It's Springtime

And I'm cleaning out all my Blender files.

It's a gigantic semi-organized mess right now. I have stuff with really weird names and half completed items galore. It makes it very hard to find things when people request changes/customizations so it's time I cleared the files out.

I should be using present tense, because I've been slowly going through and have found a fair number of gems I'll likely be releasing in short order. There are a number of female outfits that can be put up fairly quickly.

I think I might even have enough for a pose pack.

I was actually surprised. My "female" folder runs 60GB. I thought that would be the biggest folder, but it's not. Seems the "male" folder runs 67GB. And all my boxing related items (clothing for both genders as well as clothing props) is only 37GB.

The fear is that the bloat now exceeds my cloud storage amount, so if I have an HDD issue on my NAS, it's going to be very problematic. Right now, my DAZ figures and content library is kind of exposed, so I'm considering getting an external HDD and do an on-site back up of that. There's no way it will all fit in cloud storage.

From a technical point of view, I'm wondering if I should even bother keeping the Blender files at all if I can just use my Substance Painter files to re-export any mesh I might need. But the bloat is coming more from the Substance Painter files, though. I'm just not finding the necessity to keep the Blender files for 99.9% of the clothing I make because I can even grab them out of DAZ, bring them back into Blender and do whatever is needed.

Packing Up Clothing/Prop Items For Installation

But, I need to ask people how they would like these packed up moving forward.

Approach 1:

• The first approach would be to largely continue as is, where each individual item is found as a separate part inside the Content Library. I believe this keeps scene file sizes down. This is one of the easiest ways to "mix and match."

Approach 2:

• The next approach would be to make single "hero" items. You get the reduced scene file size, but the item is harder to work with yet also keeps the scene hierachy cluttered. So you don't have five or six clothing items, plus eyelashes, plus hair, plus this, plus that.

Approach 3:

• This approach is to save things as Scene Subset as opposed to individual parts. I do think this actually impacts scene file sizes dramatically. I'm not sure, but it might be saving the mesh data inside the DUF scene file(s). I've seen other DAZ creators do this for their products.

Basically, I'm asking what people find the most convenient.

Just a tip that some might find useful is that I've created Scene Subset files that just contain wrestlers and all their gear they would ever need in place. That include things like canes, coats, headsets, along with all the ring gear. I toss the scene in, then delete away what's unneeded.

Previous to that I was using merge so much, it started to get annoying. Drag and drop is so much easier, but each merge would have different Iray render settings, so it was always tedious to go back in and make sure the settings were consistent.

I also can see at a glance 90% of my roster inside DAZ, plus all the OCs from other artists.

Plagarism of Existing Mesh

Oh, another thing I did was grab a WWE title belt mesh, created a Substance Painter file for it so full belt customizations can be done fairly easily, and the belt is also segmented into parts so it can be bent into shape. It's a bit rough, but I'm using it for my Cursed Loser Unchampionship belt that is being introduced in the next few EWF comics, beginning with the Vicious Vixxxens #3 issue for March.

Genesis 9

And finally, how much are people using Genesis 9 and how many are thinking of moving to Genesis 9?

Just wondering how well the gender morphs work. I suppose it's just like the original Genesis figure. This is one of the reasons why I'm not ready (I think) to make the full jump.

The next hurdle is my lack of skins and hair for Genesis 9. Sure, I can autofit nearly anthing from previous generations but the lack of skins/makeup might be an issue. I have come up with a trick to do tattoos now so one can fake a lot of seemingly different characters by using tattoos.

I was never big into tattoos, to be honest.