what is the hardest part about creating quality characters for G3/G8?
Drekkan
Posts: 459
in The Commons
I expect none of it is easy but what is generally considered the hardest part/parts of creating good quality characters to use in Daz for G3/G8?
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1) An actual personality. Far too may items have generic and bland looks, with zero personality to them. A huge part of this leads to...
2) The face. Give the poor girl a memorable face. Don't just go for the typical BS button-nosed and high-cheekboned doxie - give the character a bit of a big/prominent honker, or a serious overbite, or somewhat bigger-than-usual ears... nothing that makes it plug-ugly, but just enough to make it stand out. The Goal is to rig it so that the individual components are a touch out-of-beauty-standard, but when combined makes for something very pretty. Finally, make sure that the face and personality match the texture! Spend the vast majority of your time on this part of the body if you're serious.
3) Asymmetry. Very few human beings on this planet have perfectly symmetrical eyes, boobs, nostrils (seriously!), ears, etc. Kick parts of the face and body just a hair off-kilter, like make one eye 0.1 - 0.5 higher than the other. Make one boob a half cup-size smaller than the other and hike it up a centimeter or so on the chest in relation to the other. Oh, and speakin' of mammaries...
4) Mammaries Based In Reality. Real women do not have massive balloon-like breasts that defy gravity and logic. Make the 'girls' *normal* sized, or explore making them smaller-than-usual, like a B-cup or A-cup.
5) Proportions. Most women are shorter than most dudes, so shove in a default G8 Male to compare against there. Give the girl a few pounds here and there, depending on what the character is and does. Don't be afraid to get a small/reasonable muffin-top action going if you're handy with making morphs by hand. Most women won't admit it, but unless your character is a teenaged girl fresh out of puberty (or some angular-as-hell hardbodied triathlete, or a scrawny transsexual person), there's gonna be a bit of belly there. Part of what makes most women... a woman. Oh, and leave at least some waist there, please? Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to shrink the chest and/or monkey with the shoulder width... the 80's shoulder-pad era is dead, and should stay that way. Finally, the head needs to be in proportion woth the body, and not that tiny alien-head that the defaul Genesis 8 character comes with, so don't be afraid to scale it up a touch.
6) A Damned Solid Skin. Seriously, this is where a lot fo characters fall mega-short. The texture (and any/all makeup and eye-color options!) should match the personality of the character you're building. I don't mean the obvious stuff like slapping a freckled Irish girl's tecture on a Korean girl's head-mesh... I'm talking the subtleties. If your character is tomboy-ish, then the makeup options should be either very sparse or very over-done (or how about both options? Oh, and don't forget an option with no makeup.) Dig into (or discover!) the ethnic makeup of your character, then go look at photos of real people with the same ethnicity - and get the entire range so you know where your boundaries are. This works even in mixed-race folks. For instance, if, say, my character is half-Black and half-Latina, then I gotta dig into the facial structures for both, blend them in a way that makes sense, but then I dig into the skin tones and find one that makes sense, blend them in a way, ensure the eye color makes sense (yeah, no baby-blue eyes here by default, folks!), and etc. Now for the technicals: Make triple-certain that your skin will show well in a wide range of lighting circumstances - for both 3DL and Iray versions. I've lost count of the texture kits that look like utter garbage in anything other than the default DS Skydome lighting. Don't get stupid with the pores - I don't need a close-up of her face to resemble a close-up photo of the Moon's surface, and over-poring (is that a word?) tends to exaggerate texture deformation when a joint bends. Don't get stupid with the rez - you do not need a 12,288px x 12,288px shader set. Unless there is a sudden spike in users who play with DS on 84" 8k UltraHD television sets, 2048x2048 will work just fine for most users, and maybe put in an HD option with 4096x4096 if you want to futre-proof things.
6a) Don't 'Help' The Skin! What I mean is, don't put in genital textures, don't put in knee wrinkles, don't put in the creases between butt-cheeks and legs, and in general don't paint on anything extra to simulate what movement should be simulating. This actually helps photorealism, because you're not seeing an out-of-place butt-crease on a bent-up thigh, or knee skin wrinkles on a knee that's fully bent, or under-boob lines on a breast that's streched upwards (hey, some folks do nudes, go figure, right?) Point is, don't 'help' the user/customer out. It only leads to headaches.
