Ok, so now that I actually HAVE experience working with Genesis, I wanted to write a blog on what I think about the new tech from a development point of view (not a user end, to be clear) As always, nothing is entirely cut or dry… there are pros and cons to everything. This is no exception. Basically, this is to help you guys made an educated decision on whether or not you want to support it. And it might actually help you with it, should you decide to dive in (granted, its not a tutorial, but it gives you some basic principles to apply to actually working)
Making Clothes: Its Easier –
From a development standpoint… well…. yes and no.
Getting the outfit in and rigging is pretty brainlessly easy compared to poser (providing you use the right options to turn it into conforming clothing, that is lol) If you modelled it to Genesis, then it will already automatically fit (whereas, Poser is a little on the retarded side, and automatically scales the object up on import – so u have to scale it down, move it about and fit it to the figure, before you even rig it)
But there are also things which aren’t necessarily easier or save you time.
First thing is with the dynamic morphs it spawns to fit the clothing automatically to Genesis (no matter what shape u put on Genesis) It WILL save you some time, in situations where the dynamically spawned morphs happen to be perfect. Any that don’t happen to be (if you wish to support them) must be replaced, so you will still have to do morphs, regardless – just most likely less than you would if you had to make ALL of them. And you will still need adjustment morphs (or at least, theyre a good idea) And you may still need JCM’s for certain occasions.
Also, any hope of converting morphs over from your M4/V4 rig is a fallacy. If you’re the type to a buttload of movement morphs, or styles, you will have to redo them all – and by eye, as closely as you can get them to the originals (for fear of them being too different) Reason being…. if you have to change the base objects to fit Genesis (and you will, always, for best results) then using any morphs spawned for the original, will cause them to morph back to the M4/V4 shape, size and placement. The only way this will EVER work, is if somehow you have a way to resize/fit all the morphs to match the Genesis clothing base shape, perfectly (and I mean, down to the decimal) I don’t know of any way to do that, perfectly. And well, that would be a mammoth undertaking, besides. So either way you look at it, its more work. But redoing morphs may quite possibly be the lesser of evils, there.
Finally, the smoothing is intended to actually fix certain things and make other things fit better. And it does. But the smoothing also wreaks havoc with certain features of your clothing — example, the set Im working on now – the hair on my helm is actual hair made with ZBrush fibermesh, and when I add the smoothing, it thins it out drastically. I don’t like that, so smoothing is off completely. I also had to practically remove the smoothing and mess with the weight of the smoothing from my Sandals coz it, combined with the rig, caused the straps to shove into the sandal edging. So, you will have to mess with the smoothing, collision iterations and weights on the smoothing to get a good result. The problem is… when u turn those things down (or otherwise, off completely) to account for certain things, it will make the dynamic morphs imperfect (thus forcing you to replace any you wish to support) That could only be a few…. but could also end up being ALL of them (depending on the item) So will that happen to you? It depends on whether the planets align a certain way lol There’s really no way to know for certain how its gonna act up, to model around it. Perhaps in some instances, but certainly not all.
That’s not even getting into things I haven’t experienced, coz the rig would be different, have ghostbones or extra pieces or whatnot (for good and bad)
So basically, when you go to rig something for Genesis that started out as a Gen 4 product, plan that you will have do a fair amount of work to get it converted. Granted, you already have the mesh built (which then needs to be fit to Genesis) its already mapped, already textured, and possibly even already has DS MATS (if you do them for your Gen 4 packs) You even have some of your thumbs already done (at least, ones that will feasibly not need changed) So that all does save time (but really, only coz you already did that stuff anyway for Gen 4 or whatever) But speaking in terms of only what DS will generate for you, there’s still a good amount of work involved.
Also keep in mind… it goes easier if you have experience with traditional rigging to boot, and adjusting jp’s, falloffs and such. Because its similar (not exact, but there are similarities there for sure) If you haven’t, the learning curve may be harder for you – or it may be easier, as some people do take to things rather naturally and maybe this will click with you better. But as DS4 uses traditional rigging as well as weight maps, you will kind of have to learn it all (unless you have no intention on using the traditional rigging stuff)
Projection Templates: Can be really handy, but be careful –
Its a cool way to get a basic weight map rig for something. So, if you have a dress, use the dress option. If you have gloves, use the gloves option. But if you use the WRONG something, your rig will be fubared LOL Case in point: I used the bodysuit on a pair of sandals, instead of the boots (which weren’t working right for me) not fully thinking it thru (that doh! a bodysuit would have no feet) I noticed later, the feet wouldn’t fit right and had to re-run it thru using no template, then fix the weight map joints manually. Just make sure that the projection makes sense for what you are doing – and if there doesn’t seem to be anything that matches correctly by item (or as in my “sandals rigged as boots” case, is not exactly right) then use nothing at all when you set it up (this will pull the rig from Genesis entirely, and take nothing into account on how a certain something would be rigged)
The Weight Map Brush: HATE IT –
Ok, this isn’t a bad thing for DAZ or DAZ Studio… just a personal dislike, really. I wouldn’t use it in C4D, either… coz I don’t like it at all. In fact, I find better results just selecting stuff in DS and filling in the weight at 0 or 100, or smoothing by that selection. The weight map brush makes me mental… it’s a slow and laborious pain in the ass. Seriously. It’d be okay for little or minor things and I use it for that stuff, but… ugh… Ill be avoiding it for the most part.
