Is Gen 4 on its way out?
Ashfire45
Posts: 126
I ask this because I have a very, very custom designed character on Aiko 4, whom I absolutely adore and who I've spent a good few years trying to perfect.
GenX doesn't work for me very well; mainly due to changes in the face and the ugly bending issues with the body.
So, in short, I want to keep on using Aiko/Victoria 4 instead of Genesis. Is this possible to do, or are vendors going to stop making clothes/props for Gen 4 and focus on Genesis? Since the autofit feature is free, why can't they make the clothes for Gen 4, and Genesis users can simply...autofit the clothes onto Genesis? I'd love if they brought out an autofit for Gen4...NEVER going to happen, of course, but it's nice to dream!
So, in short, I'm asking about the life line of Generation 4! Is clinging onto it for dear life an option?
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Comments
I think this topic pops up from time to time. Nah, Gen 4 isn't on the way out - most new products on other sites are all Gen 4. You can use whatever generation product you'd like. Heck, I still use a few Gen 3 products myself.
Still a lot of items being made of V4/A4 at Renderosity and Runtime DNA. This might fade with time, but that is not certain. People like the G4 characters.
I'm glad to hear it, to be honest; it'll be a sad day when they stop making products for Gen 4. I don't really see any reason to switch to Genesis, to be honest; new clothes, sure, autofit, sure...But to me, that seems like the only appeasing advantage on offer!
I'm glad that renderosity and runtime DNA still support Gen 4, but why doesn't Daz3D?
Yes, it's possible to do.
While some DAZ vendors still support Gen 4, there are not enough products released at DAZ for Gen 4 to justify clinging to Gen 4 IF you want a decent selection of new products.
If you are a PC member, you will find even fewer DAZ Original Gen 4 products released, and even fewer $1.99 priced PC Products.
If you don't mind (or like) shopping other stores, you'll find plenty of new offerings at those stores.
Genesis does not work well for me in Poser Pro 2012, so abandoning Gen 4 is not an option as it is not an option for others. However, I have a glut of Gen 4 clothing and character textures, and I can create dynamic clothing in MD2.
Use gen4 as long as you like. There's nothing that says you HAVE to update to Genesis. There are plenty of clothing items available for the G4 line, and new products seem to be coming out daily, at least on other sites. As for DAZ, it makes sense that the vendors here are supporting Genesis over G4, since Genesis is the current flagship character for DAZ.
Until Genesis will be only fully functional in DS Gen 4 is fine. Just look in other places, where V4 Still hold her regin :)
Oh.. psstt.. try using Autofit on long skirt, and than repeat the sentence :)
who hasn't put years of effort into making V4 into our dream woman - or Aiko3 :)
many more years luvving my magnetless V4. baked in character morphs to make her memory lean. V4 with M4's uvs. wmV4. V4 to V3. if you add defined hair groups for poser, another V4 obj.
I have bought several Gen 4 products recently, there are a few in MM. I bought Emiko and Essence recently and also a couple from Ignis Serpentis. So no, not even DAZ 3D has abandonned the Gen 4 figs, contrary to speculation from some.:roll:
The major advantage is that Genesis is a universal character with a one-size-fits-all wardrobe. As much as I love the Gen4 characters, there's a huge benefit in being able to use any outfit for any character rather than having to use magnets or special clothing fits if your morph of choice makes Vicky shorter by three centimeters.
There's still a lot of love and support for the Gen4 characters, but I expect Genesis will become the norm sooner or later. From a buyers perspective, I only need to worry about getting the look I want rather than which character it was made for, and from a sellers perspective they can reach a wider audience with each release.
Well, I'm glad to hear there's some universal love for Gen 4 still! I was getting worried I was in a Gen 4 wasteland, surrounded by Genesis users..
But, HeraldOfFire, you're spot on. I do know that Genesis has a LOT of good features, and the one size fits all wardrobe - excellently phrased, I may add - is the big, big selling point for me. Plus, getting clothes that actually fit to your character, instead of using all the bizzare tricks of the trade....xD However! As someone who uses Daz to render rp/book characters, it's quite important I get the EXACT look I want for my main gal. Despite all my attempts and tweaks and this and that, Genesis just won't give me that...So, until the day they stop selling content for Victoria 4, I'll have to deprive myself of those gorgeous advantages!
Genesis won't appeal to everyone based upon the kind of art they do. But the ability to blend every morph you have for Genesis to make new characters is hardly trivial, particularly if you're into creating unique human characters or sci fi-fantasy characters. The very reason you don't want to stop using Gen 4 is the exact kind of thing you might have been able to do with Genesis a lot easier, given the right combo of morphs.