7) Get to Know The Personlet You're Creating. The whole process of building a character is like getting to know someone. The deeper you get into the details, the more you come up with and 'discover' about the little person-ish thing that you're building. My favorite way to do this is to build something that sort of stands out, then invent a whole backstory about that person. Then I go back in and tweak it. Then I fill out more details... then go back in again if needed.
8) Leave Room For Change. If you're making something for yourself you can ignore this, but if you're making something for sale, you need to take this into account. Once you're done making something, toy with it a big - make it fat, make it skinny, make it pregnant (not like that you perv!), make it a midget, make it a giantess, make it a child, make it an old woman, etc... if you make a character morph too rigid, then changes made by a customer will be disappointing to say the least, so do some testing on that beforehand.
Gone on too long here, but hopefully this helps a bit.
Cheers!
I agree with everything said above except with how it was inferred that 4K resolutions were only good for future proofing. I wouldn't want to send the message that some people don't have use cases for 4 or even 8k maps, even if it isn't probably a widely shared requirement. There are more programs than DS, and more use cases than doing simple Iray renders.
My only point is that I know many people don't have need for resource-heavy products, however I get a lot more mileage out of things with the option to boost into the resolution stratosphere than stuff that I'm kinda locked in with, and I'm probably not the only one.
Other than that (obviously personal opinion), I think everything above is really well said!
You know this how?
Please provide links to the evidence you have; perhaps surveys of people with the numbers responding to surveys... Because I'm confused by what many means, as well as how much you know that to be true.
I know I much prefer 4k textures; in fact, any new that didn't have would get returned. I can downscale where need; it is impossible to upscale and provide the details the larger textures should contain.
Adding to this, no baked in tan lines!! We live in an age of L.I.E. tan lines that look great, making them permanent in characters for sale should be relegated to the dumpster of bad decisions forever. (Obviously what you do with personal character skins is another matter entirely, I certainly have ones where I make tattoos permanent for faster loading times.)
On the rare occasions I buy a female character, if I load her up and see baked in tan lines (especially from a bikini), then it's an immediate return if there's no alternative material without them. It's one thing to include a tan-line option but if that's all a character comes with, it's severely limiting and can make them look completely out of place in a variety of scenes. Not just if they're naked, either! Think how uttely absurd it would be for a character to wear a wide variety of historical gowns, blouses, chemises, etc. with tan lines from a modern string bikini on full display because those garments expose large portions of the shoulders and/or décolletage.
...excellent list, I follow a number of those points when developing original characters.
However #4 has always been difficult as for some reason,, all the way back to Gen3 (V3, A3), as all Daz female figures/characters tended to have larger than average breasts when compared to people in RL (even some of the teen ones). One of the main frustrating issues I have found is breast circumference which is very difficult to reduce. The only parameters that remotely handle this are those which control breast volume but they can also create in distortion in the areola/nipple region as well as the outside portion of the mesh that, in turn, can affect teh appearance of clothing fits (particularly tight fitting clothes like bodysuits, athletic clothing, and swimsuits). I have Zev0's Breast Control along with SF-Design's BodyMorph Kit and Dogz Natural Breast Shapes but even with all three, I find reducing the circumference troublesome to manage.
Another issue is the horizontal angle, which tends to always point to the outside even when the breasts are reduced in size and doesn't look quite natural on more petite physiques. Adjusting the side to side positioning is one solution but it can also unnaturally distort the breast shape, along with the armpits and central area of the chest in some poses which again can affect clothing fits.
As to 4K textures, there are those like myself who still work on older tech (because we cannot afford anything newer), and tend to shy away from them as they are a serious drain on system resoruces (the only ultra high res products I use are HDRIs).
I would like to chime in about body fat ratios. Really athletic female characters with pronounced muscle definition rarely have enough body fat to have large chests. Conversely, characters with high apparent body fat levels (think shot-putters) tend to have very large chests, mostly supported by their beer-belly shaped stomachs because they are too large to be self supporting or supported by bra's in any meaningful way.
