Michael 8 Review

DAZ 3D's Michael 8 using stock and original content. Additional modelling and cloth simulation in LightWave.

Michael 8 – Iray render. Shirt modeled in LightWave.

And here’s Michael 8, surprisingly early! With the previous Genesis figures DAZ, made us all wait several months between Victoria and Michael releases, but this time around it has been about two. What does that mean? I don’t know, but really, who wants to wait?

Actually, last Genesis release cycle I completely skipped over the Michael 7 – didn’t even install G3M (was a low DAZ Studio usage period). For most people, Victoria is the main event, and I see this in the reader statistics, but I have a journalistic duty to do this (queue dramatic music). Really, I’m doing it as an exercise to keep blogging and share what insights I have gleaned from a little time with the new figure.

Comparing Genesis 8 Male and Female

As with all Genesis figures, Michael 8 and Victoria 8 are functionally almost identical. The characters come from the same base mesh, though V8 has around 200 more vertices. At least some of the difference in poly count is in the chest. Victoria/GF has some nice edge loops to support her feminine endowments – these are absent with Michael/GM. Other than these differences the two figures share the same major topographical features.

Weight map configurations are very similar, again, the chest area seems to be the major difference, even if only subtly so. The configuration of JCMs that control the deformation of joints and muscles appear to be the same between the two figures, though are likely specifically tweaked.

With all these similarities in mind I’d suggest the Victoria 8 review for more detailed information on the updates introduced with Genesis 8.

Michael 8 compatibility

Like with Genesis 8 Female, I am assuming that Genesis 8 Male/Michael is backwards compatible with textures sets created for the previous generation. I didn’t have any M7/G3M texture sets installed, so I didn’t test it out.

Michael 8 with Victoria 8 item auto fitted.Unfortunately, M8/V8 texture sets aren’t interchangeable out of the box, though there is a product by SloshWerks that allows for this. Similarly, texture compatibility with generations previous to G3 is not supported, though again, it is likely that there will be a product in the works to open up more options.

As with V8, Michael 8 offers autofitting compatibility back to Genesis. See Victoria 8 review for full details.

Michael 7 vs Genesis 8 Male

For users looking for a simple base mesh from which to build character sculpts, the base Genesis figure is a pretty good deal. It is light on the muscular details, and generally nondescript, perfect for making unique characters, either with morph packs or custom sculpts. Michael 8, on the other hand, is a strongly defined character. He is a big framed, muscular, strong-jawed dude.

Morph and JCM comparison

The base Genesis figure incorporates most of the features of Michael, minus the eyebrow fiber mesh props. The base G8M textures and materials are quite reasonable (excellent considering DAZ give away Genesis). Michael comes with different Iray material configurations (arguably better), normal maps, and an eyebrow-less texture option (handy when using fiber mesh eyebrows).

Michael 8’s eyebrows

Unconvincing eyebrows

A note on the mesh eyebrows that come with M8: I’m not a fan. They are too light. I felt they made the character look vaguely concerned (like he’s worried we might notice he just broke wind). They certainly don’t fit with the strong facial features.

For those that have the desire and the know-how, making modifications to the brows is probably quite a simple exercise. In my opinion, the eyebrows that are included in the texture set are much better, though obviously limited for closeups.

Given how happy I was with Victoria’s new eyebrows, this was a bit of a disappointment for me.

Michael 8 bundles

Michael 8 starter and pro bundles will mostly appeal to content junkies (who will find these great value). Those that require the “anatomical elements” (genitals) have no option but to buy the pro bundle. The content in the packages are reasonably well rounded selections covering the main broad categories and content types we see in the store – hair, character/textures, wardrobe (fantasy, sci-fi, contemporary), and pose sets.

Suggested content

If I had my way in putting the bundles together, I’d be including the body and head morphs, facial expressions (I picked up these three items), and the Slosh’s UV compatibility tool. That would be a nice pro bundle, extending Michael and Genesis 8 Male’s utility. Unfortunately such ideas will undoubtedly stay wish listed.

