A humble and open request to Daz content vendors
crashworship
Posts: 218
Please make your Genesis 9 hair, clothing and props backwards compatible with Genesis 8/8.1. I have a very large number of Genesis 8/8.1 characters and very, very few Genesis 9. At the moment, I have little interest in investing in Genesis 9 content. I'm more likely to purchase your products if they have backwards compatibility. I notice that some of those clothing, hair and prop items offered do have this backwards compatibility but a great many don't. When I see an item I like and it doesn't have backwards compatibility, I won't buy it.
This is a humble request and I make no pretense of speaking for anyone else. There are a great many vendors on the Daz marketplace who create great content. I'd like to continue supporting you and purchasing your products. Backwards compatibility will incentivize me to do so.
Thank you.
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I've been pounding this drum since G9 dropped. I am not a power user. I don't understand all the complexities of clones and rebuilding shapes in other programs and importing, exporting, etc. But since Daz saw fit to have G9 be a radically different animal than G8, then it renders all the new G9 product basically unbuyable for me. But those products with G8/8.1 compatability jump right to the top of my queue.
Thank you.
For converting clothes: https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-genesis-9-clones-for-all
For converting poses: https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-9-to-3-and-8-pose-converter
Just fyi, this is literally at least twice the work, so for this to be viable from a vendor perspective, it would need to be at least twice the price. Also, 8/8.1 is a horrible pain to work on after working on 9. Genesis 9 is a complete dream from the content creation side comparatively. I understand your desires, but as Pax Asteriae pointed out, there are converters to go backwards, so I'd recommend those. I wouldn't be surprised if clothing and hair converters to go backwards were already in progress.
Now, fitting of G8 clothing on G9 is done with autofit clones, and in my limited experience worked much better than I expected. So, doing the same the G9 to G8 way makes sense to me. Unfortunately it's not part of the G9 assets, but it does exist: https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-genesis-9-clones-for-all.
Should make G9 clothing behave as if it's G8 clothing. Maybe one or two bits that are less good but these things seem to work pretty well to me.
Will confess that I have not yet seen a 'must-have' G9 anything, or really a 'Would be nice' anything, either. Still waiting, still hoping, but not yet. I have V9, but I've used G9 as little as V4 since October 2022. That's once, btw. I've used V3 a lot more frequently..
Regards,
Richard.
I'm willing to bet that majority of those backward-compatible G9 clothes were all started during the G8 period and then redone to be also sold on new base. It's twice as much weighting and rigging to do for some extra profit.
I'm curious why you find G9 easier to work with, what is it about it thet makes things easier? The only thing I am aware of is the genderless base, which is irrelevant for me.
I make characters mostly, so there are several things that I personally *love* with Genesis 9. First is the UV's to me are WAY easier to use. The rig is also much smoother. They changed up the way they did it and added child bones, and if you do your posing directly on 9, you get a much more natural feel. A pose/expression creator I work with a lot said the same thing, and when she went to make the G8 versions of her expression for a set she was doing to support both, she almost scrapped the whole project because it was so much more of a struggle on 8/8.1 to get the same looks (and she'd been on 8 since it released and only had 9 a month). The genderless base is great for things you want available to both genders (like ear shapes, teeth shapes, etc). Then you have the separate geometry for eyes and teeth which are the most commonly messed up parts with morphs, so having them separate takes that mess up out of the equation and makes it SO much easier to work with in general.
For clothing/hair, one of the best clothing makers out there made the clothing templates to start with and there are the amazing utilities the devs added into the base G9 to make it easier to visualize what each rigging template will do. The utilities the devs added in alone are *amazing*. I know that end users aren't going to appreciate that as much, it makes it *really* hard as a creator to go back to not having those :D It's like when you get a cake mixer. You *can* get a whisk and mix a cake by hand, but once you have a stand mixer, you just really don't want to go back to that. There's also the topology which is *so* much better than previous generations. The rigging and topology are much closer in line to industry standards now, and the topo flow is really so much easier to work with. This is way off topic for the thread, so I won't go on forever, but the only thing I can think of about 9 that I don't prefer over 8 is the lack of a lip mat zone, but I also understand the decision and have gotten over it :D
G9 is coming with already premade single tile UV to help with texel density. Everything fits there in quarters. To have the same on G8+ one has to do single tile unwrap by themselves or look for a freebie developer kit on ShareCG. Even then it won't neatly fit into quarters of a single larger UV map.
That is what I thought. No thank you to backwards compatibility if it's going to raise prices.
so then why would any PAs continue to support g8/8.1 if 9 is so much easier to work with. Other than maybe they hav e a good workflow developed for the 8 series.
Thanks for the responses, I will look into the points raised. As an end user I would say unless changes give a better end result in renders, or lead to lower prices, then the finer points of things like mesh topology and UV mapping are sort of moot.
Yes there are. I've used them and they leave a lot to be desired. The conversions often don't work well, especially for footwear. But as I said in my orrigninal post, it's a humble request. If ya don't want to do it, that's your call. But I'd pay more for content that's compatible with multiple generations and I'm really not paying anything at the moment for Genesis 9.
I think you have a contradiction.... Genesis 8 and 9 are structurally very different so whether Daz3d or a third party makes compatibility, they will have to do it through a converter (built in or not). Your footware issue is a model of example; each generation has a different number of foot bones so that any converter has to do an approximation (imagine trying to fit five fingers in gloves that have only three fingers... you can do an approximation). The famous comment is that a quarter of the bones in a human body are in the foot so it is an immensely complex problem that doesn't provide simple solutions.