And it's not too many real men that have six packs. However unattractive it is, the main job of a trouser belt is not to hold the trousers below up, but to support the stomach above. Ahh. Maybe for aesthetic reasons, that line of thought should stop right there.
Regards,
Richard.
The hardest part is that everyones idea of what constitutes "a quality character" is different
Dude... what you highlighted was way out of context. My opinion is the SAME as yours, but I've heard it said numberous times here (as well notes I've received when I tried to provide freebies on DA) that many people find 4K textures overkill.
All I was saying in the part that you boldened in was that I know that there are a lot of people in that camp, however my entire statement was about how 4K maps are valuable to me. Apparently, to you also.
EDITED TO ADD - if you read the second post (to which I was referring) you'll see where it was stated that 2048x2048 is fine, which is the only part of what he said that I didn't agree with.
Sorta. There is technical quality - that is, does the character accept (within limits) most common expression and pose presets out there without the need for massive corrective work? Is the texture usable close-up and far off equally? Is the character easy on the system resources of a typical desktop computer (that is, midway between minimum requirements and top-of-the-line-GFX-rig)? You know, stuff like that.
I edged into the subjective a little, but the method behind my madness looks like this: I was aiming towards helping to urge the OP towards making something that 1) gets attention, and 2) keeps it.
Anyone can whang out the well over-represented 'cutie with perfect features and perfect skin and perfect boobs and perfect butt and perfect legs and perfect body' character. Market's drowning in 'em. I don't blame them really, since it does tend to sell and it's easy to replicate (you can tell that some vendors do this almost assembly-line style with only tiny variations in the bodies and even less variation in facial features). So maybe a bit of urging to come up with something more, well, human and replicable in the real world...
I think I understand where you are going. However, I would like to point out that many of the reference photo that I use of real people have somewhat of a tan line. I usually will soften the edges and blend things together, but I'm not going to paint it out. I want things to look as natural as possible.
It may be that I am ultra sensitive to them because I work with them all the time, but almost everyone is paler around the aerola and around the leg junction/gens area. I consider that just part of the skin's thickness and natural variation.
I certainly hope you aren't sending my characters back for naturally occuring skin colors!
I'm assuming you misspoke because thats the literal function of bras
100% agree that strong muscle tone tends to lead to smaller breasts
I disagree with lots of this, but that is key to what rawart posted, everyone has their own ideas. One of the great things about DS is you can change what you want with other morphs, textures, hair, etc, so no need to strive for perfection since it technically doesn't exist. I never use any body morph that comes with any character I have purchased since I have my own that i have developed and prefer.
BTW as for number 4 on your list, more than half the women I interact with in my life have implants, including my GF and my sister. Some are more pronounced, some are more subtle. the point is, they do exist in real life, just maybe not where you live.
I assume the OP was talking about PAs and what aspect is the hardest. I would think the skin since there are more than enough morphs to go around and access to apps like zbrush is more wdiespread than ever, but creating a quality skin from scratch has got to be one of the more difficult tasks around having tried it a few times myself
Not a creator but for me it would be the looming probability of Gen 9
Oh, definitely a difference between that and what I'm talking about! Variations happen naturally for a lot of reasons, whether it's different aspects of the body getting more sun exposure or thinner areas of skin not having the same pigment density as thicker ones. I love characters that have those natural variations, whether from skin pigmentation and thickness, or because we as a species tend to wear clothing and so our torsos are often lighter due to a lifetime of being covered. My problem, very specifically, is when it looks like a character has been lying motionless in the sun with nothing on but a string bikini, leaving a heavy tan line. Not the soft sort you get from wearing clothing and while moving/going about life, but the purposeful kind that cannot be caused by anything but a very specific kind of garment. Fine as an included option, but return-worthy if it's not optional.
Fortunately that has become much less common now that technology has improved to allow for things like layered effects, but it's something I feel strongly about to this day. I remember shopping ten, twelve years ago and "has realistic swimsuit tan lines" was a selling point for a number of Vicky characters because they could be tricky to add yourself; now of course we have tools that do it for us. But back then it was a problem when I wanted a character who could believably have the kind of tan that came from working on the family farm (face, upper chest, hands, forearms), but would never in her life have one in the shape of a two-piece and that was what an otherwise ideal texture came with.
