V7/Genesis3 Not Dominating Sales?
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
Noticed this little offer appear for me at the top of the screen a few days ago (probably for others in this forum too):
"We have noticed that you haven't taken the opportunity to try out Genesis 3 yet. Let us help persuade you. Buy Victoria 7, Eva 7, Bethany 7, or any of their bundles before Aug. 13, 11:59PM (MDT, UTC -6) and we will give you a coupon worth $50 of free DAZ originals. "
I didn't take advantage, even though I considered buying and then returning V7 as faulty since it doesn't work in Carrara, and grabbing free loot, but I didn't feel good about trying to take advantage of a technicality :) But it did get me wondering...
I've got to think that if V7 was selling like hotcakes they wouldn't be trying to bribe me to buy her. On the other hand, this could be nothing but a random flash offer, but I started thinking, and there are some solid reasons why V7, although the latest/greatest, might not be 'burning up the charts' in sales figures, so to speak.
1 - V7 doesn't work in Carrara yet, so very few Carrara users have purchased her (this is an obvious one, so I'll list it first :) ) I'm sure many would say 'piffle, there aren't that many Carrara users anyway'. But I think there are more than people suspect, and one thing that is 100% sure about every Carrara user is that we are the type of customers who will crack open our wallets and fork over the dough for something we want. Can't always say that about the folks who stick only with the freebie program... :)
2 - V4/M4 *still* have never been toppled. If you look at the 3rd party sites that sell content, you'll find that at no point have V4/M4 gone out of vogue, and new content items for V4/M4 are still generated daily by vendors to support that line. V4/M4 enjoyed a long long run at the top of the figures market, and have deep, deep support, huge numbers and varieties of clothing, poses, animations, characters, morphs, etc etc. The figures work great in a variety of software, not just Studio (yes, Poser. yes, Carrara. Even Vue via the poser to Vue process, as I understand it). For the past many years, even new Genesis1 and Genesis2 characters that were released were traditionally often released as a similar morph for both V4/G2F or M4/G2M or V4/Genesis or M4/Genesis... in other words, the vendors themselves realized how well V4/M4 was still widely supported by users, so would release morphs for their Genesis characters paired with similar morphs that could be applied to V4/M4. "But, but, the bends and joints! Only latest Genesis has good bends!" Ahem... no. Xameva and Meipe's Perfect V4 looks great on all the bends, and there have been tons of other products to fix the joint bending issues in V4/M4.
3 - Genesis1 and Genesis2 autofit quite well, thanks. With the advent of dynamic cloth gaining a foothold, especially the ability to turn a conforming outfit dynamic as in iClone or the new plugin for Poser being developed that will also work for Carrara (not to mention that Carrara can go some distance towards this just using the bullet softbody physics) I think the importance of the autofit feature is diminishing, but I can still see it as a strong selling point for the Genesis line. But that's not really an argument for Genesis3, since autofit works great all the way back to Genesis1. In fact it's a detriment to Genesis3 that you apparently can't autofit V4/M4/Genesis1/G2M clothing to Genesis3, which is weird because prior generations of Genesis were pretty careful to preserve the autofit feature to use older generations clothing items. There is now a plugin called 'Wear Them All' which has been released to help Genesis3 wear prior clothing, but this costs extra.
4 - Can't use texures from prior generations? Well at least not easily. For Genesis1 and Genesis2, using textures from prior generations was as simple as changing the UV and slapping on the texture you wanted. From discussions I've seen in the Commons, you can't do this with Genesis3. Apparently there's a very complicated process of retexturing that makes it technically possible, but unlikely for most users to be able to have the expertise to do. So all those great textures people bought for prior generations aren't effectively useable.
5 - The Emperor's New Awesome Features Wow, V7 just looks fantastic in those promo renders! Oh wait, that's because it's being rendered in Iray, an unbiased render engine. Hey, even V3/M3 look pretty great when you have the right texture settings and are using an unbiased renderer. So why exactly is V7 so freaking amazingly greater than prior generations of Genesis? Hmmm, is it because it's got a '7' at the end of the name? Because I can't see much else. Some say it 'bends better'. Yeah... it seems to have great looking bends at the joints... but so did V6... and V5... and even V4 if you add on some of the 3rd party morphsets to correct the bends. Others have mentioned that Genesis3 has better abilities to make more realistic expressions. What was wrong with the expressions that previous generations were able to do? I thought the expressions and phonemes of prior generations looked pretty great and realistic, didn't realize there was any kind of problem there to begin with. So aside from having (yet another) base morph shape for a figure, what is the outstanding reason I should want to switch to this new figure?
