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Cool. Could you, perhaps, share some of that work flow?
Do you set things up in Daz Studio first then export via FBX to Lightwave, or how are you using your figures and content in Lightwave? I've Often wondered as to whether such a workflow would be possible. Like, we certainly cannot conform (or fit-to) clothing and other items to our fgure within Lightwave, right? It has to be set up ahead of time?
...and what about animations, do you set that all up in Daz Studio, then export FBX?
Yes, I fit all clothing and everything in DS and then export the FBX, the deformations are not as good from the FBX as they are in DS but LW has some options that improve it a bit so it's not bad in any way, animations can be imported into LW and converted to motion mixer (same as NLA clips in Carrara) and can then be used in LW, works nice
But it's very easy to add back IK support to the FBX rig in LW so you can animate there also.
The biggest problem is that LW keeps all morphs in RAM so they can use a bit of memory if you include many morphs, but a few hundred or so is no problem.
The best things is that you get much better animation tools in LW compared to DS, but if you can animate in DS it's better to export as OBJ/MDD, you get all nice deformations included, LW also comes with Chronosculpt that allows you to make changes to MDD animations after export.
An FBX works straight out of the box in LW, just some very easy tweaking of surfaces is needed so that is good (G3 is broken but works if you delete some auto generated rubbish morphs after import).
If you can live with part time IK it only takes 2 minutes to add full IK support to an imported FBX in LW, that is also nice, full time IK support require adding some goals and changing some settings so takes a little more work.
You must have bought a LW Bundle, eh? I don't think Chronosculpt comes with LW for free. Maybe I'm wrong?
If I had LW and Chrono, I'd likely try and use MDD as much as possible for the Chono goodness! Just being a guess from someone who has never tried either, but I've always wanted to give LW a try. With so many LWers going to Modo, I almost convinced myself to go that route instead, but I'm usually pretty happy with what I have, so I don't get so upset over slower development cycles. LW looks amazing to me.
So then I start looking at features and how I'd use them and I always end up just sticking with Carrara since I loveit so much.
Genesis 2 Projecting Morphs does take forever. That's partially my problem with using those figures right now. They just seem sluggish in Carrara to me. But I'm sure I could find ways to quicken the flow if I did go that route.
Genesis 1 is really rockin' in Carrara for me right now. It just works - and works really well.
Not sure if it's still happening, but Daz3d was just giving away (PC+ Only?) the Super Physical Male Bundle for M4, which had something in it that I didn't already have. This and so many other free or incredibly cheap deals are going on all the time these days - keeping my Generation 4 fun fresh and happy. And now with the fresh new aisles of goodness RDNA artists bring to the table... Yeah... I'm a kid in a candy store!
Generation 4 cannot ever look as good as Genesis though. V4 is awesome, IMHO. So is M4. But Michael's big-shoulder clothing carries a look that can drive people nuts after a while. Genesis has been a real treat for me to play with, but isn't nearly as awesome looking as Genesis 2. So there's always a trade-off.
Whoa... ChronoSculpt!
Oh, and thanks for the workflow rundown. I wasn't aware that Daz figures worked so well in LW. I really appreciate your time in explaining... thanks! ;)
They gave away Chronosculpt to everyone that owns a LW 2015 license (you get a chronosculpt license with LW 2015), I think they will integrate Chronosculpt into Lightwave in the future so that was why they gave it away.
They have been giving away (or selling cheap) a lot of gen 4 stuff the last few weeks, I had almost nothing before but I got a lot of stuff dirt cheap now.
That's (including Chronosculpt) amazing! I love the teasers about reworking physics simulations with it - experiment with how it might look if we removed this, or kept that from falling apart, etc., it's just amazing what it's capable of helping artists do!
Yes... and over the past few years, if we visit the store often enough, again... I never check without being logged in so I'm not sure if this is just for PC+ or for everyone, but they've given a LOT of merchandise away for free. Traveler and other RDNA artists too, when they came aboard, gave away immense lists of fun stuff!
I started collecting stuff for Genesis 1 as soon as I found out about Carrara 8.5 Beta, and lately a lot of cool Genesis 1 has been given away or heavily discounted, so my collection just keeps growing.
I started this whole thing in Carrara with M4, V4 and family, and have collected a LOT of stuff for them, splurging heavily for things that would help me to realize my two main heroes and some of their adversaries, so I have a lot of stuff for them and they continue to rock my world for animating - I just love working with Generation 4 figures, but now Genesis is closing in with that as well!
My new Genesis 1 character from TheAntFarm ;)
and another I got for Christmas! (the cool guy crawling away from the Troglodytes)
One important thing to notice is that if you do export an FBX from DS and import it into LW that includes morphs, you may notice that it use lots of ram and looking at the generated .lwo files they may be very big in size, there is any easy fix for this.
