CharacterCreator, DAZ and the Martini generation
CharacterCreator is hilariously Planet California - no cold weather clothes, no wetweather clothes, no Asian Characters, Black American females stereotyped asTwo-Ton Tessie rather than Michelle Obama, no side-whiskers, nobody under theage of 25, nobody pregnant, nobody as God made them but rather shop windowmannequins getting described as 'naked'. [Mindyou, I agree with animagic that this has been discussed and for business & marketingreasons iClone users have to humour the hicks and just use strap-ons forrealism.] To continue along the Planet California lines we have to livewith the idea that nothing was real before about twenty years ago. And if youare 96 you look as if you are in your late forties ie really old.
AGE SPREAD of a population
Justto put in a bid for reality - as to characters in a population: before what isreferred to as the Modern Demographic Transition (MDT), all previous societiesthat were not Hunter-Gatherer types had about 50% of the population underfifteen years of age. The MDT is when family size limitation becomes possible(about early 1900s in Britain and spreading to almost the whole world by today)[These type-populations can still be seenin any photograph of a street scene on the Palestinian West Bank.]
Mostof these people were under five years of age [about half diedbefore passing five; half again of the remainder before ten.]. The reverse of this happened inthe older half of the population where maybe 2-3% passed their 80th birthdaysand an old man was in his late forties. The average age at death would havebeen sometime in the late thirties early forties. That would be in any of thehistoric societies widely known - the Ancient Empires of the Middle East, MedievalEurope, China, and the Arab Empire.
So ina scene shot with a hundred random people you would have about 25 babies,thirteen 5-10 year olds a dozen 10-15year olds, twenty-five 15-30 year olds, thirteen 30-45 year olds and a dozen 45- year olds.
CLOTHING 2500 BC to 2015 AD
Clothesacross most of the world's societies for the last 5000 years have been limitedfor 95% of the population by scarcity of materials and cost of materials. Fromabout the 1950s onward man-made fibre has made clothes cheaper and moreavailable.
Whilecost was still important before the 1950s, enormous efforts across most of theworld were made to preserve the basic rectangular shape of the cloth as it cameoff the loom. Across most of the world, with the exception of Europe, peoplewore the same kind of clothes for a thousand years. There was no fashion.
It isa mystery to historians why fashion became normal in Europe sometime in theMiddle Ages. And oddly enough, in the light of the present, fashion mostlyapplied to men rather than to women. In particular, fashion descended from theupper classes: both literally, in that most clothes were second-to-twentiethhand goods (ie last century's upper-class mode); and metaphorically, in thatyoung men wore clothes meant to make you think that they were ready to put on asuit of armour or ride off on a horse.
Nakednessfor males while working was commonplace in warmer climates - the Mediterraneanand the Ancient World for instance. Around the Pacific, for instance, what theJapanese call the fundoshi was the sole garment of the ordinary adult male.Boys under puberty similarly, unless they were sons of aristocrats, wore nothingsummer and winter. In 1860 when Garibaldi invaded Sicily, he found shepherdboys wearing clothes they had made themselves out of rabbit skins. It is thepresent cheapness of clothing that makes us have so much of it. It is theeconomic success of the West, and especially of California, that makes us acceptthe tiny choice that Reallusion's Character Creator puts up as representing allthe types of clothing anybody might ever need.
Sobecause cost was the main consideration in buying clothing, until about the 1960syou could instantly gauge everyone's status, income, and education. And youcould do this across most of the world. [InBritain, but not elsewhere, this instant analysis could also be done bylistening intently to people's use of the language - the accent in which theyspoke, the words they used, how well they could hold a conversation, andwhether they used classical allusions and references. This was only becausefrom about the late 19th century onwards the ruling class in Britain went to asmall number of private boarding schools and received the same classicaleducation and the same accent.]
Body build, proportions,strength
Agriculturalcivilizations - all of them until about the 1900s and the invention ofartificial fertilizer - had famines every decade or so. This meant that for thenext five generations the mass of the population which had survived the famine weresmaller than they used to be. Five generations is 125 years for reproductionand about 250 years for lifetimes. So the Irish today are still generally lessin height than they were before 1845 and the Chinese today smaller than theywere before Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward and also smaller than they werebefore the 1850s Taiping Rebellion. So aristocrats and those families that hadbeen rich for five generations could stand up to a foot (30cms) higher than theaverage height in any scene.
Themen and women of the working class in even the recent generation dead - saythose who were working in the 1920s - were very much tougher and stronger thantoday. Hard lives bred a hard people. But they did not necessarily look it.Even now if you look at photographs of a heavyweight boxer like Muhammad Aliyou can see he does not have the gymnastic muscles that California's MuscleBeach brings. And if you go back to Ancient Greece the only men who lookedproportionate were aristocrats or took great care of their armoured infantryexercise routine. Ordinary men were deformed by their labours. Someone whorowed a warship for pay had a vast barrel chest huge arms and little bowedlegs. Someone who worked as a potter was not dissimilar but less heavilymuscled. A miner would have button-scars all along his backbone from runningstooped underground and brushing the roof with his back. A working man's handsbore calluses, a middle-class person might have a stoop from leaning over adesk, or walked with sore feet from having had to stand all day. These people livedand worked on a diet which was basically two types of porridge. Fat people untilrecently meant wealth, not poverty.
OK. Sotaking all in all as to Reallusion's Character creator we have a way to go but let's not be too funny:it is a good start IMHO. Real modellers and Zbrush and Autodesk experts willprobably regard all these sliders as painting by numbers but that is about mylevel. Join-the-dots, too.
Thereused to be adverts for a rather sickly fortified wine called Martini. To big upthe wonderful results of drinking this liquor, the adverts were entirelypopulated by handsome and beautiful, tanned and swimsuited twenty-somethings. Iam glad indeed to see that Reallusion has finally left this fairyland of theMartini Advert-people to DAZ 3D Studio. Beautiful people are only beautiful in comparison to the rest of usschmucks.
SystemSpecs
HomebuildASRock Z68 Extreme4 MoBo, i7-2600K@3.4Ghz CPU , 16 GB DDR3 RAM, 5.5Tb SATA III HDD, Palit GeForce GTX 750 Tirunning DX 12.0; Win 10 Pro (64-bit) + Samsung S24D300H 1920X1080 monitor +spare 1680X1050 monitor. Kinect for Windows v2. Huion 610 Pro Graphics tablet.