Converting Michael 4 to Genesis 8 Problems and Hurdles
RexRed
Posts: 1,323
I have finally managed to get a decent Michael 4 figure converted into the Genesis 2 figure.
He looks like Michael 4 but not perfectly.
His skin is 3delight and looks nice but it does not translate well at all with the 3delight to Iray converter. It is terrible, with parts missing and textures not overlayed correctly. (his lips were on his chin)
But I am able to get the idea of Michael 4 in Genesis 2, the 3delight textures look okay when rendered in iray and all of the daz Genesis 2 figure's clothes fit correctly.
I tried to convert him to Genesis 8 or at least his morphs. (I am not sure what I am doing)
The converter asked me to select the Michael 4 character first and then the Genesis 8 character.
It converted them and in the end of the process I was left with three figures in the scene and I don't know what to do next.
Only one figure that had no textures at all and had a single morph associated with it and I was not sure what to do with it.
The other figures were Michael 4 and Genesis 8.
PLEASE DAZ, sell us a Genesis 8 Michael 4 figure with Iray skin and original shape and textures... :(
None of the old Michael 4 hair, clothes and props need to be able to work with him just the Genesis 8 clothes etc...
It would be nice to try other Genesis 8 skins on him and morph him into other Genesis 8 figures...
Sell us the Michael 4 morph and Iray skins and base it on any figure preferably the Genesis 8 figure.
These converters are a horrible solution...
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Comments
Michael 4 Genesis 2
His morph is rather touchy and I have to kind of select a hotspot where he looks right. I am not pleased with that outcome.
It makes me think I really do not have the right Michael 4 entirely.
Michael 4 Genesis 2
His morph is rather touchy and I have to kind of select a hotspot where he looks right. I am not pleased with that outcome.
It makes me think I really do not have the right Michael 4 entirely.
Left Genesis 2 Michael 4 and Right Michael 4
Left Genesis 2 Michael 4 and Right Michael 4
4 days working on this and I feel like I have failed... And I am only at Genesis 2 so far.
EXACTLY the same issue that I have been trying to solve but have been mostly unsuccessful after spending a lot of time, effort and money purchasing several scripts, convertors, UVs, etc at the end of it all, I always end up just using the original M4 because I have failed to find any conversion that gave me 100% of the original M4 (that I totally love) satisfactorily. Several people have chipped in to help me along my journey but alas none of them seemed to mind that the converted M4 isn't 100% the original M4.
Well ... that's because it's not really possible to get 100% of the original M4 into any Genesis. According to another thread: The base model of Genesis is 18-19k polygons, Genesis 2 is in the 21-22k area. Genesis 3 was around 17K polygons, and Genesis 8 is slightly less than that.. The Genesis generations use SubD to create higher resolution characters on the fly (... sort of), but they don't start there. V4 & M4 are in the 66-67k polygon count area, G8 and the other Genesis generations don't have as much to work with, so it can't be absolutely faithful.
As far as the 3Delight to Iray converter goes, it's not clear what's happening. Are you saying that when you put M4 himself into the scene and then run the converter, his textures get misaligned? If that's the case, you probably just need to reset the UV in the Surfaces tab. If that's not what you mean, you may need to be a bit more explicit about what you were trying to do.
So ... to be clear on the process, you used the Riversoft Art Character converter for G2M-G8M, after using GenX to get Michael 4 to Genesis 2? If that's the case, you absolutely do not want or need M4 himself in the scene at any point in the process when you start using Character Converter; not the start, middle, or end.
That, you would need to ask in the Product Suggestions forum, or file a ticket. I do strongly suspect, at this late date in G8, it's not on their roadmap, but it can't hurt to ask. (Daz itself has not produced an M4 shape for any generation after Genesis -- and I'm not sure they did one then. For G2 and G3, the shapes were done by Sloshwerks (for G2) and the late Dimension3D for GenX. Maybe there's another PA willing to take on this major task.
Well ... it likely has to be some sort of conversion. Daz is highly unlikely to build a new 68K polygon figure from scratch. Apart from anything else, I don't think the people who built Michael 4 are with the company any more.
I use the GenX products to get characters from Gen4 to G3, then I use XTransfer to get them up to G8.
It's an imperfect solution. The face always comes out slightly off. I use dials to try and shift everything back into place, but it can be rather cumbersome. It seems that some sculpting details will always get lost in the transfer, likely because of the drop in poly count from Gen4 to G8, as vwrangler mentiones.
