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PA's take NOTE...I will more likely buy products that are catered to G8/8.1/9 than just 9 alone.
...the only "dedicated" G9 content I have are the Starter Essentials the Starter Essentials Expansions, and Head and Body Shapes (all which I got at pretty nice discount) to support the creature and monster characters I have by PAs like RawArt and Oso3d. The rest of the G9 content I have is also compatible with G8/8.1.
To make G9 as useful for human based characters development as G3 and G8 are would require a bigger investment than I can afford. That is the main reason I have only selectively gone with the creature characters.
Granted there are a few things I like about the unisex base, such as being able to easily swap clothing, more easily create petite and young female characters, and finally, there is is a Skin Builder utility that works on both genders.
It doesn't seem to take that much time to fix that dress modeled for Genesis 9 Base Anime Feminine once it has been fitted to Genesis 9 Base (sure, it's done by a seasonned PA, but what's done here feels like the easiest part of modelling something), so, model it on a character you like to work with and use the tricks shared in this video to get it compatible with Genesis 9 Base (or don't care about it at all, there is at least one Genesis 9 clothing product in the Daz Store said to only have a adjustment made for the character it's sold with in a bundle: no trace of any of the three Genesis 9 Base figure in the supported shapes list):
I'm not sure what characters you have in mind, but it doesn't mirror my experience.
PAs characters usually have the textures for one gender only (except for 'sibling' products in which case they have both) while Daz Core Figures have textures for both genders (main exception I could find in my library: Pixie 9 and Josie 9).
Well, at least for chest and AE, because apparently no one thought it would be nice to have a face texture without the freshly shaved beard baked in (my idea of having a young Michael 9 in one scene was fastly abandonned when I applied his skin on a younger version of himself created with Zev0 growing up product).
Personally, I always appreciate PAs that still support G8 and it's definitely an incentive to buy. This includes many of the most talented PAs, IMHO - including Strangefate/Roguey, Sue Yee, Aeon Soul off the top of my head.
Also, there are reasons some PAs make the conscious decision to not support G8 other than the time invested not being worth the return, like . . . I dunno . . . a product supporting G9/G8.1/G8 will see deeper discounts sooner . . .
- Greg
It's a wry joke playing on the idea that a thread started over 2 years ago asking whether people would be buying in to the Latest Greatest figure is still going strong. And ironically, it is still going strong. That part amuses me, as well.
I'm always disappointed when people conclude that just because a feature isn't one they will use that it's not something anyone else can or will use.
If you look at the five years of G8 and G8.1,I only know of one single school uniform set where the vendor produced matching male and female versions. That's a very reasonable thing to want or need in a uniform, but even of the other sets that aren't skimpy pin-up schoolgirls with unbuttoned blouses and barely-long-enough skirts, they would need you to carry out a conversion to get a matching jumper/blazer/sweater/whatever on both bases.
And I can't say I'm at all surprised that vendors didn't do it that often; it's tedious to have to redo almost exactly the same rigging work twice when you could have done it once - a development process that G9 achieves by its very nature.
~~~~~
I'm certainly no grand G9 fanatic - I have most of my characters built on G8, moving them is a hassle, and G8 certainly isn't suddenly defunct, so I've mostly kept my cast on G8 - but I cannot fathom that some people don't find the concept of a unisex base to be meritorous.
I'm not talking about execution here. It is after all possible to have a good idea but realise it badly. I'm talking about the fact that there's a contingent of people who don't merely say "G9 has been done badly", but instead say things like "G9 is an answer to a question no-one was asking".
If they could be done equally well, it would obviously, unarguably and objectively be better to be able to have one base that can seamlessly share all assets (allowing uniform uniforms, cross-gender familial resemblance, alien/anthro creatures to inherently come with both genders, etc) than two bases with a conversion barrier between them.
Sure, there's an argument to be had about the compromises necessary to achieve that, but we should at least agree that it's a desirable feature.
