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I agree. I agree especially on the challenge making a G8Female look more natural, because THAT has been exactly my motivation for creating my character.
Any figure can be sculpted into any character with some skills, but what is the best character sculpting job worth, when you pose or animate this character and it just looks bad, because of Joint settings and a mesh design that give artefacts because of overlapping polygon edges?
That posed or animated character, that represents all the hard sculpting work now looks hardly better than a posed Victoria 4 from not so good old Poser 7 ages.
My frustration with G9 is, that I just cannot get done with it, what I have been able to do with G3 and G8, although they are far from perfect, but at least workable.
G9 is perfect for vendors.
Cloth it, give it some material and pose it just a little bit with a smile.
Perfect for that purpose of a nice product promo, but useless at least in my workflow.
All of this, twice, and a third time for the people in the back. Even trying to make specifically attractive characters with G8 was a struggle the moment you wanted to move away from tall/muscular men and tall/big-breasted women. I want a variety of body shapes in my characters! I've put in significant work converting my custom characters from G8 to G9, and they all look so much better for it – even the tall and muscular men! With G8 I was fighting the base shape to get a result that's "close enough", with G9 the shape I actually wanted just slides effortlessly into place. You couldn't pay¹ me to go back.
[1]: This is a blatant lie. You can absolutely pay me to do so, you just wouldn't like the price.
This is not true at all...
... I have also used G8 to make short big breasted women.
Gallery Link
(I should however probably accept that the overall Venn diagram between "Matt has done it" and "super easy, barely an inconvenience" is not necessarily one with a large central overlap).
it just might take a different route for many :)
While I doubt I will be buying many core figures or more or less human G9 characters*, I have started using some of the aliens and am really enjoying them. The most rendering fun I've had in a while. I have found some things about using G9 I do like while working with the aliens (Sidra & Arcturian).
Autofit is one. Having extra templates to select is a big plus that I wish applied to auto fitting clothing to earlier generations. Getting separate requestors for each part when auto fitting a wearable is a small (timewise) price to pay. My only complaint is that autofit still strips out posing bones and morphs. Oh well.
I also mostly like having less bones, making it easy to find things in scenes, although I wonder if that's one reason I read about so many posing and joint complaints. The Point At option some bones have under Parameters is nice but limited IMO. I find it doesn't always aim well.
*due to pricing, wanting to limit duplication, and already having enough realistic(-ish) human variation between my G3 & G8 content, plus the free G9 characters (starter essentials & EG Kin)
As always, your reply has something to think about, something worth reading.
Not necessarily a good reply:
I've ended up with enough G9 stuff now that I guess I'll be using some G9, but the bulk of it is not human - Space aliens, the Dragonhide PCS armors, etc. That's actually ok with me. On the human side, I've started poking at what I've got, though I have procured nothing additional for shaping and manipulating human figures. So, they are as they are. It's not like there's any previous generation that is absolutely perfect. People who think that's my position are just wrong. It's more like, I've already spent money to make previous generations amenable to my needs/wants, whatever. So why should I bother to do that now for G9 and again for G10 and so on? It's rhetorical. I don't have or expect an answer for that. I simply haven't spent the extra money for G9. I probably will when the stuff is really cheap - not before. There were times I might have, but I missed out. So, it is what it is.
You already know the answer to your conundrum, it's just a huge pain to do it. You would probably have to craft your own custom JCMs (or whatever the current term is - I recall it changed). It's probably not worth your time to do all that if you're getting what you need from what you've already got.
I indeed did create a set of custom JCMs for my character and I tried to do it on G9 but it failed.
I don't know completly why it failed, but part of the problem has been, that huge areas of the torso had to be resculpted for only one JCM, which led me to the conclusion, that changing the weight map for bone inflence might have been the better solution, but I will not touch bone rigging and weight maps. No, never. ;-)
After all, you want to make sure, that your character works potentially at best at any pose, not just at one or two specific poses.
To make a long story short, I just cannot pose that thing, without it looking weird.
..."big breasts" have been a bane since the Gen3 days. Trying to dial the size down to more petite dimensions can cause distortion that affects clothing fits. The same applies to any type of detailed texture beyond solid colours as most clothing seems to be designed for the "default" figure breast size. I have a number of different breast morphing utilities but even with those the process can be a real struggle to get a more "petite" physique that looks reasonable.
