Genesis/2 characters - what is best choice for many options?
rampart_1576840087
Posts: 504
Looking at all the choices for the various Daz characters I thought it worth asking.
There are a number of Genesis and Genesis 2 characters to buy in the shop.
Looking at all the choices it can get expensive, especially after clothing and accessories for the characters.
It would be a help to know what are some best choices for characters when someone is starting with Carrara 8.5 pro.
Last week there were many Genesis 2 characters offered for $15 each.
That sounded reasonable, but from what I read that was all you bought was a base character.
I found a morph tool thing, which from what I can tell allows simpler on-the-fly modification of characters.
It appears to be a tool for making changes in the body, not the faces.
What about the heads, faces, and hair ?
I've not done spent any time learning about this area.
This maybe more complex questions than I realize.
I'm OK with some links or such to at least get started.
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No problem, rampart1, you'll see that it can get very complex as you go. But fortunately for Genesis and Genesis 2 (and other DAZ Figures) we have DAZ3D magic helping that complexity to become simplicity! Lets start with your first question, shall we?
Great price, but all you get is a base character
It may be more helpful (for me) if you provide a link to which product you mean, but here's what it seems like to me:
Genesis or Genesis 2 Male or Genesis 2 Female are the "Base Figures" in the Genesis line.
When you buy a "Character" for Genesis or Genesis 2, you usually (unless otherwise noted) get:
- A Character Preset in the library to load the Character with all of the morphs set and materials in place
- Any custom morphs that go into the character are also available on the Genesis or Genesis 2 figure after its installed
- All of the texture maps for the character
Here are some note about what I've just said:
Yes, it's just the character. The Genesis line works where all clothing and hair products made for the same Genesis base, Like Genesis, Genesis 2 Male, or Genesis 2 Female, will work even after new morphs have been added. It's all in the new Genesis technology for morph following, which is truly spectacular.
What that means is this:
Say you buy "Olympia". You'll get her new body shape and face shape, I think she might also come with a texture set, maybe not - look in the product details. Now that you have her morphs installed, you'll also have an Olympia preset for loading the character, but those morphs will also be available for any new Genesis 2 Female figures you make or use.
Furthermore, let's say that you've previously purchased clothes and/or hair for Genesis 2 Female. Now those will automatically adjust to the new shapes when you dial them, even if only partially.
Here's a very important thing to know regarding Carrara 8.5 and Genesis:
The material files for adding new textures to the figures do not yet work. However, you can use DAZ Studio to open the new Character Preset and add any changes, then save it back into the DAZ Library, and it will now load into Carrara. Keep in mind that, like bringing in new Poser figures, you'll still need to tweak the shaders to work better... simple Simon. So like Poser figures, it's important to find out where the texture files are installed right away, so you can load in bump maps into the bump channel, spec maps into the Highlight channel, etc.,
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There's a tool for changing body shapes - what about the head?
Okay, Poke-Away is an incredible product for Carrara. Genesis clothing seems to fit beautifully in DAZ Studio, but if you apply it directly in Carrara, like I do, it seems like there's always some kind of issue. Poke-Away works like this: Dial a morph above zero and it grows the clothing for that area, leaving the person's shape alone. Dial below zero and the clothing stays the same but the person shrinks. There are a whole bunch of morphs in the pack, so you can get pretty detailed in how to "fit" the clothing to the figure, or the figure to the clothes.
Thorne's Genesis Head Morph Resource Kits (link is for kit 4) are additional shaping morphs to tweak out the face just the way you like. Check the included morphs, because some of them might affect the whole head. I have some of these and really like them.
I've not tried Bend Morphs or the like, so I'm not sure if those affect the clothing and the figure or just the figure. It might say in the promo details.
I started collecting all sorts of morphs for Genesis 1 as it was first coming out. One note about doing this is that it adds so many morphs to every Genesis you load in! Say you just want a Freak 5 Character so you load in the Freak 5 character preset. Well, you do get a Freak 5 preset character loaded in, but he will also have every morph that you've ever installed available in his Parameters list. This doesn't bother me, but it did grow my morphs list to very high levels for Genesis 1!
In Carrara, you'll notice a better morph organization with Genesis 2 figures. Genesis 1 morphs are more sporadically filed between the main character level and the actor, but you get used to where they are after a while. I love how versatile Genesis 1 is, being a male and female and monster all in one base. But the Genesis 2 shapes are hands down much more realistic, and I think that they went to a Male figure and separate female figure to make fitting better across the board.
