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He is unlikely to have a glittering future ahead on the after-dinner speech circuit, that's for sure, but it's mercifully short and to the point with no waffle or faffing about. And it works.
When I started out with Daz some years ago I had no idea what I was doing and decided to buy one of the tutorial videos on the Daz Shop from one of the best known authors on there at the time, assuming it would have been quality-checked and therefore very good.
30 minutes of its 60 minutes running time was devoted to the author flailing about in his content library trying to find something suitable for whatever he wanted to demonstrate. It was the most unprofessional, unrehearsed and useless 'training' video I have ever had the misfortune to sit through and a complete waste of money.
I'd rather Father Purcell than that guy, any day!
Written tutorial here for making a G8F version of V4:
Video version of that process here (easier to follow and updated):
It's slightly involved the first time you work through it but once you understand what's going on it's very straightforward. It also works perfectly and you get the shape you're after with the G8 functionality and materials.
Hope that helps.
(Edit: must have been typing this at the same time as Frank replied - using measure metrics is a great idea too.)
Just as a test, before you spent the money, I just downloaded one of the author's models from the same era (Poser 6). It renders fine as it is without any conversion but a lot of the effort and detailing that has been put into the model is lost without conversion as LP pointed out - it's very true in this case.
To convert to Iray, I selected the base figure, CTRL-A to select all the parts, switched to the surfaces panel, CTRL-A again, and applied the Uber Iray shader to everything simultaneously. I then added subdivisions (Edit -> Object -> Geometry -> Convert to SubD) and set it to level 2 to get rid of the blockiness.
Finally, I used the shader to add a bit of glossiness and SSS, then boosted the bump and normal maps which were completely invisible to Iray before.
The 1st pic is out-of-the-box, no conversion done. The second is post conversion.
Total time? 5 to 6 mins. If you put a bit more time into it than I did, you'll end up with something very nice.
They're great models, worth the money, you'll have no problems using them and the manual conversion is painless.
Yeah, this one is tricky. Ideally you'd model it as one single piece in something like Marvelous (and it might be worth paying someone to do it for you, perhaps on DeviantArt, if you really want to replicate it).
This is the closest I could come up with and I don't have a match for the string accessory. I know I've seen something like it but I can't remember what set it is part of.
This is the best I can do and it doesn't have the pleating that your picture does; unfortunately, unless it's designed in, dForce won't do that. This involved a large amount of hackery and messiness and can't be described in a short paragraph so, if it's of interest, let me know and I'll send you the instructions.
May the Force etc..
Honestly, I’d cry tears of joy if Daz 5 ends up basically being an over-glorified Blender frontend.
Me too, If anyone ever buys Daz Studio, it should be the folks at Blender. I mean there are a few unofficial human modeling plugins for Blender, but none of them have the same kind of asset support Daz does.
Oh lord, yes. Combine the brilliance and openness of Blender and its unfathomable amount of tutorials with the ease-of-use of Studio. They'd have a license to print money and we'd have everything we've ever wanted in an art package. Animation with Eevee, photo-realism with Cycles or Iray - choose your poison.
Which is why it will never happen 🙁
UE5's graphic quality is staggering, as are its physics. Snag is, you need a Cray to run it at the moment with all the toys turned on but I'm confident this will be fixed before general release. It was the same with UE4. If you haven't had a play with UE5 you have absolutely no idea how this is going to revolutionize everything art/animation and game related. UE4 is good. UE5 is next-level.
If you don't believe me, sign up and have a play with the pre-release version but you'll need a hefty PC to turn on all the eye-candy.
I’d actually love for Blender to have Iray support. That way you can transfer daz scenes into blender and render them without problem.
Yup, that'd be great too! The more options the better but I do think Daz are shooting themselves in the foot (and wallet) by excluding AMD owners.
Also, Cycles supports out-of-core rendering so people who don't have the latest and greatest (and unavailable) Nvidia offerings can still at least use the GPU albeit with a slower memory transfer rate.
It's because it's built using the Qt framework and the version Studio uses (4) is hopelessly out of date and unsupported. I don't think there will be anything new at launch in version 5 per se, but it will at least have an underlying framework that is supported and can be further developed, unlike now!
If it were me running Daz, I'd be asking the dev team to be working on integrating Blender's open source Cycles renderer and maybe talking to the Blender team about disentangling the Eevee render engine from Blender itself for animation (not a trivial task!). It's got to be in their interests to support the huge user base of AMD GPUs and and and and.... AMD cards are far more generous with VRAM than their Nvidia counterparts at the same price point. Cycles runs far better on Nvidia Cuda GPUs than AMD units, but it does at least run.
If Nvidia does drop Iray (although I couldn't find anything to confirm that) it would still work as is in 4.x.
Now... here's the potential good news for Linux peops - https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/supported-platforms.html
Whether or not Daz decide to compile (and support - that's probably the main issue) a Linux build is something else entirely, but it's possible to produce a native version.
I think they're part of this:
https://zonegfx.com/dayton-bundle-for-genesis-8-females/
Hope that's what you're after!
I'm pretty sure it's this one -
- with a custom shader.
The fringe and rear can be styled identically, but the front part of the side cannot be shortened and styled like the promo photo. Other than that one difference, I can't tell the two apart. The shader included has thicker strands on the texture as well but you can get 95% of the way there.