To buy or not

For most potential purchasers it will come down to a question of, do I like the Genesis 8 updates? If you didn’t think Victoria 8 was a worth adding to your runtime then there’s a good chance Michael 8 is the same. For me, the generation is a win, building on Genesis 3, refining the figure. Introducing fibre eyebrows was a good move, as was including JCMs to give better muscle deformation, something that would have been most welcome with Genesis 3 as it moved away from TriAx weight maps.

Genesis 8 Male using included free morphs.

Recovering From Hack

Image by pixelcreatures

DigiSprawl, along with another blog I maintain, were hacked and out of commission for a couple of days. As far as such things go the event was a not a sinister attack, but more of a tagging. No malicious software or code was installed (other than changing the site’s homepage), but the fact that the hack happened, and that it went unnoticed by me for so long, is a wake-up call.

While removing and repairing all affected files, I identified and eliminated several potential vulnerabilities, but I confess, this is not an area I have strong knowledge of. I’m not a web security or engineering expert. Luckily I don’t have to be. We don’t keep, or have access to any sensitive data. Our subscription services are handled by WordPress and Google Feedburner, both companies I do trust in terms of security.

Further Examination of Victoria 8

DAZ 3D's Victoria 8 posed overlooking an industrial facility

Creating Content for Victoria 8

This is an image (1920×1080 unmarked wallpaper version here) I was working on for the V8/Genesis 8 review. I wanted something to show that was basically entirely my own, but there were some setbacks and it was taking way too long, so I put it on hold.

Everything here (aside from V8) was modeled in LightWave and UV mapped with UVLayout. The dress is draped using DAZ Studio’s Alembic exporter plugin (figure pose animation), and LightWave’s cloth Physics FX, which is often painful. I’ve been considering Syflex, which has plugins for many 3D suits (LW, Modo, Maya etc) or VWD Cloth and Hair (Poser) and it’s DAZ Studio plugin. If anyone has any experience with either I’d love to hear. If I pick up either I’ll be sure to do a review.

I’ve used shaders from Mec4d’s amazing PBS Shaders vol 2. for Iray (platform and dress) and vol .1 (rails). I am not a skilled texture and shader artist, so I love shader packs, and these are some of the best available at DAZ 3D’s store.

Victoria 8 floating dress fix

Anyway, while rigging the dress (which I constructed specifically for the Victoria 8 morph), I ran into an annoying issue where the dress would “float” up off the figures shoulders. I don’t know how to fix this, but I do have a work around that does the trick.

Loading in the original mesh as a morph and then dialing it to max effectively dials out the weird shape the Transfer Utility thinks Victoria 8 is, returning the dress to the correct shape and location.

As far as I can tell this fixes the problem, or at least works around it. The item will morph correctly.

Victoria 8 Eyebrows

The fiber eyebrows that come with the base Victoria 8 product completely slipped my mind when I was doing the review. They come in just shy of 50k polygons, which is over three Genesis 8 figures, so not exactly a light prop. For closeups, they can make a world of difference.

I used them here, and while the benefit is debatable, it is still better than the bump maps, which is a step up from having drawn on eyebrows (though sometimes that’s exactly what you want – I’m not judging).

And that’s all for today. A bit of a mixed post, but hopefully something useful there for you all.

Review: DAZ 3D’s Victoria 8

Victoria 8: an evolution

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Image courtesy of DAZ 3D

Well, I’ve gone and sunk a good number of hours into playing with the Victoria 8 Pro Bundle, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed, not so much with the content of the bundle, as high quality as those products are, but with Genesis 8 Female and Victoria 8 in general. We’ll get to the content later on.

In every way, DAZ has improved Genesis 8 over Genesis 3, which was a huge departure from Genesis 2, though something of a less exciting release. DAZ has stuck with the “General” weight maps, introduced with Genesis 3, which continues DAZ’s direction of making their figures more compatible with third-party applications. Similarly, DAZ has changed the default pose, to be more current. Daz state this is meant to facilitate content creation.

For content creators, the move away from TriAx weight map is a mixed blessing. Instead of having to deal with many, many weight maps, they now have to contend with dealing with many, many JCMs, some of which will run amok and require lots of corrections.

Genesis and Victoria 8 aren’t a revolution over the previous generation, but it is a very nice evolution. The default Iray materials are a significant improvement, and incorporate new additions to DAZ Studio’s Iray Uber Base.

