AmbientShade posted at 7:12AM Mon, 26 October 2015 - #4235298

Genesis 3 has facial rigging, V4 and Genesis 1 & 2 do not. And all the Genesis models have a fraction of the poly count that V4 has, with G3 being the lowest, in order to make it more compatible with game engines (even though it will most likely require a poly count reduction, as 17K is still considered extremely high for a nude game figure in most instances. If that's 17K with a full set of armor and weaponry, then you're probably ok).

The reduction in polygons and facial rigging is for compatibility with animation, not game engines, per the designer of genesis. This is another misconception that needs to be cleared up as it keeps being brought up. Would you need facial rigging for a game engine? (well you could for a cut scene, but that's not the purpose) Less polys are easier to weight map and pose than a heavier figure. The quad-only structure and change in polyflow is for the same purpose as well.

This is the text of the post describing the Genesis 3 changes:

A lot of the decisions I made with this mesh are about balancing and getting away from old ideas.

Anatomy being baked into the poly flow was good for when we had more limits. Moving forward, it was better to have a lower count, an even spread better for sculpting, and a flow more suited to animation. This also relates to why it cannot have backward compatible UVs. Those material borders date from V4, and I repeatedly kept them there despite the fact that they were often detrimental to the poly-flow. It was time to move on.

The move to this weight method was an easy choice. It would be very impractical to rig that many bones in the face with Triax, which has six or more weight-maps per bone. The memory use of such a thing would be ridiculous. Single-weight dual quaternion is also a very standard method of rigging you can find in most 3D packages.

Bear in mind that almost every expression you see, has been done using the facial rigging alone. People not liking expressions is something that has been floating around for a long time; people are very subjective about such things. Now, if you don't quite like an expression - you can simply tweak it however you want.

The rest of the skeleton choices were about filling in some of the remaining gaps for articulation, and a couple were to overcome a standard limitation this rigging style has with twisting motions.

She bends so well, because she has around 130 custom sculpted corrections shaping her. Somewhere along the line 'JCM' became a bad word. It's very common to use sculpted corrections in higher-end programs. When you bend an arm in a 3D program, using only weights, you are essentially folding it half. That's not how your arm works. Muscles shift, bones change alignment - ultimately the shape changes. You have to express that shape changing to get realism and accuracy, and the most control for doing so is sculpting.

Sorry, this was a bit long-winded.