I don't buy a lot of female characters, but yours are among the ones I do and I've never had reason to return anything. They're lovely and natural, Adair is one of my favorites and I've just made a note to visit Nyala at some point in the future. I love her scarred option. :)
Basically my idea of a quality character, at least skin-wise, is one that has natural variation (even in fantasy skins), and allows the buyer maximum freedom to add their own sun worshipper tan lines, tattoos, etc. as they want and need to. The ones I have from you have never failed me in that regard, they come with wonderful options but also include the "blank canvas" so I can add whatever I want.
This, ever so much. Though for my money pretty much any of Rawart's products adds character to any scene. :)
Only commenting here: I have seen a few people say they don't like 4k textures (numbers: 20, 30?) I doubt that it is that many I've actually seen. I have no idea if that constitutes many (as in a significant number) feel strongly about the texture size.
I agree that 2K textures can be fine (I've even used downsized 1k textures), but if they aren't enough, then upscaling isn't going to get me more details, and may loose some in the conversion process; I have commented myself when I've seen folks complain about 4k, that upscaling is pointless.
That folks complain about freebies and what they provide or don't is not really surprising - but it is disappointing.
I didn't mean to offend btw, so hope you weren't.
With regards to the OP's post, I pretty much completely disagree with it all apart from asymmetry; I created some morphs for that, and still use them.
The one that puzzles me is the first: Personality?
That has nothing to do with the looks / appearance of the character.
Some links about personality
https://www.britannica.com/topic/personality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality ; (I'm not always a fan of using Wikipedia as a reliable source, but it has an extensive list of references on the page, which appear to be legitimate.)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/personality
I'm not offended, I understand what you're saying. I also didn't mean to seem like I snapped back, I type sometimes quicker than I read and I was just trying to drop the facts and then move to something work-related... Ironically, I only said the part you boldened so as to not offend the OP, and although I don't know if there are more vs less people who prefer 4K maps, all I can speak for is my crowd that I associate myself with on DA. Generally speaking, it seems to me that at least the people I'm talking to are always very concerned with VRAM useage and tend to prefer smaller maps wherever possible.
That said, I agree with you entirely about the texture sizes. When I build my own ZBrush models or generate maps in SP I sometimes even do 8K just so I have them at a really big res and I don't need to worry about going back to generate more.
Hey....I know that clown!
Peng!
Wow...haven't said that in like 15 years. Where in the world have you been?
Everyone’s taste is different, and some people prefer “average” looking people, but I prefer super attractive characters for my use. It’s very easy to make a character less attractive with a few dial spins if needed but hard to make characters with that elusive beauty that PAs like Mousso can do. And I agree with them having personality but I like to do that myself with expressions. Like real life human models, digital models should be a blank slate that you can alter for your personal preferences, adding makeup, expressions, etc... SKIN is the most important thing if you’re doing realism. And a bit of asymmetry. But if a character is too distinguishable that can be a bad thing too, like everyone knows what V7 looks like, she became too popular. But I do like to add a bit of V7 or V7 for V8 to other characters because she does add that beauty and with partial morphs she’s not that obvious. Everyone’s taste is different. I like perfect model or sexy bodies with only slight imperfections if any. But I do mostly glamour and fantasy. Whenever new core Daz characters are released you see a variety of opinions from love to hate to meh, so there really isn’t one answer. It’s what works for you.
this one i feel a little "misslead", you can actually find "large breast womans with no surgery, is not because the womans you know or saw are "B" cup or less which every woman is a b-cup, you can find "massive ballon womans in real life in the same way you find "petancos"or "breastless womans", it don't exist a "exactly size for breast for each woman at best you can have let's say average woman in country x have b cup in country y have a cup, in z have c or d and goes, but even with that in that countries you can still find womans going from a to let's say G and gain to be fair i'm not talking about "plastic breast bu real large boobs, not all womans hate they breasts or have issues in having large breasts in the same way many "small breasts womans" do surgery to get "large breasts".
