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just tested, you can apply the RSL shader in the strand based preset and change the colour but cannot do patterned coats so single coloured cats only
reminds me of one of my cats Salem he'd sleep on my chest with his front legs stretched out and his paws on my mouth
Ages ago I had a cat named Jay who would run over and nestle in next to my head whenever I went to bed. He'd sort of nuzzle and be affectionate for about 10-15 minutes, then zoom off to cat business.
He did the same thing when I came home from work... zoom over and plop over my shoulder, purring when I pet him. For about 5-10 minutes, then... cat business.
It was nice; reliable affection, but not clingy.
While I can appreciate what has been done, I'm sorry, the reason a new model is seriously needed is because the old model looks bad. The eyes on this cat are absolutely horrible. Its eyes look dead, and they set totally wrong. Its all I can see when looking at these pictures, are those freaky dead eyes. I hate to be so negative, but Daz is making that difficult.
Unlike other figures, I would assume that models based on the animals would have a nice long shelf life. After all, we are talking about the freakin Millennium Cat here in 2019. How old is this thing??? You certainly don't see Victoria 3 being repacked like this! So while a new white girl will probably only sell for the brief first few weeks of her existence, a well made Daz animal should be able to sell for years. It may not sell like hot cakes when first released, but again, you need to think about the long term here. I swear, nobody thinks about the long term consequences of business decisions anymore. Its confounding. And for Daz themselves, this is about the long term somebody needs to look at the big picture. If Daz is going to have the best Daz Studio asset store so that people buy all their stuff here, then Daz needs to actually do that and build a better cat, as silly as that sounds. However the best 3D cat for Daz Studio is not by Daz. EH?
I never expected to say we "need to build a better cat", but here we are. We need to build a better cat.
Animals are an important staple product to have, especially cats. Come on, cats rule the internet! You go to any image hosting site and cats dominate them. I have an idea, somebody should make a pose collection of meme worthy style cat poses. Cats sleeping in impossible positions. Cats jumping, doing back flips and other cat-robatic feats that cat owners get to experience every day.
A well made Daz cat could recreate all sorts of these things. But not this thing. This cat just looks wrong. And that Daz resorted to reusing this very old outdated model makes me question what is going on. Is Daz struggling? Why are they unable or unwilling to create a proper Cat 8? There are a lot of things going on that make me question what is happening behind the closed doors in Utah.
I will buy this, but only because it is cheap and gets me a discount on some other things I want. Maybe I can do something with it and fix it myself.
Link to Daio's free kitten morph: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/rrfilelock/download.php?fileid=42301&key=2124
the new Daz House Cat vs Millenium Cat
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/832291
Well, my first foray with the new cat was not very successful. I am just using the default HDRI for lighting. I have one calico cat at default load settings and I created one instance of the cat to see if dForce hair works on instances. I don't know why the out of box cat came out so shiny and contrasty and the white fur areas are gray.
Then I followed a few of Will's tips and made a bunch of settings changes to get something that looked usable to me. This thing is resource heavy, though.
That, my dear barbult, is a cat of a different colour.
Okay, did a bit of playing around with the new cat (at base settings and then with different combinations of the settings @Oso3D suggested earlier in this thread), the MilCat with the free LAMH preset and the Hivewire House Cat with its free LAMH preset. I used the Long Hair preset in all cases (though for some reason the HW one got shorter when exported to OBJ, no idea why).
Please click through image for full size.
All images use the BOSS lighting default setup, with the stool used to lift the cat to around head height (scaled both the cat and stool to about 150%). No postwork on any images other than the text.
The only difference between the Daz Housecat renders is the changes to the hair settings. I tried to duplicate the pose as well as possible on the MilCat (which I used the Iray textures from the Housecat on under the fur). The Hivewire Cat came with a pose that was pretty close but not identical, but since these are just tests I mirrored it and called it good enough. Both LAMH were exported to objs and had PhilW's hair lustre applied, with the diffuse map added to the translucency channel. The MilCat had the shine set to the 'soft' preset with the default translucency, while the HiveWire Cat used the 'medium' shine preset and the HLS 60% strength translucency preset.
I recommend opening the files attached and clicking between the tabs to get the best demonstration of the differences.
