Torquinox posted at 2:56AM Tue, 11 May 2021 - #4418975

Iclone looks slick and interesting, but I lack the brainspace to address it. I put Unreal Engine in the same category. Wendy is all over that, and exploring all sorts of things including metahumans. I think it works for her because she's playing. She seems to do that without feeling overwhelmed. That's a wonderful thing!

As it is, I juggle Daz, Blender, some Carrara, and various image apps. Even though I've been using other people's assets for rendering, I spend a lot more time than I expected playing with materials, textures, lights and poses. Everything needs adjustment! I have items that would require new textures and sometimes new UV maps to make them look right. A certain number of vendors do not really understand texture mapping and material optimization. Sorry, it's true! I can't really justify doing all that work for something someone else made so I usually reach into my library and pull out a different item. I have modeling projects in progress.Some are experiments, others are not yet where I want them to be. They will be something when they emerge. Until that happens, I'm sort of wearing the mule face.

I don't share Wolf's issue with the sexy ladies. I like them a lot. I like the male figures, too. I have a lot more ladies in my library than men.

There is definitely something to the complaint about the weight of Genesis figures. People point at the G8 figures as the worst offenders, but even V4 figures can be slow to load. I may know why that is, too. It's the weight of add-on shaping and corrective morphs. Gigabytes of data! Of course that's not portable. It's a competition between on-the-fly character customization and figure optimization. Customization wins in Dazland.

To make it work in a streamlined way, you probably need a 2-stage character creation process. In the first stage, you make the character the way you want. In the second stage, you freeze, bake, and save all that into a single morph that gets bound to the rigging. After that, no more customizing. If you want to customize further, you make another figure. The effect of doing that is, you need a lot less data to support your finished figure. You're no longer carrying, checking and manipulating the data for every figure and morph pack in your library.

It seems that's what happens with metahumans. You do the customization and then you get your actual figure. Now, the big difference with metahumans is, you do the design in their web app. You don't actually get direct access to the source materials. You get a finished product you can drop into UE. And it's not clear that we end users can extend that asset like we can the Daz, Poser or Iclone figures. Those are important considerations!

For Daz, their base figures and morphs are their bread and butter; and we already downloaded them in the essentials pack. Daz has an existential obligation to protect their figures as best they can, even though it's already been pirated in places beyond their control. Reallusion has the same problems. I think Daz figures changed over time to meet the company's goals of increased realism, better posing, etc. Doing that increased figure complexity while reducing interoperability with other programs. It's win-win for them. What's interesting is, the poly count of the base figures actually decreased over time. Reliance on subdivision increased.

I'm not really trying to defend Daz in this. I'm trying to point out that maybe there are reasons things are the way they are. And I agree that some of what happens with respect to all that is troubling and troublesome.

you've nailed it in the trade-offs department. most of us struggle with those very time/brains/content adjustments/costs issues as well, which is why I envy those with a mastery of a good home-base tool and can use other tools to enhance that foundation.

so much power, but so many apps, buttons, menus and paradigms (and shopping cart$, heh). It's a good thing I enjoy the road as much as the render - usually...

--ms