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Couldn't agree more. G9 is more of the same. It didn't bring anything to the table other than a few tweaks and 8k textures. It's an incremental improvement at best at a severe GPU and VRAM penalty. G9 still doesn't have realistic collisions or pose deformations. Daz3D is on its last legs. I see AI vacuuming end users. Whatever Daz3D is supposed to do, AI is or will be soon doing better. 12+GB of VRAM is more effectively spent training LoRas or checkpoints in Stable Diffusion if you want photorealistic or stylized output than trying to kludge a product improved V4 into doing it for you.
Daz Studio is just very basic entertainment software. It’s not even remotely close to being anything like industry standard 3D/VFX software. The professional 3D/VFX industry are absolutely not using Daz Studio. Even serious enthusiasts who want to get into animation and render high quality scenes typically “graduate” from DS to far more robust, versatile, and stable software. Daz Studio is the dollar store “paint-by-number” kit of the 3D world. It’s a quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive way to render scenes without having to go through the icky process of actually learning something or investing much effort.
To be fair, with the system builds required to use DAZ beyond a stick figure level, it's not basic entertainment software. The problem it has is there is almost no market for its output - "realistic" rendered still images of clothed human figures - hence the lack of professional users. There never was a market. You can do stop frame animation at the expense of your sanity but it's nothing in the grand scheme of things. I can think of only one area where DAZ is regularly used - visual novel type indie games. I've only ever seen it used professionally in a scant few commercial projects like music album cover art, instructional art and packaging art.
There is something to be said for pre-fab scene and rendering solutions like DAZ for people wanting not to sink a lot of their time into learning the ins and outs of a professional 3D toolkit and concentrate on the creative aspects of their projects. It's too bad that DAZ just isn't capable of scratching that itch for anybody now and largely because they failed to evolve with the creative 3D scene.
The rest of your comment is spot on. The DAZ Studio ecosystem has devolved into a 3D doll house collection for adults with the money to spend on one off items. I suspect most users simply render stuff for their own pleasure and nothing else. Eventually all their 3D content creators will move over to making for other ecosystems that have larger professional user bases and DAZ as a company will go back to doing that too.
G9 looks like the last call for the DAZ Studio ecosystem.
My guess - G9 be another incremental improvement of the G3 mesh. It also appears they're going back to having a unified mesh instead of male/female variants like the first generation of Genesis so double the already insanely slow load times.The place that needed to improve is on the software side. It's years out of date and far too resource intensive for what it does. The still image render quality of former game engines (I guess we should call them general purpose 3D engines now) have almost caught up at much lower performance penalty. Cramming more texture and mesh resolution is only giving diminishing returns when the software engine itself can't use 8K textures efficiently. The 3D engine itself is rather a mess it can't deform bone joints or do collision in a realistic way which is kinda sad when DAZ's entire purpose was posing and rendering 3D human shapes.
On the other hand why bother? At this point improving DAZ Studio incrementally is a lost cause because they've let it's core go completely out of date by years. They need to scrap it and start over from scratch. They'll go back to being a store front selling figures for other render software.
When you load a geoshell like UM on top of geografted figures with their own geoshell like NGV it will automatically generate a region that is blank if UM doesn't have maps for it. That's the white patch you see - an unaltered and unmapped geoshell over NGV. You need to turn the automatically generated NGV region off in the Ultimate Moisture geoshell or set it's opacity to zero. Just select the geoshell in scene tab and there will be a set of switches controlling what regions are on or off. Stacked geoshells can be difficult to manage.
Looks like too much backscatter. Try turning Backscattering Weight down to less than .10 or off altogether. I’ve run across some iRay mats and shaders that have it cranked up. I don’t know what conditions those creators use to test their content out but I’ve not found any setup that makes them look good.
I think the issue was they were listed as custom content @ 100pts/each but the description the uploader left made it sound like they were off-the-shelf. I think they did the conversion work themselves. I downloaded one to test and the conversion was top notch. Really good model. I went back to get more but they were deleted. Such a shame.
The default G8 Lashes are almost all transparency maps. You really on need to create a diffuse map that covers the general vicinity of the lashes you want to color differently. There's no real need to be precise. In Gimp, overlay the lash transparency map as on top of a solid layer colored with the base lash color Then set the strength of the top lash transparency layer to 50%. Select the solid base layer in the layer toolbar and use a paint brush to fill in the lashes you want to change. Don't worry about staying in the lines. When you're done just delete the lash transparency top layer and save. Set the set diffuse map of the lash to the new image. You may need to dial in the results by redoing the diffuse map until it's the way you want.
You'll have to find the bad character or morph install and delete it. If you can recall what you installed right when it started then you can unwind it. Otherwise you'll have to manually lookup what's going wrong in the log file. 200 Morphs has that problem and a few other characters. IIRC it doesn't really affect anything other than stretching out the character load times to unreasonable lengths.
I've never understood the private sharing arrangements where public release is forbidden. It seems hypocritical to buy something from a content creator under an express agreement not to share it with anyone then turn around a share that with people with a stipulation that they don't violate a similar agreement with you.
Most likely it's an unreleased/one-off asset based on Maris Hair (by the same artist). It looks like a pig-tailed version of it with some subtle changes to the front like slightly clingier with a hint of waves in the front, wider/thicker side hair and a custom style morph to sweep the bang tips.
Sounds like your directory structure is wrong and therefore it can't find the morph data. It's only loading the icon images for the morph sliders and not the morphs themselves. When I unpack files I open up the My Library directory in the file and unpack everything from there directly to Local Disc:/Users/username/Documents/Daz 3D/Studio/My Library
I think the morph data has to be in a specific place in relation to where the main geometric data is stored at for the figure. The morphs must be in like My Library/data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/Female/Morphs. The .duf files to apply the character can usually find the files it needs no matter where it's at as long as the directory "tree" maintains the same relationship relative to the files it's applying.