They are big because all objects contains a copy of all the morphs, so if you exported all head morphs for example, they will be included in the basic shape, the hair, the shoes and also in any cloth, those morphs just use up a lot of space and does not actually offset any points so they can be deleted, a typical example is hair, they often have many polygons and a typical hair exported as FBX to lightwave may be around 500MB in size (the file), but after deleting all morphs from the hair that does not have anything to do with the hair, the file is down to 60MB, almost 10 times smaller.
Just a tip.
I had been trending between my own custom toon figures and the genesis 2 figures. Now that I have a better handle on SickleYield's tutorial for adjusting FBMs in Studio for proportion changes, even many of my toon projects will include genesis 2 figures.
I really do like those Genesis 2 figures!
I have just been buikding a new Rosie hero character using Genesis 1 > V5 and G4 with a bunch of Evolution morphs along with the same EYEDeas 3+ parented eyes that I've set up for my Genesis 2 Female Rosie.
Genesis 2 figures on my laptop are fairly useless, unless I really feel like losing my patience and temper! LOL
On my Carrara machine, they work really well.
It's cool having these three different generations for her now. I just need to match them up to make them all look more alike, which shouldn't be too hard, and then I can use all of these for different reasons - mainly costume compatibility.
But using the same concepts Diomede has been illustrating in his other thread, we can actually use Carrara as a modeler to refit items to fit any base figure, then send it to Daz Studio to make a new version. He hasn't been doing that - I have... but the same processes are used ;)
Another advantage to Genesis 1 is that Carrara seems to like her a bit more, as in she loads fast and more reliably than my Genesis 2 Female version, but I'm going to be trying more work with the Genesis 2 stuff as well.
She is more attractive then V4 version (IMHO).
Me, too... will be interesting to see her in a clip... with fire and explosions all around and Dartan to the rescue!!
Silene
You mean the costume, or also the face/body?
Both I think... Rosie's face and eyes look natural and expressive at the same time, especially the mouth (that was one thing about V4 I never warmed up to... the plastic mouth expressions). Is this the same hair applied twice over? I think you used Angelina Hair. Her costume fits very nicely, too!
S
It's the same hair, which is four copies of Angelina Hair that I customized.
The biggest difference in this version of Rosie is that I stylized her more with the Girl 4 Head morph - just a touch. She started out as Victoria 5, but Rosie's (the real Rosie) face is less like Victoria and more like the Basic Female face shape, but with a touch of The Girl for the mouth and eyes.
When I remove the V5 Head from V5, the head shrinks, which worked great for adding the G4 Head morph. One of our daughters looks SO much like The Girl it just kills me! LOL
Anyway, thank you SO Much for the valued input! I really appreciate (and really NEED) that!
I've really become attached (as I'm sure you have all noticed) to my V4 Rosie - having worked on her for so many years. So any other version I might make has to measure up to her, or get deleted. So far I really like this one, and when I look at me new Genesis 2 Female version, I don't like it anymore.
But that's easily fixed. If there's one thing I did in order to properly test these Genesis figures was to buy up a bunch of great morphs!
I went even further for females with Genesis 2 Female - getting one of Thorne's killer morph packs for merchants, and a bunch of other faces, including ALL of the Daz Ladies (and the younger Belle 6, upon whom Rosie 6 is now based)... that's Rosie 6 on the right.
I often render Rosie with a distressed expression, I see... hmmm
Not 'distressed' maybe vulnerable and needing her Dart, in a good way, as I am sure this Rosie and the real Ms Beck can kick a$$ from here to eternity and back !! But when playing heroes and heroines-- it rocks!
I was just talking about the face and body (especially arm joints). Clothing is a plain Genesis vest which I used to use in any case on my first Genesis male models. And I meant that Genesis 1 Rosie version is more attractive and more realistic then V4 version and Genesis 2 version too. As for V4 figure, it's completely separate story. I recognize her in any incarnation with any morph, and as soon as I do (no matter how pretty she is), I get cramps.
Cool. I think you two have just convinced me to move forward into the new generations.
I do think it's kinda funny how Genesis 1 clothes don't work with Genesis 2 Female very well - but such is life. I like a lot of my Genesis 2 Female clothing better than what I have for Genesis, but that's not really a problem, especially if I can get the two to match up nicely enough to be able to sub for each other... Hmmm
Also, I was holding back from Genesis 2 due to taking so long to do anything, load, add clothing, add a library pose, etc., but now I'm not so sure that it was Genesis 2 at all, but could be Anti-Virus watching to see what Postgre and CMS are doing. I'm noticing that same drag on other stuff (not related to Carrara)...
Either way, even if they take longer... I love the new technology enough (and especially the shapes!!!) to really want to make the move.
Much more, I really love how easy it is to make our own stuff for these newer figures!
Do both of you have the J&J Genesis 3 for Carrara CarrarActors?