Genesis 8 base mesh

Inspecting the geometry, and comparing Genesis 3 and Genesis 8 side-by-side reveals they are cut from the same mesh. G8 is slightly lighter on the poly count, coming in at roughly 16.6K vertices, vs G3’s 17.4K, which again was less than G2’s 21.5K.

Arguably, and not without merit, Genesis 2’s mesh offered the most physically accurate base of any of DAZ’s figures to date, but along with that mesh comes a very hard, and toned figure. The mesh offered clear muscle boundaries, and deforms very nicely with the TriAx weight maps, but perhaps as a general base, from which to build new characters, the mesh is too specialised. Some areas of the mesh were messy and perhaps, needlessly intricate.

Genesis and Victoria 8 continue the simplification that Genesis 3 introduced, and while the meshes have been getting smaller, DAZ has clearly been working hard to refine a figure that offers a compromise of detail and simplicity. Many areas of the G8 are much improved over the predessors, including G2 (the figure I have primarily worked with up to this point). The shoulders and neck of Victoria 8 are a nice example of these improvements.

Left to right: V8, V7, V6. Victoria 6 wins the cute award, but V7 shows better and finer details, particularly with expression morphs. V7 apparently never learned how to smile.

Left to right: V8, V7, V6. Victoria 6 wins the cute award, but V7 shows better and finer details, particularly with expression morphs. V7 apparently never learned how to smile.

Genesis 8 muscle flex and more realistic joints

For me, this is one of the biggest changes for Genesis 8. With each figure iteration, DAZ has been working on improving the realism of joint deformation, and with the new muscle flex JCMs in G8, the figures are looking better than ever. I did a quick bicep flex comparison between Victoria 8 and G8 and found that the morphs are present in both figures (which logically flows), though V8 has a more nicely defined and significant bicep bulge.

I also tested the bicep flex between Victoria generations and found, unsurprisingly, that V8 does have the best bulge. In the past this was something that DAZ’s Published artists would create products to achieve, and they probably will still do so. There is always room to improve the base figure and morphs.

Below are demonstrations and comparison of bicep bulge, or lack there of. The first image also makes use of the Head and Body Morphs.

Genesis 8 and Victoria 8 backwards compatibility

Texture compatibility

Genesis 8’s UVs are almost identical to Genesis 3’s. Overlapping them in LightWave we see this quite clearly. The biggest deviation is the eyelashes (not shown here). With G8 the eyelashes have been moved to a separate mesh. Seemingly, reversing this direction, the finger and toenails have been welded into the base mesh. I’m not sure of the reasoning behind these design tweaks, and I’m not going to speculate and risk being horribly wrong (that would be embarrassing).

Victoria 7 and 8 UV maps compared and overlayed in LightWaveThe benefits of having such closely matching UVs are obvious: once again, DAZ has given us the option to use the textures of the previous generation figure, something that they were heavily criticised for breaking with Genesis 3. So while we don’t have out-of-the-box texture support for G2, or older figures, at least we can keep our favourites from the previous generation (assuming you adopted G3).

Victoria 8 selfie styled image demonstrating Victoria 7 texture compatibility.

My rather pasty reworking of a Victoria 7 character texture set on V8.

Also on the topic of UVs and texture compatibility, the genital geograft prop that come with the Pro Bundle of Victoria 7 and 8 share identical UVs. I only got to check this out because I got the V7 Pro Bundle included in the purchase of V8 (nice!).

Genesis 8 hair and clothes compatibility

Whereas texture compatibility is limited, hair and wardrobe compatibility is much more extensive, though, as with previous generations, still subject to the limitations of the Autofit Tool. Where Genesis 3 offered us compatibility with G2 content (extended with further scripts), G8 gives us compatibility all the way back to Genesis. There is little doubt this will be expanded (by PA add-ons) to include Generation 4 figures such as Victoria and Michael 4.

Hair

Autofitting hair from previous generations does a nice enough job, and will generally keep most morphs, though additional rigging is lost (a disappointment we have all come to live with). It is a little perplexing to see morphs disappear from the shaping tab, but generally, these morphs can also be found in the parameters tab. Some longer hair props could use some additional work on their weight maps to get them working at their best. There are some work arounds to fit hair, and keep the additional rigging, though this might be a topic for a future tutorial.

