Limited functionality for the price on just about everything
DrNewcenstein
Posts: 816
I do appreciate that there's a conten creation force out there making content for Poser and Daz Studio, but after 20+ years of it, I'm going to start throwing the hard balls.
There is enough content that is only useful for the promo image. Hair, clothing, furniture. Stop. These are 3D human figures with the full range of motions all humans have, save for the disabled and paralyzed.
Clothing: Clothing follows the body. When you sit, your clothing follows. When you move, your clothing follows. When you lay flat on your face because you were hit by a bus, your clothing follows. Clothing can be put on and taken off. It zips and unzips. It buttons and unbuttons. It slides off the shoulder and onto the shoulder. It folds over onto itself, it wrinkles, it crumples. Pant legs can be pulled up. Sleeves can be pushed up. Collars fold up and down.
Hair: No one has perfect hair 24/7/365. Ever. Hair moves. Hair follows gravity. Except for buzz cuts. Did you make a long flowing hair? Make it move. Make it followable for more than standing up or leaning against a wall or sitting upright. People lie down with their hair on. People bend over with their hair on. People hang upside down for fun and profit with their hair on. The same hair they started out with that day, most times.
Furniture: When you sit on a padded chair, the padding compresses. While the covering on the cushion is indeed one piece of fabric, in 3D you have to use more than 1 polygon. We must use deformers for our scenes to make cushions deform to fit the sitting position for a given scene. That's fine. At least have the consideration to give the cushion enough polys for the deformer to work.
As I said, we are all grateful for the content creators putting in the time and effort to create content, but you are all seriously going to have to step it up and provide far more robust functionality for your products and make them far more realistic in every way. If it's something from the real world, it will need reasonable real-world functioinality. Most of you have had 20 years to reach a higher level of detail and finctionality than you are now. I've watched most of you grow in this field for that long, and I've got a chronology of content dating back to 1998. The progress is admirable, considering most started off as hobbyists in their spare time. But you have stagnated. You've settled into a plateau that is governed by a consortium who says "that's good enough, no need to make it any better, it's always been good enough, if you put more effort into it, you will have to get more money our of it, and it won't sell, don't try to surpass the herd, follow along or we won't like you anymore and you can't be in our little circle"
If you are unwilling to advance your craft to a higher level, please do not stand in the way of those who will be bringing higher standards to the marketplace.
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Comments
+1
Especially (perhaps) " At least have the consideration to give the cushion enough polys for the deformer to work."
I don't entirely disagree with the OP, but I would point out that there are very good reasons why a lot of older content may not look as good as it should.
Historically, every figure, hair or prop in 3d has been governed by the mania of poly-saving. Anyone who's been around for a while will be familiar with the oft-repeated praise for various modellers "Never a single wasted poly!!", etc. PAs and DAZ themselves have been conditioned over the years into using the bare minimum, because otherwise, the users tended to complain about overly poly-heavy figures. And why? Because in times gone by, nobody had the computer resources we have now. People regularly had crashes trying to render large scenes, and anything with a high poly count was simply avoided by the customers.
Well, things have improved a lot in the last few years. RAM is cheap, graphics cards are powerful, and now most of us have massive resources at our disposal, easily able to handle large amounts of polys. But you have to give the content creators time to catch up, (and shake off the spectre of the past). The content coming out now is far higher quality than it ever has been and improving all the time. I don't believe for a minute that the majority of people who make content think "That's good enough, no need to make it any better". I think it's the opposite. It's more like "That's good, but it could be even better"
mac
By the same token, please realize that not everybody has a system that can take advantage of super high poly content. I know that you're not exactly asking for that but there is a balancing act that has to be done when considering how many polys an item needs; is it going to be used with a lot of other items in a scene or is it going to be the only thing in it?
So those of us that do, should suffer?
And I'd save up for a better system if I knew I needed it; case in point is the Nvidia cards, whereby it might have been better to look for a solution that didn't tie users to one manufacturer. But it is what it is, and IRAY is certainly impressive. I've bought two cards because of that; I didn't buy them at the same time, I had to save up. But never did I feel that others should be held back because I couldn't utilise IRAY effectively.
1. this requires dynamic clothing with some kind of editable adhesion, to allow for unzipping or buttoning. Poser does have the cloth room, DS has a limited amount or OptiTex dynamic clothing. However what you are asking for would push the available tchnology to ht limit - and judging by what is available in the Poser market, where anyone can make dynamic items, very few people are prepared to go through the steps needed to obtain good results this way.
2. both Poser and DS have strand-based hair tools, though the DS tools do not currently support dynamics. Again, the extra work required to use the tools does seem to be limiting their uptake - though Alessandro and RawArt have been releasing quite a lot of animals and monsters with strand-based fur so that's encouraging.