Even with Genesis 1 (which also had a single androgynous base figure like G9) it was difficult to create smaller breasted characters (until Thorne's Young Teen Julie came out). Yes there have been other "young" or "petite" characters for G3 and G8 but many still rely on the default figure breast size (save for 3DU's kids and teens which tend to be more stylised).
Isn't it about time for the 10 train to pull out of the station? Genesis 9 was released in mid-October 2022.
Geez, I actually hope not.
but then G8 will be realy cheap, hopefully.
I hope so. Want the gender split to return. Genesis 9 was a fail for me.
That means a lot, thank you! And I think your reply is really insightful, as always. :D You hit something here with having found a figure that does everything you need it to—I think that's the ideal for different generations, and is probably inevitable as we reach a point where vast technological improvements are likely few and far between (which is the case with a lot of stuff, now).
I actually don't expect to ever move on from G9. Part of it is because I don't really buy Daz products anymore, and part of it is because I suspect G10 is more likely to be aimed at people who stuck with G8 and didn't consider G9 an upgrade. But also it's because it just does what I need it to do, and I've already invested in it. I will be wildly surprised if the next figure doesn't go back to split-gender meshes, but even if it doesn't, I just don't think there's much they could do to catch my eye without the kind of advancements that are not likely in the current incarnation of DS.
IMO, fewer and more targeted figure releases are probably best for consumers, even if it's not in line with what users tend to assume is Daz's business model (i.e., introduce a new figure every couple of years so people will have to repurchase their libraries, but I don't think that's their goal—it makes it vastly more likely that users will just fall off). It may be better for vendors as well; I make my own content and don't sell, but another thing that would put me off working with a new figure is having to learn a different workflow now that I'm comfortable. If you know you have a consumer base that will keep buying new things for an existing figure, it seems like it would actually be kind of exhausting to just play catch-up every couple of years with products people have come to expect so you can keep selling those regularly, when you could be expanding your catalog.
I think this is probably why a ton of vendors have not moved on to G9 or even messed with it—they're happy using 8/8.1 and people are still buying for it. I noticed a few of the vendors Daz seems to have brought over from the other store are now making stuff for 9 when they weren't doing so consistently before, and I'd seen one of them mention when 9 first came out that their first attempts at selling for it just didn't do well comparatively, and it was a lot of extra work. It's possible that the higher sales from the Daz marketplace are what make G9 worthwhile to develop for. (I also haven't seen a single geograft creator express anything but distaste for it—apparently something about the topology makes it really difficult to get weight maps working correctly.)
This far along, the 8 to 9 transition looks very different to me from the 3/8 split, which seemed more like a straightforward upgrade. I love 9, but I'll freely admit that it may just end up filling a comparatively small niche. If that's the case, I'm just glad it exists for me to use, and I'll probably keep using it until the proverbial wheels fall off (or I learn to sculpt my own base meshes, whichever comes first).
Or just don't bother to give the character an expression and leave them at default for all the promos, as I have seen happening rather often as of late... or, worse, create the expressions used in the promo pictures in Photoshop, which has happened at least once.
The fact that this thread is still so active with G9 now a month way from being two years old is rather telling. At this point I'm occasionally using the G9s for anime/toon type characters where their various oddities/quirks aren't as big an issue, but out of necessity G8 and G3 have remained my primary workhorses if the characters I'm rendering are supposed to be a realistic human being. At this point I don't think we're going to see a point 1/point 2 correction or any substantial improvements in the basic figures, so my hope is that, given the fact that we're getting some pretty niche characters dumped out, that the G9's going to go the retirement route as quickly as Genesis and G2 did...
This is the exact experience I had. I was so not looking forward to rebuilding all my G8 characters, especially without all the morphs I was used to. And then I tried it just using combinations of the standard Daz morph packages and the asymmetry morphs, and immediately I was closer to the right look than I'd ever been.
I don't know enough about rigging to know if the difference is in the way it's rigged or in the topology (or both), but what you said about it even having a hard time with variation in attractive features makes me think it might've been at least partially due to the topology not being dense enough to handle changes to facial proportions well, or at least not without adjusting the rig by hand. It still kind of amazes me to put together some large combination of different morphs, dial in a smiling expression, and have the character actually look like they're smiling.
