And at least in fairly neutral poses-like this one- the shoulders, arms, pecs, etc look much more natural than V4's. Also the face is hi-poly (great for morphing). So besides the Daz marketing- why did we (I) abandon her for V4?

What am I missing?

clothes

V4 was designed to be a neutral base to allowing morphing to happen since so many people complained that V3 always looked like V3. I prefer V3 but bends were sometimes an issue, even more so than V4.

I have about three times more clothing for V3 and Aiko 3 than I've ever bought for V4. Just never liked 4 all that much...lol.

Maybe the appeal with 4 is that she looks a lot younger. V3 looks more like a mature woman and V4 looks like a 12 year old with boobs ;). Youth rules.

Laurie

Quote - I have about three times more clothing for V3 and Aiko 3 than I've ever bought for V4. Just never liked 4 all that much...lol.

Laurie

New clothing for V3 stopped coming. I used V3 until about a year after the release of V4. At that time the wardrobe I had for V4 was about the size of my wardrobe for V3. Now it is a lot, lot more. I occasionally still use V3, but not as a main figure

Was V3 better? In some ways, yes. In other ways definitely not (bending, morphability)

 Thanks Wimvdb and GhostofMacBeth

I'd forgotten those things. Are clothes harder to make for V3?

Re: looking like V3- I've heard that said for V4. I'll have to see if I can make some morphs to change that. :-) There are a LOT of polys to move around.

LaurieA-  must like the mature woman look-she seems sexier to me than most of the V4 characters. I guess she can be V4's 30-35 year old sister. :-)

I don't think making clothing for V3 is more difficult as for V3. It is just that people started buying for V4 instead of V3 (next new thing) that killed off that market. Having the remainder get into clearance or vault did not help.

You still can use dynamic clothing on V3. It is often just a matter of "growing the cloth" into the V3 shape. The convsersion tools from V4 to V3 work reasonably well except for fine detailed clothing which take a lot of work to convert

V3 did have crappy bends. But I think a little weight mapping would clear that RIGHT up LOL

I would just LOVE to see the original Miki (better expressions), Angela, V3, Steph 3, Aiko 3, David 3 and Hiro 3 all get the weight mapping treatment :D. As well as the Gen 3 kids and Luke and Laura.

Laurie

I much prefer V3 for the looks, ease of use and IMO better mapping but yes, the bends are horrible.  Arms that bend like drinking straws, weird linebacker shoulders and the strangest butt shapes ever really don't help.

If someone was to do a decent job of weight mapping the figure, it'd be a fantastic model. 

Quote - V3 did have crappy bends. But I think a little weight mapping would clear that RIGHT up LOL

I would just LOVE to see the original Miki (better expressions), Angela, V3, Steph 3, Aiko 3, David 3 and Hiro 3 all get the weight mapping treatment :D. As well as the Gen 3 kids and Luke and Laura.

Laurie

Well, re-rigging, then weight-mapping. Apparently, the original riggers of V3 and V4 didn't understand the human body real well, hence the poor bending. S'okay - I love a challenge! Learning how to rig... she'd be fun to work with, I reckon! :biggrin:

the market for v3 clothes fell off , when stores wouldn't except new items from vendors for her after v4 came out....even if people were still willing to buy it

Poserworld has a lot of outfits for V3 and M3, plus a number for the others. Even a couple of V3 outfits made this year.

In fact, I needed a nurse outfit for Aiko 3. Had a fetishy looking one on my wish list at Daz. Instead, I took a Poserworld 60's dress, stripped the color in the material room, borrowed a nurse cap from V4's 50's nurse outfit, and stethescope and ID badge from a V3 scrubs outfit. Put on headcase's sensible shoes, and she's ready to do a double. Lots of textures in the freebies section here and at CG share.

Maybe we'll see a new birth of old now...lol. Not necessarily a bad thing ;). I'd still much rather work with the version 3's than 4's anyway. And if they're weight mapped, more's the better ;).

Laurie

V3 has quite a deep thorax that always makes her look in her 30s more than younger.  Her face is really good though although smiles are problematic at times.

Love esther

Illusions Designs also still sell really Nice V3 characters, really cheap. You can buy them in bundles, then the price comes to about $2 per character. I think they managed to morph her really well. If we can get her weight-mapped....

