Renderotica

With the advent of a working vag coming for Genesis 9, my big question as a vendor is how much longer do we need to support G8?  Are you all making the switch? At some point support is going to stop.

Thoughts?

Davo

I have spent a great deal of time (and money) converting all my often used comic characters from G8 to G9. Whilst the conversion has been largely successful I recently started a new comic using the new G9 characters, but without the mulititude of posing scripts to place hands and feet, I found G9 incredibly cumbersome and time consuming to use, and I need to make lots (and lots, and lots) of correction morphs where arm-over-head poses cause ugly distortions on all my characters so I switched back to G8. I will keep up with G9 though, with GP being an insta buy, along with Advanced Pussy if that gets done, and just hope that future development makes it esaier to use, but I can see G8 still being my character of choicce for some time yet.

Life kinda pulled me away from making products for a while, but I'm still working on finishing USM 2 and want to get it done to get back to making poses.

I plan to support both G8/8.1 and G9 for a long time.

G8 is far from dead. :)

I wholeheartedly agree. Beyond the expense of all the proprietary clothes and morphs, the file sizes of the new models keeps growing and the products used for them keep getting larger as well. I find it a bit of a racket that everyone has to start over with new items or convert their old ones. I'm happy with the 8.1 expressions and characters and plan to keep using them. I really see little improvement in the new models from the renders I've seen. They appear to be the same quality. 

One more note, have you noticed the price inflation of products on Daz? With all of the AI competition, you would think they would try and be more competitive, instead the sale items which used to $3-$4 are now $7-$8. My income has not budged but the products keep climbing. So I plan to get the most milage out of products I already have.

Not a vendor here but an enthusiastic artist, and well...  The only thing I've done with G9 so far was to check that I could GoZ it over into ZBrush, I also set up a template for it in Substance Painter and that's about it. All meant as a staging ground to build my own characters and assets if I want to.

In fact, because of the above I'm even tempted to argue that G9 can also be considered a bit of a step backwards. I mean, its surfaces have the same basis as G8 ("PBR") but a basic G8 character actually provides you with a blank canvas to work on: there's actually a basic skin surface to build upon. Not so with G9. Yet despite that it's a lot more resource intensive.

As for assets and all...  I fail to see the alleged advantages of G9 here, other than of course it being the latest sales model. I mean, I get the advantage of using a solo base model, but then again that's why I never really stopped using Genesis sporadically (the original character?). But right now I can't help get the impression that the main reason they went for this was to somewhat hinder backwards compatibility. I can easily use G1 assets on G8, but using G8 assets on G9 more than often poses a bit of an issue.

All in all, I'm not really a big fan and therefor I've heavily expanded on my G1, G3 and G8 assets which got some insane discounts over the last years. Not planning to upgrade anytime soon :)

(edit)

Daz is a storefront, so their main interest is sales and revenue. So if it sells, they'll sell it ;)  I mean, they also never stopped selling Genesis and/or Genesis 3 assets to this very same day (time of wriring).

Edited by user Saturday, May 13, 2023 10:04:37 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified