Genesis 9 Hair on Genesis 8 figures
shg0816_13461e8196
Posts: 288
in The Commons
Is it possible to use Genesis 9 products, specifically the hair, on Genesis 8 figures? Out of Toush has some good hair I am really interested in, but it's for G9.
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Parenting until someone creates a Genesis 9 clone for Genesis 8 or a script to convert (which I would guess is probably in the works)
I've tried to use this TUTORIAL of Josh Darling. He shows how to make a conversion. But his way has two problems. First, after re-rigging a hair with Transfer Utility all the custom bones of any hair are destroyed. It is not going to be the same product anymore. Second, since you are supposed to copy/paste the textures from the original hair to your new re-rigged OBJ file, you might run into a problem of missing shaders. In my case the hair I was trying to convert had a very specific shader - OOT Hairblending Hair (MDL). In the Shader Presets of my DAZ Stidio 4.21 there is no such shader. Or I just can't find it. I've got Blended Dual Lobe Hair Shader instead, but it doesn't work as a replacement.
I've tried to use auto-fit of DS. Basically, it works. However, the custom bones have neen replaced by the standard rigging and all the presets made by the hair creator, are useless now.
Thats why you have to parent it instead of fitting it.
Torian 8.1 and everything on him is for Genesis 9. I made a clone. Instructions in the Freebie forum. It's pretty easy. If I can do it, anyone can ;). The only thing you need to be aware of is that dforce strand based hair will not fit correctly, even with a clone. Not sure why, but it is what it is. Polygonal hair fits well though, as you can see :) And yes, as other have mentioned using autofit is the easiest, but it will destroy custom bones :(
That reminds me of Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) which I didn't notice on the original Torian 8.1 page.
Funny!
I did not get it at first, but it is so easy. All I had to do to is to parent the hair not just to the G9 figure, but to its Head. 
It works!
Can you give us a link?
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/599231/making-clones-of-g9-tutorial#latest
Thank you! I've already made a conversion using this tutorial Converting Genesis 8 Character Shapes to Genesis 9 - YouTube It will be interesting to compare the methods.
I hope someone makes a converter soon, there is one for Genesis 9 to 8 clothing but so far I haven't tried to see if its any good.
...I've been manually fitting and parenting hair since the Gen4 days. Not very difficult to do as like mentioned it preserves the movement and styling morphs. I also find that smoothing makes it easier to get a decent fit without having to do a lot of micro scaling adjustments on the separate axes.
I'm tired of DAZ keeping changing models and make stuff incompatible,I don't want to use G9 and I won't support anymore this business.
Daz is hardly the only company to change things and make stuff incompatible. In fact it's fairly common in almost every long running software.
Parenting the hair to the head is a the quickest way, and all the morphs and custom bones in the hair will still work. You just have to adjust the shape a bit to manually fit it to the head.
There are some Genesis 9 hair products for females which are multi-part pieces, which makes it even more bothersome to work with.
Your choice. You don't have to use genesis 9, but Daz needs to make money so they do what they need to do to keep customers buying products and moving forward. Some will move forward with them, others will stay with what they have because they choose not to.
Clothes, hairs and props are easy to convert manually from G3 to G8 and vice-versa (sadly the method doesn't work when converting to Genesis 9 and I never found someone explaining how to do it)
If money is short, it can be done without any paid product but if you have a lot of products to convert, it can be time consuming. I suppose paid converters are usesful in this situation but I never felt the need to use them: I'm converting products one way or the other when I need them.
Because I don't own any paid converters, I don't know if a paid converter will produce a better result than what I'm doing (as in a mix of tutorials from Sickleyield and Jay Versluis).
The tricks to converting between G3 and G8 play on their extremely similar geometry - in many ways, G8 was a Genesis 3.5, and I somewhat consider the generations to flow into each other. But these similarities no longer apply to G9. You're very limited in how much you can update a figure without breaking compatibilty with assets for it, so at a certain point G8 couldn't be refined any further and Daz had to start over.
That said, I have been trying to work on ways to properly adapt rigging between G8 and G9 - there's *enough* similarities between the rigging that it seems that it might be possible (although the hierarchy has changed, there's still the same number of weighted bones in most parts of the figure), but whether that's anything I can make into an automated converter may be another matter.
It's funny but you can fit any generations hair to any other generation. I often unparent hair on my figures anyway, so it doesn't conform and twist funny in certain poses.
JD
I've worked mostly with genesis 9 hair with widely varied levels of success. The most effective route is to add your hair object to the scene, and then parent it (not auto-fit) to your model. This allows dforce to still work and the bones (if any) remain intact. Using a clone or auto-fitting destroys the bones and dforce (at least with the hairs that I have used). The only question now is if there are enough morphs in the hair object to get it to look right on your character's head. Characters that are more niche (toon, anime, etc.) will likely require external editing of the mesh, an expertise that I do not have. Also, some hair works better than others. OOT hairs have a lot of morphs, while others won't even let you apply shaders when not parented to a G9 character. Daz has to make their money, but I am also not turning my back on (literally) thousands of dollars of content. I think we need a genesis 8 support group. :-)