I might do some further tweaking to a few areas I found a bit problematic (the chest hair seems overly sleek for a long hair cat and the hair on the belly also seems rather short to me, and I'd like to thicken up the tail a bit to help reduce the base mesh showing through so obviously - but then, this is in comparison to my Ragdoll's fur patterns with her squirrel like tail, so YMMV)
Render times:
Base Daz House Cat: 8 minutes
Daz House Cat, fur density 900, hair width 0.1: 9 minutes
Daz House Cat, tesselation 3: 12 min
Daz House Cat, tesselation 3, fur density 900, hair width 0.1: 1 hour 10 minutes (fell to CPU)
MilCat + LAMH (200k hair quantity obj): 6 min 30 sec
Hivewire HouseCat + LAMH (500k hair quantity obj): 9 min
System specs: GTX 1080 (8GB VRAM), intel 8700k, 32GB Ram, Windows 10, latest drivers, Daz Studio 4.12 beta
In general, the Hivewire Cat bends better, is easier to pose and is the most expressive and has the most detail in the base mesh, particularly in the face and paws. However, it has a very limited number of coat colours, with most of the ones it does have being variations. The House Cat is a definite improvement in terms of bending and morphing over the original MilCat and the upgrade to iray textures is nice. The dForce hair isn't really done proper justice in the promos I don't think - in future it might be nice if a more 'hq' preset was included and shown in the promos (perhaps with a warning that it's resource intensive) because based off the shown renders I was half way to passing on this despite the heavy discount, and have previously on the Big Cat fur that I now plan to revisit.
All in all, I think the upgrade to weightmapping, iray textures and the dForce hair is well worth the price - easily for anyone with the banner discount for owning MilCat at $4, but even at full price I think it'd be worth paying since it doesn't require a milcat purchase. Given I think I picked up the MilCat bundle for about 3-5 bucks on sale, I'm more than happy compared to the $30 for the HiveWire Cat. With that said I'd still drop money for Daz Cat 8 or 9 without a second thought (PLEASE?? with sugar on top?? :D)
Thanks very much for taking the time to put this all together and post – much appreciated!
- Greg
People keep confusing what a PA does as corporate Daz. Oso has already said... people (like ME!) wanted hair for the millenimum cat. Yes, it's old. But now it has a duf file, and iray mats and hair. THANK YOU OSO is a good response. I wanted and needed that. Now, is Daz planning a new cat? Are they planning a new house mouse? (that would send me over the moon with glee). Are they planning any animals at all? The PAs don't know taht kind of thing, and we work from our own inspirations and abilities separate of Daz. Just because a PA thought, "i bet if i update Mil Cat and gave it fur it'd make some people happy" doesn't mean "OMG NO NEW CAT EVER DAZ IS SO MEAN" because that just doesn't equate. Yea, Daz name is on the product, because they thought Oso did a good job on it, that happens too, and then made it very cheap for people who already have the cat.. THANKS, Daz!!! It was still a PA initiative and Will has been trying hard to fill up a very niche market without stepping on toes. And also, i would add, as someone p ointed out- trying to keep the hair at lowest possible settings for the users like me whose computers can't run a ton of fur. Hair can be easily cranked up. It's easiest to low the hair at lowest settings though,and most practical.
Basically, thanks Oso for filling a need, and hope that Daz makes a new cat and mouse and everything with fur. I think that's where we're going with this.
And greys, great fantastic job with the comparison and the images to go with, that is always super helpful! Gorgeous too, i might add!
Although I understand where you are coming from with this post, I also think it should be remembered that we are customers and vendors are commercial businesses, and as such are wanting us to part with our money, berating people for their opinions is not in my mind a good business move. Personally I'm not totally impressed, I would have liked to have seen the basic hair included not just the dforce, it would have been nice to have had more control over the editing of the hair.
Not berating for opinions, goodness. Only explaining that what Oso made and what the DAZ team may/may not make in the future (or has and have not made) are totally different things. In case it wasn't clear, I'm all for a new cat and new animals and new everything and have been asking for that too. I also am very thankful for the ability to use my old content, at such a huge discount, with the new hair, updated with iray and duf rigging. YAY!
and what do you mean the basic hair not just the dforce? the two pics i posted are just the basic hair it loads as. no dforce simulation. straight out of box render. There are three hair settings included in the product already for 3 types of hair length, which is awesome. And like i said i didnt even simulate but still looks good. I'm guessing if i'm smart enough to sim it next time it might look even better. ;) I still can't bel ieve it only takes a minute to render. DANG.