6 - Eh, there will surely be a V8 soon anyway... V5 never got a tremendous amount of time to try to dominate the market before V6 was released and pulled the rug out from under, being the shiniest/bestest/newest. V6 seemed like it had a bit more time to make a dent, and really seemed to have a lot more vendor content-creation support rolling for it, and was just starting to get some real traction in the 'customers can trust this will not be a here-today-gone-tomorrow figure' department. By no means am I saying that Genesis2 is suddenly going to die and vendors will stop developing support content for Genesis2. In fact this may be a strike against long-term vendor support for Genesis3. Up til now, for a lot of content items, the creators have been able to 'hedge their bets', by making content that is useable for both V4 and G2F as one example, tapping into both markets (like with so many of those character sets built and sold), but since this is apparently not possible with Genesis3, this may mean that the market forces naturally push vendors back towards support of V4/G2F instead if sales for V7 content aren't rip-roaring as expected. And if there's no deep long-term vendor support, then V7 is going to be in trouble over the long haul. If customers also have in the back of their minds that (by Daz's pattern of release) it won't be all that long til V8 might be on the horizon and will pull the rug out from under V7, then this could mean V7 might become a 'skipped generation' for many users and vendors alike.
Anyway, just a couple of thoughts that struck me. Curious what other Carrara users think.
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Comments
I got the same offer and I was kind of wondering the same things.
I really don't think it's lack of sales though. My thinking on this is based on what I see on Renderosity. When Genesis and Genesis 2 came out it took a long time for that other site to begin seeing much in the way of products aimed at them. To date there are still far more new products coming out for V4 than for Genesis or G2F/G2M over there (although there are some very nice things among what is available). But when Genesis 3 appeared, there were almost instantly items for her over at Rendo and since then there has been a regular flow of new G3 items appearing there. If that community is adopting her that fast I have to believe that people like the figure and are buying it.
I passed on the offer too, because although I like the way the figure looks, I almost exclusively use Carrara these days (and when I do venture into another program it is Sculptris or Blender, not DAZ Studio) so I can't use the new figure. I've wishlisted a couple items and if a future update to Carrara makes it possible to use them then I will buy some, but for now it's just useless to me.
I agree. Even better, Renderosity still has mostly Poser format products that usually work well in Carrara, unlike DUF format.
You make a good point about Rendo, but I also feel like it's still too early to call it, since there naturally will be an initial push from vendors to support the latest 'shiny toy', and due to a certain segment of the market that will jump at anything that fits the Barney Stinson 'newer is always better' mindset, I think there's always an initial bubble of sales for the new stuff that may not indicate long term sustainability for the figure. I agree that if the trend continues like this through the end of the year, then that would be very strong evidence that V7/Genesis3 has 'caught on', and started to dominate the market. I also agree that Genesis1 never seemed to make too much headway on 3rd party sites, while Genesis2 really had 'caught on' enough that it was evident there was continual vendor support.
I could totally just be blowing smoke too. :) I have no real idea, but it does seem to me that logically there are several strikes against Genesis3 which might make inventory for it 'harder to move', aside from the one big point in it's favor, which is that it is the 'latest/greatest' (although even *that* can work against it, because hand in hand with this point is the fact it is not likely to be included in any huge sales yet, unlike M4/V4, Genesis1, Genesis2, all of which are regularly rotated in sales up to 70% - 90% off)
BTW and just as an aside, I've found that those .duf items that gave me troubles, once I was able to load them if I saved them as Carrara objects in the objects tab, they didn't give me any further trouble when loading into new scenes (sometimes for a few .duf items that wouldn't open in Carrara at all or behave right, I would have to open them in a notepad to look at the script/coding and compare it to other .duf objects that worked fine, and spot the error in the way it was written in notepad, resave, and then load into Carrara, the save as a Carrara object in the objects tab to be able to use it long term. I'm thinking specifically of several clothing items for Genesis, for which I would find this happened). Neither here nor there, but I thought I would mention this, if it hellps people be able to use Genesis more easily in Carrara.
I have been converting clothes from Genesis to V4!
(well was but my desktop dead at moment so cannot show, was doing a video of some)
saving as Poser cr2 with geometry XD4 does a good job converting with extra bones for skirts etc too.
all the morphs come over too.
I tried G3F clothes and to G2F not bad but Carrara uses a lot of RAM with them loaded.
XD4 as in CrossDresser 4?
Yes sorry,, it uses that abbreviation,, I only have the V4 licence but Krystal Starfox works too and some Poser figures.
i do have clothes converter that worked on V4 conversion to M4, when I get my desktop fixed will be posting results in a video, bit of a setback sadly at moment hope not too damaged.
