I successfully got my G2F digime and materials into Carrara, but G2F takes an incredibly long time to save — time that I could be playing with models, but in which I have to wait for the program to quit thinking. This is very annoying.

The Carraravangelists on the Daz boards say that duf-based figures like G2F take much longer to load than cr2-based figures like V4. Thus I got the idea this weekend to hybridize figures with V4 bodies and G2F heads.

Actually, it’s a modified hybridization because I’m not loading a G2F and a V4 into the same scene. Instead I made a prop out of the G2F head and added to it all the necessary expression morphs, as well as morphs for me, Jareth, and Jennifer. Then I morphed a V4 to approximate each of my character’s body shapes, hid its head, and parented my G2F head prop, appropriately morphed, into place. Look — all of the expression and accuracy of G2F combined with all of the quick loading of V4!

I would like to take this opportunity to state how much I hate V4. There seems to be no realistic way to smoothly distribute fats across the model. There always seem to be noticeable lumps with borders corresponding to the borders between body parts. Major morph packages also neglect key areas of fat, such as upper rib cage [between sides of breasts and armpits], elbows, wrists, ankles, and feet. There’s also something very, very wrong with the shape of her weirdly conical front upper thighs, which prevents the formation of a broad, columnar thigh with consistent girth. It’s just ugly and hard to work with.

On the plus side, though, I have scads of V4 textures, clothing, and poses, as well as utilities to make clothing fit my custom body morphs, so I don’t have to buy anything more. V4 also has two advantages over later figures: 1) Clothing hangs much more realistically around, between, and below breasts. 2) Fetish wear! Most of the fetishy digital assets I have are for V4, and they require lengthy, tedious conversion up the generations. Even then, the extreme shapes of some items don’t convert really well. [Ballet heels? AH HAH HAH HAH HAH!] But now I can use this stuff on the figure it was made for — a novel concept.

I should note that I have not yet tested my V4-based figures in Carrara yet. I should probably do that, huh? They should work fine, the only problem being the gap between G2F prop head and V4 neck.