I would bet I own the majority of the male adult Genesis 9 content in the store and other places and only some female characters. Male content is more often to include anatomical morphs and maps than vice versa. In fact, I went through my female non-daz store content and there are zero chest adjustments or anatomical elements for male characters outside of DAZ or twin type characters. The same can not be said for male presenting figures. I'm not saying there is a huge amount but it exists. Some PAs' do this more often than others.
I would love it if women's textures had morphs for the chest. It would make my life so much easier. Doing the nipples the way Genesis 9 did, is not a great improvement from my perspective. I'd really like to be able to use all Genesis 9 skins on all figures and be able to remove the shirts, without the textures in the area of men's nipples looking odd. I am less concerned really about elements, since I don't do full-frontal nudity and there are products available for those adjustments.
I won't go into the problems with gender-neutral hair, and the hairlines on men, which also is a problem -for me.
...I totally hear you on the textures for women's clothing. As a number of my characters are more "petite" in physique I get bad distortion of chest textures when dialling down bust sizes. Hence most of my characters end up going with pretty bland and plain with clothing textures because of this.
My other issue is adopting male clothing to female characters, particularly for the lower body as I always get a distortion in the crotch area that sometimes even results in tearing the mesh as the male clothing is made to accommodate the bulge for the "male parts".
Must be Amtrak.
I'm about 80% of the way towards switching to Genesis 9. I just need:
(1) a G8 > G9 figure converter that solves the eyeball problem;
(2) a dependable way to fit G8 and G9 hairs on each other's heads (I'm too lazy to head-fit and head-parent every time).
I think there might be a bit of what they call “overthinking” here. As Torquinox said, my comment was kind of a joke. There has been a long running conversation whose subject asks who is getting on a train. And I suggested this is a fairly long wait for a train. My statement wasn’t a commentary about Genesis 9 or DAZ.
As an AI language model, I don’t know what I previously said about Genesis 9. But I probably said I don’t see how it is any better than Genesis 8 or Genesis 3 for me, and the price seems to have increased without the value of the product increasing. And I think some people said the memory requirement increased with the figure. I also only buy female figures and accessories, so having the male things included wouldn’t do anything for me.
The part about me being an AI language model is kind of a joke too. But the rest isn’t.
I'd rather have a G9 -> G8 converter... would be cheaper to buy the few G9 figures I would like to use, without having to re-buy all the stuff that I got for G8 that can't be used for G9
More manageable expressions, unisex and toon. I'm no longer interested in remembering anything else, aside from transferring everything I have from past generations. It's the only train that goes to my destination.
Let's just note that this thread is now over two years old, which is as long as the period that several Figure Bases have spent as the main base figure, and there's still a sizable percentage of people who haven't "got on the train", while the one big hope that so many had held... that a non-gendered base would lead to a huge increase in the amount of male products becoming available... has been soundly squelched. No matter how you want to slice it, it's clear that Gen 9 still doesn't appeal to everyone, while the cost of the base figures and everything else in the store has continued to escalate, and now DAZ has fallen back on the idea of selling a more expensive upgrade version of the software rather than giving it away. While not conclusive evidence, none of that sounds like a situation where the Gen 9 product is exactly flying off the shelf either. Personally, I wish they would just fix all of the issues with G9 and move on to Genesis 10 already.
There's people who still prefer V3.
If we hold generations to the standard that they have to completely convert every single user over to it, then every single generation has been a failure, because every time there's at least someone who's been a hold-out on the prior generation.
Which will doubtless spawn an entire new wave of threads complaining how G10 is a the latest cashgrab, trying to force everyone to buy morphs, characters, poses and clothes all over again. And there's no way that people would even agree what they want G10 to be; some people would staunchly hold that G10 should go back to separate bases, but others would want to keep the seamless compatibility of a unisex base.
Honestly, I think we're genuinely in a good place right now, where we're two years into G9, but still see a respectable amount of G8 support. So I think that right now a new generation could actually be a bad thing for G9 detractors. It's one thing for vendors to provide support one generation back, but two generations is getting to be a stretch (having three generations of support is rare, and usually limited to only hair or certain script products), so G10 arriving could heavily dent the G8 support we see. So unless you're enamoured with G10 - which is hardly assured - the arrival of G10 might well be a bad thing for people who don't like G9.
