Daz G8, G8.1 or G9, anything changed in 2025?

[innocentGameDev]

Hi,

I know this topic has been discussed a few times, but most of those post are at least 1 year old, and there doesn't seem to be any consensus at all.

I started using DAZ and blindly started with G9 as it is the newest and what DAZ (through the tutorials) kinda themselves point to.

My question is if for our use case (porn renders/animations) is one model better than the other nowadays?
In terms of cost, are 8/8.1 nsfw assets cheaper than G9 ones?
Which is better for non-humanoids (nsfw or not, is it easier to make a troll or a dragon in one vs the other?)
Which is more manual/harder to get working?
Lastly, is G9 more consuming or more optimised? I run an RTX 4060 for laptop, for instance.

I have a lot to learn still so I appreciate any help/tips in general too.

 

[holmes992]

G9's the newest figure and has some aspects to the way its designed that make it more flexible than G8(.1), especially if you're making morph packs or using the figure for gamedev in unreal or unity. If you're aiming toward VN dev, you'll mainly be interested in content, however. Here's some things that come to mind.

• G9 is optimized to load up faster in the latest builds of Daz Studio 4 and Daz Studio 2025. It won't be noticeable to you right now, but as your content folder expands, this will become more of a factor. More morph and character packs means longer load times.
• G8 has separate figures for males and females, while G9 is a generic unisexual figure. This can be handy, but once again, performance and load times become a factor as you install more content to your daz library. Over the next couple of years, G9 data bloat is probably going to be a lot worse than it is with G8 Female today. If you're making a VN, this can slow down your workflow.
• G8 are the most popular figures daz has ever released and, as of now, have much more content for it than G9.
• Assets for both G8 and G9 are priced about the same in most cases. Only legacy content from earlier generations is sold significantly cheaper on daz and renderosity.
• Non-humanoid figures like dragons or other animals with significantly different skeletal structures are usually made as separate figures entirely. There are various humanoid fantasy characters like orcs and trolls for both G8 and G9, however.
• It's worth noting that a lot of content can be converted between G8 and G9. Clothing and hair can be done automatically and there are utilities you can find which can convert morphs and poses. Textures are a little tricker, but there are multiple solutions to that, as well.

Sorry I don't have much insight about animation, as that's not really my thing. A lot of people here use diffeomorphic to move their daz scenes into blender and animate there. I usually transfer my characters to unreal engine if I want to play around with animations. Now that Daz Studio has been rebuilt in Qt6, it's possible that Daz might be able to improve the program's performance enough to make it more comfortable to animate in natively. But, that's just speculation.

 

[NemesisGames]

Genesis 9 figures look, on an average, better than Genesis 8 or 8.1. You can make Genesis 8/8.1 look just as good, but only if you hunt for the right skin textures and know how to truly light a scene. Many early Genesis 8 characters suffer from the dreaded doll-like "Daz look", especially around the eyes.

I think the content thing is why Genesis 8 is staying so relevant. Genesis 9 has plenty of content if you're doing a modern-world setting for your game, but since you mentioned wanting non-humanoid models, which you'll find more Genesis 8 content.

I can't speak for doing animations from scratch, but I can say that if you use pre-made animations like me, Genesis 8 will have far more content, especially for lewd stuff.

 

[osanaiko]

I won't comment on the G9/8/81/ question as there are good answers already.

But with regards tips: That image you have shown has a serious case of "short focal length syndrome".

Unlike real photography when you need to swap lenses, Daz3d is a virtual render engine and the focal length setting is adjustable in the "Render settings" page.

Different focal lengths will affect how the subject is distorted:


In the case of your image, it looks like the "12mm" image. This look is very common on cell phone cameras because they have tiny lenses placed close to the imaging sensor. This results in a unnatural look where the nose is huge and the face is weirdly narrow.

(As an aside: there is apparently a huge uptick in young women going for plastic surgery on their nose because instead of using mirrors, they mostly look at their own face via a cell phone screen, and get convinced their nose is huge compared to the noses they see on other people.)

Bizarrely, as people are growing up in the InstaBook era, the "attractive" face shape preferred by young men appears to be shifting towards the selfie style short-focal length extreme closeup.

