Saw that DAZ3D are releasing Victoria 9. I hope indeed that she’s backwards compatible in concern of morphs, expression and clothing et cetera. Else we’ll have to start all over, spending money on new stuff. Can’t help that it all feels like a rip-off (all over again).
I watched the livestream with Jay Versluis, and the impression he gave was that backward compatibility was pretty limited.
Clothing will auto-fit, but he admitted that tight clothing tended to autofit better than loose clothing (and dForce would probably work quite well much of the time). So some of your favorite clothing items may translate reasonably well, while others won’t.
He showed a script that applied G8 poses to G9, and that seemed to work pretty well. He didn’t talk about translating expressions, but something similar might be possible.
He showed the new model wearing a G8 hair, but he did say something about having to use Blender to get a good fit. That’s probably beyond the abilities of most users, so if that’s going to be a requirement for bringing hair over, that’s not good news.
The consensus seems to be that character morphs and skins will not carry across. It’s not like the transition between G3 and G8, where DAZ made a point of stressing that you could use many of your existing assets in some fashion. Jay was noticeably silent on the question of forward migration of G8 characters to G9.
Of course G9/V9 is not even released yet, and things could change between now and late October. And things could change again in a few months, when Riversoft Art or SickleYield have had a chance to come up with some magic conversion tools.
For the immediate future, however, things don’t look great, and a lot of content collectors are going to be asking themselves whether to start over or stick with G8.
EDIT: It’s been so long since G3->G8 that I don’t really remember what worked then. My recollection is that G3 skins were usable on G8, that hair transferred pretty much without issue, that G3->G8 autofit was mostly pretty good, but that poses didn’t transfer directly (because of the T-pose/A-pose issue), and so poses, morphs and characters had to wait for third-party conversion tools. This time around, it sounds as if poses will go across fairly smoothly, but skins won’t, hair will need work and autofit may be questionable. And that conversion tools to allow G8 content to work on G9 are likely to be significantly more complex to develop.
Also, G9, with double the polygons and 8K maps is going to demand a powerful machine.
She’s not backwards compatible. Genesis 9 is basically like Genesis 1.0. A unimesh figure (and the topology doesn’t even look that good). Expect to have to do a Level 3 or 4 SubD just to get things to look right. There’s not even polys for a navel, areola, or nipple. Just flat and square quads. Again, SubD 4 will give you enough polys to sculpt out a nipple.
And her rigging is different. The eyes and inner mouth aren’t part of the head. They’re separate objects. And there’s extra bones in the spine. But the G9 figure is asexual, androgynous, intersexed, and hermaphroditic all wrapped up into one.
I won’t be buying any Genesis 9 models, ever. Most of my artwork involves fantasy and sci-fi themes that require a lot of special effects. To facilitate that, I have acquired a large library of skins and morphs, many of them from third party content creators. I was able to adapt to Genesis 8 and incorporate those models into my work, although 8.1 has been problematic. It sounds like Genesis 9 will not work with any of my existing skins and morphs. I cannot afford to start over building an entirely new library - that is assuming the creators of the stuff I use actually step up to make updated versions of their content.
I don’t know if I’m willing to continue with this DAZ business. As it seems after the Victoria 9 release, now we should by yet more from DAZ3D. New clothes, poses, expressions, morphs etc. etc. in all eternity. I think it’s stupid to hang on to this any longer. I’m about to jump off this carousel.
To be honest I haven’t bought any clothes or any hair that’s only available for G9. I’m waiting patiently for converters and tools to be released that will allow me to reuse my G8 assets, and of the G9 products I HAVE bought they have been generic enough that I will probably use them if and when a male figure is released.
We’re also back to the default 30% off for all new releases too in the store and that just won’t cut it any more.
So my wishlist grows.
But it is freeing up money in my budget to buy more products from Renderosity and other 3D stores.
Hell, I just spent $250 today on some Blender tools and add-ons that have been sitting in my wishlist over at BlenderMarket for the past few months. Had the money in my budget for that since I hadn’t really bought much of anything at DAZ over the past few weeks.
Can we just permanently shelve the “we have to buy it all over again” schtick?
No one HAS to BUY anything. We’ve been doing this since Mike 1 in 2001. So tired.