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I just feel like: "please, don't remind me of the V4 era".
...more V4 fun both these fey were V4 based.
I feel it's a bit like with the Disney remakes. A hyperrealistic new Lion King that has no soul, because realism is soooo much better than creativity..
I don't really understand why it is all about hyperrealism and technics now.
Creativity revolves around ideas. And styles. Not just about making stuff look just like the real thing.
We are now living in the doctrine that only photorealism is good. And that products must adjust to the zeitgeist. And that both these things limit creativity a lot. On top of that, the quest for realism is limited to current things. Historical garb needs to be modernized to a level that it is anything but historical. And just try to find make up solutions for gone by eras.
I think the starting days around Poser 4 were among the most creative years. It was about idealism then, not about business monopoly and what sells best. But then again, art and business rarely are a good combination. You only get what sells best. Things highly adapted for Generation Z.
I never mentioned armor in my post. But then, that's because there's more to fantasy than "battling." I mentioned high heels because they could part of a princess outfit or sexy nymph getup; stuff that female characters who wouldn't even set foot in the battlefield would theoretically wear. And people would still complain about how "unrealistic" it is, even if the character wearing it in the promos was a fantasy humanoid like an orc or a catgirl.
While I agree that stylized doesn't necessarily mean "nearly naked", I don't think that's what's being discussed here. Especially when multiple people have brought up censorship as a culprit.
@Sempie explained what I meant much, much better, tbh
I agree with MimicMolly that some ideas work better when you don't try to make them too realistic. Some fantasy characters can wear the high heels, and it makes sense for them to do so.
I agree with melissastjames on all of her fantasy warrior goddess points. It's not so easy to find outfits that get all of it right.
One thing I do not miss about the V4 era is creating FBMorphs or even partial morphs because with FBMorphs you had to morph outside the F'in body part seams, which was a right pain in the backside and I'm glad that we progressed far from that archaic method; genesis was/is a godsend for Partial and FBMorphs!
Plus the joint bends were truly horrific, and to try and make morphs for them was too much of a hassle to even make the attempt, so thank F we're done with that era, at least from a character creation standpoint!
But yeah, there was no denying the impact that V4 has made, due to both the Daz and Poser community having a hand at creating content for V4, I do curse the idiot (Who will remain nameless) who was instrumental in throwing a wrench into both the poser and Daz community's continued creative cohesion by denying any further Genesis to poser content, and no I'm not talking about Dson as that was a bandaid for a gaping wound!
To me V4 era has been the dark era, where pretty much every figure caused a lot of frustration. Joint bendings used to look bad with just magnets support. JCMs have been told to be to complicated to use.
Did you notice, that the best renders of that V4 era has been only portraits?
That is true for Poser and DAZ Studio.
The era of enlightenment came finally with IRAY and Genesis 3.
There's no argument in the technology having advanced tremendously since V4 era, but that's not what's being discussed here.
I dont think anybody claims V4 was technologically better than the current models, far from it, so there's no point in kicking the dead dog, that's not even on the table.
As far as the debate between realism and stylistic art, I would say BOTH are needed for the other, as you need to have some grasp on basic human/animal anatomy and study from real life even in order to make a cartoon-like or stylistic human/animal figure, otherwise, it would be unrecognizable as either, same for realism, you need to be able to be creative in order to capture emotion and the interest of your audience, many ZBrush/digital character artists are masters of this technique as the study of human/animal anatomy makes even cartoon-like characters that much more compelling!
So, we are not allowed to discuss about how one finds a larger selection of V4 clothing that fits ones personal preference or likings, when looking at them fitted to an unmorphed base figure standing at zero pose - Just looking at the style and the textures, without even going into how do they come up rendered?
I think you still missed the point.
I disagree. It is exactly, what is discussed. Great for you, when it was all fine for you and you were happy with what you have got.
The frustration for me at that time has been a fact, and it blocked all the creativity.
I remember wondering, when we will be having better tools and content in all those stores.
Sorry, I just don't consider thousends of -Victoria 4 as a pixie on a mushroom in a forrest- renders as the golden age of creativity.
I was discussing the issue of realism vs stylism in art as that topic was raised in this thread, not clothing, as far as the issue with clothing, the V4 era was a goldmine!
Particularly with A3/4, there were I would argue much more incredible variety and style with A3/4 than in the genesis era... but seeing as I don't buy much clothing as I usually re-use V4/A3 and previous genesis era clothes I really did not focus on that part of the discussion.
