One thread at DAZ seems to hint at it, but you have to be an Art Zone member (which I will NOT do).... but I was about to leave DAZ...then I heard this what I will call a rumor since I can't be sure... I am not asking anyone to break any rules... but to just say if DAZ is really making a GOOD M4 with upgrades as good as V3 to V4? I will stay a member at DAZ if so.... knowing of course the famous "DAZ soon" thing....

Thanks for any information... OH and I don't want him if I have to "uninstall M3"!! 

Lyne

I haven't read the thread but I did see a few preview images of M4 in the Artzone galleries, so he is on the way.

I can't find the thread, link please?

Also links for the M4 preview images in the Artzone galleries, please ?

This is the Artzone link - http://artzone.daz3d.com/index.php?mode=photo_album&p_id=138

Nothing special. The same shoulders than M3, same hips than James... He doesn't looks better than Apollo Maximus...

The mesh looks fine, how good the figure is won't be clear until we see morphs and bends. Early days but it is nice to know that things are moving.

Is it my imagination or does the face look almost identical to M3?

thanks for the link Anniebel :D

Hmm....the body has improved compared to M3 (who had a physique like a praying mantis). I also like the face, according to me he looks different than M3.

Before you jump on the M4 bandwagon, got to the Critique Forum, and check out the New Male and female Models. They both look very promising.

3/9/08

*"but to just say if DAZ is really making a GOOD M4 with upgrades as good as V3 to V4?"

Let's hope not. At best, in my opinion, V/A4.X is a side-grade to V3. There do not seem to be any real advances in the figure to me, just trade-offs. V/A4 is not better than V3, just different. Her mesh takes less memory, but long before one injects as many morphs as V3 could take, V/A4 brings Poser 7 to its knees. Mapps points out that V/A4 is a resource hog, and he is right.

An important characteristic for variety, to me, is being able to scale a figure, and V/A4 has some glaring limitations in this respect. Even more so for men than women, for diversity, one must be able to make men taller or shorter, and this is not easy with V/A4. Even for women, considering the whole body, V/A4 is no more anatomically accurate than V3, maybe less so.

Thanks for the gallery links. The M4 model seems to have an unnaturally large head in two of the renders, but may be anatomically more convincing than M3/D3, we will have to see. No matter what deficiencies DAZ figures have, they are way better than the G2 characters in almost every respect.

Right now, V/A4 is sitting in my runtimes taking up space as I await a version of Poser, or a new computer, that can meet the figure’s memory requirements. I would hate to pay for another DAZ figure to meet the same fate.

Link to the Critique Room threads on new figures please?

LMK

Looks like he can hold a banana with his feet... guess that could come in handy.

Niles said :
**
"Before you jump on the M4 bandwagon, got to the Critique Forum, and check out the New Male and female Models. They both look very promising.".
**
Niles, can you elaborate on this ?  .... as in what Critique Forum ? .... and what new male and female models ?

I haven't had any problems using V4 in Poser 7 yet. It doen't have to be a resource hog at all. I loaded up V4, injected all the morph packs, then saved it out as a new CR2 with a pmd file - now it loads nice and fast, with everything available but without the drain on resources.

In the forums here,  there is 3 different threads ,  Look for Phantom3d.

OK thanks, Niles. Found them.

There is another picture on the first link that makes me happy: The optitex dress! It means that the dynamic cloth-plugin for D|S and Carrara is actually coming. Now I  regret my yelling about D|S 2, but if DAZ wasn't always so mysterious about all there new releases they could have avoid that.

Regards,

Bopper.

3/9/08

philibus:

I loaded everything into morphia (Basic V4 and A4, muscle morphs and morphs++). I then saved her back to the figure menu. When I put hair on her, and a dress, even without a scene, Poser 7 takes more than 1 GB in task manager to hold her. Is there something I am missing about saving her?

I love her face morphs, but for me, many of the body morphs really will not stand much in the way of a pose. They began to distort sometimes badly, long before I push a joint beyond normal range of motion.

Admittedly, my computer is quirky. It is an older refurbished Gateway, with pretensions of running a dual core processor, but the /3GB switch will not work on it. And no other memory trick works either. Most applications are very stable but if I push Poser a little on the memory I get crashes. There is much less problem with V/SP/M/D/A/H 3 figures, and I load those with every morph I can find.

I think that I will have to start leaving a lot of V/A4's morphs out so that I can use her, and clothed, it doesn't make much difference anyway, I guess.

LMK

That´s M4 ? Honestly? That character looks like a mix between James and M2...

After having seen V4 and A4 I'm not even interested in M4 anymore. Imo, V4/A4 offer such little improvements that they're not even worth investing in. For a model that has been worked on for over a year, she came out pretty lame. I'm not going to spent any money on DAZ's new milking cows since they offer nothing special at all, it's just another way for DAZ to ensure we'll keep on spending money at their store.

In the end we all know what will happen to M4.... in the end he will just be another one of those unsupported figures in our runtimes, just enough content to use him for a while, but then he runs dry while the girls get all the attention.

