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deslea — Tutorial/Guide: Victoria/Michael 4 or Genesis/G2
#daz #poser #tutorials #victoria4 #victoria4_2 #michael4 #genesis2female #genesis2male #genesis
Published: 2015-01-12 15:21:48 +0000 UTC; Views: 5863; Favourites: 40; Downloads: 321
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Description
Make an informed choice between the key Daz figures for your individual needs and priorities, and learn how to work around their quirks and get the best of all worlds.
Coverage: Key differences between the figures in relation to System Performance and Render Speed, Character Definition (Quality of Morphs), Skeleton Structure (Rigging), Movement (Weight Mapping vs Parametric Joint), Pose Availability, Clothing Availability, Character Availability, Morph Availability, and Cross-Compatibility. Appendix 1 and 2 are Daz-oriented. Appendix 1 includes an overview of cross-compatibility plug-ins and Appendix 2 provides a cross-compatibility Cheat Sheet. The guide is generally favourable to Genesis/Genesis 2, but does highlight areas where V4M4 outperform, and provides workarounds in both directions to maximise versatility.
Target Audience: Both Daz and Poser users for the technical pros-and-cons information, and Daz users for the cross-compatibility workarounds. (Most of these are not currently available for Poser). Suitable for both a beginner and intermediate audience, with technical concepts referenced but also explained.
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Comments: 24
I think this is the best discussion of this fractious question I've ever seen. It's certainly the only one where I didn't stop two paragraphs in and say, "Oh, well, this person is obviously a developer/vendor for DAZ/Renderosity/Hivewire, so..." A fair, even-handed, thorough, and balanced encapsulation of the merits and challenges of each figure with the concerns of the artist firmly in mind -- Well done!
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Thank you so much! I'm glad you found it helpful.
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Nice guide, I haven't read it all yet, but I did notice that you compared HD morphs to the gen4 figures, which is selling HD morphs short by a long way. Every time the sub division level on Gen2 is increased, the number polygons is multiplied by 4 and HD morphs use/require sub division level 3 (which is set automatically in DS when using 3Delight, but is required to be set by hand when using Octane, Lux/Reality or in Poser. It's also required to be set by hand if you wish to see the HD morphs at full resolution in the DS viewport), so when using HD morphs G2F is approximately 1.3 million polygons, making HD morphs look truly amazing at that resolution and there's nothing gen4 figures have that even comes close to comparing to them.
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Ooh, thank you, you're quite right. I'd sort of gotten side-tracked into simply correlating them at that point I think - I'd forgotten about the higher sub-D. I'll include discussion of that when I revise. Thanks!
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I was always curious about the differences. I use generation 4 people, as I don't know how to do the Dson thing, and I was curious about them.
So, if I get this straight, Dawn is a bit like both G2 and V4? I noticed she has a few more bends in her torso as well. I wish that Dawn/Dusk had more facial morphs as I like to play with my dials. I got so spoiled with V4 that when I would go into Dawn and try to dial her lips etc... I couldn't do what I wanted. She is pretty much collecting dust in my runtime because of it.
I got started in the middle of V3 and used DS. I was stubborn to the point of geriatric railing about that newfangled V4 figure, because why did I need her when Aiko 3 was so cool and had so much good stuff? Also, people drive too fast and those kids need to get offa my lawn! *ahem* I finally listened to Mada and Thorne and gave her a try. They do G2 stuff now on DAZ, and I should want to give it a try, but as I said... I like Poser and I don't understand Dson. So I'll just sit here in my rocking chair and deal with the 4 people. Still, it's nice to read about the new stuff. Thanks for sharing this.
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Dawn collects dust for me too. I just think she's an ugly figure. I really did try. Of course, V4 and Genesis/G2 are also ugly until you put a decent texture on them, but somehow she just never seemed to be worth the effort.
DSON works pretty seamlessly as far as I can tell, but only with Poser 9 SR3+. And you have to install all the Genesis packages as well. Once it's in, you can load up Genesis/G2 just like any other figure. There are extra scripting extensions that I don't know how to use, though.
In all honesty, though, I think the Daz/Poser gap is going to get wider and wider. They're both doing new technologies that don't fully cross over. Strangely, Daz seems to have more scripting support at the moment, which I don't understand when Poser uses Python and Daz uses bloody QTScript of all things, and has a mostly-undocumented API.
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What does scripting do? I always wondered...
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A wide variety of things. There are a fair few script-based products for Daz. There's a product at Rotica that, with a single click, can take a copy of the Torso texture of the selected figure, in the clear space of the abdomen overlay genitalia details (probably in the Layered Image Editor), save it as an image, pair it with a custom UV, and save it as a material preset for one of the genitalia add-on products. This means the genitalia product can be made to work with any V6 texture without losing the texture detailing. It's an ingenious product.
