I noticed with great interest that Daz is now offering morphs for Genesis to turn it into M4 and V4. My opinion is, this is their way of getting around the (extremely) luke-warm reception Genesis has found with 3rd party vendors.

As I understand it, one could buy these morphs, make the needed changes in Daz Studio 4 and export them for use in Poser. My assumption (which may be right or wrong) is that the advantage of these figures over the ones I have right now would be the addition of weight mapping.

Am I missing something?

I don't see any back peddling! What I see is DAZ expecting us to fork over more money to buy figures we already have just to use the new Genesis weight mapping. To me it's now a MAJOR FAIL because when Poser Pro 2012 comes out I can just weight map my current figures and ignore DS pretty much as often as I do now.

Steve...

I agree, and you mis-understood what I was saying. I believe that the offering of the M4/V4 morph set is an admission that Genesis was a bad idea from the get-go.

I share all of your opinions, 100%.

What gets my goat about these "morphs" like V4, M4, A4, S4 etc. is that they were all available for free  in the initial DS4 beta release.  Genesis was called Unimesh5 at that time, and although the morphs were hidden, they were still available.  In the Genesis figure the morphs are all present, but again hidden and also locked in the latest beta update.  Go figure

I didn't misunderstand at all. I just don't agree. DAZ has made no such admission and from all I've read over on their site, they still think Genesis is the wave of the future.

Gene has been out for a month or two and it's only got a few exclusive items.  Most people using gene have a ton of M4/V4 content that they'd feel shafted on if they can't get it to work on Gene (which is supposed to be the shape adapting figure).  Making V4/M4 morphs (no aiko 3 or aiko 4?) only makes sense.  I'd be surprised if M3/V3 morphs don't come out eventually.

Not everyone uses daz either and you have to look at it from a vendor's prospective.

Gene has an expensive auto convert tool that daz users can use to bring M4/V4 stuff over.  Poser doesn't have that.  So if you were a vender you have two options.  Make something only half the market can use at most (gene item) or make a poser item that both the poser people and the daz people can use (a V4/M4 item).  Both take the same amount of time to make, one will get double the sales or more.  Which makes more sense to invest your time in?

Gene in general isn't a bad idea (it is kinda cool from a technical perspective), it's just something that isn't going to work as well in this market.  Poser is one platform, daz is another.  Most things in the market work well in both platforms.  Now daz has come up with something that only works for its platform and there's nothing saying both DS4 and P9 will use the same weight mapping system.  So it's possible you'd have to re-map it after importing.

Quote - What gets my goat about these "morphs" like V4, M4, A4, S4 etc. is that they were all available for free  in the initial DS4 beta release.  Genesis was called Unimesh5 at that time, and although the morphs were hidden, they were still available.  In the Genesis figure the morphs are all present, but again hidden and also locked in the latest beta update.  Go figure

The hidden morphs are resources used by AutoFit, and as a result they aren't set up in a way that would be useful for shaping a working figure. They are still there, too.

Quote - I noticed with great interest that Daz is now offering morphs for Genesis to turn it into M4 and V4. My opinion is, this is their way of getting around the (extremely) luke-warm reception Genesis has found with 3rd party vendors.

As I understand it, one could buy these morphs, make the needed changes in Daz Studio 4 and export them for use in Poser. My assumption (which may be right or wrong) is that the advantage of these figures over the ones I have right now would be the addition of weight mapping.

Am I missing something?

That's about it. And if you get Poser Pro 2012 you can weightmap V4 and M4 yourself :P

Laurie

Half the problem as I see it with the poor initial reception of Genesis is the lack of content creation tools for Genesis.

Until Poser Pro 2012 or DS4Pro come out, making content for Genesis is not that feasible for the rest of us not blessed enough to have access to these tools in Beta. And that's a LOT of peeps out there. The BASE ability is there in modelling tools etc, but that's the relatively simple part of making content. Rigging, falloff zones, joint editing, JCM's etc are the more complex tasks.

Once the tools are there, will interest in Genesis pick up? I suspect so. It bends far better than V4/M4 do.

Even converting the existing falloff zones in PP2012 won't particularly improve the bending of the figure unless you significantly tweak that weight map, whereas Genesis is ALREADY tweaked.

And let's face it, most users want instant gratification and quick-to-use tools. They're not likely to go tweak their own V4.

That raises a pretty interesting possibility though.  What if a third party person DID do a weightmapped version and then distributed that, just the weighting work?  E.g. with RTEncoder.

Pjz99...

THAT is what I am suspecting will happen with fair quickness. At that point, my own belief is "game over."

