Where have all the creatures gone?
mikek
Posts: 192
I have been wondering for some time now why older figure generations seem to have far more items of non standard human models.
Number of items the store lists in the people category:
People and Wearables->Genesis: 1348
People and Wearables->Genesis 2: 2748
People and Wearables->Genesis 3: 3283
So we see a trend upwards. In comparsion the animals and creatures category:
Animals and Creatures->Genesis: 140
Animals and Creatures->Genesis 2: 108
Animals and Creatures->Genesis 3: 71
What is happening? Newer gens receive far more content so the store seems to grow but there are less and less creatures. Is Daz accepting with each generation less non human models? Have artists lost interest and do now only standard humans? With the store growing the sale numbers in the creature category should also be higher but then why is there less new content?
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Comments
One simple fact is that many of the creatures don't really need to be 'updated' all that often or work best on the original Genesis platform. Another factor is how well they sold. If they did poorly, in total units sold, then there is little to no incentive to continue/update them.
With iray the difference between what we see now and some of the genesis (or older) figures is imo rather big. They often don't fit well next to a highly polished current gen human. Also wouldn't the same be true for newer human models? Genesis 3 human models keep far better up than the old creatures.
But if they didn't sell well why were there even that many for genesis and before that? Would be interesting to know how well a creature sold back then and how well it sells now.
Well, I'm hoping to make a lot of weird critters down the road, free.
For what it's worth.
Materials can be updated fairly easily...even a manual conversion with just the Iray Uber base is often much better than the on-the-fly autoconversion at render time.
And if it takes 180 hrs to make a 'creature' that sells 100 units it's not likely to be updated all that often...now if it sold a 1000 units, then, it probably would be.
RawArt, for one, contnued to use Genesis for his "creatures" even while he was using later versions for more human shapes. I think part of the appeal, in general rather than necessarily for RawArt in particular, was that using Genesis gave male and female versions immediately, rather than needing two characters with separate maps.
For skin or lifelike creatures with sss requirement and such this doesn't work well imo. I have seen backgrounds where this works somewhat but even there the conversion lacks usually the nice iray look as shadows are baked into the diffuse and so on.
As often as not, the quality difference you see with Iray is a function of the renderer, not the textures of the original model, so investing in a decent set of iray conversion shaders like NGS2 usually brings them up to the same levels, and while there are improvements in the bending of Genesis 2, 3 and 8, those are HUMAN bending and offset by the increasing loss of actual geometry in critical areas... especially since with Genesis 3 & 8. And then, of course, there's the little problem that anything made with Genesis 3 and 8 is basically dead to the entire Poser half of the market. If you're doing monsters and creatures that are less human looking than a devil or vampire, there's no need to limit yourself by using a human-shaped base in the first place. For many of the creature creature type artists it makes more sense to build them from the ground up so the end result is something that can be sold to both DAZ and Poser users. Which why you'll see a lot of the major creature artists like Sixius selling at other stores that cater more to the poser crowd.
Obviously they do sell well enough, overall, for the vendors who continue to do them, or DAZ wouldn't handle those products anymore if they consistantly tanked. Even so, that doesn't change the fact that some items just don't do as well as hoped. In fact, for a lot of products sold here, the number of units that are sold is probably a lot lower than most people who shop here think it is.
Actually, it has a lot less to do with baked shadows than it does with whether or not the orginal texture maps are linear. If they aren't linear, running them in a renderer like Iray will never show them off well. But either lieing to the renderer and saying they are or making them linear goes a very long way to making them 'more real'.
The main advantage of having a figure based on the human shapes is the ability to reuse content like poses and possible addons like clothes. Thats a big plus for any potential buyer. On the other side wanting to release for DS and Poser is understandable. Although I would have expected a figure for a newer genesis in the daz store would outsell one of the other stores for poser & daz (who uses its own skeleton). But I have no idea what the real sale numbers could be for each.
Non Iray background materials look for me with iray usually only about as good/bad as they did before iray. There is some tweeking possible but it has limits. Replacing everything with proper iray shaders creates usually far better results for me than trying to convert whats there. The problem here is while this often works with clothes, objects and backgrounds creatures can be difficult depending on their skin. If its human like skin using a preset like CybersoxXIII mentioned can work but for less human like its difficult.
The first image is the Gazer (can't get a much older creature) with default mats converted/rendered on the fly
The second, is a ten minute (didn't do all the eyes, as it would have taken longer) manual conversion...
No, it isn't perfect, but it's a lot better. And if I went and pulled out all the stops and did the dual lobe and all that, it would be even better.
From what I recall, Reptilian 6 sold fairly well, yet never had an Iray-compatible Genesis 3 version.
Still kind of hope someone might do some proper Iray skins for it, but...
Hmm. Just ran a test and it converts pretty well to Iray as is. Here's a quickie conversion I did using NGS2 in Dark Skin mode, with max pores. The only things I changed from the straight conversion was to tweak the metal flakes up a notch and pull the diffuse texture for the tongue since it looked a bit dark.
Hmm I like the first one better but could the light. They aren't bad but booth miss lifelike features and look a bit like wax figures to me. Beside that he keeps well up.
The Gazer pretty much only has diffuse and bump maps. The lack of a specular map, among others, gives it that wax-like look, since it has the same specular all over.
I do admit to really wishing we had a new and updated DAZ domestic animal catalog. There are animals sold here, and good ones too, however I don't need to render wild animals. I'm looking for domestics and they are few and far between or really too dated.
Yeah, I know other stores have cats, and other stores are making dogs, but, I could really use practical animals sold here...
I completely agree with this, unfortunately the only PA doing animals in this store seems to be only interested in wild animals (and now dinosaurs).