Genesis 9 Character Issue - Fewer Surfaces!?
Keiku
Posts: 143
So I just started playing around with the new Genesis 9. (Not Vicky yet, since the site has slowed to a crawl and I manually install everything)
I've noticed a few things.
1. The extra detail is nothing to write home about.
2. Posing and shaping may be better (we'll see more once the extra bits are added to the store)
3. The merchant shaping resources are $7000? Is that right? I don't think I've ever seen anything that expensive on the Daz store before.
4. There are fewer surfaces than 8.1 (eyes are all one, no separate iris, sclara etc, no lips) and it has me wondering how to achieve certain effects. Namely, how do I make the lips glossy, now that there is no separate lip surface?
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Comments
Try HD Vic. It is unbelievable! The eyes and eyebrows so far are my favorite feature and the asymmetry too. Perfect!
Those are meant for PA's and if you haven's seen more expensive ones, you haven't been looking
I might like the eyes better if there were actually eye colours and not just the once she came with.
CAnt download V9HD yet but did get the essentials. Unfortunatley the eyes have no UV so textures dont work.
Well that's unfortunate. Yeah I cannot seem to download Vicky yet myself. The page is just hanging.
Here is a quick test of the new figure. (No Victoria yet).
Entirely underwhemed, as expected.
Yes, unfortunately. I knew I would be, yet bought the Victoria 9 bundle anyway, like an idiot.
Not impressed but just like all the other new releases we have to wait for at least a month to get upgrades and tweakings that make them better. I will be watching for them to add the tidbits that make it worthwhile.
Be patient!
I think she is awesome!
Those textures look a fare bit better than my first test render (no postwork other than a little contrast). Is this just Genesis 9? or were you able to use Victoria?
Moved to Art Studio as it is not a Daz Studio topic.
Perhaps these forum categories are not as well defined as I'd thought. Perhaps there should be one to discuss problems with characters. But I digress.
To return to my original topic: What is the deal with the surfaces for Genesis 9? Why are they now so limited?
Have you read the announcements? Because they are now industry standard. Changes to lips, eyes etc. are easily accomplished with mapping and LIEs. Just like we do now.
Cheers
Have they fixed the issue with LIE being painfully slow?
Looks like I'll have to use mapping then. I usually just directly change the glossy and glossy roughness values on the surface, which was super quick.
I haven't tried the editor yet, but applying makeup does take quite a long time. Perhaps a second longer than 8.1. In fact working with Victoria 9 now, it seems doing just about everything is a bit slower. Just a wild guess, I'd say about 15-25% slower. For me anyway, on a 5950x and RTX 3090.
Is there a good place to find out how to do this? I've only ever done it through individual surfaces with Specular settings. Never used LIE to accomplish it.
I still haven't found or been given an appropriate answer. I even created another post in a more appropriate section of the form and tried to be more specific to finally get an actual answer. But it was closed. L.I.E was the only thing mentioned which of course is not an acceptible work around as you know and like you I've never used it either. We can use the geometry editor but that isn't going to work well for close ups. So the only solution left is custom specular maps, but that's a major pain in the butt.
You may not like the answer but you have been given the answer - LIE or a Geometry Shell.
Well, I DID just try out adjusting the head specular map in GIMP. basically I just brushed the entire lip area to be far darker, exported it under a slightly different name (please make sure you do that, don't save it under the original name :D ) and just used that for the head specular map, and the result was not-as-dry-looking lips. Quite framkly, I think most of the stock or complete face makeup options are way too over the top and I have no real time or experience adjusting all these things manually. I really don't like most of the DAZ preset makeup options on just about all of their original characters... that's actually been a complaint of mine since I started using the program, honestly, but also a whole other topic!
Does anyone know of a place to look up how to accomplish either of those techniques? Don't geoshells use the same surface properties as what they're based on? IE if there isn't a specific lip surface to tweak on the model, there won't be one for the geoshell too? Sorry, I usually don't use them, so I'm not too familiar with how they work...
To wit....
Your adjustment does seem to work fairly well. How long would you say it took you vs the old way?
If these are indeed the only options now, it would be nice to have a link to a tutorial or something.
Either needs a mask to control the effect - you might be able to make one from one of the existing control maps by adjusting levels to clean the join and simply erasing the bits far from the lips (or whichever part is targeted).
using a surface/material zone to control lip glossiness was always entirely stupid because you end up with a harsh edge. It should be done with maps or masks.
There were way too many material zones on Gen 8. It's annoying to tweak them all. Really, we needed face, lips, ears, and eyesocket all as different surfaces? lmao no.
I didn't get too deep into surface settings, but how often were the settings for those surfaces even noticably different?
It took maybe 2 minutes. The old way was much faster and had instant results. This is how I altered the map for V9.