Aiko3 has always been my main figure of choice. Gen4 never really caught on with me though recently I have appreciated the expressions that come with A4 and G4. Genesis is my second figure of choice as I feel its what Gen4 should have been and the ability to do male or female makes it a lot cheaper to cloth. There is nothing wrong with having and using multiple generations of figures.
Excellent manifest, Matt!, I even use Cookie figures in some renders!
I had the same toughts when Aiko3 was replaced with Gen4, I was terrified!!, no more PA providing A3 clothes, no more diversity, Gen4 for me is a difficult figure to morph, but still crying for my beloved A3 and feeling the end of my 3D career [ok, no XD], Genesis was created, with fear I've choose her [or him?], was more complex than Gen4!!, but the diversity of morphs got me interested.
Now, I'm happy with the choice using Genesis figures, and Aiko3 is not buried in my runtime, no!, both figures can live happily in my runtime.
After Mattymanx and zilvergrafix, all I should say is "me too"...
Gen4, Aiko 3, and Hiro 3 still have their fans, enough so that new freebies are still being created for them. (Not so much for H3, but still...) And, as far as I know, Genesis doesn't yet work in 3D Studio or Blender. (Daz Studio and Poser aren't the be-all and end-all of 3D art, after all.) I can't see DAZ3D ignoring these markets altogether.
That's technically true, but if an outfit doesn't come with a special shape for the Genesis shape you are using, while it will fit, it tends to look not that much better than whatever methods people were forced to use before. That's why we have the growing number of tools to solve problems with fitting clothes to Genesis. I'm not saying it's not a remarkable step forward, of course, just that it didn't completely solve the problem.
As far as I am concerned, while I wish more vendors I like would support Genesis, I'm not really supporting it myself. Still prefer Gen 4.
I have tons of V4 items as well as some very custom FBMs i have done for V4 that I use often. that being said, I use Genesis most of the time as she is very versatile and my custom V4 morphs transfer well and with clothing for gen 4 and gen 3 able to fit well, I see no reason to use V4 much anymore. Luckily since Gen 4 clothing fits i still buy lots of it, but I still want Genesis specific items also like heels and such that don't transfer well.
Victoria 4 is still the queen of Poser. Despite the success of the DSON importer I usually won't use Genesis in Poser... mostly because I have grown to like Daz Studio 4.5 and Genesis has more tools to work with in Daz than in Poser. So for me anyway... its Genesis in Daz Studio and Vicky 4 and Mike 4 in Poser. I don't see any weakening of the Gen 4 products offered at the sites that focus on Poser... but I do see Daz as focusing as they should on Genesis.
That's technically true, but if an outfit doesn't come with a special shape for the Genesis shape you are using, while it will fit, it tends to look not that much better than whatever methods people were forced to use before.
I have to disagree heavily here. There are tons of items in my runtime which were never specifically designed for some of the shapes I have. Because of the weight mapping, the majority will fit perfectly even under more extreme morphs. Trying to do the same in the Gen4 series was incredibly difficult and borderline frustrating. Those Genesis ones which are a bit misfit can either be smoothed or otherwise quickly remedied. The same task with Gen4 was a far more laborious and time consuming process with exception to a few paid-for tools such as CrossDresser.
While I won't disagree that the Gen4 were (and still are) outstanding figures, Genesis still has a massive upper hand in terms of flexibility.
not trying to start an argument but ssgbryan does make a point - there are only a few characters with dark skin for Genesis. But Genesis can use generation 4's skin textures. There are more ethnic skin textures available for Victoria 4 than for Genesis considering that Genesis has been out for about two years.
Hopefully artists will create more ethnic textures and morphs for Genesis.
I think there are a ton of people who are still using Gen 4 with no real interest in Genesis, because they prefer Poser for whatever reason (including myself). I haven't tried using the DSON thing, so I have no idea how well it works, but I think you lose most of the real advantages of genesis with it, so it becomes just another figure...but one that isn't optimized for Poser.
So, until Poser users find a fully functional alternative to M4 and V4 that is better than those and has strong 3rd party support, I think there will be a market for selling items for those two, and thus, continued support via sites like Renderosity and DNA. I'm surprised everytime I see a genesis item at 'rosity marketplace, since it seems like it makes much better sense to sell those items here. But, it does mean that DAZ has little to offer us Poser users, other than environment pieces like you find in Stonemason's store (and Faveral, and nightshift 3d, and ...)
My guess is that in a future version of Poser, the scaling stuff needed to do what genesis does will be available, and there will be a Vicky 6 or Vicky 10 that works in both again. But, I could be wrong. If SM is smart, they have some very good talent working on moving Poser users away from DAZ figures. But, they certainly haven't shown much ability in pulling that off so far.
