markht posted at 5:54AM Fri, 02 October 2015 - #4231871

Writers_Block posted at 10:14AM Thu, 01 October 2015 - #4231673

"So why on earth screw with the UVs???"

I've asked a time or two, and made comments about the multiple UV types; they seem to be to make money, and serve no other useful function.

Often, a character based off of a particular UV set works fine without; this means if you don't want to buy the new character (eg: Eva 7, Josie 7), but did want to buy one of the character's based on those, it would work; Daz offers refunds so if it didn't work you could return it. I've bought characters based on a particular one, but it shows as being Base Female; one such example is Camile HD for Bethany 7; states she requires Bethany 7, yet uses Base Female UVs not Bethany 7, although she uses some of the morphs, these could be manually dialled in, to approximate if Bethany wasn't owned. So it is misleading imo. So it uses the character morphs, not always the UVs.

In principal the different UVs are suppose to allow skins to fit the body shape of each character better without stretch marks on the skin. You can really see stretch marks when you use a skin with lots of freckles, but none of the DAZ characters have a skin with freckles or other features on the skin that make is easy to see stretching. I have some skin textures with lots of freckles, mostly V4 skins, but one is a V5 texture that uses V5 UVs. You can see some stretching with those skins on extreme body shapes, but with most skins, people don't notice the stretching.

In generation 7 it seems most PAs that create characters are using the Base Female UVs for all characters, even the characters that come in the bundles. So the only character that uses V7 UVs is V7 herself. Likewise for Eva, Bethany and Karen. I don't know about the younger characters, Josie, ect. Different UVs make more sense for child characters or the highly stylized characters.

In generations 5 & 6 there were characters created by PA that used the V5 or V6 UVs, but I have not seen any using V7 UVs. That could change, but I think the PAs have gotten the message that people prefer characters on the base UVs and don't mind a little stretching of the skin, since it is difficult to see anyway.

Actually I don't think that's the message. If you're referring to those vendors that quickly put out characters, they're using the base UV not because they hear the customer, but they aren't creating that resource from scratch. Thus you're probably paying for the same resource over and over.

If someone is targeting the UV a character then they are creating the texture from scratch to match that character and most likely getting a higher quality and unique texture; but it's a crapshoot depending on how popular that characters is. Except for V7, what you would think is popular in the forums wasn't in sales especially any ethnic characters. Personally I would target V7 as the UV as the body shapes vary much more between the base and V7 than V7 and the other characters based from G3F, except for Bethany and Josie (done by PAs), as one modeler does the architecture of the generation and the other does the characters based on it.