The only hairs I have all have dforce settings, if you select the hair and try to edit it as SBH you can't. I know there are 3 hair length presets but it still for me would have been nice to have been able to alter the lenth etc in the SBH editor myself.
I think I did a couple of things wrong here.
i can't use use dForce, and since i'd like some hair on my cats, i tried the old lamh milcat presets on the new house cat. of course, as expected, it doesn't work. lamh doesn't find the figure. this is not news.
NOW, i had a peek at the lamh preset in notepad++, it seems that besides the huge list of numbers there is only 1 reference to the figure right at the beginning. can this be edited so that instead of the milcat figure the preset searches for the daz housecat figure? i'm not sure what it's called tho - the name of the geometry, if there is any? of the cr2, or eeh what..?
i tried loading a daz housecat, then a milcat downscaled, pose them pose with the same pose (almost...) and then add lamh to the milcat, make an obj (for iray), and then hide the milcat so that all what's visible is the daz housecat and the lamh hair (yeah, just tinkering around, cuz instead it'd be way easier to just forget about the daz housecat until i have dforce and go on using either the old milcat or the hivewire housecat both with lamh...).
anyways, i must have deleted something wrong or made brusk moves, DS crashed... but i guess it works. totally pointless, but it does ~
Seen plenty scraggly moggies like that
He looks better now.
can'tparent lamh if you did that, it will crash every time... maybe that's happening? what part of dforce can't you use? For the record, again, i didn't dforce the cat hair and it looked pretty good anyway. I'd think that Iray obj fur is heavier to render than the dforce hair without it dforced. My computer struggles with heavy hair obj but rendered cat with dforce hair unsimulated in a minute
TigerAnn, that's so adorable!!! :)
Your hair balls roll? Mine just *splat* wherever they land.
Which is usually wherever is most inconvenient to clean.
While it's great that the PAs did an updated fur for those for whom the Mil cat works with their style, there was a post within the last couple of months from a Daz PA saying they were at work on a new cat. They posted a screen shot of the mesh- and said it was going to be 'awhile'. Of course, I can't find that post anywhere now.
yeah i think that i deleted the wrong group (when you obj lamh, you get another more group) and deleted the new iray hair instead of the original lamh. so when i also deleted the milcat which wasn't needed any more, everything crashed. but this was just a test - NOT the subject of my post - cuz if i have to do so complicated, i'd better simply use the milcat with lamh anyways.
but what i'd really like to know is if/how i can edit a lamh file to adapt it to the housecat.
btw dforce doesn't work for me afaik because my old laptop nvidia gcard doesn't do openCL.
In the So When Will We Get Cat 8 thread, @Sylvan said the following:
[source link]
So, it sounds like there is some sort of plan for a Daz Cat 8. In my opinion, this was a nice update to the old Mil Cat until they can get to that project.
The dforce hair has maps for fur density and fur length. Users with moderate skills can alter or olugnin their own masks.
For instance, if you want to fill in hairs on the tail, you can paint in more white at the tail in the density map.
You could give a cat a Mohawk by creating a fur length map with a bright stripe down the middle.
This is true of most dforce hair; yes, you can’t directly edit the hair with strand editor, but the maps give you a lot of control.
My comment that you can't use Millenium Cat textures on the fur is not correct. Just applying the preset to the fur doesn't work but that isn't surprising since they are old style pz2 files and the fur uses something called a Blended Dual Lobe Hair shader.
I have tried putting the texture map onto the hair's root and tip colour and transmission colour and this seems to work. If you apply the preset to the base cat first the map will appear in the dropdown so you don't need to search for it. I think that reducing the diffuse strength on the base cat can help, at 100% the colours look a bit exagerated to me.
I liked the new cat before I worked this out, this makes it even better. Well done Oso3D and the others who created this lovely kitty.
I don't know much about using dForce hair. With Strand-Based Hair we could comb the hairs to change the direction they point.. With dForce hair, is there any way to make the tail fur point toward the tail tip, instead of poking out perpendicular to the tail?
Not easily, although you could try using a wind node...
Animated simulation with a torus primitive starting out around the base of the tail, and ending around just beyond the tip, brushing the fur tip-wards as it goes? Be a pain to set up though.
Thanks! I have a soft spot for scruffy old cats.
@Oso3D I take back what I said and apologise most profoundly. dForce hair is quickly starting to grow on me. (Stop it with the dumb puns, Anne. You're not even British.)