722 opened this issue on Aug 01, 2011 · 272 posts
Penguinisto posted Tue, 09 August 2011 at 3:08 PM
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Oh, please. Have you looked at how many people are selling things like poses, facial expressions, hand poses, and characters created purely through dialling existing morphs? People have been buying things which they could create on their own already. Genesis is not some magical thing which will stop that.
Stop it entirely? 'course not. Slow it down a lot? Quite likely.
The reason why is pretty simple... Sure, you can dial-up a body/facial shape all day long in the existing apps, but usually it requires a lot of tweaks, and demands that you often go back and forth a lot to hit a large number of individual dials to get what you want. Overall, doing it the old-fashioned way can take hours all by itself. Of all the things I've (so far) found frustrating about the whole DS4/Genesis thing, the one thing that impresses the hell out of me is the ease with which you can ring up something custom shapes/sizes/etc in very little time. No need to go hit individual body parts, tweak individual dials, etc. If this thing lives up to the hype, instead of taking hours to come up with something unique and useful, it can take just minutes (sans texture). I don't need to go nuts coming up with a figure that isn't Yet-Another-2-Meter-Tall-SuperModel.
Seriously... if you look through the store, I'm willing to wager that most of them are the same height, have roughly the same body shape (with minor breast varations), the same size head, etc. The ones that don't fit that mold are painstakingly built. OTOH, I can get a teenager, tall/skinny person, a hulking monster, etc - something that doesn't fit the typical mold for the mesh, and I can do it in literally seconds, without having to modify, then lock each Y-axis leg dial, each X-axis arm dial, etc. Oh, and the clothes will still fit no matter what I do to it, even if the cloth maker forgot to include the needed FBM/PBM dials. That last bit alone is worth the price of admission, IMHO.
Poses are the same way... if you know how. PowerPose was originally a radical idea, and has finally become something you can use without turning the CPU into butter while you're using it. Otherwise, you usually have to do it the old-fashioned way: visualize what you want the thing to be doing, then work outward from the hip to all extremities. A good pose that fits into the environment can easily eat 90 minutes or more of work just by itself if you're doing it competently... little wonder folks bought pre-canned poses and used one that was 'close enough', tweaking only to fit the scene. With the whole DS4 thing, that's no longer a need, and you can cut the time at least by half.
Put it this way: If I can get up a pose and/or character look in only 20% of the overall time it used to take for both steps, why would I bother buying poses or characters? Note that I only buy character sets nowadays for the textures anyway, but as time passes merchants can supply just those. Now consider - if Joe Ordinary can do pretty much the same things, then why would he/she bother buying the pre-canned bits?
Stuff like clothing, hair, props... anything that requires moving vertices? Those won't go out of style anytime soon. Morphing is still as much dark art as it is science for most folks. Textures? Likely won't be affected. OTOH, I believe that the dial-up characters and suchlike aren't as likely to sell as hot anymore, IMHO.