I've been really surprised at how many interesting script-based products there are for Daz, because as I've indicated, it's poorly documented. I hate scripting in Daz because I invariably have to do detective work back through the SDK, and apply some educated guesswork as well - the API alone is never enough. As someone who normally programs in C# and PHP, where the doco is extensive, I really notice it. It's probably Daz's biggest dev failing at the moment - as much as the V4/Genesis divide has caused a break in the user base, it has also resolved a lot of problems from a development perspective. A lot of things in V4 that were really hacky from a vendor perspective (if you were designing for a Daz user) now just work.
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I'm pretty sure that you were speaking English... I'm convinced you were... ;D
So, it can transfer textures? That is pretty useful.
Look, I would be WAY more into handing them my money if I could have my hand held through installations. It isn't happening at Smith-Micro and it isn't happening at DAZ. I'm not butthurt over proprietary software or whatever, I'm butthurt because I can't figure shit out and no one can tell me. I don't even know if it's actual butthurt. I think it's more like "well, don't know how to get that to work... moving on..."
But I bow to your knowledge. You seem to have this stuff worked out. Am jealous of your skillz.
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That's really fair comment - neither side is all that bloody good at helping people over the learning curve. The free Daz videos are pretty good to get you started, but they don't get you into the more advanced stuff. And frankly the more advanced stuff can be pretty hacky. I find it scrappy and I used to be a coder/sysadmin (and still code around the edges), so I can't imagine what it's like without that background.
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I guess they just don't really want a lot of business. Maybe they want to keep things small.
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I think this is a very thorough and very balanced assessment, and very valuable to the community. I only have a one, small issue with a part of it.
Actually, morphs are injectable in both Poser and DS for any figure. So while V4/M4 come with empty morph channels, you don't have to use them. The technology advanced, not the figures. V4/M4 support the old way and, like any figure, can work in the new way. Genesis only works in the new way.
And there are (or were) fine tuning morphs for V4 just like those breast morphs. They're by Posermatic, who made both movement and shape morph sets. V3 has them, too. V4 has (or had) multiple tongue fine tuning morph sets. There are tons of _free_ custom morphs for V4. At one point there were pages of 3rd party morph sets for version 4 figures at DAZ, and that doesn't count the many custom morphed characters. All of SAV's characters, for instance. Fine tuning V4 morph sets are _still_ best sellers at Rendo. AFAIK, a whole lot more vendors have made custom version 4 morph sets than have for Genesis. And the morph artist whose sets I've found most useful over the years, Capsces, hasn't made any Genesis morphs and probably won't. Amazingly enough, she uses Poser's magnets to make her morphs.
I can't say what's still available and what isn't without research I'm probably not going to do, but unless you're talking creatures, V4 still comes out ahead in terms of volume and certainly comes out ahead in terms of number of vendors who made morphs for her (simply because some are no longer vendors or don't make morphs any more). And I've seen no indication even at DAZ that Genesis is attracting more morph artists. Frankly, the primary issue wasn't the technology. It was skill. If you know anatomy well enough to go beyond what DAZ already does, you're likely to either want to build your own figure (and control your own topology, which strongly affects what you can do morph-wise) or work on higher profile and higher paying 3D projects. There's very, very few people in the community who can do realistic, human morphs at all. And of those, only a subset can do generic morphs rather than sculpting specific likenesses. And I've yet to see any serious growth in that area in the community.
What I have seen is an issue of morph quality. Since there's only so many morph artists in the community who can make quality morphs, the figure who has the most experienced morph artists gets the best morphs. And the morph artists at DAZ are the most experienced (and probably the best paid). So G2 is getting the best morphs at present.
That said, I think the content community as a whole is approaching that last 1% of quality, so the quality differential isn't but so large. Whether it's significant or not really has to depend on the artist. And as I said, V4 still has a lot more morphs. As far as I can tell, even DAZ is putting out fewer morphs for G2 figures. Stephanie 4 came with dozens of morphs. S6 seems to limited to one morph.
IMHO, the biggest issue is that most of version 4 morphs use the old injection method. I have _many_ fewer version 4 characters than I do version 3, and only a few key morph sets beyond the DAZ ones (which make their own channels), but I still had to use a chart and change channels to make all my custom characters work together on the same character (I made a loaded V4 character). There's many, many more morph sets using channels than there are channels. So a lot of them overwrite each other and break when you try to use them together.
You know, just doing a browse on DAZ, I'm finding only about 400 G2F products at all? And G2F's DAZ morphs are spread out over more sets than V4's.