 

[668 Neighbor of the Beast]

(As an aside: there is apparently a huge uptick in young women going for plastic surgery on their nose because instead of using mirrors, they mostly look at their own face via a cell phone screen, and get convinced their nose is huge compared to the noses they see on other people.)

Bizarrely, as people are growing up in the InstaBook era, the "attractive" face shape preferred by young men appears to be shifting towards the selfie style short-focal length extreme closeup.

Well that's just scary, and stupid, and unsurprising.

As a side note, the "focal length" of the human eye is approximately equivalent to a 55mm lens. So, from our perspective, anything lower than 55mm is wide angle and anything higher would be considered telephoto.

 

[innocentGameDev]

First of all thanks for taking the time.

I won't comment on the G9/8/81/ question as there are good answers already.

Right, well my post was rather if any of those takes have shifted since the latest post I could find I think was over a year ago iirc. Hope you understand. I take it from your reply that nothing has sufficiently changed, then, and G8 still has more assets for NSFW?

In the case of your image, it looks like the "12mm" image. This look is very common on cell phone cameras because they have tiny lenses placed close to the imaging sensor. This results in a unnatural look where the nose is huge and the face is weirdly narrow.

Thank you, will bear this mind and play closer attention to the render settings.

(As an aside: there is apparently a huge uptick in young women going for plastic surgery on their nose because instead of using mirrors, they mostly look at their own face via a cell phone screen, and get convinced their nose is huge compared to the noses they see on other people.)

Bizarrely, as people are growing up in the InstaBook era, the "attractive" face shape preferred by young men appears to be shifting towards the selfie style short-focal length extreme closeup.

It's a multitude of problems. Yeah sadly the cosmetic surgeries done just keep rising and rising, and the age at which -- mostly women, also men -- want them keeps dropping and dropping. I'm sure it's not just the shot angle, but things like filters which very attractive women like Ariana Grande still use to look even prettier. And I'm sure as AI gets better and floods more of our socials and advertisement, "perfect AI faces" will start showing up here and there too. It's a very interesting topic for sure.


Other than that, I have a question... how do I even start rendering genitalia... for free? It seems genitalia comes with an expansion pack of some sort, or some popular assets like Dicktator, and they are all paid for?

 

[innocentGameDev]

As a side note, the "focal length" of the human eye is approximately equivalent to a 55mm lens. So, from our perspective, anything lower than 55mm is wide angle and anything higher would be considered telephoto.

So aim for a 55mm for a believable POV shot?

 

[osanaiko]

Right, well my post was rather if any of those takes have shifted since the latest post I could find I think was over a year ago iirc. Hope you understand. I take it from your reply that nothing has sufficiently changed, then, and G8 still has more assets for NSFW?

I meant that the other posters in the thread had given what I think are reasonable answers. (Personally I don't do much Daz rendering this past year so I won't have a very relevant opinion anyway).

> very attractive women like Ariana Grande

I have a very different opinion about her, I don't understand why she is considered attractive at all. She is a manufactured product and has been oversold by corporations since she was a teenager. These days she looks like artificial human and painfully thin like a skeleton.

> So aim for a 55mm for a believable POV shot?

That's a good start, but the best way is to understand the settings and try different ones depending on the situation, then use your own artistic judgement. Maybe there are some cases where the shorter focal length is useful.

Anyway, Good luck with your projects!

 

[caLTD]

This is my experience. Until the beginning of this year, I used Daz Studio only for exporting to Unreal. Because the export tools I used were optimized for G9, my library consisted mostly of G9. Then I decided to try producing with Daz.

G9 has better skin materials. However, it has less asset support in certain niche areas. In my case, G9 was very slow in the editor. I completed a small project with G9.

I'm continuing with g8.1 for my new project.

I think G9 seems to be more effective. I think it would be better if I didn't get lazy and cleaned up all the assets and figured out what was slowing G9 down.

G8 consumes less resources. But when I used G9, nothing has exceeded 16 GB so far, or if it had, I could probably reduce it (I didn't optimize anything). But my scenes had a maximum of three characters.

I think you should stick with G9. But be careful with asset management. This is the most problematic, but often overlooked, aspect. Daz is ridiculously liberal about it, so everything is everywhere, and after a while you lose control.