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I think that before scientists develop AI we should try working on common sense.
I would like to point out that not only does AI have issues with hands... You have got to see the stuff it does with penises. I mean.. dang... wasn't that his leg? Nose? No wait... this one is a loop! Where will it go next? Conjoined penises?
There is most certainly a Rule 34 section for XXX AI images, and its safe to look at as long as you have enough eye bleach on stand by.
(I've played with Stable Diffusion more than Genesis 9. That tells you what I think of Genesis 9.)
FIRST... have you taken the DRIVE to a REPAIR SHOP? Often the electronics or the head are busted, and they can transfer the platens to another donor drive. You can then copy off what you want. (I dropped a laptop once.)
SECOND.. Make sure you use lots of floppy disk hardener. That will keep your disks from breaking.
THIRD.. I keep two backups on site, 2 on my PC (my installed library), and 2 on my server (Raw install files). I use a program called SyncFolders to do this.
FOURTH... Synology NAS systems can easily backup, and manage your backups at home or offsite. They are affordable, and you can set them up to remote snarfle up all your data and keep multiple locations instantly up to date. (I was looking at them for backup up stuff at my office.. I was surprised at what they could do.)
G9 isn't better. Its just different.
The reality is that textures are NOT what we should be looking at. They can be placed on any figure. (Yes... more regions on G9 means you can have more detail .... but who cares!)
Early G3F was pretty meh... early G8F was ok.. I guess. Current G8F is pretty killer IMO, and G9F is about that quality.
But I think the degree of failure here by Daz can't be understated. They were a group of Poser employees who broke off to make and sell models. Genesis 9 is an utter failure for a company founded to make and sell models. They did a shit job.
I'm really not interested in G9... I suppose I'll get dragged screaming and kicking later on, but lets face it... I can get this stuff for free here, and I'm not interested.
[Full disclosure, I wasn't interested in G8 initially, but when COVID hit, I blew money out the window on it. I'm happy with it, but its not a way better model than G3.]
I managed to get a decent V4 Alice (Base, Curvey, and Faerie) transfer to G8F. Maybe I ought to offer it up...
@Frank21 "IMO a prog with native shader support will always beat importing and converting any day of the week."
Its a catch 22 really. It depends on the complexity of the background scene, and the level of equivalence you want. Also, to be fair, there are times that the existing shaders just don't cut it, especially with older products. Its virtually impossible to fix the shaders with the mechanisms provided by Daz. You pretty much need to be an expert in order to perform minimal amounts of shader work. ("Customer Vicious" must be their mantra.)
By comparison, with Octane you can do simple work very quickly, and you can even fix up shader\UV work when the older materials simple won't cut it in an Octane world. In one case, I had a single texture for the entire surface of a build and grounds, so I created map to separate the grounds from the building. I then built separate shaders for both, and combined them using the map. Suddenly I have high detail grounds... (and sigh.. shitty buildings)
The real cut off for where Octane shines versus Iray is how often you have to run test renders. I tend to do that a lot in order to tweak my final works. Since Octane is blazingly fast, adjustments are simple and easy to do. With Iray, kicking off a render is just slow enough to tickle my ADHD in a bad way.
Some folks here may recall the days of 20 hour renders with Reality\Lux. The quality was there for sure, definitely comparable to Iray\Octane, but seriously... 30 minute test renders... I could watch a whole sitcom between test renders, then say, "Oh yeah, that Chrome could be more shiny..."
Actually... I'm an expert Octane fanboy. I was there from the beginning and still have my perpetual license. (I was not aware that they supported Radeon GPUs yet.)
- Its not worth even trying Octane if you don't have the REDSPEC skin shaders.
That's just my opinion.. but I'm never wrong so.. deal with it.
Ummm... At last check, the auto conversion of Iray shaders to Octane is just plain borked. You tend to get 100% glossy everywhere which necessitates changing every single shader in a scene before you can reasonably render. (Honestly I wish they'd just use a single simple shader for all textures when auto-converting. Then I could just get a 'good enough if you don't have it in focus' look, which is really what a lot of a scene is.)
- Creating your own shaders in Octane is super easy, and its easy to understand.