I was looking for an example of what I mean for folks who never encountered the issue, and this is pretty much it. The first pic is G8, and the second is G9.
My version of the Joker tends to be on the "he'd be pretty if he wasn't watching you from inside your walls" end of the design spectrum, so he's not even realistic-looking; he's actually very stylized. But it was really, really hard to get him to look animated, for lack of a better term. I still like that G8 pic, but he has the Jack Nicholson smile—like something is artificially forcing the corners of his mouth upward even though he's otherwise very aloof and composed. Which isn't a bad thing for this specific character in certain contexts, but it was a struggle to make him emote at all.
The "two year figure cycle" isn't really a thing.
Sure, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 lasted about two years. But Genesis lasted more like a year and a half, Vicky 3 lasted about three years, and Victoria 4 and Genesis 8 lasted about five years (albeit both through some sub generations).
I really do need to get my toolkit for all that sorted.
I love the little glimpses I get into your insane little world.
And just a tiny bit worried to discover that one of my main custom characters also uses that exact same hair. 
I see what you mean. That second one just nails it! Very evocative. I like it. Good job!
I am by far from an expert, but this. It makes no sense to me.
I needed to upgrade a character, a male from Genesis 7 due to shader issues so I thought I would go through the process to convert some clothing.
How it's supposed to be easier makes no sense, there's extra steps. First, you need to model it after the base figure (which is further off from male or female, whichever way you go). Then after you do that and rig it, you need to morph again to the gender's shape you want to use to avoid distortions as much as possible. It seems like just more work.
It was a lot easier to do the scene identification trick for G3 to G8, and many of the JCMs are more or less preserved.
I really wanted to switch over to it, like a lot of folks, but the difficultly in migrating stuff over just doesn't seem worth it.
I'm not sure migration is necessary or even desirable. I have enough characters of each generation that I don;t necessarily need to move any of them. I sometimes just want to. AFAIK, HD morphs can't be migrated. So, that's a limitation. Some characters work really well within their generation and would not work as well in the later generation. So, it might be better to work with the older characters as they are and work with the newer characters as they are.
I'm still experimenting with transferring characters from one generation to another, but it's not with a goal to make every character fit in the same generation - That may not work, may not be possible for all characters. It's more about seeing what's possible for characters where that seems like a good idea. As example, I can take a V4 character I like and turn it into a G8 character with either V4 UVs and original textures or with G8 UVs and some other textures to get access to other stuff I have for G8. I can do the samewith a G3 character, if there is no HD morph involved. Sometimes it makes sense - Sometimes not! It depends a lot on what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do it.
Mutual respect! So cool! Thank you, too. Glad to see you back. Seems like you've been gone a while.
I agree, it's good when we find a figure that works for us! I've found there are some really neat characters in each generation and even some of the really old ones can still be fun. As long as there is a market for G8/8.1, it's good that it's still getting support. Cheers to that!
I think the workmanship that's going into some of the G9 items is very impressive. I haven't heard much about vendor difficulties with G9 - I'm sure that's a thing. Vendors here who have access to the full suite of G9 creation tools in the PA version of DS seem to to like it a lot. Without all that, G9 may be more of a problem. It seems the complexity goes up a bit for each generation of figure, and that's a challenge. The vendors who push G9 the furthest rely a lot on subdivision and higher resolution, though they did that with earlier generations, as well. Whatever issues there are with geografting G9, it seems some folks have made successful geografts. You have, too. I recall you showing the demon legs you made. Those looked pretty cool.
I think the idea of a single-mesh figure is laudable. I do feel like the market is drowning in G9 feminine stuff, though the female figure bias is nothing new. I'm not convinced G9 will end any time soon. I guess we'll see. Your Joker shows that you've got some excellent results from G9. I've seen some great-looking work with it. That's all heartening. I looked in my library and loaded up some G9 figures. I was surprised to find that I have more morphs and resources than I thought - probably not as much as I want, but baby steps! I added SY's 200 Free Morphs Merchant Resource last night, and that should be fun. On the whole, I'm at a point where I want to do more with the G9 and see where that takes me. I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about integrating G9 in my work now.
I likely have made more geografts than any product maker out there, and I have had no issues at all with making grafts for G9...in fact the more linear topology makes fitting the grafts much easier
I use both G9 and G8.x. It's not really an either/or proposition for me. I switch trains on a regular basis.