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Thank you, that's really helpful background. I was a more casual user in the V4 era - strictly amateur play stuff - so the products that have discontinued in the meantime are out of my knowledge base. I knew it was possible to do make more channels on-the-fly with script tweaks in Poser. It is possible in Daz too (I've managed it) but it's completely undocumented and unsupported, and I've never seen a pro product that did on-the-fly morphs in Daz with scripting for channels.
I'm planning to do an update to this in a couple of weeks to incorporate things from comments - I'll make sure to fold some of this in too.
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Actually, you don't need scripts in either app. I've been told that in DS you just put the morph files (objs?) in the right folders and the app finds them. I don't use DS and have to rely on second-hand information for this, but I've been told by multiple people that the process is simple and has been around for some time. In Poser, you just use PMDs to make injection poses that insert channels. Both of these methods are the present standards (as I know them) for content for any figure or prop.
Version 4 figures still have many more morphs than Genesis 2. Even just looking at DAZ morphs, V4 and M4 got huge morph sets for about half the price, or free for PC members, of sets that are now single morph sets for G2 (Aiko, Hiro, Stephanie, etc.). And there is no DAZ version of the muscle morphs for G2, no version of the ethnic morphs, no version of Freak, and no version of Hiro. I've yet to see a 3rd party morph set that isn't a creature set and doesn't have one or more equivalents for V4. And while it's true that all new morph sets at DAZ are for G2, that's not true at places like Rendo. Where Exnem has a set of 138 morphs just for V4's teeth. Mec4D also has a huge morph set for V4's teeth. I don't think you can get much finer tuning than 200+ morphs for teeth alone.
IMHO, the issue of whether or not to upgrade to G2 comes down to quantity vs. quality and (some) new content, and how much you're willing to pay for the latter. Version 4 figures have much, much more content. Even top morph artist Posermatic, who's now exclusively a DAZ PA, has 16 products for older figures (mostly V4, but V2 and V3 are in there too), and only 3 for Genesis figures. Since most version 4 content is older, it's often deeply discounted. G2 figures do have quality advantages you detail quite nicely in your document (like all new figures, actually), but they also have major quality disadvantages in Poser (need an add-on just to have IK, often have major bugs, etc.) that you also touch on in your document. G2 figure content often gives you much less for much more money. But most of the top G2 artists have been making content since at least version 3, and DS itself has majorly improved. G2 takes advantage of those DS improvements. Thing is, G2 doesn't really take advantage of any Poser improvement beyond weight mapping, and there have been a _lot_.
Pricing it out, it would cost me, as a current PC member, $220 to just sort of match having V4, Morphs++, A4, S4, and She Freak 4. That's at 30% off. Even with a sale taking that discount down to 50% or 60%, that's a whole lot of money. And doesn't include relevant advances like the HD morphs. I paid about $110 to $120 for V4, M4, H4, A4, S4, She Freak 4, Freak 4, Muscle Morphs for V4 and M4 (separately), Creature Creator morphs and addons for V4, and V4 Elite Morphs. I just picked up ethnic morphs for V4 and M4 for less than $4 each over the holiday sales. So for a whole lot less, I not only bought more than three times as many sets, each set had more in it. Conversely, just to get to a bare minimum with G2F, and ignore G2M altogether, I have to make a substantial monetary investment. Even if I just compare V4 Complete, which was $30 and included V4, Morphs++, hair, clothing, and a character, I can't get anywhere close to that for G2F without spending much more than twice as much. And again, without the HD morphs that take G2F from less detail than V4 to more.
Time has passed, but more than a 200% increase is really steep.
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Actually, you don't need scripts in either app. I've been told that in DS you just put the morph files (objs?) in the right folders and the app finds them. I don't use DS and have to rely on second-hand information for this, but I've been told by multiple people that the process is simple and has been around for some time. In Poser, you just use PMDs to make injection poses that insert channels. Both of these methods are the present standards (as I know them) for content for any figure or prop.
This is true in Daz of Genesis and Genesis 2 (which are built in Daz file formats) but not V4M4 (which, while Daz products, are built in Poser formats). They're not OBJs themselves, though. They're sets of vertex coordinate changes that represent the difference between the base figure and the morphed figure - ie, the morph tool compares the two OBJ and creates a summary of differences in a Daz format, and there's your morph file.
