Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
That's always frustrating, but I think hoping for any product to stay in a marketplace for a protracted period of time is playing with fire in the current market. I mean, how many DAZ vendors have disappeared without warning as of late? Several dozen? And how many entire stores have gone bye bye in the last five years? Aty least five or six. And that's not even counting the vendors who simply decide to prune their stores. Unfortunately, the older a vendor's product mix is, the more likely it is to pull an unexpected vanishing act.
Why is that? It doesn't cost anything to leave them around, or does it?
As someone who has had it to archive digital assets for a business, oh yes, it costs them. It is still inventory, the creators are still business partners with all the paperwork and tax stuff involved with that, the stuf still has to be inventoried, checked, backed up, etc...
I often wondered about that, just looking over at Rendo and it is quite interesting to see what the differences are.. Seems that Victoria 4 is still very popular, where as Genesis and Genesis 2 not so much.. As for myself yes I still play around a lot with Genesis 2 and Genesis 3, as converting characters is not so painful as it is converting to Genesis 8.. Also that Generation X2 unfortunately only goes as far as Genesis 3..
V4/M4 lasted a long time in the market compared to G and G2. Did someone already mention that? V4 works quite well with Poser, too. They like Poser at Rendo. There is still a lot of older content here, there, and other places - Content for older figures, newer content for older figures, etc. I picked up some stuff I didn't even know existed. O_o
The solution to getting stuff before it goes unavailable is to buy it before that happens. Sounds obvious, but I have stuff on my wishlists that I need to buy or remove, too.
I didn't realize that G8 was going to be a problem. I migrated to G8 slowly continuing to use G2 and G3 characters. Then, when I was almost G8 exclusively, I learned that I can't render a scene with four G8 characters in it. Three is the limit. Sometimes not even three. I did not have this problem with G2 or G3. So I'm going back to those two generations and trying to buy as many unique characters as possible.
...Generation X2 was also one of the reasons I stopped with G3. as it really expands the "gene pool" nicely. There is a utility to transfer morphs between G3 and G8 but it is more limited.
...Gen4 through G3 also work with Carrara..
Any new character for G2 or G3 would also compete with G8.
What benefits would you use to say it was better than G8/8.1?
The rigging isn't, the shader would depend on what you decided to release.
A mesh is a mesh, vertex-count asside, it's what is done with said mesh - and G2 offers nothing I need; hell I even created a couple of morphs for someone on G3 a while back and decided to test em out. I then copied over the new shader, as well, G3 is lacking for what I tend to experiment with.
... After all that, I stopped as I just might as well use G8.
Have you actually successfully done this? IME, it's not easy.
I see. I expect youll find more G3 than G2..
there are those who want to do animations too
legacy figures and Genesis 1 and 2 import BVH easily from softwares like iClone 3DXchange or FBX exported as BVH from many other programs inclucing the Plask.ai video mocap
good luck with Genesis 3 and 8 and if you succeed I hope you like foot skating
yes I save from Genesis 1 to 3, works almost flawlessly for static poses, moving the root bone to 0,0,0 certainly helps but it's never as good
if you can get it to work you can use arm pose down 45 and leg pose out 6 on genesis 8 but it won't imporove a crappy footsliding animation at all
...I've used the latest version of Carrara for a while and had little trouble with loading Gen 4 through G2. Of course you need to convert to Carrara materials (there were some Carrara material sets available for G1/G2). Certain Daz plugins and custom morphs of course may not work unless you pre pose and then convert to ,obj format.
G3 was different because of the change to the weight mapping but a community member here figured a way to make it work in Carrara.
That's good. Any time I've fiddled with it, the effort went nowhere. I'm aware of the work Misty did adapting G3 and even G8. I have some of the material sets, too. They came up as freebies, I think. All that makes it possible, not necessarily easy.
Yeah, there's no arguing that the adoption of G1 and G2 at other sites was definitely hamstrung by DAZ's own "push only the current figure system" strategy. Given that dropping the production of new V4 gen products down to a trickle in order to push Genesis as the replacement, despite the fact that there were massive compatibility issues with Poser, pushed a lot of the user base into not supporting Genesis and created a huge and very nasty schism between the user bases, and a lot of vitriol aimed at DAZ in general. As a result, a lot of PAs and users simply kept using the older figure, while a large portion of the Genesis and G2 products that did get made and and sold outside DAZ were actually hybrid items that paired two seperate sets of morphs, one for Gen 4 and one for Genesis 1/2, into a single product with a shared V4 era texture set. All of which is rather ironic given that DAZ is basically going down the same road again right now by phasing out the G8s in favor of G8.1, despite the known technical issues caused by the post 4.12 generations of DAZ Studio no longer supporting older graphic cards.