Ditto here... but it's hard NOT to end up with a runtime full of neins when that's where the focus of the PC+ products and freebies has been switched over to, while the intro sales so often make it cheaper to buy bundles that include 9 product than it is to buy just the individual products that one wants.
I've been sticking with G8.1 because I can't afford to invest in G9. I did recently load up G9 to experiment with the expressions and was very impressed by what it offers, but otherwise I just haven't spent enough time with G9 to have a really strong opinion about it.
...
....I still prefer Aiko 3 to the later generation versions as they moved more and more away from the "cute" anime appearance.that made her so charming.
Chapelon developed the Steam loco when others were giving up on them (see this book: https://camdenmin.co.uk/products/la-locomotive-a-vapeur-second-printing) With the cycle improvements, modern combustion technologies and decent insulation, these locos can out perform diesels and have cheaper running costs. Steam engineer La Porta kept a mine open in Argentina for 10 years with a modified 1927 steam loco that was un-economic with the extra maintenance & fuel costs of a modern diesel on the same line (https://camdenmin.co.uk/collections/technical-steam/products/advanced-steam-locomotive-development.) So, existing technologies, when developed, can be superb. It just takes time & investment which unfortunately the 'New, shineee' marketing people seem to miss.
Regards,
Richard
Keep in mind that line is out of context, after I listed many cons to the single multi-gendered mesh.
For the cross-gender clothing support you also need to keep in mind at least today, there really aren't that many unisex outfits in the real world. Even in 2024, our children go to a school that requires uniforms and they are different for the sexes. Even something basic like a polo shirt, they are cut significantly different and fit differently between the sexes. Sure, you can morph it, but you generally morph the crap out of it and wind up compression/stretching issues I mentioned in that post. Same for the US military ACU, while similar the differences are beyond morphs.
I never said it was impossible for me to fathom a benefit for someone - that's not the point. The point is that IMO the cross-gender compatibility is a net negative for me, what it offers doesn't outweigh the drawbacks. I'll even go so far to say my lack of need for unisex or cross gender is probably the norm - granted, feeds get tailored for what we all click on now but at the art rags I look at there simply isn't much unisex or cross dressing going on out there.
I may come from an older era of forums, but I do not like the increasingly common approach to quote an entire post AND all of its nested quotes in order to respond to it.
It's particularly frustrating when reading the forum on the frankly very-poor mobile implementation, where after a couple of levels of nesting, the innermost posts are reduced to a one letter wide column that goes on for hundreds and hundreds of rows.
Hence, usually, I will reduce posts I'm quoting to key points.
~~~~~
But, if we're taking that argument...
And I'm pretty sure I'm in the upper percentiles for doing things the vendors didn't plan for.
(Well, I say that, but by this point Lyoness absolutely anticipates me doing stupid stuff with her products. She certainly didn't plan that originally though).
True on every generation, if textures are not actually painted onto the morph they're being used on. I've had enough cases where both large and small breasted G8F characters had problems with stretched textures in the chest area.
Making any clothing item to a good standard already needed manually fitting to major morphs.
Even if you completely disregard any idea of making the clothing work for cross-gender, there's functionally no difference between having to make your clothing fit G9 base, G9 Feminine, Victoria 9, Olympia 9, etc as it was was with G8 base, Victoria 8, Olympia 8, Monique 8, etc. Either way, you already had to make the clothes fit a base shape and then a load of morphs. But on this one, you can be assured that everyone already has G9 Feminine, and a lot of characters sold on the store therefore use it as a shape to sculpt over.
Also, if you're genuinely planning on making the clothing only for one base, then while I hold it's best practice to start on the base shape, the transfer utility *does* have the Reverse Source Shape from Target option, so you can actually model on G9 Feminine, then have Transfer Utility fit to that morphed shape rather than the base shape.
