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Us normal users don't have that option if one intends to bring it back to DS as a morph for the (G9) figure
Even with having checked that the joint corrections is fully enabled, I'm not seeing better bends. On the contrary the G9 torso bends like it has 4 steelbars as the backbone, which doesn't look natural.
Did a quick search, but I didn't find anything I could understand. What are JCMs and how do we use those to fix the ugly bends? I don't see anything in the parameters tab for G9.
...indeed.
I'm not the best at modelling, actually rather bad at it, even for props & such. My goal is to create high quality detailed scenes and illustrations which is enough work in and of itself without having to sculpt #, create morphs, or model what i need. Granted since Blender 2.8 the UI has been improved to be a bit easier to learn and work with, but it takes a certain mindset to do 3D digital modelling (and this is coming from someone who worked with sale model display and radio control aircraft). it's different when you can actually touch the object you are working on.
Having to translate from "old school" painting and drawing to digitial 3D art has been quite the learning curve in and of itself.(which II am still on 15 years later). It has even involved learning how to build a workstation as back then, "off the shelf" systems were inadwquate while custom built ones were extremely expensive.
I pretty much have settled with G3 and G8 for now as they are easier to work with out of the box, even for the extent of morph and character mixing I do.
Still the one part of G9 that attracts me is the return to the unimesh (and a more refined one than G1), for as MattyManx illustrated, as it allows for more realistic breast scaling for younger or more petite female characters wihout all the struggles i've been going through for years. However I'll have to wait until more merchant resource and utility content is released, along with some way to bring in head and full body morphs of older generation characters as desired (like an update of Zev0s XTransfer or a resuscitated GeneraionX).
i didn't know that nipples can distort clothes. Oh, if you move the mesh of the clothes in Hexagon you mean? I got it.
Are the official Daz PowerPose templates available yet? (I know there is a unofficial freebie available)
While I am leaning more towards getting on board, it is gonna be a while. Money is of course a factor, and I still have a lot of mileage to get out of my G8 stuff too, before I feel like I've gotten my money's worth.
SF-Design's https://www.daz3d.com/body-morph-kit-for-genesis-9 did what I had hoped it would and made G9M's chest better looking to me. I have found Skin4 has creases baked into the texture I'll need to photoshop away if he's going to be without a shirt. Hopefully they aren't there on M9's texture, too.
@Timbales:
This may be more what you're looking for:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/603561/g9-masculine-chest-smoothing-morph#latest
Yep! I'm really glad that set has something for this, and I'm definitely going to have to pick it up myself.
(I don't know why the quotes on this post are haunted.)
I think usefulness really is relative, because all the issues people describe having with G9--weird bends, lack of flexibility for what they want to make, etc.--were things that frustrated me about G8 and 8.1. Part of the reason I started paying monthly for a ZBrush subscription was because I wanted to do scenes with characters who don't have the ideally fit, gender-dimorphic bodies G8's topology lends itself to, and trying to work too far outside that range meant the mesh was just going to fold up. So I got used to smoothing it out myself. I was always going back and simplifying my character shapes because I could get a face looking just right on G8 and then I'd try one (1) expression and they'd look like a killer mannequin. Or I'd try to make an unusual body type with morphs and the bends would look bizarre.
That doesn't make 8 and 8.1 bad figures, but I was already used to compensating for what they couldn't do with extra work and help from outside programs. The only reason I know how to do that with G9 is that using G8 made me decide I needed to learn.
The PAs that do characters are brilliant texture artists, yet I'm just a user of textures, not a texture artist, (I mean where does one even GET the raw materials!?) so as a person that strives for realism in their art it can get tiring de-creasing/de-highlighting the textures, but the good news is, that it has given me a real appreciation for texture artists!
Looking at it from a stylistic perspective, it makes sense because the artists use their skill to contour the details instead of relying on pictures alone, as artists crave self-expression, so we as artists love to add ourselves even into our tools, so I don't want to discourage an artist's way of making texture art, which is a respected art form in itself, as they aren't concerned with realism as much as artistic expression, so kudos.
Back in the day posette/V2/4 and poser were perfectly suited for non-realistic textures/renders due to the limits of the time as the industry was just getting started, so contouring was and still is a stylistic technique that is needed as the skill itself requires knowledge of the human figure, even if the contours are non-existent within the texture.
Now we're in a different age, where Daz characters are as real as any model can get, and while the same techniques have changed little, the sources for the skin textures have, and there are some that are less than ideal for realism than others so the creases, highlights, and contours are going to remain which is perfectly fine, but it would help us a lot if we had an alternative source.
