I've been doing this Poser stuff for a few years now. I probably have mode than 1000 character sets in my runtimes. I still shop for characters, for all figures that work with Poser. I am frustrated now. Are the vendors getting lazy, I wonder? I keep seeing the same face, or almost the same face, with perhaps a tweak to the eyebrows. I see this for various figures. Is there some new ideal of feminine beauty that I was unaware of? Big eyes, heart shaped face, small nose, tiny mouth? I already have some of those. I even get the feeling that some vendors are recycling the same base skin into different products, adding a mole, a bit more blush, whatever. Even when they are not using merchant resources. Please. I am keen to buy your work, but I don't want to buy the same thing over and over. Offer some women with character, and I am interested. Right now, I look at the stores (and not only Renderosity), and I think:..."Oh, not another one of those. please".

This is what I say for "years", all the same "sweet" chars. When there is a char like Odelle or Lola, just 2 examples, I'm willing to open my purse.

Yes, I love both Odelle and Lola. They are both older. I'll still buy a young character, but these days I look for something distinctive. And I feel that even vendors who used to offer that, don't anymore. The recycling is too obvious.

Additionally, it would be great if there would be characters with well made maps, something like an usable bump map , a diffuse map without burned-in speculars and shadows and a specular map which makes sense. In nearly all products, the diffuse map is much to uniform to resemble skin, the bump map is some kind of desaturated diffuse.

Are there characters with working maps out there?

Maybe there isn't a market for any other type of characters. I agree that the characters being released for purchase are less than inspiring, but I don't mean to cause offense to any vendors.

Infinity10 you may be right - it could be economic forces at work. Vendors have to pay bills, and re-using your own work in different products makes economic sense. Perhaps I have just become jaded. But I keep looking. Nobody is forcing me to buy characters I don't want.

To be fair, I can understand them using the same image maps. They either cost good money or they take quite a bit of time to make. But it would be nice if they would put s little effort into making them look like different people. And I'm not sure how having 80 characters with the same map and shaped face would bring in more revenue than 80 figures that look different but are still attractive. Surely after the first 50 most people start saying I have 1 or 2 of those. I don't really need more.

As the guy who just released Odelle recently, i can tell you that there IS a market for it. The feedback i've gotten so far is simply overwhelming. People messaged me to thank me personally, that i have made something different. Seems like people are really craving for it.

To what RedPhantom said. Yes, It takes time to make good maps. But i see it differently. That's our Job. It's our Job to make the best characters possible, with the best maps possible. That's how every company works. Everybody is trying to make the best products they can and i'm a firm believer that this attitude towards quality will be rewarded with sales but also with the recognition of the community.

To show bantha and RedPhantom the maps of the character i'm currently working on....

Now that looks interesting Fredel!

@ Fredel, that is very- very good.

@ Nanette whenever you see Morphs++ required, you can expect "more on the same".

I dont understand how people became so dependent on premade "character " sets in the first place.

I just buy every morph pack available and dial in. Your own.

Why depend on vendors to create the exact looks you have in your head??

@Fredel very very nice work indeed , and a great example of what promo images should look like . I'am hoping that as more users become proficient with p11's cycles renderer .. it will begin to shine a giant spot light on some of the lazy ass rubbish characters floating around in the marketplace , forcing vendors to step it up .just as daz vendors have had to do when iray was introduced .

wolf359 posted at 5:56PM Mon, 21 December 2015 - #4245156

I dont understand how people became so dependent on premade "character " sets in the first place.

I just buy every morph pack available and dial in. Your own.

Why depend on vendors to create the exact looks you have in your head??

Because this would entail users to perform work beyond slapping some content in the scene, applying pose/material/lighting presets, clicking the render button and then calling themselves "artists"? The concept that elbow grease is the first plugin you need for your graphic application is not very popular in this community.

I think most everyone can turn a dial. But really good textures is a different matter. I think most people buy characters for the skins.

I buy characters mostly for the skins, occasionally for a custom face morph that really appeals. I don't mind if the body is dialled in. I can make my own face morphs and often do.

@Fredl: Much, much better than almost everything that I have on disk. But, if I may nitpick, you still have a black shadow near the nose and at the mouth on the diffuse map. The skin isn't black there, the darkness should come from the shader and the light, not from the texture. Pretty please get rid of that black shadows from the map. Skin isn't white and it isn't black, so the diffuse channel should not have any white or black spots. Bump and Normal map look great from here, though.

Count me in as a customer for this set, and I will have a look at Odette too. But please fix the diffuse before publishing.

Well - don't mean to offend, as this is a great improvement. But the wrinkles in the color map display burned in specular from a light source beneath the eye level, This highlight reappears in the "lazy" bump map which is the diffuse map converted to gray scale. The resulting bump causes a protrusion on the upper part of a wrinkle, which is subtle but clearly why those eye wrinkles are not quite believable. The real wrinkle is entirely an indentation and should be hand drawn to correct it.

This is exactly why I don't limit myself to 1 base mesh for figures.

Different figures have completely different morphs & they have different vendors.

Viva Diversity.