Victoria 4 is based on Poser CR2s and not Daz file formats, because at that time there was, I think, a greater priority on trying to support interoperability by the Poser community. It isn't enough to have an INJ file for the morph - there has to be a morph channel to receive it. This is the barrier point in Daz. At the API level, CR2s and PZ2s do support the creation of morph channels, but Daz CR2/PZ2 implementation has never, and still doesn't support the creation of morph channels at runtime after the initial figure has been created (ie, by PZ2s calling on PMDs). You're limited to whatever channels that pre-load with the CR2 - in V4s case, the fifty community channels.
You can work around this in two ways. One method involves Powerloader add-ons, which interrupt the CR2 build and add extra channels by referring to extra PZ2s and then continue building the CR2s. (Edit: This is pretty similar to what you described above and may be what you were thinking of, although that doesn't use OBJs either - it uses PZ2s and PMDs). This works about 75% of the time, but if certain configuration oddities are in play or if Powerloader is turned off, you can have, at best, nil result, and in rare worst cases, quite serious problems for the end user. I managed to corrupt a beta tester's runtime as a result of this, and Daz indicated to me after this that Powerloader's implementation basically supported the garden variety user and garden variety build. The other method is failsafe, using Daz scripts - but that places a barrier to entry for vendors to using this method. (Source: I recently made a morph product for V4 - a conversion of a product of mine for G2 - that took four weeks of work to determine the channel creation method, and that was with direct assistance from Daz. It's completely undocumented).
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No, I wasn't told about Powerloader, though I can see why you'd think so. None of the people telling me about this process worked in Poser at all, only DS. So no PMDs and no pz2s. My thought is that they were just working with DS presets. Thing is, they weren't talking about Genesis, but other figures and random clothes. So again, it's not specific to the figure. From what you're saying, it's specific to DS presets.
Just as a random info to pass along, the vertex coordinate changes are actually in the OBJ file. The software doesn't have to do the comparison. DS might save it in a new format (as Poser does), but you can actually "squish" OBJs by hand into that same information. There's tutorials from back in the day about how to do that. Back then, people shared morphs as pure OBJs, so you had to "squish" them to keep from sharing the original mesh. I've done some of that myself not that long ago, though it's unnecessary now. It's always good to know how to distribute morphs as pure OBJs, since they work in DS or Poser no matter what.
Actually, it seems to me there's a much simpler solution. Just save a V4 character preset in DS and work with that. Poser users have to do much more than that to use anything Genesis related, and that's not only considered perfect in most brokerages, but fine in most forums. Seems to me that if needing an hour or two of work just to get something to work in Poser is OK (which I find true of nearly all DS vendor products, not just ones that need DSON), asking people to click and save a preset in DS shouldn't be a problem.
Checking, Exnem's teeth morphs says to use something called "InjectPMD" for DS. Since he(?) warns that he doesn't guarantee its performance, I'm guessing it's no better than Powerloader, and might be worse. But I thought I'd mention it. Poking around, it seems like people just generally use the community channels for DS versions. I know how limiting and problematic that can be, so I understand why you worked so hard to avoid it.
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A very well informed guide. I've been using both figures for quite some time, and you've pretty much covered everything the two figures have to offer. You even made sure to outline some of the extra morphs available for both Generation 4 and Genesis 2 to ease up on some of their built in limitations. Recommended for anyone who's on the fence about which figure to choose.
The one thing I would add is that due to the nature of Genesis' Weight mapped unimesh it's incredibly flexible when it comes to morph options, while Victoria and Michael are a prisoner of their own parametric rig. For example, you can easily morph Genesis 2 into a small child and have the rig dynamically altered to match, but the same would be impossible using a V4. This means a wider variety of figures including orcs and demons available for the figure. There's also the advantages brought along by Geografting technology which replaces existing geometry on the figure with new geometry, such as a Mermaid tail or horns.
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Thank you, I'm glad you got something out of it! And good point about the extreme rig changes and geografting, too - I'll probably tweak this and add that in.
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WOW! I haven't had time to read the whole article yet. Put it as a fav so I can do so later. Also, being a PDF file means I can put it on my HD and the links should remain intact (vs a jpg version) for off line (well not at DA site) reading. The PDF step makes this one of the more versatile tutorials because of the flexibility. Special thanks for taking the effort to do that.
You put a lot of effort into this and the comparisons seem spot on. I don't use Poser so can't speak to those points but the figures and such apply mainly to Studio. As a long time Studio user, you confirmed many 'suspicions' (not meant in a negative way) I had about comparing V4 to Gen. (I never took the time to do side by side look.) Listing the add-on/converters available helps those with an fairly extensive V4 run time (like me).
As you point out, users of various levels will find it extremely useful.
Thanks for taking the time to put this document together.
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Thank you, and you're welcome! I really like PDF tutorials so I can read them on the go, and I always appreciate it when others do them.
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