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CatsEyes for Sora
- Thread starter Ken1171
- Start date
I keep hearing people complaining DAZ and Rosity keep selling more of the same. I don't know about that, but I can tell their galleries keep looking more the same nowadays. Genesis characters all end up with the same look, very recognizable, which is somehow surprising considering they have so much contents available.
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That's one of the main reasons I never upgraded my DS 4.0 Pro to later versions. I was tired of the Same. Old. Thing.
I have, and still use V5/M5/Genesis 1 occassionaly, but have no use for Genesis 2 or Genesis 3. They all look so much alike, I can't tell which generation they are by just looking at their promos and/or gallery images.
I have, and still use V5/M5/Genesis 1 occassionaly, but have no use for Genesis 2 or Genesis 3. They all look so much alike, I can't tell which generation they are by just looking at their promos and/or gallery images.
The thing about the mainstream market is what people want, which translates into what actually sells. If people want fashion models, that's what CAs will be making. But as far as I could see, the morphs include other body types, so we are not tied to just the default idealistic shape. It was like that with V4 as well. 
Well I will give proper Kudos to DAZ for their releases of Ivan and George. Total surprises and they look totally different than anything they've released for their females, except for Bethany who is really just a larger version of Vicky 7. Ivan and George are just so far removed from the norm it's not even funny!
I was pretty disappointed with the new Aiko 7, I like having a "real life" option for her but I think her default look should look more anime since that's what she's meant to be. Someone on FaceBook posted a comparison shot of A6 and A7 and while I like the face better on A7 she's almost half the height of A6 and her body just doesn't look cartoony at all.
I like the look of Aiko 7 but she isn't true anime in my book...but she does look nice. I just don't have the cash to buy the basic figure at the moment.
I feel like that when I look at the new characters. They all are really basic without anything that really differentiates them. Even Madelerium's Genesis character which I bought didn't have many options. I love her V4 stuff so bought it as I want to encourage her to make for DS but it was nowhere near the quality of the textures she's done for V4.
I thought they were doing so well with A5 and A6, but then they went Disney with A7. She's pretty, but in the wrong style. When I look at all the trouble Chris and I went through to research the modern Anime style that would best fit the Dawn topology, DAZ decides to ignore it and make a toon instead. So I am not saying A7 is not pretty, but instead that it was a waste of effort and opportunity. She's pretty, but if I wanted a toon, I could buy it from 3D Universe. Some people have complained that A7 is not even completely Disney toon, but half way into that direction. Seems like they had sat on the fence and couldn't decide which way to go with it. If they had asked ME, I would just state the obvious - well, what about going ANIME style?
Historically, Japan started the Anime style by imitating the Disney features with National Kid. Some people don't realize, but the big eyes and small mouth stereotype was originally developed by Disney, so Anime started with that, and then evolved its own features over time. What we recognize as Anime nowadays took several decades to develop out of what Disney was doing in the 1950's.
Having that said, it's easy to confuse Disney with Anime and vice-versa if we ignore their roots. When I look at Aiko7, that's exactly what I see. To me it sounds as ridiculous as to make a Mickey Mouse spin off and call it Sayuki from Japan.
At least Chris has spent his time researching the proper style before going for Sora's design. Whenever I use Sora in my renders, I am confident I am in the correct style the morph claims to be, so there is no confusion about it. Conversely, I could easily use A7 to make Elsa from Disney's "Frozen" movie, and that would be as Anime style as Charlie Chaplin was a heavy metal guitarist.
But don't get me wrong, I am not over-blowing this. Anime is the style I grew up with, and it hurts me to see it misrepresented on a mainstream product. I first got started with Poser by doing Anime style renders only, a couple of years before the first Aiko came out. When Aiko3 was released for free in 2005, it has removed all other true Anime figures from the market, since they were not free. If Aiko came to replace them all, it should at least be faithful to the style. That's all I am saying.
Historically, Japan started the Anime style by imitating the Disney features with National Kid. Some people don't realize, but the big eyes and small mouth stereotype was originally developed by Disney, so Anime started with that, and then evolved its own features over time. What we recognize as Anime nowadays took several decades to develop out of what Disney was doing in the 1950's.