3. This is the least challenging of your suggestions, and in fact quite a few items do have higher-resolution upholstery and even include some pre-made morphs for compression.
This opens the differences between the equipment haves and have nots. Between the amateurs, talented, and professionals. Between the adventurous and the satisfied. There are, out here, those of us who are on the low end of the spectrum. We appreciate that we can "make art" surfing with the older models and the older versions of Studio, but recently we get the impression that the wave of technology is about to break over our heads. Yet every message from DAZ is "Buy Up!". The recent dumping of model products from that recently acquired company into the DAZ catalog without checking to see if they actually work in the newer versions of DAZ Studio is a slap in the face to those of us who were looking for fresh content we could use.
It's great that DAZ has grown and modernized and improved their technology but when the old products don't work in the new Studio we should be adequately and accurately warned. I've given up trying to get the old products to work by dinking with adding lines of code or translating through a ten year old version of Poser (which I no longer have installed). I just ask for a refund which costs DAZ time and denies the artist income.
So, DAZ, go ahead and continue to improve technology for the "have, professional, adventurous" clients but perhaps it's time spin off and lock down one of your old versions of Studio and identify in the catalog which models do NOT work in the versions above that, for those of us out here who are the "have not, amateur, unadventurous" share of your market. We're not all going to continue to throw gobs of more money down this blackhole but would still like to orbit for a while and would appreciate seeing new stuff in the catalog that actually works for us.
We would all love far more realistic movements and mesh collisions but there is always the technology barrier. The mesh is just a shell that does nothing on its own but take up 3D space. All the realistic movements and interactions need to be programmed into the software and/or in the case of hair and clothes, movement needs to be modeled. And with hair, that can be extremly difficult. All of this takes time to do even if it can be done. And time is an enemy as we all need to make money to pay bills. The longer we take to make content the greater the risk of not getting the return on the time and effort. I am one who is for higher poly items where its needed BUT if movement like for cloth and hair is required on a high poly item, moving all those polygons cleanly becomes all the more difficult.
To be fair to DAZ Studio, it already has the tools to do some of the things the OP wants. One is the option to increase the poly count through sub-division, and the other is the DFormer tool. If your system can handle it, you can sub-divide existing items, such as cushions, them DForm them into new shapes and add these to the cushion as morphs.
I found a pretty good solution for making conforming clothing more dynamic looking.. I like to use the fits them all Because once I apply the script, it does allow me do basic morphs such as pulling the pants down, moving straps of bras and tops exposing breast etc. it was a good work around for some of the clothing issues. and there is a great tool at renderosity called "DynCreator for DazStudio" which kind of turns conforming clothing into dynamic clothing..
As far as building props and environments If i need something working that wasn't made to. I try to kit bash something that does work combining a sets piece(s) to another. if i have a need for a door or window that needs to open. or find a set that does have working props,. Wouldn't a particle or soft tissue physics be great? It cost nothing more to dream big!
Another thought, how much are you willing to pay for the added funtionality? For example, the requests for more functionality in the clothing, if using conforming clothing, would take many many additional hours on the part of the content creator(s). I wouldn't expect the content creator to do this for free (anymore than I would expext the OP to donate 1/4 to 1/2 his/her time at work for free). So the cost of items that add this additioal functionality would also need to increase.
True, everything mentioned in the original post would be fantastic. But there are "cost" considerations on both sides (creator and consumer), plus for some things there could be an additional learning cost that the all end users might not want to invest in either.
I agree with both Matty and Mac. I think most PAs are capable of doing truly extraordinary work, but there are limitations put on us. One is hardware limitations the other is ROI.
It's not just the mentality of people who have been around a long time... Virtually every model making tutorial is written assuming you are making the model for a video game... DONT WASTE POLYGONS!! MINIMIZE GEOMETRY!! Over and over... Very rarely does one come across a model in a tutorial or magazine article that doesn't seem to be optimized for use in a game. One gets the idea that low poly with limited details and as much faking with bump or normal maps as possible is the only way to go... Then again the flip side is the guy with the scene that took his twelve supercomputers running for six weeks to render... I'm sure anyone who has learned model making outside of DAZ/Poser, especially in a school or though professional teachers has had the low poly mantra hammered into their heads.
Being an industrial model maker I learned that you HAD to have every detail there... Coming over to DAZ/Poser it was very confusing in regards to what was too much detail... Heck, I only ever made closed hull, solid models... Seeing open geometry, or unconnected intersecting geometry just totally seemed too wrong... You can't machine that... Yeah, it was just a shirt and nobody was gonna machine one out of solid aluminum, but still it seemed unnatural.
Well tools are coming that have made it possible for 3D modelers to work faster and produce better results and the increased productively should eventually filter down to the consumers in better products that are easier to customize.
