Opened my email today to be informed that Daz3d have a new horse model out. Apparently this one used Genesis technology with weight mapping. I’ve had to pop out just now but just bought the pro bundle and will finish downloading it when I get back home and run it through it’s paces. Ok been back home now for
a while and been trying out this new model. The textures that come with the pro bundle are by CRWR and as you’d expect are absolutely beautiful, they are from her Pro textures bundle for the MilHorse and have been updated to work with the new horse 2 model. The horse bends and poses much better than the MilHorse, having weight mapped joints, no more breaking mesh when you bend the legs and neck in extreme poses! The mesh is almost identical to the MilHorse apart from more detailing to the head and the fact that it uses the same sub d smoothing as the Daz Genesis human figures. Well I’ve come up against an easily fixable problem, whilst trying out my multitude of poses for the Millennium Horse a few of them were messing up the hooves of the horse, stretching and deforming them.
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/daz-horse-2
After asking about the problem on the Daz forum I found out that the problem is to do with having xyz translations included in the pose, I checked my poses and sure enough some of them had values included for the xyz translations for the hooves. I removed them and now apart from the hooves and fetlocks needing some small adjustment my MilHorse poses all work fine on the Horse 2 model and some of them look even better due to the improved bending.
One thing that I really don’t like about the new horse is that whilst it’s mane and tail are separate conforming figures (much better done) the geometry for the mane is missing a large part of it at the top of the neck. This looks great on a show horse such as arabs and miniatures but is a wild horse running free and unfettered by human conventions really going to have a shaved mane? having the geometry for the full mane would have been much better with the option for a partly or fully (hogged) shaved mane done via trans maps. Another thing I’ve noticed that I’m disappointed in is that there is no geometry at all for trans mapped fetlocks (feathers) in this horse model, a big downside when depicting heavy or native horses and ponies, sure it can be added in postwork for still but what about animations?
The good? well brush those disappointments aside I’ve already mentioned the superior bending due to the new weight mapped rigging, the conforming tail figure is also excellent, lots of morphs included in this to make it very useful and better than the MilHorse’s tail and the forelock in the conforming manes (left and right) is a huge improvement on the boned version that the MilHorse sported that was a PITA to pose, just a shame that there are so few morphs for the mane which is very strange considering how many there are for the tail and forelock.
——–more screen shots and details to follow——–