I don't even bother transferring the body shape anymore. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but transferred bodies always come out weird for me, with fingers that don't pose correctly and other issues. I have given up on that. For me it's mostly about the faces anyway.
The materials should be less of a problem. Cayman's Legacy UV products work well, eventhogh they're a little cumbersome. For IRAY conversion I use the products by V3Digitimes but that's only one of many options. I hear Anagenessis is very popular, I haven't tried it myself.
If fingers don't pose correctly it means that rigging needs to be adjusted for the morph using the "adjust rigging to shape" command.
Sigh, why am I hearing about this only now, after all that effort and money spent on conversion and UV products that have all gone unused. The original M4 is a masterpiece.
Hm, I might give this a try sometime.
It will be quite a while until I have time to try it, though, so don't expect me to report back anytime soon...
But thanks for the hint!
VWrangler wrote:
Well ... that's because it's not really possible to get 100% of the original M4 into any Genesis. According to another thread: The base model of Genesis is 18-19k polygons, Genesis 2 is in the 21-22k area. Genesis 3 was around 17K polygons, and Genesis 8 is slightly less than that.. The Genesis generations use SubD to create higher resolution characters on the fly (... sort of), but they don't start there. V4 & M4 are in the 66-67k polygon count area, G8 and the other Genesis generations don't have as much to work with, so it can't be absolutely faithful.
RexRed comment:
Thanks again for all of the info here...
I stumbled across a slider in my Genesis 8 actor morphs for Michael 4. The conversion process must have worked.
It works sort of but looks weird and does not give me the skins for 8.
His eyes seem enlarged...
I guess we will have to wait for Genesis 9 when the Genesis figures may catch up to the Generation 4 figure's polygon count.
It also seems evident now why it takes longer to load a Michael 4 figure.
This lowered polygon count in the Genesis 8 figures may also account for why I am drawn so much to the Michael 4 figure.
It might be also considered that a lower polygon count also means a lower texture quality because the texture quality is a direct ratio of the texel count. (Correct me if I am wrong in any of my assumptions here.)
None of the morph converters (Character Converter or XTranfer or GenX) handle the textures. They're not designed to do anything but the morphs. You need to handle the textures on your own, either by using one of the Cayman Studios Legacy UV products (that would use the original textures with some geografts to help it put things in the right places - there's a PDF at the bottom of the readme that tells you how the product works) or something like Texture Transformer (from Renderosity) that remakes the texture itself from the old UV and makes a new copy to the new UV. (There's an extremely manual process for remapping and rewriting the textures using Blender -- I think -- that's somewhere in the forum, but I don't remember the name of the thread, and it's not easy.)
And Genesis 9, whenever that arrives, almost certainly will not have anything like the M4V4 polygon count. Daz is focusing much more on game development using its existing figures, and that simply won't work with a figure that's four times the poly count of Genesis 8.
This is not correct. Texture quality depends only on the size of the texture maps, not on poly count.
Thank you for correcting me on that Hylas.
I assume by what you have said that a texture map can be a high texel scale with the polygon geometry (within reason) underneath it at a much lower poly count?
This is a lot of new information for me to learn and I thank you all for helping me understand it!
I need to focus on the M4 to Genesis 8 texture maps conversions etc...
Now I am wondering if a M4 texture map can be made to fit all Gen 8 figures?
It seems to me that a Genesis 8 figure that has roughly the same shape as M4 and roughly the same texture maps as M4 would sell quite well in the Daz Store...
There's no direct correlation between polygons and textures like you're suggesting. You could put a 16k texture on a 1-polygon plane if you wanted, and it would look the same as on a 1,000,000-polygon plane. The relationship between the two is only in UV mapping.
"Roughly the same shape" has nothing to do with the ability to use the same textures. What matters is how the mesh is UV mapped, and also how the material zones are setup - for example where the texture map used needs to change, as the whole skin is not on the same map.
This product enables you to use M4 textures on G8M: https://www.daz3d.com/legacy-uvs-for-genesis-8-michael-4
It modifies G8M mesh so it can use M4 textures, by providing alternate UV map for G8M mesh and geografts which add polygons and material zones in the right places to handle the transition between M4 texture maps which are not split in the same way as default G8M ones.
Hey, Anagenessis 2 is currently discounted to 5$!
https://www.daz3d.com/n-g-s-anagenessis-2-revolution
As I said, I haven't tried this product myself, I've only heard folks talk about it.
But what is there to lose? In the worst case one can always return it.