Gen 8, the Queen of Botox

Doc_1189058

Hey, folks. Sorry to make a second post in such a short amount of time, I'm having teething problems with Gen 8.

First, quick; no one seems to have a sollution to the fingers bug which I've discovered is incredibly common. The finger morphs turn her fingers all long, curly and weird. Even manually moving the digits individually causes the same effect. Someone suggested Edit > Figure > Rigging > Adjust Rigging to Shape, and that DID fix the fingers, but the thumb is still mental. It literally clenches backwards, and no amount of manual posing can position it like a proper thumb should be. - Has anyone found a fix for this? Or is this why 8.1 was invented? lol

That's more of a minor question, just if anyone happened to know off-hand. My main question is about the facial expression of G8. Now that I'm using the model as god intended, I'm finding that her expression morphs are pathetically minimal. I'm a cartoonist, so of course this is going to annoy me a lot. To open the eyelids as wide as possible requires the employment of at least 6-8 sliders, and even then they're a little less wide than an actual human being can do, let alone a cartoon or an exaggerated expression. This is a singular example, but most of the other sliders are the same, including the eyes-slider that barely moves the eyeballs at all.

I keep calling her the Queen of Botox because every single movement I'm trying to make her face do feels like I'm trying to drag an anchor out of the ocean. Why is her face so unbelievably stiff? Worse still, I can't even break the parameters! So it's like "here's a barely functional face - live with it." - Have the people who developed G8 ever seen genuine human emotions, and how expressive a face can be?? --- 99% of ALL posing is contained within the face. If the face isn't working properly, the model is screwed.

So what's going on here? Are there some packages I need to buy to bring this zombie to life? Or is there a way to disable the limits on the sliders so that they actually allow the boundries to be broken? I'm tired of staring into her dead eyes, it's like looking at a wife who desperately wants me to take care of the tree stump outside.

Before I sound like I'm crapping all over G8, I like a lot of the new stuff I see in it, it's obviously incredibly well made. I probably prefer V4 due to the simplicity, versitility and customisation, but there's a lot of great things I see in G8, but this facial rigidness is my chief complaint (along the finger thing. Which wouldn't be a problem if they stopped trying to be so clever and just make them simple moving parts instead of morph-controlled).

But above all. It's the face that's the problem. - It's like asking a cardboard box to go win you an Oscar. For the love of sod, help me.

- Doc

Richard Haseltine

The bending is because you have a shape applied that doesn't adjust the one placement, so the centresd of rotation are outside the model in its current shape. This shouldn't happen with commercial products or good freebies, so the question is how are you shaping the figuire - or is this a single doubly-bad morph both applying by default and failing to adjust the rigging?

How are you setting the expressions right now? Which Genesis 8 - the original or 8.1? Using 8 expression sets on 8.1 is likely to fail as most rely on the base Gensis 8 expressions, which are disabled 9by default) on 8.1 since it has new expression cotnrols 9and a fancy controller gadget to use them). Even if you are using 8, you may need the expressions to use any other add-on expression packs.

If you are using the base pose controls then note that most genesis 8.x expressions are drivers for bones - removing limits on the driver, if that is what you mean by breaking the parameters, won't affect the limits on the bones. If you are removing limits and not seeing an effect click the gear icon on the slider to open Parameter Settings and then look in the Sub components tab to see what the slider is actually driving.

Doc_1189058

Richard Haseltine said:

The bending is because you have a shape applied that doesn't adjust the one placement, so the centresd of rotation are outside the model in its current shape. This shouldn't happen with commercial products or good freebies, so the question is how are you shaping the figuire - or is this a single doubly-bad morph both applying by default and failing to adjust the rigging?

How are you setting the expressions right now? Which Genesis 8 - the original or 8.1? Using 8 expression sets on 8.1 is likely to fail as most rely on the base Gensis 8 expressions, which are disabled 9by default) on 8.1 since it has new expression cotnrols 9and a fancy controller gadget to use them). Even if you are using 8, you may need the expressions to use any other add-on expression packs.

If you are using the base pose controls then note that most genesis 8.x expressions are drivers for bones - removing limits on the driver, if that is what you mean by breaking the parameters, won't affect the limits on the bones. If you are removing limits and not seeing an effect click the gear icon on the slider to open Parameter Settings and then look in the Sub components tab to see what the slider is actually driving.

OK, so after staring at your very articulate reply, I stared into space dribbling for a few hours, not understanding a single word you said - then I realised I didn't mention that I was using a purchased character from a non-Daz store. So that helped what you were saying make sense somewhat. The purchased character is using a G8 (not 8.1). My normal Gen8 figure is working fine, Daz just hates this character. The fingers are fixed with the fix I mentioned, but the thumb is still stuck in reverse for some reason. Is there a way to fix this? It's pretty annoying that the slider doesn't just bend the bloody thing, it behaves more like I understand d-formers to work. Whatever happened to simple roations?

For the expressions, I took your advice and followed the sliders, then I just broke everything I could. I saved the edited G8 in a file of its own, so I'll just load that if I ever need a G8 whop is actually capable of human emotion, so cheers for that.

Richard Haseltine

Adjust Rigging to Shape is often good enough, but soemtimes it needs rfinement - I suspect that whatever has been done to the thumb shape is going to require some manual adjustment of the bones (using the Joint Editor tool) or a fix (using the same method) from the maker.