For the average consumer when a very capable modern 7" Android Tablet costs the the same price as a new DAZ Original Genesis 3 model you know cheap gaming tablet hardware that can handle models and scenes with the complexity of DAZ Studio's and even more is coming down the road. There is competition in this niche now that there wasn't before but I still prefer DAZ & Poser characters for now.
McGyver,
A similar mentality is prevelant in almost every aspect of computing. Take web sites as an example. How many years were we stuck with the 'optimise everything for 640x480 screens' advice? People think technology moves fast, but in reality, sometimes it takes a long time to catch up with the users.
But there are two things to remember about tutorials. Firstly, a lot of them are pretty old, and secondly, our corner of the market is miniscule compared with gaming. It's not easy to find good 3d tutes that are actually applicable to us.
Still, I remember proposing a set to DAZ about 10 years ago. I wanted to make a bunch of high-poly fruit that could be used for still lifes. I was told it would be much better to make it low-poly and fake everything with bump maps and displacement. Yes, it was probably good advice at the time, but that mentality is still with us in many forms. And on the other side of the coin, a lot of users just can't upgrade their hardware whenever they feel like it, so it's still a balancing act for everyone.
On the matter of the "Hobbyist" label
I like Daz studio and find its
"ready to use" figures a great cost effective way to get digital actor assets to our Maxon Cinema4D /After Effects based my pipeline.
That said there are many areas where DAZ studio falls clearly short of being even close to a professional solution
1) Character animation : Like poser without a proper foot& hand contact Ik solver Daz studio will never be more than a hobby level tool for creating complex character animation.
There is a reason why many of us Character animators use Reallusion Iclone Pro.
The aniMate2 nonlinear system is cool but with no proper feet pinning its very limited for getting professional results
And if you Dont buy Grapmate and keymate addons editing the keys of your animation is not even worth the effort with the primitive fob of a graph that exitst in DS as the default.
No Character physics or "ragdoll" options
No Dynamic hair options
Cloth physics: NONE built in.
and of the two third party options, one has a walled garden around the proprietary clothing items one has to use and the "Rendo Thingy" ( which I own) is a nice option for the $10 price tag but frankly limited as it has no pinning or constraining options.
Limited lipsync options:
The basic lipsinc feature that is built in is 32 bit only and has no option to adjust or replace phonemes.
The 64 bit "mimic live" only works with live captured audio and has no option to use pre-recorded tracks.
This is ridiculous from a production perspective.!!!
Suppose I want to hire remote voice actors to provide authentic Foreign accents.. the logistics of it would be a
production nightmare.
Thankfully We can at least export our genesis2 figures to poser CR2's and make use of the powerful, yet sadly
Discontinued ,mimic pro3 which has many more phoneme editing options.
Scene managment: without a proper layer system to instantly hide the visibility of entire groups of scene elements Daz studio quickly bogs down with even one or two fully dressed character and a stonemason set
and constantly digging through the hierarchy in the scene tab to flick the little eyeball symbol on & off is not a professional solution.
I am not saying Daz studio should have all these features and somehow still be free
but anyone who has ever used an actual professional application Like Lightwave ,Max,Maya or even C4D
understands that Daz Studio nor Poser even come close to being a stand alone professional 3D/CG solution.
Ahhh, I begin to see.
Some people are looking at Daz3d as simply CG artistic tool, while others are looking at it as an animation tool similar to Blender or Maya. A lot of this debate comes down to people coming from completely different perspectives and what they're using Daz for. Well I guess if you're looking at Daz as an animation tool, it would appear to be aimed squarely at the CGI hobbyist. People use Max and Lightwave for still art, but in my opinion if that's all you were using those programs for that is severe overkill in the reverse direction, but even so none of those will get the job done as a stand alone solutions either, hence the popularity of plug-ins, After-effects and photoshop.
Personally I've never looked at Daz as primarily an animation tool, though I find some of the iclone applications quite interesting.
To tell the truth, I'd rather have the "optimized for (insert size here)" than the general trend of "javascript/flash/etc everywhere" that pervades the web industry. Like with DAZ Studio content, not everyone that has a PC wants or can support the dynamic interfaces, nor do they often lend themselves to the same level of user friendlyness that older versions of sites had.
My only complaint with conforming clothing items for females is that too many handle breast/buttock morphs by shrinkwrapping each corresponding morph's deform, instead of stretching across the area in question. If this were trivial to correct I wouldn't even complain that loudly.
Someone please tell me this problem was solved years ago and I just missed the bus.
Would it benefit PAs at all if each had their own thread in a separate forum where customers could make suggestions or comments on their products? For example, if Ironman13 had a thread where people could suggest poses or environments for her future products, and to also leave intelligent suggestions for product improvements that would make them more likely to buy. I'll give another real-world example of how this can actually be helpful.