Whether the base figure triggers your uncanny valley response is irrelevant; lots of what we do in the process of developing an asset will look like a distorted version of the final result we're aiming for.
If you don't like the base G9 shape, don't put the base G9 shape in your renders. What shape the figure starts at is not what's important, it's what shape it ends up as - and, indeed, the exact base shape you start from has little limitation on what shape the character can be.
I mean, here's the same character on Genesis 2, Genesis 8 and Genesis 9, despite all of those bases having a different initial shape.
I'd challenge people who think the base figure shape leaves an indelible fingerprint on the characters to put their skills to the test and make a correct call on which base each of these is using.
(And I promise, they are genuinely on Genesis 2, Genesis 8 and Genesis 9; I've not used the same base three times).
Yes, significantly so. Daz have brought down loading times massively from where they were, and we know that when we (finally) get DS 5, one of the main things they're trying to resolve is being able to multi-thread processes that DS4 currently can only handle single threaded. As mid-range modern CPUs tend to have about 8 cores, and higher end ones can have 16 or more, that's going to be around an order of magnitude of speed increase.
Already addressed this one, but moving on to your reply...
Aside from the fact that having *a* matching polo shirt but perhaps not with a perfectly feminine cut is obviously better than having *no* matching polo shirt, if we're talking about singling out points from a post without addressing the entire thing, I address several other points where native cross-compatibility is a boon - anthros don't need the vendor to make two different sets of body fur, aliens don't need two different sets of geografts and HD morphs, male and female members of a family can actually share morphs to get resemblance, etc.
Possibly...
... but I would say that the greatest strength and the entire ethos of the Genesis lines are their flexibilty and compatibility. Victoria, Olympia and Josie aren't all stand-alone figures - we can share the same hairs between them, we can share the same clothes, the same skins, the same poses.
If you say "well, we'll take away a function because not everyone's using it", then suddenly you have no functions. (Hell, on the basis of sales figures, we'd probably have no male bases at all).
But that as an example strongly illustrates a point. Options have exponential potential; even if you don't use rock monsters very often, the fact that you *can* use a rock monster when a scene calls for it massively increases what you can do. Taking away men might be much more obvious in its drawbacks, but the number of scenes I've had to put to one side because I don't have a specific and niche-seeming item to complete them is considerable. (On that note, I have to fanatically promote GCJellyfish's Dirty Dishes sets, because the number of scenes where I've thought "there's no way I can finish this, I won't possibly have a posable banana peel in my library... holy mackerel, I do." Actually, GCJellyfish's sets are like this in general, and I *still* underestimate their feature sets)
Even if few scenes may use cross-gender clothes, I'm willing to guess that many people have done (or had to abandon) scenes that required a seemingly niche function. Taking away functions because they're not useful to you eventually gets to the point where the DS feature set is below the kind of critical mass it needs to be useful.
~~~~~
Sure, things could be done better about G9, but I think the things that G9 has tried to do are good ideas in principle.
I fully agree that Genesis 9 is superior. Facial expressions, body stretches, exclusive hair/skins. All clearly superior!
Only (or main) issue is what's always been there - younger characters cause distortions that prevent me from using certain hairs!
Whew... there's a lot there. You acknowledge that it's best practice to work on the base shape, but then go on to say you can use the transfer utility to skip that step.
Aren't best practices given to us to avoid issues down the road? It's N+1 amount of work. Maybe not a big time investment, but the industry generally moves toward less work not more.
So it's less work for rigging things between sexes - how many care? I think a lot more care about having a better base to work on for male and female renders (the texturing issues you acknowledge) vs. a bit less of a one-size fits all. To be sure I wasn't taking crazy pills, I went to a virtual machine that I don't use to browse the internet with on a VPN for a totally clean session - I briefly scanned through a few dozen or so pages of art (well over 100) and didn't see a single instance of an art subject dressed in a unisex style, or opposite of traditional gender norms, or different sex siblings - so less than 1%.
