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wallace_trustIn CG Hobby World, there are some basic human figures most everybody starts out with. The DAZ Millennium figures were released around 1999. Victoria 4 arrived way back in 2006 and is the figure I have been using for Frodo for years now.
Time has gone by and technology continues to improve. While the fourth generation figures are still perfect for a lot of applications, DAZ is now up to Victoria 8. I prefer the 5th generation, also called Genesis.
When the Genesis figure came onto the scene in 2011, a lot of things changed. For one, Genesis is neither male nor female-- it can be made into both, eliminating the need for special clothing fits, etc, which can otherwise consume a whole lot of time. It also has an auto-fit feature to make any previous generation of clothing fit on it perfectly. But to me, the best part about Genesis is the weight mapping. Weight mapping means the way the bones and mesh move. I was delighted with my 'Beautiful Bends' generation 4 Frodo, but the BB figures require dozens if not hundreds of mesh DFormers, which take up gigabytes of memory that is needed for other things. Genesis uses no DFormers. Instead it has a different kind of weight mapping which makes the figure bend so much better than any of its predecessors.
Now I have been using Genesis since 2013, but in 2015 I switched to the Carrara 3D software. Carrara does support the Genesis figure, but often does better with Generation 4. I designed my LOTR characters all in Carrara on that generation.
Later, having switched back to DAZ Studio after it had a major upgrade, I had no way to precisely transfer my generation 4 characters forward onto Genesis. There is a utility called GenX2 for this purpose, but it was way too expensive-- close to $40-- so I was stuck for what seemed like the longest time with generation 4 and its less-than-ideal bending/twisting/posing. Until last week, when DAZ started its big holiday super sale and the price for GenX2 dropped suddenly into the single digits! :D :D :D
Transferring V4 Frodo forward through time was still a big deal and it has taken me since Friday night to do it. I had to export my figure, mark the morphs I wanted to keep (out of hundreds) then load everything into GenX2 and do the conversion to Genesis. After this, I had to switch the UV maps in order to use the original skins and completely repaint some accessory parts. Then I had to fit Frodo's original Michael 4 clothes to the figure, but this took only seconds with auto fit and I got a much better fit on Genesis than I ever have gotten with trying to fit those clothes directly to Victoria 4! ^^;
More samples below the cut.
Time has gone by and technology continues to improve. While the fourth generation figures are still perfect for a lot of applications, DAZ is now up to Victoria 8. I prefer the 5th generation, also called Genesis.
When the Genesis figure came onto the scene in 2011, a lot of things changed. For one, Genesis is neither male nor female-- it can be made into both, eliminating the need for special clothing fits, etc, which can otherwise consume a whole lot of time. It also has an auto-fit feature to make any previous generation of clothing fit on it perfectly. But to me, the best part about Genesis is the weight mapping. Weight mapping means the way the bones and mesh move. I was delighted with my 'Beautiful Bends' generation 4 Frodo, but the BB figures require dozens if not hundreds of mesh DFormers, which take up gigabytes of memory that is needed for other things. Genesis uses no DFormers. Instead it has a different kind of weight mapping which makes the figure bend so much better than any of its predecessors.
Now I have been using Genesis since 2013, but in 2015 I switched to the Carrara 3D software. Carrara does support the Genesis figure, but often does better with Generation 4. I designed my LOTR characters all in Carrara on that generation.
Later, having switched back to DAZ Studio after it had a major upgrade, I had no way to precisely transfer my generation 4 characters forward onto Genesis. There is a utility called GenX2 for this purpose, but it was way too expensive-- close to $40-- so I was stuck for what seemed like the longest time with generation 4 and its less-than-ideal bending/twisting/posing. Until last week, when DAZ started its big holiday super sale and the price for GenX2 dropped suddenly into the single digits! :D :D :D
Transferring V4 Frodo forward through time was still a big deal and it has taken me since Friday night to do it. I had to export my figure, mark the morphs I wanted to keep (out of hundreds) then load everything into GenX2 and do the conversion to Genesis. After this, I had to switch the UV maps in order to use the original skins and completely repaint some accessory parts. Then I had to fit Frodo's original Michael 4 clothes to the figure, but this took only seconds with auto fit and I got a much better fit on Genesis than I ever have gotten with trying to fit those clothes directly to Victoria 4! ^^;
More samples below the cut.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-03 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-03 06:21 pm (UTC)This software works like paper dolls, except you start with a perfectly blank human doll (Victoria 4) and then sculpt your character's features onto it before you add clothes and hair. The problem is when you want to transfer those character features (i.e. nose shape, eye shape, height and build, etc) onto a newer blank doll (Genesis) which is not compatible with the previous doll. This is the problem I just solved. :D
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Date: 2018-12-03 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-04 04:48 pm (UTC)Wow, that's a complex series of tasks you undertook! Does it take time for your system to render the images or is it pretty much an instantaneous process?
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Date: 2018-12-04 07:57 pm (UTC)Render time depends on the render engine used, how many objects are in the scene to reflect light, whether or not there are transparency maps (those slow things down terribly!) and in iRay, how well-lit the scene is. The three scenes in this entry took about five minutes each. On the other hand, the scene I just did with Frodo and his pony Strider took about three hours because the computer had to calculate the light bouncing from all those leaves. That render was still too grainy when it finished due to low light levels, so I applied a faint Gaussian blur to the whole thing to reduce the graininess.