I would really like a weightmapped V3

Love esther

Compared to V4, V3 has more detail, and not just aspects that make her look older. for instance, her knees, elbows, and back are just more defined.  She also has a defined shape to her orbital I've been completely unable to achieve with V4, nor seen anyone else achieve, despite it being a very common shape I can find in reference photos of people of various races.  V4 is undefined and smooth in a way that it's hard to get V3 to be, but it seems as hard for anyone to give V4 definition as it was to get rid of V3's.  To me, V4 is a lot like A3 with her realistic morph turned on, even in proportions.  Since A3 was wildly popular and more advanced due to the refinements made to each successive Unimesh figure, I can imagine DAZ using her as the template for the new generation rather than V3. 

In V3's time, more petitely proportioned figures were rare.  Now we don't have as many defined or broad-shouldered characters.  It would be great to see more variety instead of any one type of character.  I have way more V3 characters than V4 ones.  Probably because I was such a freebie hunter back then.  I'm betting you can still find some good V3 stuff in various places.  Certainly, she still has a pretty significant section in freestuff here.  And I notice Blackhearted's GND 2 is still being sold.  I could never get the morph to look as normal as the promos did (somehow I always managed to make it look way creepy thin instead of fit), but I personally found the texture to be very realistic.  Between that texture, the Irina 2.0 texture, and DAZ's International, I could do just about anything with V3 that V3 could do. 

A weight mapped V3 would be absolutely wonderful.  That said, I'm ecstatic to have Antonia WM and I'm really looking forward to V4 WM.  I am so much more than content; I'm almost overwhelmed with gratitude.  If Antonia is a gourmet meal, then revitalizing older figures with new rigging is a luscious dessert.

A big problem with V3 is that whilst the figure is still available over at Download.com, DAZ stopped selling the morphs...

V3 has some shortcomings, like the unorganised morphs, the !!!weird directory structure in the Poses folder, and a lot of free as well as commercial stuff contains bad pathnames to textures which need to be fixed.

On the plus side, there are not these tons of magnets. With Snarlygribbly's EZSkin, a lot of the textures come back to new life, here's Nereida from the Rendo freestuff.

It's fun to play with the older characters again.

Best regards,

   Michael

yup, sure is. playing with A3 and Snarly's script atmo

I will always like the Gen 3s better than the 4s ;). Maybe I'm just stuck in the past. Maybe I'm yearning for better days.....

Maybe I need another cookie....

Laurie

Gosh, those renders of V3 make me wish I could afford the new Poser! I always did like her face the best of all the figures. It was a blank slate.

Quote - Hello,

V3 has some shortcomings, like the unorganised morphs, the !!!weird directory structure in the Poses folder, and a lot of free as well as commercial stuff contains bad pathnames to textures which need to be fixed.

On the plus side, there are not these tons of magnets. With Snarlygribbly's EZSkin, a lot of the textures come back to new life, here's Nereida from the Rendo freestuff.

It's fun to play with the older characters again.

Best regards,

   Michael

 

Thank you!!! I think I've now got a complete collection of all the 3d generation Daz characters. I was wondering how the new shaders would look. Still lots of cheap and free stuff out there. Those on a tight budget take note.

Has anyone tried to add weight mapping to V3 in general without rerigging the original.  Wouldn't modifying the joint origin points in Poser fix some of the bending problems?

Thought I'd ask.

If the OP can tell, how was that image rendered?  That doesn't look like a Poser render.

Quote - If the OP can tell, how was that image rendered?  That doesn't look like a Poser render.

I've gotten just that look in Poser before ;).

Laurie

 Wow! I'm glad I'm not the only one interested in V3! Thanks for all the replies. It figures that Daz won't sell the old morphs. A dumb choice from my perspective. Yes-she needs some re-rigging. But in fairly neutral pose she looks more natural- to my eyes. 

Michael1234

I still have not tried the EZ script- I just applied various earlier mat collections I'd worked out for V4- and switched the texture maps. T

Flibbits- as Laurie said- she's gotten that look in Poser before- as did I with the render.

It is BB's enviro sphere with an HDR image applied. Also one Key light (Point) from Blackhearted's Anastasia character-that'd I just been rendering. I used IDL. The skin is a variation of BB's SSS+ Blinn. I've found I can get some subtle differences if I mess around with the math functions.

Quote - A big problem with V3 is that whilst the figure is still available over at Download.com, DAZ stopped selling the morphs...

they are still in the store but you need to search them :
navigate to the all products and promotion page
filter DAZ originals and Victoria 3
with 60 items / page and sorted by the newest they are in the middle of the page 5

simplier method :
log in
click on any product
on the address bar replace item=xxxx by item=3008 , refresh and you are done

Quote - V4 was designed to be a neutral base to allowing morphing to happen since so many people complained that V3 always looked like V3. I prefer V3 but bends were sometimes an issue, even more so than V4.

My vote goes here as well.  V3's bend's got atrocious at times, enough to make me transfer all the V3 morphs to Laura's frame and use that instead (I prefer petite female frames anyway). The Aiko 3 variant was even worse bends-wise though, with the front of each thigh denting in horribly if the legs bent more than just a little.

V4 can be made to look more "human", but you have to do more than just load some pre-made character to do it. I've found that enlarging the head a touch, and adding some 'meat on the bones' (esp. the arms and legs) tends to help things out a lot. 

Corvas made arm fixes for V3.  those arm fixes

Personally, i never liked V3's big cheek bones.  At the time, I couldn't get her morph injections to work, either.  That left me with Posette and P6 Jessica until V4 came out.  I don't understand why do so many people complain about V4.  She's versatile, she's got a TON of morphs, and while she suffers from the "perfect 20-something" look, so do most of the other figures we use.

I've been fooling around with Nerd3D's weight-mapped injection for V4 and I have to say that I really like what I've seen thus far.

Quote - > Quote - A big problem with V3 is that whilst the figure is still available over at Download.com, DAZ stopped selling the morphs...

they are still in the store but you need to search them :
navigate to the all products and promotion page
filter DAZ originals and Victoria 3
with 60 items / page and sorted by the newest they are in the middle of the page 5

simplier method :
log in
click on any product
on the address bar replace item=xxxx by item=3008 , refresh and you are done

That's good news-I couldn't find them after DAZ put the last batch of stuff in The Vault.

Just to clarify, when I mentioned not being able to achieve some very common structure  and detail to V4, I wasn't talking about with dialed morphs, despite owning quite a lot of morph sets, both DAZ and 3rd party.  I was talking about sculpting custom morphs, and looking at other people's custom morphs.  I almost never "just load some pre-made character," because I'm too specific in terms of what I want to make.  I don't think it's better or worse to do, I just personally don't do that.  I probably waste a lot of time twiddling with dials for effects no one notices, to be honest.

Also to clarify, my experiences with V4 involved attempting to match reference photos of ordinary people from various places around the world.   For full disclosure, I had problems sculpting V3, too, but in a totally different fashion.  I just couldn't make certain things happen with V4's mesh due to low resolution and loop placement in certain key areas (moving edge loops to an appropriate position would cause an incredible amount of texture stretching), but I just couldn't do certain things with V3 because the poles in her mesh for detail gave me problems.

Unfortunately, enlarging her head and making her more puffy won't help realism unless you don't mind decreasing the amount of detail rather than increasing it.   If you're trying to add detail, well, there's stuff I've done and stuff I've seen others do, but certain basic limitations seem to have persisted.  Limitations that V3 simply doesn't have.  Which isn't to say it doesn't cut the other way.  V3 has limitations V4 doesn't, too.  Figures all have limitations, and you have to choose the ones that not only suit you, but suit what you're doing at the time.

Given JoePublic's results and my own experience with the morph tool, I'd say it's just as valid to say say you should spend a little time with the morph tool on V3 as it is to say you can't use any of the hundreds of dialed and custom morphs available for V4 without having to adjust them to make a realistic character.  It's not that hard to smooth stuff like that out or generally fix bends.  I know because I have to do it all the time with V4.  I have consistent problems with her shoulders (even after corvas' fix- these aren't due to the high cut), her hips, her knees, her elbows, and her butt.  Her ankles are just a nightmare for me.   I'm guessing I'm not the only one having these problems to judge by the popularity of the recent fixes to her arms, legs, and butt, and previous fixes to her shoulders and feet. 

It all depends on what you're comfortable doing, and what your goals are.  Personally, I often work from poses in photos, and the only figure that hasn't given me a problem with bending is Antonia.  And of course, if someone weight maps V3, that should take care of her bending issues.

Pre-made characters are just someone's else's custom dial spins.  En masse, they actually give you a very clear usability test. If most content creators, who are generally the ones in the community with the most experience in skill in creating characters,  have so much of a problem making realistic characters with V4, and pretty much all the characters for V4 are stylized, then the issue isn't the content creators.  Which isn't to say that realistic characters are any better or worse than stylized ones.  But it's nice to have choice. 

 I think Daz marketing was the real reason many (including me!) dropped V3.There are aspects of V4 I prefer to V3- and vice versa. I agree that there is no "one" figure!

I'm not suggesting anyone should drop V4 for V3- just that she is worth revisiting-particularly with the new weight mapping. I use V4, AntoniaWM, and now Anastasia(WM).

I also use V4 "Stephanie 4". A very nice petite V4 from Daz.

Also since V3 was a much earlier figure-most of the texture maps are lower resolution to work better with the slower computers of her time.

Older, lower resolution figures are good for populating a scene such as a party, street scene, etc., where you need a number of figures, but details aren't that important. The Poser 4 figures are also useful.

Personally, I'd love to get a modified A3 body with a V3 head, and I'd be fairly set.

Quote - Personally, I'd love to get a modified A3 body with a V3 head, and I'd be fairly set.

Ohhhhhh yessssss :) I really must learn how to slice and dice...lol.

Laurie

V3 is still my girl; I still use her almost exclusively for my female figures, and with updated "fixes", custom morphs & shaders, I think the results I get from her are still far better than V4 (I never could get over V4's "plastic" looking face and body, not to mention memory hogging mags and morphs). I would love to see a weight mapped version of V3; heck, I still buy content for V3 if I can find any.

V3 forever.

Peng's idea is a good one. I like that. In fact, a version of A3 with all of V3's morphs incorporated would probably be a good place to start.

I really liked V3... still have a lot of things that sold pretty well even I was in a smaller market then... would love to release them again :)

You know, the Millennium Horse is more human looking than V4. IMO, of course. :)

Quote - I really liked V3... still have a lot of things that sold pretty well even I was in a smaller market then... would love to release them again :)

what a great idea.

i would love to find V3 skin render ready for the new SSS. 

and it's fantastic V3 skin also works for M3, etc.

Quote - You know, the Millennium Horse is more human looking than V4. IMO, of course. :)

Laurie

Har Har!

Quote - You know, the Millennium Horse is more human looking than V4. IMO, of course. :)

 Laurie

For the last several days your icon has been replaced with text saying that the Icon is regenerating- how is that coming along? :-)

Quote - > Quote - You know, the Millennium Horse is more human looking than V4. IMO, of course. :)

Laurie

No idea how it's coming along....it's still regenerating

Until I get bored, that is LOL

Laurie

This was 20 minutes in Poser:

15 minutes for re-rigging V3's shoulders using weightmaps.

3 minutes for setting up the SSS using SnarlyGribbly's EZSkin.

And 2 for rendering. :-)

I like the result, but I still would want a fully working GENESIS in Poser.

Because what sets GENESIS really apart from other figures is its scaleability that allows it to go from adult to child and male to female and everything in between with a single dialspin.

Of course V3 could be modified in a similar manner, as Poser supports animateable joint centers and all the 3rd Generation figures are the exact same mesh anyway. So you could switch between V3 and M3, David and SP3, Aiko, Hero, Freak, Luke, Laura, Maddie and Matt just as easily as you switch between GENESIS morphs.

I'd really like to have such a V3 based GENESIS for Poser because of V3's higher resolution mesh, but unless some of the Python wizzards come out with an automated solution, adding all those various rigs to V3 manually and making them animateable seems to be quite a lot of work.

But just "fixing up" the older meshes a bit using modern tech is really no big problem.

She looks good with the SSS :). I always thought she was such a nice figure.

Laurie

Hi Princess MistyLara,

You already can! It works on any figure. I just take any of the BB or my modified SSS setups and swap out V4 textures with V3. Works just fine.

I HAD forgotten that V3 and M3 textures were compatible.

what a great idea.

i would love to find V3 skin render ready for the new SSS. 

and it's fantastic V3 skin also works for M3, etc.