Baking Textures from G8F to G9
Gregorius
Posts: 397
I'm trying to use Blender's texture baking function to remap Genesis 8 Female textures to Genesis 9. In Daz Studio, I used a hidden "clone" morph to morph G9 into G8F's shape, posed G9's legs to match G8F's default pose as closely as possible. I then exported the result as an OBJ, careful to merge the base figure with the conforming mouth and eyes to align with those items being built into G8F. I exported G8F as an OBJ as well and brought them both into Blender and have been trying to follow this tutorial. It hasn't yet worked for me. I reliably get a warning about a "circular dependency" in one of the material zones (not consistently the same one; it seems to move around with successive attempts to load everything and set it all up). The baking then proceeds, but after about an hour, most of which seems to be spent stuck at 1% progress, it seems to finish, only for no remapped textures to have apparently been generated. I'm going to keep playing around, and I'm a complete novice at Blender, so I might be missing something incredibly obvious, but I welcome any ideas from more experienced blender users! Thanks in advance! Screenshot attached.
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Comments
The title should be "transferring to different uvmaps", not "to different objects". The issue with G8 G9 is they don't have the same geometry, so you can't bake among uvmaps. To use G8 textures on G9 you have to make a G9 uvmap for G8 textures. For example G81 has two uv sets, G81 and G8, so she can wear the G8 textures.
Interesting! Haven't played around with this myself, but this might be a working approach.
I have an old tool (Blacksmith3D) to get textures from V4 and M4 through to G8, but nothing from G8 to G9 so far.
you should be able to do it with that but not automatically, I don't have it but AFAIK the addons only made the process easier
I use Ultimate Unwrap3D Repaint and have to export matching in shape meshes in it's format myself, I assume Blacksmith has something the same
Well, I'm getting closer. Nothing below the neck transferred at all, and what did transfer (head, mouth, eyes, and lashes) is clearly not without problems, but it's better than nothing. My best guess is that it's getting confused when there's multiple layers of geometry to contend with (e.g. the mouth and eye geometry encased by the head geometry). That doesn't explain why neither the torso nor the limbs transferred at all, though.
I really hope you can figure this out, so I can then follow in your footsteps and use Blender to bake G8 textures to G9 too!!
To avoid the issues with the mouth and eye textures being akwardly and weirdly merged with the skin/face itself, have you tried using Geometry Editor inside Daz to delete the eyeballs and mouth parts in G8, then exporting that edited version as obj to Blender and using that to bake the textures? This is what I was planning to do if I ever get a chance to mess around with this. I figured it'd be best to try baking just the skin first, then do the mouth/teeth/etc and eyeballs separately, since they're separate geometry in G9 anywyas. (And with that in mind, make sure you're also using the Dev Loads of both G8 and G9 so that you aren't dealing with eyelashes and tear geometries/surfaces too; maybe even delete the fingernail/toenails too, and further maybe even the inner eye and mouth bags on G9 and all similar internal surfaces in G8-- basically make it one empty shell to another, deal with the inner parts or any other extra geometry separately. Still might not work, I'm a total novice myself too, but this is just my best guess at what would give the smoothest chances.)
Also, not sure if this will give you any additional help or insights, especially since this is many years old and new versions of Blender probably have the various functions/buttons/etc located differently, etc, but it's specifically dealing with using Blender to bake DS Genesis figures' textures between generations, and gives that in clear step-by-step manner: http://the-freehold.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Texture-Conversion-Using-Daz-Studio-and-Blender.pdf ;
And these might also be useful to you in this process; they seem to be the closest equivalent to the "texture conversion helper morphs" for G2/G3 used in that tutorial. Obviously these are just for G8 so far, nothing for G9 yet, but you might be able to apply the poses from G8 onto G9 at least, and don't forget about the Dev tools in Daz Studio itself-- like the "UV Prep Pose"! Both G8 & G9 come with that, so might be what you need to set them both at for baking.
https://sharecg.com/v/94190/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/InTheFlesh-Dev-Kit-for-Genesis-8-Female ;
https://sharecg.com/v/94141/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/InTheFlesh-Dev-Kit-for-Genesis-8-Male ;
Would it be better to try the transfer using the body without the other things loaded and then do things like the eyes and mouth separately?
If Blender can do this I might have to bite the bullet and see if I can get my head around how to use it.
Using Ultimate Unwrap 3D repaint
That's great! I'm going to be reliant on Blender for now though, since I can't afford another program right now, and I currently only have a Mac laptop to use too, which severely limits my options. Soon hopefully I'll be able to get a new and actually working PC again, but for now stuck >X(
Most other people won't have that issue though, so it's good for them to know what other options they have!
heres a nice condensioned version of the instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/1egnqp/how_do_you_transfer_textures_from_one_mesh_to/
i also got head baked but nothing else.
according to stackoverflow someone fixed it by ensuring an image texture is selected/active on each of the materials. I did that and it still didn't work.
according to this video, baking is unsupported for UDIM tiles so that might be the reason why. You have to temporarily move each UDIM tile to the first in order to bake each material.
i just got it working. the secret is to set every surface UV to "Base Single UDIM" in DAZ. It will bake everything to a single texture but at least now you can use it. the eye sockets and mouth are the only things missing, but I'm ok with delegating those to other textures.
Please don't post textures.
Here are the steps to get it working:
1. load dev mode g8+g9
2. apply your skin to g8
3. set g9’s surfaces to single UDIM
4. dial clone morph on g9
Image removed
5. dial thighs inward on g8 6 -6
6. export each to obj on base res
7. import them into blender
8. select g9, go into shader editor, make a new material (i called it "full body")
9. create image texture node, click new, set to 8192 x 8192, don’t connect it to anything
10. set every slot to that material
11. select the image texture node so it's highlighted
12. select g8 then g9 using ctrl
13. on the properties editor, click the render tab, set render engine to cycles and device to gpu, and find “bake” section underneath. (If you can’t find it, make sure you’re not on Optix mode under edit->preferences->system.) Use these options:
14. click bake. will take a few sec depending on your gpu. to go texture paint section to see your new textures and save them out with image->save as
Image removed
you can either separate the textures, or always keep the UV set on "single UDIM".
repeat this for normals, roughness, bump, etc. by changing the image texture nodes in your g8 materials.
Thanks for the step by step. I'll have to install Blender and see if I can get it to work.
Thanks for this step-by-step but as a newbie in Blender (i've just installed it when i saw your posting) i dont figure how to assign the full body image to the 7 slots of the G9 figure...
If anyone can help, would be great...
Let's call it step 9.5 :)
Also, i tried to follow the other steps to be certain i can move on once the step 9.5 will be posted and it seems a step 10.5 would be great too since i've no clue how to "select the image texture node so it's highlighted"
Thanks in advance to any help, seems i could manage to find the other steps
no problem. for step 10 see attached image. just click on the circled icon and select "full body". do that for every slot. switch between slots from the dropdown that says "slot #'
for step 11, just click anywhere on the node so it shows a white border around it. if it's not selected, there will not be a white border.
@davidtriune Thank you for this, I wasn't aware that bake can project to different topologies. You may need to tweak the ray distance by 1 mm or something if G9 is not entirely contained inside G8.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/baking.html
Thanks for your answer @davidtriune It worked fine :)
it seemed to work by just changing the "extrusion distance" (new to 3.3?). i set that to 0.3m based on exporting at 100% scale. if you export at 1% you will have to adjust accordingly.
i managed to fix the eye socket by deleting the eyes and mouth from g8 since we're not mapping them.
i think it also helps if you increase the models' subdivision before baking.
also i found that instead of copying material to every slot, you can just delete every slot except 1 of them. it will automatically span the entire body.
I know this is an old thread but I was attempting to bring a G8.1 character to G9 and i was able to get the texture using the steps above but for the last bit "repeat this for normals, roughness, bump, etc. by changing the image texture nodes in your g8 materials." Im not sure what I'm supposed to be changing to get the bump maps, etc.
Does this mean this particular character didn't have any other maps?