This week I've got a commission to create an outfit for G3F, and man, I haven't rigged anything with general weights since the early 1990s! Say goodbye to TriAx - it's back to the very basics - a single map for all axis rotations (and scaling), and no more bulge maps. To compensate for the poor posing quality, DAZ has bloated the figure with JCMs, which is what has killed Victoria 3 and all Gen3 figures back in the day. It was so bad that when Gen4 figures came out, they had no JCMs at all, and became the most successful figures, even nowadays.
So I am painting the weights for a thigh to bend, and when I am done, I go to side-side, and the SAME map has to make do. If it doesn't, I edit it a bit, and ruin the BEND I had already done, so every joint is a compromise. Then enter the many JCM corrective shapes, which DS has no tools to edit or create.
I fail to see how this is "better" than TriAx - the next step in figure evolution? It takes me back to how I rig models for game engines, with all the inherited limitations, but what does that has to do with Poser/DS? Has DAZ decided to abandon this market and dedicate themselves to the gaming market, which has been ignoring them because of the obvious content licensing legal issues?
Don't know if this is just me, but with DS 4.9, the weight map brush kept disappearing, and some of the tabbed panels would stop responding so I couldn't get access to the ones I needed. I had to switch back to 4.8 to have any work done. Lucky me the commission wasn't for G8F, for she only works in 4.9. Nonetheless, general weights feel like a 20+ years step back in figure rigging, even more with the return of JCM bloating from the times of Generation 3 figures from over a decade ago.
General weight compromising was the reason why TriAx came out, so this makes no sense at all. Sounds great for compatibility with game engines, but what does that has to do with us?