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224 S 200 W, Suite #250
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Very interested in a V4 version as well. The current tool I have access to (gen x) gives me results so far from the original I'm better off scrounging the same PAs later generations for a close match. This, of course, fails when the applicable PA stopped working, either in general or on characters for later generations.
If there weren't issues with V4, as mentioned, there would be little interest in porting the morphs, I'd say.
Well, if you're going to go V4 to Gen8, please don't leave out the guys. I'd really like M4 to Gen8, for the same reasons mentioned in connection with V4: far more characters still on the market, new one still coming out, etc.
Again, I've had the same results, though I don't want to bash the Gen X product. I bought it and transferred many of my M4s to Genesis 1. I was, however, disappointed in the results. So, it would be wonderful if you'd start all over again, and we could have M4 to Gen8.
Consensus seems to be... ALL of them!
Er... the whole point of a convertor is to move those older shapes to the newer figure so you don't have to deal with poser cr2. Just to be clear, as someone who owns over 300 commecially produced G2F characters I'm eagerly looking forward to a G2F to G8F convertor, BUT, and this is a Brute 8 sized butt, as anyone who's used GenX will tell you, converting the morphs is only half of the process of converting a character. You have to be able to transfer the textures accurately as well, and currently there is no easy way to transfer the textures for a large number of the G2F characters out there to G8F. This is because of a weird obsession that DAZ had at the time of creating new custom UVs for each new major figure release as they came out rather than simply reusing the base G2F UVs or the custom ones created for Victoria 6. To date, those two UV sets are the only ones for which a "plug and play" texture conversion option exists, so if you want to use any product texture that uses the UVs from any of the following base figures, you're going to have to create a conversion yourself:
Aiko 6
Ninive 6
Callie 6
Monique 6
Keiko 6
Belle 6
Mei Lin 6
Lilith 6
Giselle 6
Stephanie 6
Teen Josie 6
Olympia 6
Gia 6
edit - added The Girl 6
Fortunately, about halfway through the G2 run a lot of the vendors realized how limiting the custom UVs were (as a charater made with a custom UV could only be used by someone who'd already bought the corresponding base figure, thereby automatically dooming it to lower sales) and by the end of the G2 run most PAs had stopped producing characters that used anything other than the base G2F UVs. What it does mean, unfortunately, is that a good chunk of the approximately 700 G2F characters that were commercially produced, including all of the iconic characters except V6, can't be replicated easily in G8... At least, not unless someone creates ready to go UV convertors for those UVs.
Baking textures to another uv isn't all that difficult, but it is time consuming, and doing it for multiple figures would be tedious and take a long time. I can see Cybersox' point for sure.
Laurie
Ding! The exact reason I didn't invest in GenX. I had been testing with SingularBlue and learned the hard reality of have the shape but no texture. Ribbet for Genesis and others stayed where they are.
Well I can certainly look into it (and I won't forget the guys
)
Sounds like textures are the big challenge and may make older generations conversions difficult if not possible. I have no idea how to convert UV maps and whether it could be scripted. I would first have to find a good online tutorial.
I'm not sure if it could be scripted as there's a lot of eyeballing and artistic judgement involved and there was a radical change in the way the UVs were laid out between the G2 and G3 generations. Cayman Studio's brilliant idea of creating multiple geografts to facilitate the transfer is really the only thing I've seen that comes close to "plug and play" functionality within Studio, but he apparently hit a point where it wasn't commercially viable to keep making sets for all of varied UVs that DAZ churned out for Genesis and G2F. He did cover G8 for almost all of the Gen 4 generation though,since V4,A4 and S4 all use the same UVs, as do M4, H4 and F4.
Within generations, the ability to convert textures from one UV to another of the same gender is already in Studio itself. You can just do a map transfer, on the Surfaces tab. Hands and feet tend to be weirdly hit-or-miss (it's not at all unusual to look at the results and wonder where the extra finger came from, or where one of the toes went), but it's there. So, for example, you can convert Kimo 7 to Base Male and get a texture usable on G8 without an extra program.
Outside Studio, Blacksmith3D has Texture Converter. (And Blacksmith3D's main program itself, I suppose. Never used it, so I don't know.) Texture Converter takes an old texture from the main UV of one generation to the main UV of another. For example, it can take an M4 texture and make new maps for G3/G8 Base Male or V4 to G3/G8 Base Female. (Or G2, if you're so inclined.) There's a slight loss of quality, but that's largely because the source texture format is JPG.
I do think that you could probably point people to those tools and let them handle the texture conversion themselves, especially within Genesis 3, since Studio can handle that on its own. Dimension3D did that for three generations of GenX, and it seemed to work just fine.
These are good products if you want to use G3 textures on G8.
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-character-uvs-for-genesis-8-female
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-character-uvs-for-genesis-8-male
I rather suspect that most of us are willing to address porting skins as a separate issue from porting morphs. I certainly wouldn't demand that the same product needs to handle both transfers. Getting the morphs properly transfered without overwhelmingly weird glitches is enough of an issue without having to deal with textures as well.
For that matter, base G1 uses V4's UV by default, and came out of the box with the ability to switch its UVs to M4 and K4. It was only the new series 5 DAZ base morphs which started us down the road to several years of propagating custom, and incompatible UVs.
And, no, there is no consensus as to which older generations would be the best to support first. I can only speak for myself, and I've been pretty much sticking to G1 until G8 started bringing out the mature bases that I was in sore need of.
Mainly because in the first fine flush of GenX, I ported a slew of gen4 character morphs to G1 and *really* didn't want to have to go through that again. Most of that library of close to 100 characters were built from the dial-spins from those ported over, along with the ones which were brought out for Genesis 1. With any luck I would like to be able to port up the resulting composite characters to something a bit more current. But I suspect that my experience is not necessarily typical.
Absolutely. I brought up the UV issue as a warning to those who might expect to push a button and instantly duplicate any character, and the Genesis 2 figures are by far the most problematic due the sheer quantity of limited use UVs DAZ insisted on dumping into the market, even though the base UVs were clearly capable of handling even the most extreme designs by vendors like RawArt.
And even with Genesis, the damage was limited to just 5 new UVs - Aiko 5, Hiro 5, David 5, Freak 5 and Stephanie 5, as there are already Michael 5 to G8M and Victoria 5 to G8F convertors available.
I'm in roughly the same place. I have a LOT of V3 and V4 characters that I ported to Genesis, smaller numbers that I ported to G2 and G3 and only a handful of the newer generations that I ported up to G8... but that's primarily because my character library has become so stupidly large now that I have to do a lot less digging when I'm looking for a given type of base when I'm dialing up characters. At this point most of what I've moving up are creatures, anime/toon types and a lot of custom dialed characters that I want to replicate.
Good to know. Thanks.
I am learning a lot from this thread! I never knew there is this map transfer. I am trying it now to see what it does and how to use it.
Thanks for sharing @Barbult
Thanks for the information.
Anime/Toon types would be problematical with this tool as those are usually extreme shapes. The others should work.
Since the tools to convert the skins from one UV to another on the same figure are built into Daz Studio, then I guess this could be scripted. I am refering to "Map Transfer" which is accessed via the surface tab. This has always worked well the handful of times I have used it. Basically you can use it to transfer a custom UV, eg Olympia 6 to a base one like G2F. Of course you would still need the relevant Cayman product to use the Base G2F skin on Genesis 3 or 8.
Yes, this map transfer things sounds interesting. I need to look into it more.
Yeah... the DAZ 3D internal map transfer tool works very well. I used in the past to convert G8M skins to G8F skins and then merged them in my image graphic tools, for skin fading/transformation scenes with opacity maps, painted in blender.
I attached a screenshot from the result of a G8F to G8M skin transition.
The upper skin is the female skin (If I remeber right Sahel).
Doing this is a hell of work... maybe I'll write in the future a script for this.
Thanks to all the contributors to this thread. It has been quite the education.
I need to look at the map transfer tool more, but I don't know I will be able to automate it. After a cursory googling around, it doesn't look like the Daz Studio scripting API exposes the map transfer tool.
Agreed!
No matter how hard I try to spelunk around and learn all about DS, there always seems to be an undocumented gem in DS hiding around the next corner.
Oh... I didn't find any API, too... Damm it... that ruins all my plans for a little helper scripted I wanted to do in the future to save me tons of work...
I'll write a ticket with a feature request. Maybe you should that do, too, if we want to see the map transfer tool scriptable in a future DAZ version.
As for map transfer from one character gen to the other. There is a tool called blacksmith3d that has this feature. They also make a stripped-down version that only transfers skins called Texture Transformer. If these tools can do it I am sure there's a way.
These are other helpful products for swapping skins between male and female:
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-8-uv-swap-male-and-female-base
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-uv-swap-male-and-female-base
Here is a map transfer utility tutorial. (I haven't used it, but it looks helpful).
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/184696/tutorial-from-map-transfer-to-material-presets/p1
Good idea!