Anyone considered we may all be suffering from content fatigue?

Every figure released by DAZ seems to correct some problems from the previous version but add in several new ones.  For example, I hoped V4 would be a major step up from V3.  It's a major step sideways, IMO.  I really don't like it at all.  My system (admittedly ancient) slows to a crawl with V4 in a scene.  I also don't like the basic shape of the model.  Even morphed, it still looks like V4.  One exception is BH's GND4 but I can't use that in every scene.  The damn shaders everyone seems duty bound to include hack me off, too.  Most of them are set up wrong and correcting them is a major pain in the arse.  Most times, all I want is a really simple skin setup or, if I want something clever, I'll use BB's.    I know the Unimesh concept isn't popular with some people, too.  I also wonder if folks don't like the idea of being tied in to D|S. 

So, perhaps people are skeptical of Genesis being the answer to everyone's prayers.  In any case, there are so many good, free figures around now.

As for me, I don't have the money so it's a non issue.   

I know i ain't shelling out for a figure that has little support and that the company now desparately releses morphs for to change back into the PREVIOUS set of figures, just so users can have clothing and stuff to use with the new one.

Not to mention the learning curve issues to learn two posing programs when I've still got a ton of things to learn about the one I CAN make work.

To me the morph packages are a blatant admission that Genesis might not have been the best idea the company ever had.

I don't actually have a problem with Genesis beyond the fact that it won't be fully compatible in Poser. I do think the weightmapping, now that I've seen what it can do is a good thing for Poser AND Daz. Where I get bent out of shape... aside from the non-stop DAZ hype about Genesis is that if you really think about it, there's little difference in Genesis with V5 and M5 than V4 and the V4 Male.

I love the idea of being able to take a lump of polygons and turn it into anything I like with dials.  Therefore, Genesis should be right up my ally.

The problem ends up being that with every new figure, DAZ seems to get further and further away from "Real" with their human shapes.  Morph something too much and you lose the rigging (I don't know if that applies to Weight mapping or not)

New blood is needed at DAZ for the ideal defualt shape decider.   Genesis is a failure IMO.

Poser default figures look like Aliens and are usually unfixable IMO.

I believe the world still awaits a viable, sustainable, professional 3rd-party figure

why RTEncoder.?  If a 3rd party makes a weight map for V4 , and Poser 9 allows that to be loaded and applied to V4 then you can just sell your map. You as a vendor dont care if the person has v4 or not, the weightmap is just an image file.

Before people start going whole hawg and spending a ton of money on Genesis, I really strongly advise you to wait a bit until some conforming content is available, assuming you care about putting clothes on your Poser people at all (I don't judge). 

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=168467

Is weight-mapping without soft-body dynamics kind of a waste of time?

Nothing looks realistic when muscles and flesh don't compress together properly, forming ripples and rolls...that sort of thing. 

Collision...when a knee hits a boob the boob should react and at once go up and conform around the knee.  For example. 

Can this be that difficult to do with all the computing power we have nowadays?

completely unrelated.

Quote - completely unrelated.

Totally, I get that, but is one fairly worthless without the other?

Quote - assuming you care about putting clothes on your Poser people at all (I don't judge).

Do cat ears count as clothing?

Quote - Totally, I get that, but is one fairly worthless without the other?

does the carrot have a buddha-nature?

No one may agree with me, but I've been wondering for some time if the Poser/Daz community was going to split. Looks like the answer is "yes". Although, to be honest, I thought the split would be caused by Studio trying to take over more market share, instead, it looks like Genesis may be the catalyst.

Well, to be fair, Daz actually anounced the release of V4/M4 for Genesis since the very begining, their idea is to have a "Gene Pool" of figures, old and new, and allow them to use the new rig, plus any new content, so you could, e.g, have a V3 shape on Genesis, and use any new Genesis clothing, plus get rid of a lot of bending problems.

Where they went wrong, I believe, was in releasing V4 shape before any other new shape, because for custormers it might feel like just paying for V4 all over again, which esencially is. They should have release a lot of new content first, V5 shape even, and THEN release legacy figures like V1/2/3/4 as a Genesis shape.

basicwiz wrote;

Quote - I noticed with great interest that Daz is now offering morphs for Genesis to turn it into M4 and V4. My opinion is, this is their way of getting around the (extremely) luke-warm reception Genesis has found with 3rd party vendors.

Since the M4/V4 shapes were created months before  Genesis was released that's not possible.