Wardrobe

We are all familiar with this process by now, and generally we know what to expect. Items, like panties, tend to get trashed when they are converted from one figure to another, as are details of pants, such as belts, buckles and pockets. Some of these issues can be fixed with a simple smoothing out with the weight brush.

Tau Ceti Overseer native fit on Victoria 6 (right), and Autofitted to Victoria 7 (right).

Tau Ceti Overseer native fit on Victoria 6 (right), and Autofitted to Victoria 8 (right).

Generally, the more extreme a pose the more we will come up against the limitations of Autofit. A pair of pants, for example, might look fine with a walking pose or animation, but when crouching, where the legs are bent up quite far and to the sides, distortion in the crotch is likely to be quite noticeable. Luckily, for those that don’t want to get into weight mapping and morphing, lighting and textures can hide a multitude of sins.

G2 item autofitted to V8 (left). Quick weight painting fix (Right).

G2 item autofitted to V8 (left). Quick weight painting fix (Right).

Long dresses and skirts tend to suffer more than a lot of other items when converting between figures, especially for ones that include additional rigging to control the flow of the longer fabric. Again, there are work arounds for retaining the rigging, but that goes beyond this review.

Poses

Genesis 8 backwards compatibility with poses is limited, but there is some functionality. I found that the arms were the least responsive. At best you have a horribly butchered base to work from, at worst you’ll be rolling on the floor laughing (which is actually good). The key is to have low expectations in this area.

I found that there was actually greater compatibility between G2 to G3 poses then there was from G3 to G8.

testing poses on various generations of Victoria 8

The inverse is also true. G8 pose on V6 (left), V7, V8 (right)

Victoria 8 Pro Content

Victoria 8 posing in red and black custom shader Andromeda outfit. One of my biggest criticisms of DAZ’s Pro Bundles, from G2 through to present, is that other than additional content (which while good quality, is obviously consumer oriented) and genitals, there is nothing to distinguish the starter and Pro Bundles. There is no extended functionality, which one expects from the title “Pro”.

My memory could be faulty, but I seem to remember the original V5 and M5 bundles coming with the Evolution Morph Bundles, which included the head and body morphs. I have gone and looked, and they aren’t included, so it might just be my faulty memory after all… To me, giving the Pro bundle some more flexibility would make it a truly “Pro” bundle, hell let’s get carried away and throw in HD morphs while we are adding stuff to the wish list.

This is not to diminish the value of the Victoria 8 Pro Bundle. The content, as always, is top shelf stuff, and this time we have a great mix of contemporary, sci-fi, and fantasy themes. The included hair is of particular note; both offer a lot of detail and a high realism quality, which is always very welcome. The Voss hair comes with the Starter Bundle, and the Vertigo Ponytail comes with the Pro set (the starter set being included in the Pro set).

Victoria 8 side profile demonstrating subsurface scattering (sss) and translucency of hair.

FW’s Rebekah HD with Vertigo Ponytail.

The content I was particularly interested in added up to over $150, so right off the bat the Victoria 8 Pro Bundle is already worth it, especially if you are getting it at the opening discount price, and more-so if you are a Platinum Club member (which unfortunately I’d let slip). So clearly, my criticism isn’t so much about value, it’s more of a petty (I’m big enough to admit it) disagreement of the definition of “Pro”.

Victoria 8 yay or nay?

And that’s it! That’s my review of Victoria 8. I like her. I think she’s a good and valuable evolution in DAZ’s line of figures. She offers greater physical accuracy with the new muscle flex JCMs. While some are mixed on whether a more general, less detailed base figure is better or worse, or whether moving to a JCM dominated figure is better or worse, DAZ manages to offer an improved figure that offers a good compromise which expands its utility to more users.

PowerPose

…I realised I hadn’t talked about the update to Power pose, and the new template for Genesis 8. It’s a great addition to Genesis 8, and a long overdue update on DAZ’s behalf. It can be a little counter-intuitive and awkward, but it is a worthy tool that is worth persevering with and developing a feel for.

Demonstrating PowerPose in DAZ 3D with Victoria 7

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