I render women. So I'm not interested in this dude

... well, perhaps if he's free I could download it... :lol:

Ikendall,

Under General Preferences (ctrl+G) go to the misc tab and make sure the "Use external binary morph targets" box is checked, then save the cr2. This should create a very small cr2 (238kb) and a PMD file (40,702kb). The PMD file will contain all of the morph targets and saves resources by loading a morph from this file only when you turn its' dial.

I'm using a fairly old machine with a single Celeron D 2.8 processor with 2Gb of RAM and this seems to do the trick for me. I haven't used more than one V4 in a scene yet but I have used it with 2 other Unimesh figures, all clothed and with hair. On the subject of clothes, some items (including some hair items) also have a lot of morphs and so are worth saving out with PMD files as well.

Hope this helps.

He looked to me to be a little better shaped than M3. He just better have 'a frank and beans'! I like my digital dollies to be anatomically correct. M3 was at least an improvement over M2 who had some serious proportion issues, this is not to say that V4 doesn't have proportion issues in the thigh area. We'll see. I'll want to get him anyway. There's too many girl dollies, I want more guys. Hope he also has a lot of facial morphs. V4 doesn't have nearly enough facial morphs.

Are you sure he's not going to end up being a morph for V4 like A4 is?  :blink:

I like the look of M4 so far.

In fact I like him. He looks like ½ M3 and ½ D3 for me and I think it's great...well...for me.
At Artzone there is a new forum (Club M4)...This forum is for people (like me) who are especially interested in Male figures (M4 for now) and want to give their opinions and suggestions for M4.

I kind of like what I've seen of M4 in those three pics.

As for the figures in the critique forum, I can't get over how their feet are modeled. I mentioned something to that effect there too. They look somewhat club-footed :-

Quote - In fact I like him. He looks like ½ M3 and ½ D3 for me and I think it's great...well...for me.
At Artzone there is a new forum (Club M4)...This forum is for people (like me) who are especially interested in Male figures (M4 for now) and want to give their opinions and suggestions for M4.

Link? :)

What is the pont in another male poser figures honestly?  From Daz?

All new textures, all new morph packs, characters etc which will just be rehashes of existing things.  Clothing? HAHAHAHAHAHA yeah right.  Daz will have the 10 clothing making PAs do new clothing packs for M4 and then you will see nothing new for M4, just like all the other Male figures Daz puts out.  Then all the PAs will go back to making female sex clothing that sells.

If one had the BEST beall and beall male figure that did everyting everyone wanted, there just is no support for male figures.  Poser is about female fantasy.

ApolloMax has everything free for me, what could others possibly want in another male figure that cannot be done with what is already available with existing figures?

*ApolloMax has everything free for me, what could others possibly want in another male figure that cannot be done with what is already available with existing figures?

*Two men is always better than one???

3/9/08

"Under General Preferences (ctrl+G) go to the misc tab and make sure the "Use external binary morph targets" box is checked, then save the cr2. This should create a very small cr2 (238kb) and a PMD file (40,702kb). The PMD file will contain all of the morph targets and saves resources by loading a morph from this file only when you turn its' dial."

philebus:

I did not know this. I only knew this applied to external saves to PZ3 files. I think I had "Use external binary morph targets" off when I was first working with V/A4 because of reported problems between earlier versions of V4x and PMD files. If I load the CR2's and save them bace with this setting, would I need to re-inject everything? Its worth a try anyway. What about figures that are already saved in PZ3 files?

Thanks for the information. I will certainly try it out.

LMK

At Daz there are about 10-15 products released weekly.  I'd like to see the "leader" in the poser store community to put out a mandate.

for every 3 female clothing items sold at Daz there has to be 1 male clothing item.  Least then they could honestly say there are etempting to even up the market on male/female in their store.

Last night I went through the galleries at Daz for the past 3 months.  There are like 3 or 4 male pictures total for 3 months.  The rest are all female pinup renders for the most part.

Ya'll have so much money to burn instead of throwing it away into a new male model that will just eventually flop why not support what is already available or make what is available better.

Since I am not a member I can't SEE the pictures at AZ....but your imput really helps... if those SHOULDERS on M4 are not fixed, then forget it, period.

I didn't think I would like V4, but I did get her...and with adding some user (freebie) created morphs to fix her arm pits, and shorten her toes and DIALING in her eye parts to look better, I LOVE HER (v4.1) a lot!! Her arms and knees do not create a CRACK or oddball line and the top of her thigh does not flatten out awful when brought up to "sit" or kneel.... she is way above V3 in my opinion, and sadly my pretty V3 is getting neglected.... BUT I do not like the V4.2/A4 AT ALL, so just not installing... and the great venders who care are making their figures work for both .1 and .2 as far as the morphs, so that is just really great!!

Anyway, back to M3... With M3, I hate his bowlingball shoulders... and have to increase the size of his head, otherwiase he is pretty good, and with D3, and especially some of the great morph and textures, he is tops...(even if he has to be rendered separately to be as tall as V3 or 4)... I love Jepe's morphs for D3, and I can see the figure is more "morph-able" than M3....

But again, thanks a bunch and I will take a look in the forum here you suggested.

