I have been using DS3A for a very long time, I do not have, nor do I expect to have in the next few years, the money to invest in Genesis, it's morphs or anything else for it. Is it worth it to switch over to DS4 if all I use is the same things I did in DS3A? And do I have to rebuy my plugins? Specifically the Dynamic clothing Control. 

I have both, but I find DS3A my most "go to" of the 2.  I don't choose DS3 because of cost, but because of my workflow. So that should tell you something, at least as far as I am concerned.  I also don't render a lot of genesis type characters, so I don't require it much.

If you need the capabilities of DS4, then get it when you can, otherwise, stick with DS3.

-AniMajik

Thanks :)

DS4 can be used without Genesis or Genesis 2. There are several advantages in using it with Gen4 or even Gen3 figures. Plugins need to be updated but the dynamic cloth one is included and so are others that were add-ons with DS3.

All in all I strongly advice to make the transition.

Cheers.

One thing I do not like abut Daz4 is the search engine...Sometimes you manually have to look

something up ..Very rarely use it.

The only thing I read about is some changes in the animation tools that was a deal breaker for some users. I can't remember the specifics since I don't do animation.

You can always carry on using V4 in DS4 but Genesis itself doesn't need as much 'investment' as previous new figures. Out of the box, V4 textures work, V4 wardrobe works, that's a huge saving immediately.

If you've got a specific V4 character that you want to carry on using, you may need to buy the convertor to get V4 Characters to transfer to Genesis. The various convertors allow you to keep using all your existing runtime but with Genesis' capabilities. ( I think the only exception is V3 textures because of the complexity of combining the seperate head and body texture maps.)

Even without Genesis I think the improvements to DS4 make it worth the pain of transition. ;-}

Studio 4 has many new tools to work the triax figures; genesis, G2F/M, and even dawn. So you can transfer a lot of content to the triax figures with just s few simple steps. What that means is pretty much most anything for the mil4 figures can be transfer to Genesis. More over it is then an easy step to transfer it to G2F/M.

Now DAZ was done with genesis the day it was released. Genesis has never been updated to fix the issues it was released with, but ingenious users have found some nice workarounds for the issues. G2F/M is a jump up in functionality over Genesis. So if you were to invest in a figure{s} I'd recommend investing in G2F/M.

None the less I know what it is like to try to work with limited funds, your best investment will be morphs and the mil4 clones for autofit; so you can use mil4 clothes directly on G2F/M rather then autofiting them to genesis then to G2; converting a conversion can cause issues.

As much as I am down on DAZ for various reasons, the functionality of Genesis and G2F/M are worth stepping up and learning the new tools. I use genesis and G2F/M almost exclusivly now, and have had since Studio 4 came out; I was using genesis to begin with because of beta testing carrara 8.5, which was being built to be genesis, DUF compatible; wish they had actually followed through with that. 

Now I will refrain from expounding on DAZ's inept handling of genesis and autofit for genesis and just thank got they left the second generation triax figure up to PAs.

Genesis had bug-fixes, I'm not sure which issues you mean. No figure is going to be perfect, and not everything that can be seen as perhaps being better done a different way can be changed on an existing figure.

It's not so much genesis as the way autofit works with genesis{shoes}, it works much better with G2F/M. That's one of the reason's G2F/M are better investments.

Genesis was, after all, the first run with the new tech.

Well, that's an example of something that couldn't be changed within Genesis - the problem (a problem) with shoes is that the zero positions of the fourth and fifth (Genesis) feet are very different, so some degree of distortion is inevitable - that's why third generation content, where the figures had the same zero position as Genesis, auto-fits much better than fourth generation.

I never used DS3. I actually started with DS4.5, but in my experience there has been a significant reduction in render time in DS between DS4.5 and the latest release of DS4.6. I think most of this improvement has come from newer versions of 3Delight that are packaged with the latest releases of DS.  The bulk of this improvement was maybe a year ago or so. I remember re-rendering some big scenes and noting a significant reduction.

The AoA Advanced Ambient light can also provide environment lighting with occlusion and shorter render times than than the UberEnv lights. The AoA advanced spot and distant lights can speed up renders and give you more control over how surfaces are lighted.  The AoA lights are not part of DS. They are separate products that you have to buy, but I believe they are only available for DS4.6+. The AoA lights have a bit of learning curve. They are more complicated to use (well, maybe not more complicated than UberEnv2).

Even if you are not using any Genesis or Genesis 2 figures, you can take advantage of these improvements.

I just upgraded from DS 2.3 on OSX to DS 4.6 on windows 7!!

I only use it for the nonlinear motion system of aniMate 2

and the poser format exporter to get to motions out as PZ2s

I will never render anything final in DS as I use Maxon Cinema4D

with the interposer import plugin for render my poser content

but I like the MDD out option to send my Genesis figuresfrom DS4 to C4D and apply animation to them via the MDD importer in C4D

but yes DS4 has a place in my pipeline which now includes Iclone pro with 3D exchange.. big fun ahead for me!!!

I'd like to say something about using C4D as a render engine for Studio, but thanks to DAZ borking Carrara 8.5 so badly, I'm doing about the same thing with carrara now. I stage my figures in Studio to send to carrara to finish staging and render the scene. I bought animate 2 so I could work out animations in Studio to run/render in carrara.

I may run down DAZ but I think Studio is a pretty nice app especially now that it has tools. Even if DAZ hadn't borked C8.5 I'd still be using Studio for animating and for optitex clothes. Not saying carrara doesn't do great animation, but carrara doesn't have aniblocks.