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I still feel that V4, M4 and all of those figures are easier to work with out of the box in Carrara. The reason is simple, at this point:
Generation 4 and earlier figures were designed to work properly in Poser. Carrara has been tweaked to work well with Poser figures.
Genesis is brand new technology and DAZ Studio 4 was designed around and along with Genesis, so they work very well together.
DAZ's new duf format was born as they developed compatibility with Carrara. So Carrara does open and work with duf files. But it's still very new, so using duf material application to a figure straight within Carrara does not work. duf poses do work.
Moral of the story in short:
If you buy a model (like a vehicle, building, furniture - some non-Genesis object) that is offered in both Poser and DAZ formats, load the Poser version into Carrara because it will work as expected - as we've been working with Poser objects all along. If you load in something and things just seems to be not working the way you want them to... check to see if you loaded it from the DAZ library or from a Poser Runtime. As of this writing, there is a new 8.5 beta for Carrara, but it does not yet address this issue. So for now, load the Poser Runtime version if possible.
For Genesis, only use the DAZ Studio version, not the Poser DSON version!
While there still needs to be work done to Carrara to make DUF files work more fluently, Genesis and Genesis 2 are still very much worth looking into. They are a superior figure to generation 4 figures - hands down! Better joints, better rigging, more realistic shapes... Yes... I still use my Generation 4 heroes in my project. But I have my Genesis 2 Female "Rosie" almost perfected now, and Dartanbeck is near completion. I have done so much work on saving NLA clips, pose files, shader change tweaks for various scenes and situations... all collected and organized for my production, it's hard for me to justify the switch right now, myself - for this. But Genesis (and 2) looks so good that I am seriously contemplating trashing it all for the new figures. They are very nice ;)
I do remember that it took me a while to get the hang of V4 after working with V3 for a long time. I think that this is the same thing... in that Genesis 2 figures and their supporting products will be like second nature after a bit of practice.
Oh my... look at the time....
Hello rampart1
Previous post about Genesis/2, there's a few links in there as well, worth checking out.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50312/
As regards what's best you will find that there will be a number of thoughts/opinions about that.
Firstly what is your budget ?
- If it's like mine you will be able to afford a few new items but otherwise will be checking out the sales.
Secondly are you a newbie to DAZ3D & Poser ?
- If you are new there is lots that is available with lots of choices to make.
- If you have had DAZ3D/Poser for a while you will most likely have a number of models to work with in addition to those supplied with Carrara.
- There are also freebie sites such as ShareCG, some of the freebie items are as good as the payware items.
Thirdly how good is your learning curve ?
- We all differ as to what we learn straight away and what we struggle with. Carrara does have a learning curve but is well worth it !!!!!!!!
- Some things seemed very clear and easy to me while some things had me scratching my head. There are also lots of people who can help provide advice for when you get stuck, there are also excellent tutorials to get you started.
Fourthly, are you a kit-basher or do you like making your own items ?
- You can do both to your hearts content with Carrara.
Finally what do you want to achieve with Carrara ?
- Renders ? Making models ? Landscapes ? Animation ?
- There's a lot that can be done, my advice as someone going from Newbie to Regular is to start with the basics but also keeping an open mind as to what direction you want to travel with Carrara. The Carrara Challenge is a good place to join in if you have time.
Regards, Bunyip
Great information, terrific responses
I was really in the dark on this.
I conclude it may be a best course to go only with G2 characters.
Not because I cannot use the other characters, but I can get a better handle on content and content purchases.
The G2 is an improvement over Genesis, which is as it should be since it is the latest version.
Thank you
I second that opinion. I've done a number of short animations in Carrara, all with Gen4 characters, and with very little difficulty ... with the characters, anyway. And if, like me, you have a lot of Gen4 compatible clothes, hair, mocaps, etc., there is a lot of reluctance to switch. Someday. Maybe.
I second that opinion. I've done a number of short animations in Carrara, all with Gen4 characters, and with very little difficulty ... with the characters, anyway. And if, like me, you have a lot of Gen4 compatible clothes, hair, mocaps, etc., there is a lot of reluctance to switch. Someday. Maybe.
Maybe I missed on this... I was thinking from all I have read and this thread that is would be best to start with G2, since it is current.
There is alot of content that applies to G2 as well.
So... did I miss it?
Well G2M & F may be current but buggy too.
There is so much back catalogue stuff out there for M4 &V4; it would be wasteful to ignore them and it all works so well in carrara.
Poser users STILL use it largely in preference to genesis onwards which saya something.
DAZ studio is the only thing genesis and genesis 2 is complely perfect in.
I have also found hiding parts under clothes they export better to iClone 3Dxchange and iclone, just a lot more work retargeting and adding facial expression but once in there I can use many more than genesis in spite of being higher poly in their base state add decimator to the work flow or Ultimate Unwrap 3D poly reduce and they become very good crowd fillers.
Hmmm...
Wendy, looking at the new avatars within IC6 it makes me wonder if RL isn't closing the compatability gap between Daz and iclone genesis 2 characters.
The next few weeks may produce more and better information on iclone characters/avatars relationship with Daz characters.
I gather from what you mentioned you prefer the M4 V4 characters for lower poly applications. Yet, you still use the higher poly Genesis/G2 as well.
I was concerned about whether to buy the decimator, as I do recall reading where many early users of daz3d characters passed them through 3dxchange after decimator. The number of poly were so high they were unusable for practical application in iclone, if the decimator wasn't applied before export to 3dxchange.
Do you prefer the Ultimate uwrap3d?
I like what I have read about the number of convert tools included with it. The new 3Dxhange 6 will export obj files, which might make it possible to do some workarounds between unwrap3d converted files into Carrara and other Daz applications. Interesting!
I use UUW3D a lot before bringing 3rd party stuff into carrara too like extracted Skyrim nif files and Direct X files
love that program and it works a lot better than decimator
as I have pipeline I have also used it on iClone figures to make very low poly figures indeed
I would wait for a sale for decimator it is usefull too and good with genesis as the autoconvert facial animation pipeline still works for iclone
and yes on M4 and V4 it is very good as they are very high poly
in carrara of course this is a good thing and why they look much better IMO than genesis as well as working better, genesis relies on subdivision for artistic renders hence the popularity of the HD morphs that only work in DAZ M4 and V4 are already high poly enough to look good as is.
What is a good price for decimator?
not full price :lol:
Since I joined Daz3d PC+ I think I can buy it for around $70 USD. The Ultimate Unwrap3d Pro is about the same price.
Which would you suggest as a first or preferred purchase?
I know I have to lower poly for almost any Daz character into 3Dxchange to iclone. Most higher quality iclone 5 characters are around 35K poly. I have not looked at the IC6 yet.
Low poly under 12K poly is what I targeted for multi-avatar scenes in IC5.
I do not have iclone pipeline version, only the pro version.
I don't see anyway to effciently use iclone 6 with 70K or higher poly count Daz characters.
Everyone likes the fast realtime render of iclone, but I think that has always been a misapplied way of thinking. If your avatars are under 30K poly it really isn't a strain for renders as the same scene in Daz3d or Carrara with 70-80K poly characters.
I think I paid $35 50% off maybe even less, hard to work out my total order for that day included the Licorne ship and accessories and totaled $57 which guessing adds up to 50% off of both!
there was 50% off sale last month
DAZ will ALWAYS have another sale is just a matter of patience as it is usually just after you pay full price for something.
LOL...
You got that right!
I learned that lesson well enough buying content for Iclone.
RL never has a marketplace sale, only their own store content is promoted at lower prices.
A couple of other types of sales to consider are:-
Fast Grab - you can get some very nice prices.
Is a case of continually checking to see whats new and if they have something reduced that is of interest to you.
Platinum Club + if you can afford it gives you a discount on a lot of things, plus some freebies (and there are some old gems hidden in the forum for PC Members) as well as a couple of monthly discount vouchers. Check it out and see if you might like it.
http://www.daz3d.com/platinum-club-plus
As regards Genesis, G2M & G2F, I also have lots of M3 V3 A3 H3 M4 V4 A4 H4 items including morphs.
If you are interested in the Gen 3 & 4 figures and using them with Genesis G2M G2F there are a number of conversions to enable "cross-kitting" to take place.
http://www.daz3d.com/genx2-addon-for-genesis-2
http://www.daz3d.com/michael-4-for-genesis-2-male
http://www.daz3d.com/genesis-2-male-and-female-base-uvs-for-genesis
http://www.daz3d.com/victoria-6-and-michael-6-uvs-for-genesis
There are a number of items of DAZ related UV and shapes that are helpful for "cross-kitting".
If you do go for a "cross-kitting" option which greatly increases the options it also means more "budget" and more "learning".
Autofit is "cross-kitting" manna from heaven.
http://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=autofit
There are also shaders for DAZ3D, Bryce, and Carrara.
Unfortunately they are not applicable to each other, but if you save DAZ3D as DUF files they generally come in okay.
Shader Doctor by Fenric is well worth considering.
http://www.daz3d.com/shader-power-tools-for-carrara
Bryce items can be exported as obj and imported in.
EDIT: Added Autofit info.
Yes, that's the bottom line. To me, Gen4 in Carrara animations ain't broke, at least not enough to need fixing. Especially if the "fix" is buggy ... the real message in the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Plus those V4/M4/K4 "back catalogs" are not just here at DAZ ...
Steve K
I am very new to Daz3d everything.
I barely know zip about zip.
All I have done past 3 years is iclone and live actor video production.
There are so many animation tools in the Daz3d applications that are not available in iclone.
I have a complete arsenal of competent editing and effects tools for Sony Vegas Pro.
Carrara and the Daz3d applications appear exciting to me. There is just so much you can do with them, unlike iclone.
iclone has alot of efficient tools built in to accomodate video production, which are excellent.
Yet, you almost have to buy content constantly for projects.
I bought a Carrara Tutorial and I've worked through it one time.
The holidays have not allowed much time for it.
Now, I am down to trying to make sense of Daz3d content purchases.
Since I am so new, I am reluctant to buy content or characters without some pretty good insight.
The avatar/characters look superb. I am just trying to find a starting ground. I have no daz content, except for some freebies and the content that accompanies the Carrara and Daz3d studio.
The iclone 3dxhange will do some very interesting things with genesis characters and conversion of those characters to iclone.
I'm not sure about M4 V4 or other characters. There are a number of support documents that explain migration of iclone Genesis/G2 characters into iclone. So...yes, that is basically why I mentioned Genesis/G2.
Since I have been doing iclone video production for over 3 years... you must realize I am competent enough with it to produce videos without alot of problems. I cannot begin to say that about Carrara or Daz3d studio, of which I know zip.
Yes, I bought a tutorial package by Mark Bremmer. I think this is an excellent package and he does a very good job or teaching.
After I make a couple more passes with his tutorials I should have a pretty good grasp of Carrara.
I will need to acquire some characters and some additional content, that was the reason this posting. I may have answered my own questions in this thread and I'm not aware. LOL
Anyway, I appreciate all the good responses helpful suggestions.
I am not a penny pincher. I have thousands in software and I have learned you can throw money at applications that don't get the job done. So, I have become more careful purchaser.
When on sale grab the V4 & M4 bundles
they were heavily discounted not long ago, you must become very sale canny here.
Aiko3 has oodles of freebies on sharecg and is free in a starfighter bundle and very popular
look through all the PC $1.99 items too for great buys.
A handy item to have is morphing clothes by Dimension3D, you can otherwise use transfer active morphs in DAZ studio and save the duf file but this utility will put all the extra morphs for any morphed character in clothing items eliminating the need for unifits as unlike Genesis generation 4 eg V4 & M4 do not have autofollow, it is something I use a lot for extreme character morphs.
Evilinoccence XD (crossdresser) is also useful and works on a license per figure basis. Like autofit for non genesis in that you can fit clothes from many figures to each other.
Another thing to consider before going with Decimator and/or Unwrap, try just loading in Genesis or Genesis 2 and turn off smoothing. You're basically then seeing the SubD cage without the SubD being applied, which is still higher polygon count than V4 or M4, if I remember correctly, and works amazingly fast in Carrara.
I don't use iClone, so maybe I'm missing something there... no need to explain it if you don't want to though... I've decided now that all of my production rendering, animating, scene building, lighting, shading, etc., will be done in Carrara. It just fills me with glee doing these things! :)
I've never minded exporting, importing, then exporting again... etc., back and forth between a pile of other softwares, back when I was building and tweaking game assets. But once I started animating and rendering in Carrara, well... also after I discovered the simple process of building shaders, I was absolutely floored by the fact that I was doing everything right within Carrara - and I guess I got addicted to just staying in Carrara for everything.
So that is what poured a bit of reluctance into me regarding Genesis 2 - it works best if I include DAZ Studio into my workflow. The thing is, the more I get to know the content creation and tweaking power of DS Pro, the more I love it!
But then, when I got back into playing around with my main M4 and V4 characters again, my love for working with them shone all the brighter again... not having to bounce around at all - just save a set of Carrara-optimized figures to my browser, and they're always ready for filming (animation and rendering)! That being said, I have also found immense joy from using Predatron's LoRes folks for supplemental actors. They render in an instant, animate well, and come with gobs of morphs for changing them to many different looks, including Dwarves, Elves, Orcs, and Zombies! So I started collecting others from his LoRes series as well. Predatron Rocks when it comes to built-in pose morphs (morphforms) as well!
Decimator on rigged esp triax DAZ content does not play nicely as in carrara
however
if used on a reimported FBX export from pipeline with iclone motions as crowd fillers is excellent
I suspect but not tried resaving the figure as a new support asset or cr2 if legacy will in fact fix this, it is the imported decimated duf scenes that lose rigging but you can re attach the skeletons under animation if full functions unimportant like mimic
but there is no need to really use it much in carrara as replicated full figures work equally well for crowds but will admit with the iclone import ones you can extremely easily use tens of tens of thousands of replications but the lorez predatron ones are just as good for that.
One of my JaguarElla vids used several full M4, M3 figures replicated 10 000 times though no issues.
I have never used iClone, so I can't compare it to Carrara. I started out with Poser long ago (and Bryce), then switched to Carrara when I realized it handles Poser format content seamlessly - no import, just load directly from Carrara's browser, and all the sliders, etc. are there. Plus, Carrara can handle large scenes much better than Poser, at least the last version of Poser I used. Lots of lights, effects, cameras, etc., and much easier to manipulate than Poser's tools. Yes, I am now biased since I've used Carrara so long, but I was sold at the beginning when I was much more familiar with Poser (and realized its limitations).
I tried an early version of DAZ Studio and got very frustrated. It may be better now, I don't know, but I see no compelling reason to try it again. As has been mentioned, the Poser format elements, especially V4, M4, K4, etc, work flawlessly in Carrara, so there is very little wrestling with the software (which seems to be fairly common per DS users). Add that to the vast amount of Poser format (and substantial Carrara format) content available at many sites, and the answer in my situation is clear. I also have a lot of software, including e.g. Lightwave, but the Carrara/Poser format combination works best for me, a wannabe short animation "director" (not modeler, etc.). Your mileage may vary.
I second Wendy's advice to get the M4 & V4 stuff on sale, it sometimes gets very low priced, since it is no longer "current" ... same at other sites.
Rampart1, one thing that should be mentioned is that Carrara 8.5 pro is going to come with a fair bit of content for Genesis already. It used to come with the M5 (Michael 5) and V5 (Victoria 5) pro bundles, when I just looked I didn't see that anymore, but still looks like it comes with most of the same stuff that was in those bundles previously, namely clothes and poses and character/texture sets for Genesis. M5/V5 are simply morph package add-ons for the Genesis base shape.
Genesis2 is supposedly the latest technology, but really it's pretty much the same tech as Genesis, and Genesis works more reliably in Carrara than Genesis2 anyway.
Victoria 4 and Michael 4, the previous generation of figures, work great in Carrara, but since you mentioned you want to work hand in hand with Iclone, and from what I've seen in the videos for iclone documentation it sounds like the Genesis figure was the first one that is routinely able to be imported into iclone with the exporter tool, I think it's natural to stick with Genesis (m5/V5) and since you don't already have a huge back catalogue of characters and clothing and poses for V4/M4 (unlike many of us who prefer to stick with the V4/M4 characters) there's no real reason to go with that figure. I would think, naturally enough, that Genesis1 is probably the one to go with, at least to start off with. Also, I should mention that Genesis1 can wear M4 and V4 clothing (except for shoes which don't work as well) due to the 'autofit' function that Genesis has. So there's a lot of clothing that Genesis can wear, and some of it is fairly high quality yet also fairly inexpensive.
Genesis2 autofit doesn't seem to work as well in Carrara, and so my experience has been that only Genesis2 clothes with autofit onto Genesis2. It's possible (in fact likely) that one of the things Daz will develop for Carrara 9 is for Carrara to handle Genesis2 better, so this problem may resolve itself in time, but for now Genesis is the better, more stable character in Carrara 9 in my opinion.
One advantage of Genesis1 is that that same base figure can be morphed into really anything, man, woman, monster, child, etc. It was designed to be pretty universal. With Genesis2 they went back to using 2 different figures, Genesis2female and Genesis2male. The claim was that somehow Genesis1 was too androgynous or something, but really just glancing at the character sets that are out there for M5 and V5 characters I think it's pretty apparent Genesis1 was able to look pretty good as a male or a female.
I agree that seems like a reasonable option, although I have not used the Genesis content that came with C 8.5. So I'm not sure about the "bugginess" that others have mentioned. My previous advice on using M4/V4 etc. *is* from the perspective of someone with a *lot* of compatible elements.