What really IS EASIER: MORPHING! –
What I will say that I like… and I mean REALLY like – you don’t have to have a grouped mesh to use for morphing. It can be grouped however you want, whether by certain pieces in a grouping, or one single group, even (it only needs to be the same exact mesh) Which is actually REALLY helpful. So you can export your mesh from DS with groups and materials attached. Take it into UVMapper, and group it to how you want (either by using the existing groups, or by material) and save them as new groups (whatever you want them to be)
With traditional rigging, you always had to follow your grouping being in tact to how it was in Poser or DS, and you couldn’t change any of the grouping, for the full body morph to work properly (coz you’d get the incorrect number of facets error) When you are trying to get at certain pieces that are made up of several pieces (but you want to grab them collectively – like wings, for example, that would be a collective made up of several feathers) its really hard. Fortunately, in Z you can mask stuff using the scale tool and a couple buttons, to account for it… But you have to do it topologically for every single piece of that something thats going to be in the mask (and if you have 50 pieces in that masking, you can imagine the pain) But its EASIER and TIME SAVING not to have to mask at all – to already have the mesh grouped the way you need it to be, so you can flip the “mask by grouping” switch in Z and grab entire pieces.
The Grouping Tool: Brilliant and Not so Brilliant –
Well, its not a deal breaker or anything – just has pros and cons to it like anything. I will say it is eons better than the Poser grouping tool, however. You can use lasso selection, select individually by poly, or rectangular selection. You can grow and shrink the selection you make. And it works really good. But…. it also selects THRU the mesh. So while you may be thinking “Oh, Im only editing this one little piece” you may actually be editing a selection that went thru that piece, and is including other parts of what you are rigging. So you have to be careful with the selecting, and make sure its on an angle, or otherwise, can’t select thru onto other parts of what you’re selecting. It would also be really cool if you could add to or remove from from a selection you already made, by holding shift or something and selecting again (although, maybe you can some other way, and I just don’t know how)
A common Misconception: Everyone can do it, with Auto Fit! –
Well, even I am guilty of this one. When the tech first released, I thot the fact it was sposed to be sooooo easy and had Auto Fit to boot, would completely kill any need to even bother with Genesis clothing. The end user could just veritably convert whatever they want. Why bother doing an addon they won’t pay for. But I soon discovered… that was a gravely wrong assumption.
Auto Fit isn’t perfect. Because its essentially trying to fit an outfit thats modelled to Gen 4 content, to a completely different shape. And then the morphs further complicate that, by deforming it further from its base shape. The result? Crunching, crinkling, distortion and general yucki-ness. Sure, you can get by with AF – but its never going to be perfect (though it could get better as DAZ improves it) You also lose any adjustment/movement morphs the original outfit might have had (though, there is a way around this using the transfer tool)
That, coupled with the fact there is some work involved even in modelling it to Genesis, and time it will take to learn the new tech, and you have very good reasons why its not as simple as just that.
Poses: the Bane of my Existence –
But after posing in DS, they’ve become more of a bane of my existence. You see, in Poser, when you make poses intended for a prop, it will actually save the prop inside the pose file. So you can move the prop around however you want with a pose, and save that pose. The prop will automatically place as you moved it. This is helpful for tricky poses, where the prop may otherwise intersect with the figure (esp if you want both hands on the prop) Its also handy if you want the prop to face a certain direction (you can just spin it to face the camera, always, so the features stand out) So, in poser, you can just move it about for that pose, save it, and it will work perfectly as you intend it to.
Unfortunately, DS4 doesn’t save the pose with the prop rotation/translation settings. So, basically, your parents must work for ALL the poses. You can’t move them, or twist them to face the camera. This makes me mental…. and makes doing poses harder. In fact, I may even submit it as a suggestion to DAZ for future feature inclusions.
I will say that in some ways, I like posing in DS more and less, than Poser. Really, both apps have their pros and cons there
Now, for the rest, I will have to leave that for another blog, as I am only covering what Ive experienced thus far. I have yet to create a character (fully custom or otherwise) using Genesis (that is actually next on my list) so I couldn’t honestly tell you how painful or not that is. But there is more to this tech… much, much more. I will have to cover that in a part 2.
So, will I continue on the Genesis path? Well, for me, its not as simple as yes or no – but rather Yes and No. Given that to do both sides is rather lengthy (and some of my packs can be rather massive) I may not support both interchangeably … but rather one or the other, in some cases. And probably on smaller things, simultaneously. I will definitely be doing more Genesis content, tho, as well as Generation 4. You just might see me bounce around a lot 🙂