Lyne

Ikendall,

The way I did it was to load an empty V4.2, then inject everything and save this out with a PMD file. I know that some people have had trouble with PMDs but I think this is usually from when they want to import into other software. If you have V4 characters saved in pz3's then these will be unaffected by this move, loading with all the morphs you had injected at the time they were saved.

Quote - *ApolloMax has everything free for me, what could others possibly want in another male figure that cannot be done with what is already available with existing figures?

*Two men is always better than one???

In bed, yes. ;)

Quote - Two men is always better than one???

I absolutely AGREE WITH YOU :)

Quote - Ya'll have so much money to burn instead of throwing it away into a new male model that will just eventually flop why not support what is already available or make what is available better.

I don't render females...Sorry but I like men much more so I will fight for having more males, and absolutely not for making the female products better. I won't buy them anyway. I didn't buy and don't intend to buy Aiko4.- Apollo is a great product but I prefer M3 or D3 because they are more convenient to use and morph...for me...of course. It's a question of taste I guess...

Quote - > Quote - In fact I like him. He looks like ½ M3 and ½ D3 for me and I think it's great...well...for me.

At Artzone there is a new forum (Club M4)...This forum is for people (like me) who are especially interested in Male figures (M4 for now) and want to give their opinions and suggestions for M4.

Link? :)

Well you know I think you have to login. If you login you can use the following link:
http://artzone.daz3d.com/index.php?mode=tribe&act=show&trb_id=

In this link there is a section "Group Forum" and in this section you can see the link "view our group forum".

 I do agree that V4 seems more of a side grade then an upgrade from V3, but having said that I do like V4 as a additional alternate figure, I do like her look. With V3, V4, Jessy, Sydney, Miki, SP3, L3 and A3 I find I have  a great range to choose from for diversity.  Now being a huge A3 fan I found A4 on the other hand was a huge letdown. 

Now M4 I am not sure on, I have M2, M3 and all them G2 gents and I haven't even tried them all yet. Don't think I need another figure that I will never use. I would rather see a huge increase in items and clothes for M3 and perhaps some more diversity morphs.

* I do agree that V4 seems more of a side grade then an upgrade

*I think that if we are to see some really significant upgrades in figures, we'd first have to see some significant improvements with Poser.. like maybe improved rigging system etc...

As of yet the figure is not finished there are several items that must be reworked.  The hands and feet both must be redone because I reworked the entire model recently and changed the geometry in several place, which tends to mess things up quite alot.  However in an effort to save having to do then over and over and over again I decided not to rework the hands and feet untill everything else is done with the body.  So as I have acknowledeged in the post of the model the feet are not done. But keep a watch on the model and see if in the final form these issues are not resolved. This is the purpose of a critque forum, to get feedback, go back to work and fix things.  So if people want a better male model, let me know what you would like to see, and I will do my best to incorporate it into the model.

Also, I have been contacted by several of the best (in my opinion) artists for textures, hair, pose files, clothing and other items, who wish to work with this model for all the support products. Some of them from Daz too.

This model will be: easy and faster to pose, does not need gads of magnets and morphs to bend correctly (thereby saving on resources) and always delivers excellent results. You can tie this model into knots and never break the mesh.

Here take a look: there is absolutely NO morphs of any kind, NO magnets, and NO post work.  You can see there are some dents and creases but absolutely no broken mesh. The middle photo is the model cut in half so you can see the bending of the mesh. For more see the critique forum and my gallery

Critique, comments and suggestions for what you would like to see are sincerely apreciated. This pose took me 10 minutes, simple and straight forward easy bending.

Thanks for looking phantom3d 

*I decided not to rework the hands and feet untill everything else is done with the body.

*So, you will rework the feet - that's good to know!!! Now it sounds much more promising :)

So M4 can kiss his own ass, now that's interesting.. Were did I have that contortionsist poses?

Bopper.

Yes the hands and feet are as difficult to do as the face, and I have had to redo them so many times I just got tired of it.  But when I get them done again,(which will be real soon) I plan to post them in the critique forum so that people can weigh in on them and I will keep working on them untill everyone is sastisfied.  I really hope to make a model that everyone will be happy with, take away the frustration and put the fun back into working with a model.....

Thanks for the input.

phantom3d

P.S. in case there is some confusion this is not M4. This is a totally new model started from scratch and built in 3ds Max, Zbrush and Poser. I very much doubt M4 can bend like this.

How's this? This is not M4 but the model mentioned by Niles created by phantom3d. This frank and beans is unusual in that it actually has a built in foreskin just like the real thing. With two morphs, one controles the opening and the other pulls the skin back.

For more info on the idea behind this model visit the critique forum.  http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2728435

phantom, regarding yer figure, I would advise against offering it to daz.
if they want it, make them come to you.  regarding the M4 thing, they need
better promos than the ones at the AZ link IMVHO.

I agree, I had decided that I would go ahead and finish it out myself and let these other wonderfull artists here who do such nice textures and things to work with it.

Thanks for all the imput you have given me, It has helped more than you might guess.

phantom3d.