There is a vendor at Rendo who makes medieval buildings. If he didn't insist on cramming 500 textures on a single UV shell and modeling everything fairly low-poly, he'd be among the best fantasy modelers in this business. I wrote to him after buying a few of his products and suggested that he consider separating some of the elements of his environments (for example, sheep and chickens, fences, and tree stumps were all grouped into a single object) so they could be more useful. He was very nice and not long after, his sets started coming with objects divided up into smaller groups. He has listened to various suggestions since, and now adds interiors to his buildings and is slowly adding more and more basic features to his creations. If no one had made those suggestions to him, he might have just continued making products as always and, as the original poster here describes, not helped to advance the overall quality of items in our community.
I remember the Old "catsuit" For Vicky2 had a Chest morph to overcome the shrinkwrapped breast look
For the modern genesis line the best corrective option I have seen is this product by Zev0
http://www.daz3d.com/fit-control-for-genesis-and-genesis-2-female-s
that's a wonderful idea.
I love this particular vendor for that exact reason....
Adding on to some of the comments. A lot of the issues brought up in the OP are a result of the sliding scale between realism and ease of use. (I'm not saying those things are diametrically opposed, and indeed, improvements to technology help to bridge the gap)
Lets take skirts. There are 4 paradigms for setting up skirts
The point isnt really about skirts though. Its mainly that in addition to RTI there are a lot of factors that go into how something is made
+1
I think we are entering an age where DAZ has to be a bit more ambitious.
I'm not disagreeing with those that argue that not everyone want's to animate, or has access to a supercomputer, but I do believe that overall progress requires a more optimistic view, that our technology will continue to improve, and ultimately costs will come down, for that improved technology.
With the technology as it stands, we should not expect to use DAZ to animate the way things are. The time it takes to render one high resolution frame, in DAZ, just takes too long to be practicle. But DAZ should still be working to add the features to support this functionality, for when their users systems can quickly render these images, in the future. In the short term DAZ users still images will greatly benefit from these enhancements. Dynamic cloth, and hair, pinning feet to the ground, and functional lip synch, are really necessary for animation, but can also greatly enhance the realism of static images.
If DAZ waits too long, game engines like "Unity" could eventually become the logical DAZ Studio replacement, as game developers move away from the current limited polygon count model, which they will, probably much sooner than any of us expect, and the story tellers will decide to just use game engines as the animation tool, and for still images.
Many use XnaPosingStudio (XPS) to do DAZ type, single frame, posed, scenes, using game assets, so it's not that far fetched.
Ultimately creatives will get creative with whatever tools help them achieve their goals.
Just the way I see it.
JD
You can use the group function which acts like a layer to hide all objects within the selected group. Just right click Scene>Create>New Group.
Here are some solutions I found to get around some limitations.
On clothing Sickle's dress rig and Zevo's fitcontrol gives you some control over clothing behavior. I'm waiting for Virtual world dynamics daz bridge to release for clothes and hair physics
For Hair there is a prodruct that applies a rig to the hair for motion over at the other store that uses the dformer spheres. Ultimately the best solution I found was to learn rig the hair myself and add poseable bones to the hair.
For Furniture you can always use subdivision surfaces to increase polygon count. Right click Scene>Edit>Geometry>Convert to SubD.
Overall I think Daz3d needs better IK.
Yes Studio has a lamentable lack of even simple physics and that is part of the problem.
But my reading of the OP's point is more about the PAs. Some clothes seem like simple flour sacks with a pattern painted on. If autofollow doesn't solve it too bad for the purchaser.
Others come with all kinds of controls. The new Medieval Cloaks for G3 Female is a great example. And some vendors take the time to add lots of morphs. Hongyu is but one that comes to mind. Clothes open and close, sleeves roll up, straps move. And there are others who are as diligent. The same can be said of hair.
I've taken to looking at at the list of morphs in the product description. If there are none or only a few copied in like BreastsHeavy or BreastsGone then I'm not going to buy it. If there are many movement morphs then I am more interested. Ditto for hair.
It all depends on how much time the developer invests. And of course us, the buyers, if we reward the once who don't spend the time.
Having taken the plunch with Marvelous Designer, I have to say that while dynamic draping in that tool is not real time, it's pretty close. You can grab it and adjust it in real time, while it drapes. The technology for this is catching up, I'd say has caught up but not in Studio yet.
I still prefer well-made V4 clothes on all female Genesis models because of the extra controls. Things like wind morphs and tweaks for fitting. I wish content creators would add those to current clothes... I often get poke-through on G3 clothes on G3 models that aren't even heavily morphed or straight G3 or V7. And these are sometimes Daz originals or top PA products.
In the V4 era, the vendors focused on morphs to make it look more realistic. Now they seem to focus on detailing like seams and buttons to make it look more realistic. What is being requested in this thread is both. I'd love that too but honestly I loke the seams and bottons and stitching better, I can use d-formers and the like to get some more matural morphs but I can't use them to add details.