G3f to G2f was with auto fit and transfer utility in DS saved as support asset duf import to Carrara
That's what I'd understood through the various discussions, that there were new bones in the face or something similar that would allow for better or more realistic expressions. I'm not saying that the approach is wrong or isn't better at it's heart, but at the same time I kind of feel like this might be akin to repaving a highway that doesn't need it. I'm sure that if I was starting from scratch with a V4 and morphs+ alone, and compared that to starting with a V7 and it's facial rigging, that if I took the time to try to dial in an expression by hand it might be much faster/easier with the new V7 to achieve a good expression. But since I have dozens and dozens of excellent preset expressions made for V4 from many different vendors which already look quite excellent to me, I don't really need to start from scratch in trying to dial in parameters, I've already got a nearly one-click solution to get to the expression I really want very quickly.
I'm not discounting the importance of using new bones/rigging to achieve realistic results quickly though; actually I never even noticed or thought to use the new 'pectoral' bones in Genesis til I saw a post from you in discovering and using them to quickly simulate realistic breast movement quickly, and you mentioned 'hey how come no one ever mentions using this?'. For me the answer was (embarassingly) I never even noticed those new bones were there :)
I am not one who has adopted any of the genesis line, as I don't use DS, have an older version of Poser and am not yet really getting to grips with how to get DS content into Carrara.
However, having said that I have to admit the new facial structure in Genesis 3 is really good, when the person using it knows what they are doing, as are the extra bones added to the toes, so toes can now move naurally
I have seen some really good images done.
Good point about the toes, that is something new for V7 isn't it? I don't think the prior figures could move their toes separately without add on morph sets (or maybe not at all). On the other hand, I don't think I've ever had a single render that needed movable toes, so while it's a point in V7's favor, maybe not a super strong point. It did make me chuckle to think that V7 might be a dream figure for any foot fetishists out there :)
Ahh, thx... I thought it sounded familiar, toyed with it many years ago version 1 or 2... Cool to hear. Will have to check it out again.
Before anyone can say V8 ... Lets not forget the rest of the G3 family yet to arrive ;)
Speaking of product longevity and obsoletness, yeah when Victoria 4 and the rest of the Gen4 family followed, Gen3 slowly went on the decline at Rendo. Probably mid-way into V4's lifespan as current generation model, Gen3 clothing was tough to come by at Rendo due to their clearance market model. Save for the Japanese Aiko3 modeling community which put out some top notch freebies, Gen3 was quite easily forgotten in favor of V4. Now, We've had Genesis 1, 2, now 3, and if we look at the Rendo market place, even RuntimeRdna, Gen4 clothing is still full swing in production and sales. V4 still works perfectly unhindered across Studio, Carrara, and Poser without need of the DSON. Probably has the single most widest user base. DSON likely hampered Genesis 1 & 2 somewhat for the Poser crowd. I've no clue if G3 even works in Poser via DSON...
I recently picked up the V4 joint fixes by Xemeva, and will enjoy using V4 again. Hope I can find a similar joints fix package for the Gen4 males.
Possibly the biggest feature about the Genesis series is the improved clothing support across all the figures. Genesis 1 was UniSex , emphasised use clothing male or female for either gender. Genesis 2 & 3, became more gender specific again, however regardless which shapes and morphs package you bought, you didn't have to worry what and which clothing had support specific for those morphs, or even support for the rest of the Gen4 base character family. Couple that with being able to convert clothing from your Gen4 content, the Genesis series is quite remarkable.
I have only scanned this thread so apologies if I missed something, but my feeling is that sales of G3F / V7 have been going very well for DAZ. I have also noticed quite a few products popping up in the likes of Renderosity, and it seems to me a lot faster than any support was available for G1 or G2.
Which only leaves the question - why didn't I get that offer!!
I'm confused!
I didn't get the offer and I feel dumb for buying V7 when I did :( (not pro, or any bundle, justt the shape) Cause if I would have waited I could have gotten a $50 coupon! Same for being a plat member, missed the plat club saving offer cause I had a membership already. Buyers regret?
Has Daz issued a statement/email saying "thank you for making V7/G3F the fastest selling figure in history?*" Cause G2F got that marketing statement pretty early in her life.
*I am paraphrasing. It may have been fastest selling Daz Figure, Fastest selling Vickie, but G2F was supposedly the best launch in Daz history, or something.
So if I bought V7 later than I did I could have gotten the offer as well?