Quote - As I understand it, one could buy these morphs, make the needed changes in Daz Studio 4 and export them for use in Poser. My assumption (which may be right or wrong) is that the advantage of these figures over the ones I have right now would be the addition of weight mapping. Am I missing something?

Yes. The M4/V4 morphs are not for turning Genesis into M4/V4. They give Genesis the M4/V4 shapes to be used for mixing with other shapes and morphs. If you have any M4/V4 characters that you would like to recreate with Genesis it will be much easier to do.

William_the_Bloody wrote

Quote - I love the idea of being able to take a lump of polygons and turn it into anything I like with dials.  Therefore, Genesis should be right up my ally.

The problem ends up being that with every new figure, DAZ seems to get further and further away from "Real" with their human shapes.  Morph something too much and you lose the rigging (I don't know if that applies to Weight mapping or not)

The weight map rigging changes automatically in DAZ Studio. I don't know if that is the case in Poser Pro2012.

Coldrake

Quote - Before people start going whole hawg and spending a ton of money on Genesis, I really strongly advise you to wait a bit until some conforming content is available, assuming you care about putting clothes on your Poser people at all (I don't judge). 

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=168467

The silence in response to that post is deafening.... :blink:
 

Quote - The weight map rigging changes automatically in DAZ Studio. I don't know if that is the case in Poser Pro2012.

Since as I understand it, Genesis must be exported from Studio as a .cr2 to be used in Poser8, it probably isn't an issue. as the morphing and scaling would be handled within Studio...

Quote - The silence in response to that post is deafening.... :blink:

I don't really know what's up with that either.  The Autofit tool is not cheap even if you're a Platinum Club member, and it's the only option anybody has, at least until a) DAZ gets the content creation tools done and b) content creators get some content out there.  Price of the tools is going to be a show stopper for many of us, certainly for me.

DAZ Rand said the CCT were free in Studio 4 Pro.

Quote - DAZ Rand said the CCT were free in Studio 4 Pro.

yes, but DS4 Pro is $430, you are actually paying about $200 for CCT.

Quote - Is weight-mapping without soft-body dynamics kind of a waste of time?

Nothing looks realistic when muscles and flesh don't compress together properly, forming ripples and rolls...that sort of thing. 

Collision...when a knee hits a boob the boob should react and at once go up and conform around the knee.  For example. 

Can this be that difficult to do with all the computing power we have nowadays?

There have been a few attempts to deal with the lack of proper softbodies in other programs, but the closest poser got was the jelly magnets or morphs that no longer work.  Carrara also lacks this feature but has Sparrowhawke's jiggles plug in to at least allow body masses to be affected by gravity/momentum.  IClone has a spring solver which while not exactly realistic at least keeps the affected parts from seeming unnaturally stiff.  I hope someone out there is thinking about a solution to this.

3anson wrote;

Quote - yes, but DS4 Pro is $430, you are actually paying about $200 for CCT.

Not really, you're also getting GoZ Bridge (Bridge to ZBrush), Photoshop 3D Bridge, Texture Atlas (Automated Texture size reduction) and the FBX Exporter.

Coldrake

Quote - There have been a few attempts to deal with the lack of proper softbodies in other programs, but the closest poser got was the jelly magnets or morphs that no longer work.  Carrara also lacks this feature but has Sparrowhawke's jiggles plug in to at least allow body masses to be affected by gravity/momentum.  IClone has a spring solver which while not exactly realistic at least keeps the affected parts from seeming unnaturally stiff.  I hope someone out there is thinking about a solution to this.

Extending the concept of Body Handles to weight-mapping might open up some options.  This would allow more precise deformations of soft body areas by the control bones than is available via the current sphere zones.  Ockham's Jiggles script can work with Body Handles and might prove useful in this area. 

But that doesn't address the issue of an object deforming a soft body area.  Cloth collisions could be tried for this, but cloth dynamics aren't really well-suited for the idea and will tend to cause the soft area to collapse upon itself.  Python could be used to generate vertex deformations but the current tools offered for this sort of thing by Poser Python can be quite slow.  The idea would basically require that someone script a new dynamics engine using Python.  A popular idea in gaming is to build a spring system between the vertices of the soft object, which is the same basic idea applied by Poser's cloth engine.  I've programmed a very simple implementation of this idea for chain and rope dynamics, but the process is slow and the simplifications I've applied for speed gains wouldn't transfer well to soft bodies.  :sad:

The basic idea could be useful, though.  The project would require someone with a better knowledge of physics than I have and might work best as a compiled, external program which can somehow generate the deformations and save a data file (like a cloth .dyn) for application in Poser.  :unsure: