Gen 9 and Exporters
brainmuffin
Posts: 1,205
Other than much larger maps and bigger files, what impact will Gen 9 figures have on the various exporters?
Comments
Unexpected DSBS notwithstanding, I don't think Sagan will be very much affected. There wasn't really anything innovative about G9 that would make me think they would have to break the general Genesis way of doing things. I mean, there are more bones, but it appears to be a normal armature beyond that. There are more and larger textures, but of the same type. There's more geometry, but they're still just associated with nodes.
Of course, no one yet has any way to know, but it sure looks like everything that has changed has changed within the existing Genesis framework.
I can have a rather cavalier attitude because, being an Alembic exporter, I don't have to deal with the "hard" stuff that, say, Thomas does. And having seen the ammount of special-case code around armatures in Diffeomorphic, I think there's going to be a significant amount of work to be done to support G9.
G9 wouldn't be able to replace G8 until it has well established customization support which G8 has, including custom morphs, geografts, face and body generating plugins, expression capturing plugins, lips sync plugins etc. G9 uses higher base mesh density whereas G8 also can be baked to HD meshes.
Until G9 gets support from important plugins like Diffeomorphic, G8 is the best and would keep using assets made for G8. Even older genesis like G2 has its unique place because G2 is more compatible with common rigs, most animations can be easily retargeted to G2 and then converted to G8 in Daz Studio.
I imagine things like iClone and various plugins such as Unreal, Unity etc will need new retargetting
As for diffeomorphic.
Can't say for sure until she comes out. But if there are no new shaders then the materials should export fine. As for the rig diffeo is general purpose so again there shouldn't be big issues to fix.
Standard morphs (expressions, facs etc) will not work with diffeomorphic until information about the location of the relevant files is added. And new bones will probably cause problems for MHX and Rigify. But there is no way of knowing until we test.
Ok, so nothing cray, at least as far as can be known.