Iray... is inscrutable to say the least. Good luck figuring out what the Daz shaders are really doing.
- Most of my time spent on Octane renders was work on shaders\texturing to get them to look right.
I switched to Iray after I spent 6 hours converting all the shaders in one scene. It was amazing when done, but I could quickly get the same results with Iray without doing 6 hours of work.
Hands down, Octane is faster and easily cleans the performance clock of stupid old Iray. Daz outright lies when they claim Octane is slower.
You kinda need to offer more information. Are you using Iray or 3Delight? Octane? Lux\Reality? What are you trying to do? Indoor, outdoor?
Assuming its Iray, then you need a good video card preferably in the 12GB+ range of RAM. You do not want CPU+GPU rendering enabled. Its slow.
There isn't a generic answer to lighting issues. It depends on what you want to do. And it helps to understand what the pitfalls with rendering in general are.
Its best if you think of rendering as photography. Choose the exposure, and adjust lighting to suit.
Rendering engines are capable of generating imagery with dynamic ranges well in excess of anything we can create in the real world. If you don't have a good lighting solution it will take long and tend to get sparkly.
What I recommend you do is practice some renders from the basics so you can recognize what's happening in your renders. Start with a simple portrait set up. (This is what your basic portrait studio set up is.) One light on camera, one high and behind for drama\hair, and one low and to the other side.
Don't add much for clothes or hair, and just play with it. Then add the other stuff. You should get an idea about performance impacts various elements add, and how the light plays with it. Hair can be, annoying to get right, so stick with stuff you know will render well. (For me OOT hair for the win.)
In movies, there's a reason there are a lot of people working on the lighting. (I remember one extra from Lord of the Rings showing Gandalf holding a mirror below his face just to even up the light on his face.)
In a real render you need lots of light in the scene to even up the contrast from light to dark. I recommend mesh lights, but that's just what I'm used to working with. This is hard to get right, you want the light, but you don't want the splash light on the scene, blah. It gets hard.
Ghost Lights are worth picking up.
Cake One at Daz has lots of Click and Render IBL light sets which I find quite good for simple portrait work.
I'm not really into HDRI rendering, but there are some great tutorials in the Daz forums by MEC4D.
At least its not SkyKnit...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/the-making-of-skyknit-an-ai-yarn/554894/There is a limit to how long you can support old software. Its a real issue.
As far as I know Daz used some freeware in its UI, and that's the biggest factor holding them back for Daz 5. (Not compatible? Not working with Apple? I dunno.)
Its also a rats nest for code by all accounts, so... I bet we'll have Daz 4 with no new real features (a'la Genesis 9) for quite a while.
And dude.. Windows 7... That's soooo last millennium. Windows 10 is fine. Its Windows 8 without the crap and bugs.
Windows 11, now that has me worried.
I haven't been able to eat hotdogs since I saw it.
Contagion 2010... In case you want to relive the joy of the last 3 years, watch it.
Look on the Daz forums. There's a script which may sort out the issues. You need to look in the log, and figure out which morph causes the problems. (It doesn't always work though... so there's that.)
I recommend that you keep on top of these issues as they arrive. Create a separate library, and test installs in that. Load in characters simply to find these issues, if you can't fix issues, don't install them in your main library.
My opinion is that Daz needs to make product reuse, texturing, and quick geometry modification (Mesh Grabber) a simple and easy thing to do. Buuut they won't sell as much stuff, so I guess we know how this will go. Gen 9... release everything! 🙂
They are so lazy they barely have documentation on what they do have.
I want to add a positive note here. Like playing with Daz and 3D rendering. I just don't like Daz the company.
With that polygon count, your character better have nose hair!
To be fair, I don't think its just a Daz thing... I think this is just the way of the world these days. Like, what are you really going to get out of an 8k home TV screen? They sell them, and if you can find something to show on them (Daz Genesis 9?), are you even going to be able tell if you aren't standing right next to the screen?
Daz Iray's default settings will turn 8k textures into a collection of JPG artifacts, and I bet most people using Genesis 9 don't even know that. No one will really notice because no one is rendering 8k.