Brian was mentioning in the other thread that he really liked them. I'm still so very skeptical. I do still plan on buying them, just so that Misty gets paid for all of that labor. I guess I'll wait until then before I decide on whether to buy some of the cool new clothing. Too broke now anyway! LOL
Gotta say, I love the idea of grabbing a facial rig bone for tweaking expressions! Yikes that feels in my gut to be a cool thing!
Woah! I spent the last couple of hours working on getting Rosie 6 to match Rosie 5 in facial appearance and she's turning out really close! The subtle differences (improvements in mesh shape and joints, etc.,) are just fine. I bet they could be shot as the same person at different parts of the same scene (in an animation) and not be a noticeable change - I say that just as an example... it'll never happen unless it's a flashback or premonition sort of scene.
The expression in Rosie 5 above is not a combination of facial morphs, but a custom Genesis facial morph (not turned up all the way) by SimonWM, so now I need to get his Expressions pack for Genesis 2 as well.
She's still not done. Still working on her eyes and haven't matched the hair shaders yet - still deciding which to use.
Funny thing... I was using the Belle 6 base and SASE Elize textures (still using some of the morphs for them), but I knew that the Base Genesis 2 Female uses V5 Bree textures by default - and Rosie 5 above is using V5 Bree, with some modification I made, so I just stored all of the shaders separately, copied my G2F shape using an NLA Pose, and made a new character using Genesis 2 Female - only to find that the V5 Bree shaders for G2F are different (with completely different UV Mapping) than the V5 Bree from Genesis 1's V5!
How odd is that? Why not just give those textures a new name, right? Oh well. It didn't take me long to do similar modifications to those - it just took more time than I had, so she's just not done yet! LOL
I also still have to tweak the eyes a bit in scale and placement... but she's close.
The new Rosie 6
Here are some closeups of Rosie 5. I've learned more about some morphs on the EYEdeas figures, plus I think I might give the hair some more saturation back again, and some more work to the morphs. so she's not done yet either ;)
Of course, I'll have to build Rosie 6 again once I get these expression morphs... but that's fast and easy to do
Very cool that SimonWM actually sculpted entire new morphs for the expressions, instead of just making MCM (morph controlling morphs) because now we still have our other morphs available to further tweak them... it's really great how they work.
If I can, I'm getting the bundle for both G2M and G2F. But right now it's looking like I'll be just shy of that - so I'll have to get both separately... oh well... such is life, eh? ;)
(image link leads to product page)
I will never pay for the facial expressions made by someone else, not myself. All those expressions will not express the right feeling.
For me it's gen 4 all the way but my needs are different than many others who are using Genesis 1 and 2. My end goal is animation so for this I found gen 4 to be much more forgiving on a slower system. I've since upgraded my system but I've invested a lot of time in getting to know V4 and M4. I just find them more flexible and easier to work with for my needs. One thing that I firmly believe is that they still have a LOT of life left in them! A little custom tweaking goes a long way. For example here's a native V4 render that incorporates some morphs, alpha and normal maps I'm working on.
Great lloking eye - Dart will be beside himself with the Iris Glow there!
Ooooh. stringtheory9 I am a sucker for good eye reflections/iris colours etc! I am also making my own eyebrows now with a PS brush set I got someplace I can't recall.
Dart, I don't have trouble with Genesis 2 loading UNLESS it's with the HD skin textures, so I don't use them as I don't need them. I make Normal maps with Crazybump for ruggedness, scars, etc.that I paint onto the textures. I do need my figures to be flexible for morphs and poses. Like Vysur I do my own expressions, but sometimes begin with a basic expression morph.
What is really nice about G3 is all those facial bones which give you more options. Extra joints in the hands and feet, forearms and shins.
This is a quickie render of my Neanderthals (for kids) I have started recently with Misty's CarrarActors for my teenage brother & sister. Am working with making the cave (from scratch!). The younger children in the background are old Genesis 1s. I need to work with the Growing Up stuff next for G3. Fingers crossed they will work! If not, I have some as G2s still.
Killer!!!
Those are many of the same reasons I've stuck with Generation 4 for so long. I've never really delved into the 'realism' category for skin textures. In fact, I've even reduced the resolutions of my maps in the past. The thing I wanted to stand out is the eyes. Such an entire change of substance from skin to eye surface.
Very cool, Silene! Very cool!
Thanks... a long ways to go, but getting there!. And agree about the realism skin school of thought. It's perfect for those who want it, but I don't and make my own alternative textures. And it was you that pointed the way to weight painting for effects, too! Crazybump makes me a bit lazy, but gets the job done when I want figures to share a certain look.
Silene
Aiko 7 now my go to Aiko. Haven't loaded A3/Aiko19 in a while.
sigh, pc coupie not working on wear them all, wanna see how it works with aiko3 stuff on aiko7