Years ago, I started to try to put together some "believable mid-life" characters. I came up with something for my own use, but pretty much concluded that I don't have the time to learn texture creation well enough to manufacture distributable maps, even assuming use of merchant resources.

I do disagree with Vilters though regarding dial spinning. I think that excellent morph packs make believable, distinct-looking characters entirely possible. But most character creators simply don't dial those in. It's not that much effort; they apparently just are not interested.

I used to get blasted for what I called Cookie-Cutter Barbies. Now folks are figuring it out? LOL I would be willing to bet ready cash that if you stripped the names off these "characters", the overwhelming majority of users wouldnt be able to tell one from another.

And no, I dont really see it as laziness on the part of the vendors. It's just how society is these days. Cars all use the same basic parts. Pop tarts — or, as they're otherwise known, female singers — all have the same tone and approach. The plots of comic book movies are utterly interchangeable. We're in a period where such mind-numbing sameness is almost comforting.

When I started I did purchase a lot of the characters available but came quickly bored with so many that looked almost identical. Over time I began to do some dial spinning and then moved on to playing with the textures. In a sense I was forced to go that way as I wanted a slightly older character, at least older than the twenty somethings that appears to be the norm.

Earlier on this year I started using Dawn SE and I did not even look at the characters available. I purchased a few morph packs and some textures and created my characters from there. As others have said, I think the only thing that would tempt me to buy characters now would be a good set of textures.

If you stop and think about it. it's beyond imagination that we have millions of different faces and we can recognize the millions of different faces.

99%of Venders females are hot ,sexy ,perfect ratio in there early twenty females. there only some much you can do with that.

2015 texturing software is killer .you could probably make 5 to 10 textures a day with Allegorithmic

RorrKonn posted at 11:38AM Sun, 27 December 2015 - #4245803

99%of Venders females are hot ,sexy ,perfect ratio in there early twenty females. there only some much you can do with that.

And anglosaxon. Mediterranean characters (as causian as Rangarr Lothbrok, dear nazi/asatru fanboys/girls) are already cartoonish. When you go further away (e.g. to indian characters) you get into not the uncanny but in the ridiculus zone.

"I only eat cereal, why does everything taste like cereal?"

chaecuna posted at 3:44PM Sun, 27 December 2015 - #4245806

RorrKonn posted at 11:38AM Sun, 27 December 2015 - #4245803

And anglosaxon. Mediterranean characters (as causian as Rangarr Lothbrok, dear nazi/asatru fanboys/girls) are already cartoonish. When you go further away (e.g. to indian characters) you get into not the uncanny but in the ridiculus zone.

True. More real diversity, and characters which are not plastic dolls would be great. Although characters with usable bumps and without burned-in speculars would be great..

Any opinions on what is the best photobased texture set for Daz's V4 figure (the topic) out there? I like the hand painted feel ones but I mean in terms of photorealism.

What makes me mad is that the difference to create non-barbie dolls vs. barbie dolls is just firing up google image search and start checking your target. It is not advanced ethnography, it is just ELBOW GREASE (google it if you don't know what it is). And while you are using google, check for "average faces" so that you can sculpt vaguely realistic morphs.

EldritchCellar posted at 5:13PM Mon, 28 December 2015 - #4245914

Any opinions on what is the best photobased texture set for Daz's V4 figure (the topic) out there? I like the hand painted feel ones but I mean in terms of photorealism.

IMO, Danae is, by far, one of the best producers of lifelike human textures for V4 - https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?uid=5262

Also, the DAZ "Elite" textures are pretty good.

I prefer Danae's, overall, to any figure artist's textures I've tried. I buy whatever Danae sells for V4 with no worries about quality or realism involved. I only buy characters for the textures, unless there's a very interesting custom body morph. I have purchased characters from many praised character artists out there and, time and time again, I compare them to Danae's work and find them lacking. That's not an insult, though, because Danae's work is just that good, IMO.

PS - I do find myself often modifying certain textures, a bit, though. But, that goes for every character texture set I've ever purchased, that I can recall. Luckily, most vendors have removed lighting shadows and AO effects from their texture sets... Well, I hope they have. :) PPS- IIRC, V4 "Elite" texture sets have some shadowing in the lower regions, but nothing too obtrusive.

Personally I am not really aiming for Photo realism and I am not skilled enough to know how good textures are technically, but I do tend to use a lot of different textures and modify them to my liking.

My favorites are 3DA Agatha by 3-DArena when using V4 and Master Skin Resource 7 by 3Dream when using Dawn as they help me create figures a little nearer middle age (in my view at least) than the teen to mid twenties that seem to be the main focus.

Quote: [] I wonder? I keep seeing the same face, or almost the same face, with perhaps a tweak to the eyebrows. I see this for various figures. [] That's what you get, if a figure is going old. We had this with V3 and have this with V4 as well for years. Those figures have been "over-supported". And that inj-rem morph++ system made it even worse. That's why I like new figures frequently. They can bring a fresh breeze into it all. I would prefer fresh new innovative figures with a tech-progress over backward compability, allways. If backward compability is your first commandment, you'll get stuck.

If you morphed Vicky in Blender could you move her rigs to make hips wider or legs longer ?

Do you find this problem to be worse or better with male figures?