Having that said, it's easy to confuse Disney with Anime and vice-versa if we ignore their roots. When I look at Aiko7, that's exactly what I see. To me it sounds as ridiculous as to make a Mickey Mouse spin off and call it Sayuki from Japan.
At least Chris has spent his time researching the proper style before going for Sora's design. Whenever I use Sora in my renders, I am confident I am in the correct style the morph claims to be, so there is no confusion about it. Conversely, I could easily use A7 to make Elsa from Disney's "Frozen" movie, and that would be as Anime style as Charlie Chaplin was a heavy metal guitarist.
But don't get me wrong, I am not over-blowing this. Anime is the style I grew up with, and it hurts me to see it misrepresented on a mainstream product. I first got started with Poser by doing Anime style renders only, a couple of years before the first Aiko came out. When Aiko3 was released for free in 2005, it has removed all other true Anime figures from the market, since they were not free. If Aiko came to replace them all, it should at least be faithful to the style. That's all I am saying.
Kinda like what Hollywood and now Marvel did with Howard the Duck. He started off looking very toony with a very oversized bill and eyes. Now he looks like ... I don't know... not Howard at all. I won't even consider buying the comic because when I look at his new imagined face he looses all magic that Steve Gerber first imagined. Sad. Not sure why DAZ doesn't go more into Anime, as stated above, they took a chance with Ivan and George, both were well received so what if Anime is on the other side of all that... I'm sure they would have an audience for that. NearMe was pretty much along the lines of Anime but she's old now. I think I still have her on my hard drive somewhere! lol
Would be cool if Chris could totally re-imagine Dawn and Dusk into an Anime style morphs. I know the expressions and head morphs would all have to be redone mostly. I found that out when creating Tommy and Tina, allot of their expressions are just too much for their tiny mouths and larger eyes so can you imagine the kind of work that all of that would require. It's a gamble but I think building on the gene pool for these figures is important. I mean look at what Steve did with Genesis 3 Male... transformed him into a super stylized fairy. He's totally out of the ballpark ... once again the males get the most interesting character presets but still don't have allot of support. Weird! lol
Would be cool if Chris could totally re-imagine Dawn and Dusk into an Anime style morphs. I know the expressions and head morphs would all have to be redone mostly. I found that out when creating Tommy and Tina, allot of their expressions are just too much for their tiny mouths and larger eyes so can you imagine the kind of work that all of that would require. It's a gamble but I think building on the gene pool for these figures is important. I mean look at what Steve did with Genesis 3 Male... transformed him into a super stylized fairy. He's totally out of the ballpark ... once again the males get the most interesting character presets but still don't have allot of support. Weird! lol
I agree that it's great to be able to tweak stuff. I think a lot of people don't realize that when if you buy a dynamic cloth outfit, the creator can have preset most (but not all) of the settings for you. Which means that buying a few well made dynamic cloth items can really pay off, so that you can learn the basic settings, and then learn about the more advanced ones.
Most of the issues I had when I first started learning the cloth room had to do do with trying to convert and use meshes that weren't designed for it, and fell apart in bad ways. What SM should really do is include a couple good dynamic options for their figures like Pauline, so people can get a handle on what cloth sims can do.
Okay, fascinated by the whole discussion of what style Aiko 7 is. The funny thing is, when I first saw here I thought she looked too realistic, at least in the images in the advertising e-mail I got from DAZ. I've gone back and looked at the actual product page for the base Aiko7 and she looks better there, but she still looks more to me like someone adding in some non realistic details because they are worried about the uncanny valley, then like she was really meant to be an anime figure.
I think I remember seeing once, that DAZ has people that will make promo images for their CAs, could be wrong about that, but that could contribute to some of it. If you do have a handful of people making most of your promo images, unless they are really dedicated to making them look unique you're going to see a lot of the same.
I think my impression that DAZ sells mostly the same stuff also came from when V7 first came out. There were several nice out fits I saw and liked for her, but then I quickly realized when I clicked past the initial e-mail and looked at them, that they were updates of existing v4 stuff I already had. Probably the best example is the morphing fantasy dress. I don't think they ever bothered to do a truly new style or textures for the v7 version, they just updated (although very nicely) stuff which had been around I think since v3. I mostly look for fantasy clothing, and I've seen very little they have released in that category that isn't just an update of something they already sold. In fact the only thing I've bought from DAZ in a really long time was Littlefox's Lord Snow for M4, but that was completely unique (even has dynamic hair options
).I think they've probably gotten better since then, but the problem was, for so long everything I liked was just a re-do of something I already owned, that unless something really jumps out at me in their e-mails, I don't even look any closer.