If it's not that one, it's a derivative.
@billyhill
At the moment you do need a top-end PC to use all of the new features in UE5. If I turn on all the candy-shop goodies (Lumen, Nanite, Shadowing et.al.) I struggle to get 30fps in a basic scene with a 59590x, a 3080 and 64Gb of system RAM.
It is, however, a Beta. It will have to get better than this as it is not realistic to expect the average gamer to own the PC equivalent of a Cray to run a game/application built with it!
UE5 can just about run on Linux but a lot of the new features don't currently work with it... neither does the launcher which is 32-bit Windows-only code right now. I would expect to see full Linux support at launch but right now the drivers for the GPUs aren't there.
You may well be right about Studio lasting longer than my cynical prediction but do bear in mind that UE4 and UE5 are also essentially drop-and-go if all you are doing is still renders or animated cutscenes, with not a single line of C++ in sight.
If you can use Daz coupled with an external renderer (say Octane or Lux) you will find UE or Unity no more difficult or tedious; the mystique surrounding these engines is undeserved but, obviously, you will be starting from scratch again.
I would love it if out of the blue Daz announced Studio 5 - tada! - which cured all the problems, had a built-in renderer for AMD GPU users and added the features people have been requesting for years on the forums but the day that happens I expect a large, pig-based object to appear in the skies...
Daz Studio is OK. It's cheap and easy to learn and you can get some nice results if you're prepared to do a bit of post and have just the tiniest inkling of artistic talent. If you want to do animation, though, forget it. If you want to do a complex scene with complex lighting and have an AMD card? Forget it.
Optimising, refining, texture crunching - all of this is the staple of the Daz artist and there are quite a few people who self-righteously proclaim that if you're not doing the work to get around the limitations then you're not working 'properly' but at the end of the day, the real-time engines are here and one kicks Iray's ass. I'm using it in Early Access - Unreal 5.
Sign up for it, have a play and realise that Studio has about 12 months left. It's pretty straightforward to import Daz assets into Unreal (PBR works really well btw!) and you now have access to state-of-the-art animation, lighting, cut-scene and camera tools that are used on TV shows today.
I have a soft spot for Daz Studio - it's easy, it's relatively cheap and it can look good and there was nothing like it for years. I'll still use it for messing around until UE5 is stable but when that happens...bye. Although perhaps not 'bye' to the store...Daz assets cost a fraction of what UE assets cost and with a bit of fettling can look amazing. Maybe that's where Daz will end up... a model store.
/end ramble
I'm wondering if you installed the Genesis 8 Starter Essentials from Daz in between the time they released Vicky 8.1 and Michael 8.1. It was quite a gap and the only thing I can suggest is you uninstall the G8 Starter Essentials package and reinstall it.
From your error messages it looks like you're missing Daz supplied base morphs so you actually don't have G8.1M installed as a base. It's not Michael 8.1 that's the issue I think but your installed G8 package.
Can you load any other 8.1 males successfully?
The file corruption error shouldn't be present either... there's too many variables to give you a definitive answer I'm afraid so all I can suggest is - reinstall G8 essentials and try a different unzipper if you're using WinRAR (7zip is much better). You're missing some files but this is a bit too vague to pin it down to a 'do this and it will work' solution sadly.
Then nothing I can do will convince you! It's a database that can be run across networks that actually, in this case, just runs on your PC. It's an odd solution but it's how Daz builds the Smart Content for Studio. It can not, and does not, shout 'look here, pirated content!', to Daz.
Even if it could or did, can they pin it on you, John Doe? No. the account you buy Daz content from could be completely different from the account that runs Studio and you don't have to log in to run Studio anyway.
You could disconnect your internet when running the script but you might be wondering if it gets logged and uploaded when you reconnect. It does not. It's your PC, your stuff, do what you want with it, but it sounds to me like you made up your mind before you posted this.
Why not ask around and see if anyone running the CMS has had their content 'mysteriously deleted' or had a lawyer's letter land on their doorstep. You'll find no-one but, at the end of the day, it's entirely up to you. I don't blame you for being cautious, but the Deep State is not after your Daz content 🙂
There's a quick but comprehensive 10 minute tutorial here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeLdxBQzDdw - for rendering the entire scene as an HDRI and then using it for multiple renders.
Once made, they do speed up the rendering process enormously and allow far more geometry and materials to be used on characters/props/etc. The rendering time also dramatically drops but there is a tradeoff; your camera is free to swivel and zoom but it is anchored to one point in space and any additional characters or objects will always render in front of the background. If you need a character to sit at a table on a chair, you have to remove those from your HDRI creation and render separately, likewise if you need a character to be partially obscured by some of the set.
Some time ago I was creating a series of scenes inside the ROG Inn set and spent a day trying to get HDRIs to work but it was too problematic. For simple scenes with an open space it may well be worth doing and LP's other tips on scene optimisation will help enormously.
I'd just like to find a 3090 and be done with it!
(Quick Edit - that video shows you how to render the scene multiple times and combine the 3 or 5 images in Photoshop, but you can render it out just once using the canvas. That will also create an HDRI but the lighting is not quite as predictable as using the technique shown. If you want a high level of detail in the background you'll be looking at an 8k+ render so scenes where you are going to use DoF are more suited to this technique as well.)
