So now that Ive done everything for Genesis that Id do for a V4 set, I have better formulated an opinion on what I think of the tech. So here goes….

Character Creation:
The tech in DAZ Studio is freakin brilliant. Esp if you have Z. You just zoom it back and forth (and can infinitely, even if later u need to change something) save the morph and whatnots, create a card and ur done. I like the card presentation better than the icky bitty teeny tiny thumbnails. You can actually see it, and its far less boring. Also the character presets are badass… u just click it, it will load geni, your morph and a default tex applied. Better than any inject for sure.

No inj’s/rem’s to deal with. That makes DS far easier and nicer to make characters for.

Also, being able to adjust the rig to your character morph is doubly brilliant. No more restrictions coz of how something is rigged. You can rig it to your morphs. Technically, you can also create a pose for an edited gen 4 rig, to apply to a certain morph that screws up joints… but its messy, and not many even know how to do it.

Clothing Creation:
Also brilliant. You pop it in, you transfer the rig, adjust your WM’s and you’re solid. Most of the morphs are auto generated to be acceptable, leaving only certain ones that need tweaked – this takes a lot of the work away. I still do a bazillion adjustments, either way, and Im sure there will be times I do movements. But not having to deal with fitting issues that gen 4 has is really nice.

I like that you can overwrite existing morphs. I also like that you can have an obj grouped anyway you want, and it wont matter… as long as the no of vertices is correct overall, it will work. No matter how its grouped. And going gen 1 to gen 2 mors  on the same outfit will even work (but will likely need changed, unless the morph is exactly the same)

Adding bones is nothing, grouping in there is also nothing. WM’s look generally nicer, but can be a pain if you model a certain way (though, not impossible, as Ive done it) It does require a certain method of modelling, for it to be simple.

Rigidity maps are awesome…. finally, a way to stop morph distortion from happening on hard surfaces.

JCM’s are brilliant…. I wanna do my JCM’s like that all the time. No more messing with code.

But most of all, I have said in the past I wish everything had collision detection – esp clothing. Well, Genesis does… and its one benefit it has that Poser doesn’t. It makes life so much easier.

Poses:
Not much to be said here… the only thing I would suggest to DAZ, is allowing prop rot/trans/scale information to be coded into the pose, so you can adjust the prop for each pose. The one size fits all method is doable, but very restrictive.

Materials:
Are still pretty primitive, unless you are using shader baker or ubersurface. The SSS Shader AOA did is brilliant, tho… it rivals, and even surpasses Poser’s SSS and light emission capabilities.

DSON: Making DSON files is pretty easy too. The only thing is that it doesn’t like when u kill bones (as Poser works best when u extend one bone outside of a geom) and in some cases, there may be good reason for killing them. Honestly though, I find the DSON thing sort of eh….. its much better to have natively rigged content. It really wouldn’t affect my decision on a purchase.

Converting a Genesis set (with a character, clothing, poses, props) to Gen 2 is also really easy, quick and amazingly exacting. I did most of mine in one day. The uv transfer utility is also brilliant, in that it will convert gen 4 character maps to V6’s uvs with almost no issue whatsoever (the only issue I had, was a slight crinkling in an eyelash map, which is an easy fix) Also, no seams. I had to adjust the props a little, but everything works pretty well.

Dealing with tabs in DS is annoying at first, but u do get used to it. Also, u can right click on a clothing item, and quick select it to apply materials. That makes it a little easier to deal with tabs.

What would normally take 2+ weeks to test in my personal group of testers, has only taken 1 week. Its that much easier.

The overall:
Though, there are some things I find annoying, the fact is… I like it. In fact, I might like it too much. As much as I hate to say it, Im having trouble going back to Gen 4 and Poser. I can now understand why people have moved onto Genesis content. And though, I dont currently have sales info, if they turn out to be really good, that will make it even harder.

The fact is, DAZ really did a brilliant job with the tech. Though, it took me awhile to get into it, now that I am, I’m finding it hard to turn back.

Does that mean Ill not do Gen 4 stuff? Well… that depends on the sales. We will see which is stronger.