - Fred Winkler Art
FW Hillary HD for Genesis 3 Female - Fred Winkler Art
I think for some of the products, the character is selling the product. Like they have a character that makes any product look better. So they want to keep that to themselves. Or maybe they just take their character personally like it's their girlfriend or something.
Sometimes the PAs have other people help out with promos. I've done a promo that was used in the store and I did not provide the PA with a list of every asset I used in the image. That said, I absolutely love it when character information is given, and some PAs are better about it than others. I totally get custom dialing some charismatic character and using it to sell products and NOT wanting to see the gallery or market saturated with the same unique eye-catching character. It is a PA's right to not share their custom character. I have participated in a forum group that worked feverishly to reverse engineer a character and we got it eventually but it took several people a lot of work to get the recipe right.
It looks to me the materials are from P3D Ursula HD for Genesis 9, the promo for X-Fashion Sport Fit for Genesis 9 also mentions her (see "Additional products used in promo images"-section). I think the morph might be a mix of Ursula and Vicky 9.
How about this, a PA will want their product to stand out from the rest, which would then make sense to use other custom assets to make their product stand out even more, so just always assume it is a custom character (8 times out of 10 it is) and stop asking and move on
stop asking? why? we don't have the right?
how many have ended up purchasing the character instead of the promoted product?
or both, I suppose.
When a given vendor is repeatedly using the same character as their primary model across multiple products, then the outcome almost always falls into one of these three possibilties:
1) It's custom and they want to preserve the look for their visual brand.
2) It's a figure they themselves have for sale on the store (e.g. some of xtrart's older promos use G8F characters they released).
3) It's actually the base figure (I've seen a lot of people ask about characters that are actually base G8F or G9, having not recognised it).
It's very unlikely that any vendor repeatedly uses an available but unmodified character as their main promo model, and it's exceedingly difficult to guess the formula of a mixed character unless it's a very simple combination.
Now, if a character is used as a once off or otherwise infrequently by a vendor, then that's more likely to be an identifiable character - or the vendor may be entirely willing to provide the recipe for characters they have less connection to - but if it's a repeat character? It's so unlikely to be told it's an available model that you might as well just accept they're not available.
All the explanations you give are unnecessary for me. I don't question what a PA does to promote his product. I only question someone telling another person "stop asking."
Of course you have that right... but by the same token, the PA is under no obligation to supply that information... assuming that that they even CAN, or how unlikely it is for someone else to have all of the elements needed to recreate it. As an example, all of the characters that I use for my own work are custom mixes, which usually start with a mix of several commercial characters to create a rough base that is then extensively modified using additional morphs from between six to twenty additional sources (many of which may not be commercially available and some of which may have been converted from an entirely different generation of character base), combined with a base skin texture that may not have come from any of the previously mentioned figures, which in turn has been modified even further with one of a dozen different skin shaders, custom makeup, eyes, eyebrows, body hair, add-on gengrafts for various parts, and often a bit of custom paint work either using LIE done directly on on the skin textures themselves to add or remove specific marks, wrinkles, brows, etc.. Given that most of that is all created on the fly and I'm not really taking notes when I'm doing it, just saving off a preset at the end, the process of going back and trying to document everything that went into that character would not only take quite a while to go back and figure out, but would also end up requiring a description that would take up far more space than DAZ would even allow. And this isn't even getting into the PAs who start off with 3D scans of real people, build an original morph in z-brush, or use a photo to 3D program to create a unique original morph.