I understand that frustration. I am coming at it from an after-the-fact perspective. For me, she's still fun because I have just about every enhancement ever made for her along with newer versions of DS and some content made well after her heyday ended. If I had suffered along for years and years as the products developed, I would likely feel differently about it. I do think there is more to the content than pixies on a mushroom, but that's quibbling.
Naturally, the newer figures and their content have a lot to recommend them. The part that I find a little frustrating is that we still have not escaped the need for aftermarket helper morphs and enhancements, even on the latest figures. Also, I'm a little alarmed that recent content has become very heavy, downloads increasingly measured in Gb instead of Mb. My next computer definitely gets bigger harddrives!
Yes, your right, and I wonder if it will ever work without extra helper morphs. The point is that I don' t have to spend as much time anymore to fix joint issues. I can focus now more on my scene, instead of painting over a twisted shoulder joint.
I am exited to see what future figure rigging system will do.
lol: the amount of data has become ridiculous. Just for comparison: I had a 20 gig hard drive, when I started with Poser 4.
V4 lifespan was long enough to shock me how far it went from P4's renderer (almost no skin details) which i used cause my pc couldnt handle new renderer in p7, to those uberenvironment AOIBL scenes...
edit:
This doesnt have to do with anything, just i remember that often.
I think also the idea that because a person is interested in photorealism must only be interested in pursuing realism is... Inaccurate
It's also not like striving for realism wasn't a thing in the v4 era, there's a reason why the Lana elite and danae's London textures were pretty much famous and so frequently used that I can still recognize them to this day. I think there was a call by someone else to just use this as a v4 product appreciation thread rather than an argument about which era is "better" and I would second that. There's plenty of stuff from the v4 era that was great and I still love, I'd way rather focus on that than getting bogged down in "back in my day"-ing....the bottom line, is it enjoyable?
Yes, there were lots of limitations in the Gen4 days as you couldn't even swap clothing between characters (without a conversion tool that was often hit or miss) let alone mix them together as we can freely do in the "Genesis era" of today. I once did a mix of Sadie and AIko3 which very tough as it involved literally grafting parts of the two figures together. . I did lots of experimentation back then to create "new" characters.
All the images posted involved a lot more work than just dropping a V4, with a couple of the standard Morphs+ as well as clothing and hair into a setting and hitting the render button as each required some degree of manual fitting of hair and clothing as well as custom morphing.
Sometimes you have to make do with the tools you have at the time and find ways to go outside the boundaries of what you have available. .That's where "creativity" comes into play. It can be "wow" or in these cases, subtle. .
As someone who renders a lot of centaurs, mermaids and other fantasy creatures in a photoreal style, I agree.
If you read OP's post (the first post of the thread), it is not about the technology, but the variety of clothing.
I suggested that. Maybe someone else did too? I think that would be pretty cool. In any case, I appreciate your insight on the subject.
..that's why I posted a couple pics as I like the idea.
I noticed that! Cheers for doing that :)
...you're welcome.
My problem with V4 was that they fixated on bone structure. Unfortunately, muscles span joints, otherwise they don't do anything. Models would end up looking like a wood mannequin. Genesis 8 also has the same problem, but they have gotten much better hiding the effects, well, mostly. There are a few glaring errors remaining, like how the lats attach to the shoulders. Some day, a version will appear that models the muscles, with the bone structure thrown in as a side effect. Clothing however, is getting hard to do because, well, the bodies are being distorted so much to hide the inter-joint errors that draping cloth just doesn't look "right".
I started back in the V4 M4 Millenium Kids era. I do not look back fondly on it at all. Perhaps it is because I was just starting to learn that stuff, but the thing I recall most was frustration. I had a super crap computer back then, which probably didn't help matters any. I remember having to "inject" a bajillion things before even getting started in creating anything, or else elbow knee bends looked like wet noodles, and I am not even gonna mention shoulders. Lets pretend they didn't even have any shoulders, that is for the best. I remember having to postwork a lot, because of the dreaded poke throughs. I had to paint the crap out of hair to make it look anything close to good.
What I do not miss in the least is DS 3. It was 32-bit on the Mac. Just try to get more than 4 characters into a scene and render it in a 32-bit program.
I got up to 18 G1 characters into a scene in DS 4 and rendered it wothout a hitch (screen lag to the max if I tried to adjust anything, but hey, it rendered).
That said, A3 had the coolest clothes. V4 had some good stuff, but it sometimes seemed like 3/4 of her wardrobe consisted of strapless minidresses with a migrating hole somewhere.