Pro bundles, 5, 6 or 7?

drinformation

Hi, I finally decided to purchase few pro bundles and wondering which ones are better for my use?
- My main use for them is still image renders for my Visual Novels (story + image games)
- I'll be using Iray for renders
- So far couldn't find many free cloths that fit any of genesiss series but planing to use lot's of freebies

few more questions:
what's the pros and cons of each 5. 6 and 7 bundle series?
are series 7 bundles cheaper than series 6 for some reason?
Is there a good reason to buy series 4 bundles other than price?

Richard Haseltine

Each number is a different base figure - 4 is Victoria 4/Michael 4, legacy rigging so doesn't bend as well but plenty of add-on content. 5, 6, and 7 are Genesis, Genesis 2 Male/Female, and Genesis 3 Male/Female respectively - all use weight-mapping, in general the newer figure has better bends than the older, plenty of content but not as much as for the fourth generation figures (though content for the Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 is most likely to have materials set up for the current versions of 3Delight and Iray). Clothing can readily be converted forward in DS using AutoFit (in stages, or with an add-on to skip generations); textures for the older figures can be made to work on the newer easily up to Genesis 2 via UV sets (add-ons needed beyond the previous generation), the third generation figures do have options to use older textures but not as simple and requiring an add-on. Morphs can be converted from older geenrations but it requires using a moderately advanced tol or the purchase of GenX 2 up to Genesis 2 (Genesis 3 is not yet supported for this tool though the manual methods still work).

nicstt

If you don't have much of anything, I'm tempted to suggest Genesis3 (7). Genesis2 (6) is a good compromise as it has better discounts. Genesis 1 as it combines the male and female mesh is still used by some as it makes for easier creation of gender-combinations; that doesn't mean the others can't do that, only that some consider it easier on G1. I don't know as have never used it.

Personally, I prefer G3; if you want to use Poser as well as Daz, G3 is more of a problem, but doable.

I don't buy anything 4, figure-wise; there are a lot of morphs, and addons from what I can tell needed to get good results.

All however, do benefit from the morphs available, and some are essential really.

G3 tends to support IRAY as default; earlier versions require shader packs unless you want to sort your own shaders.

It isn't really a simple answer; I suggest you look at the default figures that can be used without any purchases; look at what you need and go from there.

Wilmap

Lots of freebies for Genesis 1, 2 and 3 on my website if you're interested. See link below.

drinformation

@Richard Haseltine and @nicstt thanks for all of answers, seems there is a lean towards gen3 based models.
@Wilmap your website is pretty neat and I enjoyed browsing your designs,  I've downloaded few of them and checked a while back, the skirt control was a bit hard to deal with for me but the thing that I had problem with was the textures, I couldn't find many cloths  that look contemporary, is there an easy way i can take the texture files to photoshop and design my own textures for them?

mjc1016

This thread has lots of good info on how to texture items...

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/74272/texturing-with-destinysgarden/p1

drinformation

thanks @mjc1016 I was wondering why I can't see an option to export those UV maps... now I know ^_^