...well Iray still supports older cards from Maxwell on up but at the price of VRAM (Optix "locked on") to compensate for the lack of RT cores
Actually it was Nvidia that put the Fermi and Kepler on the "obsolete" list with regards to Iray. Maxwell is up next to get the axe as it has been on depreciated status since late 2020.
Glad I'm not the only one still using G3 & G8. I have a cast of characters and far too much time and money invested in them.
You seem to know a bit about vid cards so maybe able to answer a cncern on mine.
Any info on how long DS / iRay will support Pascal based cards? Worried my aging PC and DAZ characters will be a sort of fly trapped in amber sort of thing. Price I guess for progress. Always be something new. ; )
Nothing has been said about Pascal cards yet, and it's only the 'small' Maxwells (SM5.0) that are marked as deprecated;
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5534311/#Comment_5534311
SM5.0 means
GeForce GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, GTX 960M, GTX 950M, 940M, 930M, GTX 860M, GTX 850M, 845M, 840M, 830M
Quadro K1200, K2200, K620, M2000M, M1000M, M600M, K620M, NVS 810 and Tesla M10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA
That's a relief. With inflation & chip shortage, upgrading an aging i-7 "Skylake" based desktop & having to replace Paschal based cards isn’t an option right now. Thx!
This kinda cracks me up. Before I finally upgraded, my old card was a GTX 745.
...I also still have a 4 GB 750Ti which is Maxwell
It's just a shame that the PA's would rather ignore a group of artists and customers that either choose or are forced to use older figures as an additional revenue stream instead of ignoring to concentrate only on new figures.
The PAs, at least those doing this full-time, need to concentrate principally on what sells in sufficient numbers to justify the time taken.
If I have a choice between selling 20 copies of something or 200 copies of something, why would I pick 20?
'The art of it!' Well, sure, at least some of us PAs do this work in part because we love it. But even from that standpoint, I'd rather reach 200 people than 20 with my art.
'Money!' This one is obvious. Putting 50 hours into something that sells 20 copies is not a great idea if I could put the same 50 hours into something that sells 200.
I totally get how frustrating someone's situation may be, but suggesting that PAs are somehow in error or being mean is... weird.
I would just settle for easier ways to convert stuff to older figures myself.
I do a lot of it already but every new feature added makes it harder.
The hierarchical materials for example, I do work around it loading the full sets and saving individual presets but then you get geometry shell features that are UV dependant included in outfits, geografted shoes, bits parented to other bits, it gets quite complicated autofitting what appears at first glance to be a straightforward close fitting G8 outfit to your Genesis 1 or 2 with an Autofit clone but is anything but.
The worst bit is the armpits
if I change scene identification and bake rotations I can at least use the t posed Genesis 3 as my starting point but things are getting harder to even go back there.
I was a G2 holdout for years until I migrated from C4D to Blender.
Understand this: You can get flawless G8 animation data imported into Daz studio as baked FK….but not from any FREE source IMHO ….only via $$$Autodesk MOBU and RL 3DX tools$$$
(I have not tested cascadure but I am not hopeful as it relies upon FBX import into DS)
If you render your G8 figures animated in Blender (via diffeo)
the world of Character animation is at your feet (without sliding LOL!!)
My youtube channel has multiple Videos on retargeting options to G8 in Blender including to the G8 figures converted to rigify.
The issue of animation of Genesis 8 is resolved for me.
Ironically, despite the "export to Daz Studio" command being the only export option that seems to work in the free version of Cascadeur, I have yet to figure out how to successfully import animation into DS and onto a G8 character (but have no problem getting them to work in C4D and Houdini). The arm rotations are really wonky, as if I were applying a T-pose animation, but I built the animations on a G8 to begin with. Granted, I've spent very little time even attempting to animate in DS, so there's probably something really obvious I'm missing.
Not to mention that after spending 50 hours on something (and longer), there is no guarantee Daz will take it. Making it for G3 and earlier, without also adding G8, reduces the chance of it being accepted. (Or so I presume.)
While I wouldn't want to deride, belittle or disrespect anyone in this situation, people who are forced to use older versions of DS or older figures likely have to do so because they are still using older hardware, which does not suggest that they are a market with a large amount of disposable income.
Those that choose to use the older figures - well, there may be a number of reasons to do so, but almost all of them put them in a part of the Venn diagram where they don't overlap with the much larger market looking for the newest and most up-to-date figures.
This is not really an additional revenue stream as you put it, but an alternative one, which is problematic as vendors have a finite limit to how fast they can create content.
I think at this point in time, the only major reason a vendor would still want to specifically target the older figures is because they personally want to.