Oh thanks Daz : D Now Im even more paranoid and hesitant to buy anything because there might just be a better offer some time later : D
I think DAZ and Microsoft are in the same boat...
They both have to generate sales excitement for relatively minor incremental "improvements" in a product that, honestly, the average user doesn't really need.
Yeah, for some the facial rigging is improved in more recent versions of the V's and G's and whatever. The mesh design and rigging in the V4 is pretty horrendous if you want any lifelike expressions. And yeah the joint bending is nicer in some cases. But how many users honestly care about that stuff?
But new characters mean a lot of people buying a whole new wardrobe for their cool new characters, and that generates a lot of revenue. So you have to get folks excited about stuff that isn't really that exciting for most users, IMO.
Personally, I'm betting that DAZ and others are already working on stuff like this for some future version of their characters:
It combines a super hi-res facial/body scan with some cutting edge morphing/rigging to generate something that is heaven for those who want a realistic looking character. And it's what the professional movie and gaming industries are already using. You can download some free versions of body scanned characters and play with them. (I think someone here has already posted some renders here of the old bald guy...)
And BTW, for those who are convinced that REALISM = UNBIASED RENDERING, that video is an example of why texturing and mesh design and rigging are what sells it as "real". The incredible detail of even the pores of the face, as well as the minor details of the skin folds, etc. are the realism in this case.
Think it is random, I did not get it or want it.
Been saying for years that you can use Unbiased Rendering for toons. Was mocked for it. My avatar is rendered with an Unbiased engine. Now we find Warner Brothers uses Unbiased rendering for there Batman cartoon :)
Unbiased rendering is just another tool, that people can fail or succeed with.
And Warner Bros and all the other major and minor studios and VFX houses have been using simple BIASED raytracing in their feature films for decades to integrate 3D stuff in their real life camera footage, and we all think it looks totally realistic.
I remember seeing that video a while back and being impressed. While it certainly is impressive, I think it should be mentioned that with Fenric's ERC Carrara is capable of doing the same thing (would take a bit of work to set it up, admittedly, but I would think this would be so useful for animators it would be worth the time/effort to do so).
I see in that quote embedded videos do not show on my new iPad, one gets a bit blank gap, just an aside
carry on, sorry to derail
I can use V7 via iClone of course but still not tempted to get her for all the reasons many DAZ studio users have held back too, not many skins, cannot reuse old ones, different boning so lots of converting needed etc.
This would be the way to go for facial expressions... So easy and intuitive... The morph sliders method I was never fussy about going up and down the list for the various adjustments for expressions
Just to clarify about what's being shown in the video...
It's not a photo of a guy's face being manipulated or anything like that. It's an actual 3D model mesh (like a super advanced M3 or whatever
) that is being manipulated using some very advanced morphing/rigging techniques. And the mesh and "shaders" on the model were generated by some advanced, hi-res scanning techniques, which reconstruct the face down to the actual pores, etc.
So yeah, I suppose the slider thingy where you select a slider on the guy's face and slide it to affect a particular morph is something you might duplicate using expressions, but the revolutionary part of this is the scanning and texturing and mesh design/topology, etc.
People following reactions to the release of genesis 3 female may be interested in the following thread. It starts with one person's dissatisfaction with the topology of G3F (and its implications for morphs) and then the discussion goes from there.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/61280/why-i-won-t-be-buying-anything-else-for-g3f#latest
A promo on V7 is just a marketing measure to give incentive to dive into the Gen 3 market. A company would still do it even if sales are great. The V7 (V6 V5 V4 V3 V2 V1) bundles are just the seeds to create product adoption. Once you are vested in a product your barrier to buying more accessories for that product line become lower. Every journey starts with a first step.
All true. However the offer itself (while I do see it as a bribe to try to push me into getting V7) wasn't really the focus of my argument, it was simply the catalyst that made me start to ponder. I agree it could be a simple marketing technique they are trying out in various targeted microcosms for 'traditional spenders' here at Daz who for whatever reason haven't jumped into V7/Genesis. But the points I raised above about the possible problems V7 might be encounteriing don't really have anything to do with the flash V7 'We'll bribe you to please please buy her' offer.
I was floored by the link to the Commons that Diomede posted, where many (many!) Studio users are also very unhappy with V7, and for different reasons than anything I speculated about, reason endemic to the flawed way the figure is built (and I have to agree that looking at a wireframe and uvs of V7 and V6 next to each other, V6 looks much better made). That thread is very long, and filled with lots of good arguments against V7 from a Studio-user's perspective, points I never considered.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I do think there are some good logical reasons that V7 might be a tough sell.