As for diversity, I'm not entirely sure that V4 and the gang had too much diversity very early on. Also, keep in mind that it didn't take long for the majority of venders to switch to V4 after she came out. While some folks clearly prefer V3 and M3, the shoulder bends and a few other things were so severe that the next generation was a huge upgrade for most users and worth switching for...and venders were eager to follow. So, it's probably more a matter of how many venders are contributing to genesis than anything else.
Actually the most versatile models are the Aiko and Victoria lines of any version. All you have to do is look at all characters made for the models to see it. Aiko is used for both Anime and young girls, particularly of the fantasy variety (just check out Thorne and Salsa's characters). The Victoria line has been used for multiple ages of women from quite young to quite old. My disappointment is in the fact this same trend is not used on Hiro and Michael. The vast majority of characters created seem to forget Hiro exists and Michael seems to be stuck in the young man mode with buff body, with a few senior one's thrown in.
Genesis is not such a bore or difficult one to use, it's just different, it's new and we all know how people tend to stick with what they know and fear the new. I believe what should have been done is allow the other Gen models to be used for creation of product as easily as the Genesis model, without having to buy all those morphs. It basically amounts to buying models you already own.
They should have just created a script that would use the previous versions information to add the morphs to Genesis, thereby allowing the use of what is already owned and giving customers the choice of what to use the script for. Basically using the same concept as Evil Innocence's CrossDresser program, you must buy a license for the model and it's a lower price, making it more available to those who struggle with income. Unfortunately, Daz has now created a model so vastly different from the previous versions, this script may not be usable in that way.
Another thing I noticed is that the morphs of previous versions now available for Genesis, are not the same as the previous versions. You can not recreate a previous model for use on a new model when you have such vast differences in how each was created in the first place...just take a look at the bone structure as an example. The Gen4 and Gen3 models...now morphs of Genesis, are nowhere near the same. They don't even look the same. The only reason these morphs were created for Genesis is due to the amount of complaining done about not being able to use content from previous models, which gave them an opening to create more for everyone to buy in the way of morphs and scripts that allow you to use previous poses and characters.
There will always be people who don't want to use DAZ Studio because it's DAZ Studio, and with respect to those who did so much work to create it, Genesis in DSON is impractical to use in a workflow compared to the Gen 4's because it's so laggy (even in Poser Pro 2012 on a good machine!).
I've been kind of expecting the weight-mapped gen 4's to take off more than they seemingly have, especially when there's a free tool to convert Gen4 clothes to WMGen4 clothes. Maybe it's because WMM4 isn't out yet. The solution isn't going to be Alyson and Ryan. Not when they're hard to make decent characters with for most customers, have so few clothes and character sets, and completely new ones have to be made for them when conversions are possible for both Genesis and WMGen4. I think they will continue to maintain a niche of fervent fans, like Miki, and never take over the main market.
I think not enough people must actually have P9/PP2012 to drive conversion to weight-mapped figures in general, especially with all the bend-fixes for V4 and M4 that have been sold at Rendo lately. Because make no mistake, objective quality of a figure and its features are not going to do it, or everyone would have switched to Genesis. Platform, clothing support, and ease of use are just as important to a big chunk of the user base.
I'm actually very curious to see where the market goes.
Isn't that what Autofit does for clothing, and Genesis Generation X for morphs?
I have found it much easier (with Genesis Generation X) to recreate 4th Gen characters with Genesis than when I try to recreate 3rd Gen characters with V4/M4. V4 has such a huge collection of morphs and is far superior to V3 in morphability, but there are still V3 morphs I wished I could have for V4.
"I’m actually very curious to see where the market goes."
I think a lot of vendors and user are, also.
Yep, and as there are plenty of ethnic textures for V4, you have them for Genesis too. I use Elite Marie for my character and it works fine. I'm not terribly fond of the ethnic morph sets for Genesis, but there are plenty of basic eye, nose, and mouth morphs to cobble together your own.
Older characters are more difficult to make in Genesis, but not impossible. I'm pretty sure there's an Old morph in DieTrying's free Genesis morphs (from ShareCG), and Phoenix1966 makes a lot of older character textures that work with Genesis.
SnowS
Zev0's Aging Morphs are coming to DAZ pretty soon, I think.
On a technical level it wouldn't be difficult for you to create a set of UV's for the Gen3 characters so that you could use older textures. Morphs can already be transferred from earlier characters via Generation X, so that much is also catered for. With Genesis having access to the textures and (to some extent) the morphs of its predecessors, it at least earns brownie points for being flexible.
Actually it would - the problem is that two maps on the G3 layout need to end up on one map on the G4/Genesis layout and there's no way to do that.