To answer op. I agree with Rawart
In terms of aestetic considerations It is all subjective what is appealing is going to depend on the person
more "realistic" porportions (and this doesn't really mean realistic just closer to average proportions) isnt intrinsically better quality just an aestetic preference. (one I personally have for the record)
and thats not even going into intentionally stylized characters who might have a completely different sense of aestetic conventions.
That said there are a couple of technical elements that I do think have some degree of objective quality
mcms and jcms - when your character bends do weird bumps or creases form? when you bend the arms and legs is there a binch of self intersection? when you dial in the default expressions do they immediately become an unholy nightmare?
on the extreme good end od the spectrum there is smay's Boris which has about 50 million HD jcms and is just an absolute technical marvel. Look at this
I mean look at it. when you form a fist the details on the knuckles change. One of the few things I bought immediately on release despite not knowing if I would ever have any use for it - I bought it purely out of apreciation for technical artistry.
not everything needs to be to this level, but there shouldnt be creases or large abount of self-intersection when the figure is posed within the limits.
in a similar vein - I personally believe that the main daz morphs should also work without distortion. Make the fleshy chestal protrusions as big or small as you desire when the "breasts gone" morph gets dialed in the breasts should probably gone or at minimum not turn into a horribly distorted mess.
in terms of textures/materials they should be optimized to not needlessly waste memory. I like 4k testures I can even see some instances where 8k testures would be good. Extra maps which give the user options are good. But, for the love of god, if you, for example, have textures with and without eyebrows but your material settings only apply the eyebrowless texture to the face maat zone and leave the otherwise identical textures with brows on the ears doing absolutely nothing but needlessly taking up memory I do hate you just a little bit.
I think there was some makeup product I bought that used layered images, but applied the lips only to the lips and the face only to the face meaning you ended up with 3 seperate sets of facial maps Since it also used the bump and spec this meant using it as is made your figure use an extra 6 4k maps completely unnecesarily
of course all of this is small under the hood details that is almost impossible to show as a selling point and a bunch of folks will never notice anyway, So I'm not sure how much its in a vendors interest to put the extra time into
Lovely jubly...became a Daz vendor and enjoying it. Moved to Texas to build a house and got the heck outta CA. Staying home and hiding from pandemics. I haven't started making characters yet, but I promise not to overendow them!
I think even with iRay it's pretty clear the big fail is still the shader texture materials. They just don't hold up at various distances and in different lights to be realistic looking like they should. I mean it's iRay & it's presets so if those shader texture materials are realistic I should be able to just load in the default DAZ HDRI or other lighting and camera distances, render, and I have a realistic, if uninspired, render on my hands but that's usually not the case. They still look good, don't get me wrong, but it's more of a modern graphic novel toon look than realism.
I agree with at least 90% of what the OP wrote. And I don't use any figures "out of the box" too, using morphs to make them into "characters" (see what I did there?
)
Contrary to You, I yet have to meet a female in real life that had got herself implants. Except for a few cases of breast cancer recreational surgery. Or some breast size reduction for health reasons, 'cause them big boobies can cause severe back problems. Might be because I live in rural germany now after living in a medium sized (250k people living there) town in germany, where the chance to meet any potential photo models, adult movie actresses and normal movie actresses was rather low. So yeah, implants exist in real life. But the percentage of females having them seems rather low where I live. Less than 5% probably.
Larger appendages may be nice to look at, but when you are telling a story of a spinster that has her hair tight in a bun and collar buttoned up to her chin, where's the credibility of the character if she has mammoth mammaries?
None of those characteristics are incompatible with having large breasts.
Not, if she weighs 300+ lbs...
Large breasts occur naturally in women with all sorts of body types. Weight influences breast size, but is far from the sole determining factor.
I think my biggest pet peave these days are the heavy normal/bump maps. It seems like people are just using a noise map or something, and makes the skin all pitted if that makes sense. Like the texture of an orange peel almost. I dunno about everyone else, but my skin don't look like that at all lol. I know flat perfect skin don't look realistic, but to me that looks even less realistic.