@Darryl I think they are counting on people converting stuff from previous Genesis versions, or buy remakes from vendors. It seems like with new Genesis coming out all the time, CAs are hesitant to create new contents so they keep converting and re-converting older products. If you put yourself into a CA's skin, imagine how they feel when DAZ kkeps coming out with yet another figure?
@RAMWolff I have discussed additional expressions that are unique to Sora with Chris, and he has agreed to make a few of them for this release, and (I guess) maybe some more for the next update. I have also filed some of my suggestions for Dawn body morph upgrades, but I think those will be left for later.
@Gadget Girl I think SMS could be doing a better job advertising all the cool tools we get with Poser that most people never use, or even know they are there. Frankly, I think even I have advertised them more than SMS on a release page. Not to mention I have never understood why SMS keeps all the cool stuff a secret even after a Poser release. Imagine this - I am a content creator, I sell at their store, but for a year I didn't know what Unimesh Skinning was in Poser 10, or why it was introduced. Their ads didn't want to talk about it (besides mentioning it exists), and I ended up learning about it by reading the manual.
The cloth and hair rooms have been polemic for years. People have been asking them to make them multi-threaded, but no luck so far. I am not sure about this, but if they bought them both as 3rd party plugins, maybe it doesn't depend on them when it comes to making changes.
@RAMWolff I have discussed additional expressions that are unique to Sora with Chris, and he has agreed to make a few of them for this release, and (I guess) maybe some more for the next update. I have also filed some of my suggestions for Dawn body morph upgrades, but I think those will be left for later.
@Gadget Girl I think SMS could be doing a better job advertising all the cool tools we get with Poser that most people never use, or even know they are there. Frankly, I think even I have advertised them more than SMS on a release page. Not to mention I have never understood why SMS keeps all the cool stuff a secret even after a Poser release. Imagine this - I am a content creator, I sell at their store, but for a year I didn't know what Unimesh Skinning was in Poser 10, or why it was introduced. Their ads didn't want to talk about it (besides mentioning it exists), and I ended up learning about it by reading the manual.
The cloth and hair rooms have been polemic for years. People have been asking them to make them multi-threaded, but no luck so far. I am not sure about this, but if they bought them both as 3rd party plugins, maybe it doesn't depend on them when it comes to making changes.
I just had to go check out A7 for myself, because I couldn't remember what she looks like, and I agree with you Ken. She's very pretty, but so far off from the anime A3 and A4 characters we are used to, it's amazing. Why did they even bother? They could've just as easily made her another character for V7.
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Quick update. I have created leg posing JCMs to correct CatsEyes' leg shapes when posed. Today I have created the controllers for eye's animated origins, so the eyes will stay in the sockets when posed whenever the body and/or head morph are applied. Each case has to be handled separately.
Next is to create correction morphs to close the eyes, which was supposed to be a 5 minutes task, but there is a mysterious glitch that eludes me. This part was on hold until now, when Sora's head morphs were finalized. The morph targets are done, but the morph created with them won't match the head position (?!). I have tried resolving this for a couple of days, but it just blows. I have asked Paul for help, with hopes he knows what I am doing wrong, since he has already done this for Sora.
I am pretty sure this is simple to fix. Everything is simple AFTER we know how to handle it. ^^
In the render below we can see the animated origins in action on her eyes. They now pose correctly.
Next is to create correction morphs to close the eyes, which was supposed to be a 5 minutes task, but there is a mysterious glitch that eludes me. This part was on hold until now, when Sora's head morphs were finalized. The morph targets are done, but the morph created with them won't match the head position (?!). I have tried resolving this for a couple of days, but it just blows. I have asked Paul for help, with hopes he knows what I am doing wrong, since he has already done this for Sora.
I am pretty sure this is simple to fix. Everything is simple AFTER we know how to handle it. ^^
In the render below we can see the animated origins in action on her eyes. They now pose correctly.
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