The only issue then is where will those that want realism going to get their textures; I propose that either Daz lifts its strict nudity policy, so we can feature the textures on the characters with thongs and pasties at least, so we can actually see the texture on the characters, or better yet, have a category that only features textures much like with hair and clothing, that way every texture, for both realistic and stylised, can be purchased!
That way, as a category itself, we will inevitably have more textures to choose from, giving each character sold, and each PA selling their wares a separate stage in which to perform their best work, I mean we already have highly skilled texture artists doing clothing/hair, why not the most important thing a character needs; the texture themselves!
I'd also like to add my apologies to the PAs due to my last post on the subject as I was too irritated and hasty, so it came off pretty bad, which was not my intention… One should never post when irritated.
NOTE: When I mention realism, I mean realistic models and textures, not rendering techniques, as rendering is a different beast altogether!
I'm glad you can make a corgi out of it. That's great! Really, it is, I have no need to comment further in this thread.
Ugh. My G9 train just derailed. Can't render two G9s at subdiv 3 without dropping to CPU with an RTX 2070 Super. Not sure I want to spend $400+ for a 3060 just so I can render a pair of G9 figures.
Good info to have. To be fair, SubD 3 for G9 is the equivalent of SubD 4 for G8, right?
3dsk mostly some photograph models in a studio themselves
https://www.3d.sk/
Thanks for this, this is a great place for me to start! :)
On topic, I think I'm ready to board the train, this is my Cimmerian character I dialled in real quick, so yeah, I'm gonna compose a few scenes with both G8.1 and G9!
BTW, it's the Robert E. Howard/Frank Frazetta version, not hollywood's…
Actually nipples is a great example, but I have to admit that it sounds scary approach if PAs are just eyeballing where the nipples are supposed to be. If character creator A eyeballs his/her model's nipples 1 cm one way and B eyeballs 1 cm to the other way, and then they both create their new models. Not any kind of expert on this, but I assume if me as a customer who wants to use A's textures on B's character will end up having nipple textures 2 cm off from where the nipple mesh is, right? Personally I prefer the "old way" where the mesh topology marked where navel and nipples are supposed to be.
Also I'm not a big sculptor myself, but I've made some some small morphs for my characters with Blender. Since normal customers don't have access to HD tools, I believe it's much harder for us hobbyist to define nipples or whatever since we can't add extra vertices where we need them and topology does not support it. I get it that this is a good business move, since now other character creators (except those that are working with Daz and have access to HD tools), are having big troubles trying to create new characters for G9, but as a customer I do like the versatility that those other store's vendors' have given.
I'm on the train. The shared model is huge, especially considering there is a drought of male hair, clothing and poses for other models. We can now use all those female assets on male characters too, and visa versa.
This right here is good example of what I'm talking about, as well. I don't need nipples in different places, and I don't need 4 of them, I just need to be able to have the flexiblity to add my own realism and unique touches to the characters I purchase. I also need to ensure that any other morphs I purchase are presupposing the same base figure that I am, so that I can know that the morphs will apply the intended result.
I know most users don't do their own sculpting, and I think that I (as well as the OP in the text I quoted) am more of an edge use case and from a business perspective not part of the 80% they want to target. NO problem there. I don't like feeling like my own opinions are discarded immediatly by people saying that Displacement/Normals are a replacement. Unfortunately, for me, they aren't.
As with all change, though, there are positives and negatives, and it's just an exercise in evaluating whether the positives outweigh the rest. My own concerns could be unfounded, as morphs and everything could still work as expected and perhaps I'll just have to export out a SubD5 instead of SubD4 character to sculpt on top of, but only time will tell.
Also unfortunately, this seems to have become an "us vs them" kind of conversation, and I'm not interested in that so I'm out. I only wanted to discuss some of the concerns I had to see if anybody else shared them and had opinions on what options were availble to mitigate them, but I'd rather not risk unintentionally offending a group of people. I'm a big boy, and I can figure it out without crying on the forum about it ;)
I did a test on my system playing around with just 2 G9's, with the basic content that comes with the free essentials pack. Being hair, clothing and textures I rendered with no environment, and GPU-Z was telling me I was getting close to 8 GB of my 3060's 12GB of vram being used. So can only imagine if I had made a complex scene with many scene elements.
And with that, this is one of my main reasons for not hopping on the G9 train, among other reasons.
That really sucks, I curse Nvidia for cheesing out with the memory with their GPUs, 16Gb SHOULD be the standard, not this 8Gb rubbish!
At least the 3k series is going to get cheaper as time goes on for the 4k series…
I can't be definitive but I suspect that whatever GPU you have, you might expect DAZ Studio (IRay) to use as much of the VRAM as possible. For example, I went from an 8GB 1070 to a 24GB 3090 and it surprised me to find that the scenes I was able to render with my 1070 now registered (GPU-Z) something like 12GB of VRAM on my 3090.
Interesting, has me wondering what Studio/iRay does with GPU's and memory used. The one good thing with my RTX 3060 is I can fit upto 10 G8's with hair, clothes and a complete environment. Although I do fudge the numbers a little, by going ham on reducing texture sizes of all the elements in the scene. And replacing large format texture files such as PNG and Tiff with jpg files. So the same could be done with G9, but as of yet I have no need or desire to start anew again, that and having the funds since the AUD exchange rate right now is not great.
Converting to JPEG only affects the amount of space it occupies on your HDD. Any computer software that can view it or use it has to decompress the file to do so and the same image, regardless of its extension, will use the same amout of ram or vram once decompressed.
Ahh k I was not sure if it did or not. But the main reason I reduce texture files is when it comes to large 8192x8192 or 4096x4096 texture, reducing them to 1024 or 2048 for me it makes a difference, and having them as jpg seems to help sometimes. And since most of the work I do is with comics and I postwork the images after rendering, so needing a hires texture is not really a must have.
It is rather the opposite. Since G3-G8 have a detailed topology you can use a lower subdivision. With G9 you have a higher density but no topology, this means the mesh density is not "where it counts" if we speak of human figures. Indeed the main reason for a good topology is to optimize the figure adding details where they're needed. As for the hardware resources, again, G9 is HD based so needs a more powerful hardware this is expected.
Ok, I didn't understand that... can you (or sombody) explain this further, or phrase it differently?
My understanding so far had been:
G8 geometry has a certain amount of polygons, which at base resolution (subD 0) uses N amount of space on your GPU while rendering.
Increase subD to 1, now the geometry uses 4 x N amount of space on your GPU. Increase subD to 2 and it uses 16 x N amount of space. Geometry quadruples with each subD increase.
G9 has twice the mesh density of G8, so quadruple the amount of polygons (roughly). At base resolution (subD 0) G9 already uses 4 x N amount of space on your GPU (roughly).
G9 at subD 3 is the equivalent of G8 at subD 4, regarding the amount of space its geometry uses on the GPU (roughly).
Everybody, please do correct me because my understanding of these things is iffy and I want to learn if I got it wrong.
You need to factor in that when you increase the resolution of G9 the eyes and mouth and teeth are not subdivided. When you increase the reolution of G8 they are subdivided.
See the blender video I will link. In general, for posing and animation purposes, an even mesh is inefficient. There needs to be more polygons where there is more bending, and there can be fewer polygons where the body does not bend or express. For example, the middle of the front of the shin does not bend, so the mesh need not have as many polygons there. But the ankles and the knees bend, and the back of the calf muscle contracts and bulges. So the top and bottom and back of the shin bone need more polygons. The top and bottom blend when the ankle and knee joints bend. The calf muscle contracts and bulges when the muscle exercises. It is good to have plenty of polygons near the joints and near muscles, but extra polygons are not needed in the middle of long bones. Genesis 9 has even polygons, so it is inefficient from the perspective of edge loops. Given the total number of polygons used, there are too many in the middle/front of the shin and not enough by the ankle and the knee and back of the calf. That is an oversimplified explanation. There are actually plenty of polygons in the ankle and the knee but their edges do not match the typical peaks and valleys of healthy human adults. But hope it helps get the general idea across. See this video.
See here. Getting on the 9 train, or not - Page 30 - Daz 3D Forums
The reply is that an even grid is better for sculpting. (1) The even grid makes it easier to completely reshape the base figure. (2) For posing and animating, if the creator is going to rely on morph fixes instead of good edge flow, then the even grid gives maximum freedom to the sculpting brush.
Trade-offs.
EDIT: Given that the square grid does not line up the edges of the grid with the natural peaks and valleys of human muscles and bones, the sculpting solution is to make the grid smaller so that there are points everywhere. Increase subdivision to increase the density of scuplting points (make grid smaller). Summary. Subdivision is a strain on computer resouces, subdivision would not be necessary if the edge loops lined up better, the square grid is inefficient.