By the same token of using the Transfer Utility to skip a step rigging as you mentioned, you can use the transfer utility on your female article of clothing and transfer the male rigging to it or vice versa. Was it easy for you to do the image of the three separate look alike figures?
THAT is why many of us are complaining, we'd rather have a separate female and male mesh to mitigate those issues as much as possible without diving into extra work. Personally, I'd rather optimize for the 95-99% use case than the 1-5%. (Throwing in a few percent to err on the side of caution).
Then by all means, tell me which figure is which and prove me wrong.
People say that they can tell, but saying they can tell is not proving they can.
Isn't it cheating with having them clothed?
G9 reminds me a lot of Victoria 4.
It is a "face-only" figure. Great for portaits, but don't pose him/her/it, for the joint bending is just horrible.
Like V4, G9 might also be ruling the DAZ universe for a long time.
V4 and G9 are love-it or hate-it fugures.
I never had any use for Victoria 4 and I have no use for Genesis 9 either.
I'm not into Manga or Anime, but this would make G9 somehow useful, since accuracy doesn't really matter on it, and cell shading is easy to fix in post work.
"Best practices" aren't "only practices".
The feature does exist and it does have uses, so it would be silly to say it should never be used.
On the other hand, I've had to do it on many occasions, know people who do it regularly, have heard hundreds of complaints about things like women only getting the skimpy armour sets, etc.
To pull out a couple of examples of my own over the last year where I've had to use G8M assets on G8F...
Putting the centaurisation aside, Crusher Armour had to be converted to fit the G8F upper body, because the armour was only released for G8M:
There is no hi-vis vest I know of for G8F, so this had to be converted from the G8M-only Road Work Outfit:
Just because you might not obviously spot cross-gender clothing or conversions doesn't mean it isn't a feature people can and will use.
No, you can't.
If you are rigging well, Transfer Utility is merely a first step, not a complete rigging process. You then have to go in and refine the weights and correctives it gives you. This is why auto-fit alone is - while better than nothing - still inferior to content that has been properly set up by a capable creator.
To me, this is sounding quite a lot like you've never actually done any of the work past the basic auto fitting stage. As a creator, having to *maybe* do some refinement on the G9 feminine shape barely changes anything when making clothing well means you've normally already got to do fits for multiple core characters, the spectrum of generic body types, a panoply of different breast shapes, several JCMs/CBs (including multi-axis ones that have to be handled in the right order) and all that. As for why it's maybe do some refinement, G9 has much more robust autofit templates than G8, and they already have basic projection fits for most of the major shapes. If they're used correctly, setting up G9 fits is way faster than G8 ones.
The clothing items above are things I had to convert with a much more rigorous process than simply auto-fitting them.
Me? Yes.
Most people, probably less so.
Being immodest for a moment, I am above the curve on my ability to transferring asset between figure bases. I had this uploaded the same day AM's Rabbits came out, and let me tell you, there are no existing auto-fit clones to go between Genesis figures and the rabbits.
While I may have a less burning need for G9's integrated compatibility, I am intensely aware of how much work has to be done to fully transfer things between bases.
If a set of textures were originally made for the morph it was associated with, then the UV stretch and squash will already be baked into the maps.
If you are using such a set of well made feminine maps on a different feminine figure, then it's the difference between those shapes, not the difference from the base shape that matters.
Doubtless some smart alec will then question what the utility of being able to load G9M maps onto G9F is, and then I'll smartly point out that there was enough demand for that, despite some of the drawbacks, that G3 and G8 actually had products specifically for the purpose of achieving that.
I'm hearing excuses and deflection.
Any "G9 can't do masculine/femine shapes" (I've heard both) claim eventually comes down to a general assertion that base figures have an indelible fingerprint. And if they do have such a fingerprint, it would hold that anyone should have a better than random chance of getting the question right (and even if it were random chance your odds aren't that bad)... but for all people claim that G9 is fallible in this regard, it's now very much looking like no-one's actually all that confident in this claim.