Tutorial: Making TriAx Figures from Old Parametric Characters
richardandtracy
Posts: 5,070
How often have you wanted to use your old Generation 3 or Generation 4 content but been put off by things like poke through, not having just the perfect content or even by the fact the clothing you want to use is for the wrong figure?
Well, now you can update a character like A3 to have most of the benefits of Generation 7 (Genesis 3) or Generation 8 (Genesis 8) characters. The benefits you can have are:
- Wearing almost all Generation 3 clothing (A3, V3, M3, H3, GND2, GV3 & IV)
- Wearing most G3F and G3M clothing & hair by creating an Autofit Clone
- Wearing most G8F and G8M clothing & hair by creating an Autofit Clone
- Be able to morph from A3 into V3 into M3 into H3 etc
- Have the clothing follow the morphs
- Update the skin to Iray with a material setting (requires DAZ High Res V3 texture)
The tutorial is a 69 page pdf giving step by step instructions and illustrations at every step. You can do it yourself. I include shaping poses for V3 and M3 to create basic Autofit Clones for G3F, G3M, G8F and G8M clothing, and explain how to do it yourself while referring to Catherine's tutorial for how to create much better modeller aided clones.
The tutorial does not cover improving the joint geometry of the old parametric characters, as that's outside the scope of this tutorial which is to convert an old parametric character into a character that can take advantage of the biggest improvements that DS has brought to the Genesis range of figures - autofit & autofollow.
The Tutorial goes through the process with A3. It can be done with V3, GV3, V4, M4, M3 etc. Any Pre-Genesis parametric character can be converted in the same way to take advantage of the same things. The image below shows TriAx A3 wearing G8F Rhiannon's Crux Attitude bottoms, Top is G3F Rhiannon's Crux Attitude top, the hair is G3F, and the shoes came from PoserDazFreebies for V3.
And here is another I prepared earlier, Glamorous Vicki 3 (a V3 variant by Jim Burton) wearing a G8F Kaftan.
I hope you find it useful, and look forward to a revival of old content.
Regards,
Richard
Edited to add: See here for M3 and V3 poses to help make M4 & V4 autofit clones and a medium res material preset for V3 materials.
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Comments
I can't wait to try this, hope it's not too difficult for my mostly non-existent rigging skills. Thanks for doing it!
Hopefully you won't need to do anything other than follow every step, one at a time, starting at the beginning going to the end.
Completing each section is to reach a break point (except between section 7 & 8 - because section 8 shows how to save the character as a TriAx library figure). If you don't do everything, you won't get the full benefit, but that is the maximum penalty. I think it's in a sensible order, and if you jump from one section to another you'll probably forget to do something.
Regards,
Richard
Thank you so much for your time and effort, and also for putting it into a handy dandy pdf!
Hope it'll be useful. Took a fair bit of time to do, and much longer to learn how to do..
I really didn't know it was possible until recently. Have always been told that it was impossible, so I was actually learning how to rig obj files from scratch to be able to use one character when I thought 'I wonder if...' and started playing about. I discovered by chance that all the Generation 3 Unimesh models were different morphs of the same mesh (though the 'Unimesh' clue was shouting at me right from the beginning, doh!) so could be used as stunningly simple ways of getting Autofit Clones to start off. Then, being on a roll, I thought 'how easy will it be to pose V3 as G8F and will it be good enough for a clothing clone?'. Turned out it is usually close enough for the smoothing modifier to deal with.
Getting the clothing to autofollow the morphs took a bit of time to reliably solve. Turns out if you set the autofollow on all residual morphs before ending the session where the figure is converted to TriAx, then the morph deltas are retained, but if you don't, they're lost. I have suggested the slow but reliable method where all morphs are saved as full body obj files and re-loaded as morphs in one batch and changed to autofollow as a batch.
So, hope it works for you.
Regards,
Richard
Oh great. Just seen I've missed one (not very important) image and have one or two tripe writing errors. I shall collect them together, and in a week's time I'll update the pdf to issue 2. If I get comments that need incorporating, I'll add them at the same time.
Regards,
Richard
The last version of Poser I used was Poser 4, so I really have no idea how much you'd keep of the benefits if they went into one of the current versions of Poser.
Regards,
Richard
Way back in time, I did try converting V4 to triax. In that scene it appeared to work just fine, all morphs included. BUT in a fresh instance of D/S, the new figure choked the program, it froze the program, figure would not load.
No, Thank you for doing the sanity check on it and showing where I needed more details.
Regards,
Richard.
Neither do I, to be honest. I was thinking aloud. :) I may have some comments later when I've had a little more digesting time.
@ richardandtracy
I am looking forward for your PDF Document, I will put my hands on the Keyboard and Mouse and start doing something about it.
But this product DAZ High Res V3 texture you mention does not come cheap (currency exchange will balloom up the total price for that product) so I see no savings.
I would be tempted to borrow any other kind of installed textures as these could do the trick.
When you ready let us know, and I will go flying to the download source and rub my hands with glee to get the job done one page or chapter at a time
Cheers!
Thanks.
Remembered this one. As I mentioned above I made a TriAx version of GV3 before the TriAx A3 in the promo at the top of the page, and this one was with her wearing G8F dForce Denim Diva clothing and with the clothing following the body morphs:
The GV3 model has built in high heel feet. This causes issues with shoes if they're not her own high heels, so in the image above, she is wearing the heels that came with the original character. Thinking about it, I may try experimenting with 'Adjust Rigging to Shape' to see if I can make the Flat Feet morph the default GV3 foot shape.. That'll be interesting to try.
Regards,
Richard
Nice one! There's life in the old girl yet - and given that V3 was released almost exactly 21 years ago, her apparent age here actually matches her 'real' age.
Now for an image that doesn't feel too far from the original meaning of NVITWAS. OK, this TriAx converted V3 character is clothed with G8F clothing and G3F hair, but has the obligatory dragon wanting its chin scratched:
Regards,
Richard
Looks good Richard.
I don't have V3's hi res textures, so won't be able to use this in that regard, love the idea though.
I mentioned that I had created a V4 Autofit clone for a TriAx A3/V3/M3/GV3/F3/IV/SP3/H3 character.
This is the Domino for V4 set. And it's applied to V3.
Regards,
Richard
Thought I'd do a side-by-side comparison of G8F (Left) wearing the same G8F clothes as TriAx GV3 (Right) and using the same V3 pose. Interesting:
Had intended GV3 to have SWAM's Robin hair at scale X = -100% too, but that rather threw things and broke the model a bit.
Regards,
Richard
Attached is a zip file for the Medium Res texture Iray material preset for A3/V3/any other generation 3 character along with poses for V3 and M3 that are close enough for them to be used as Autofit Clones for V4 and M4 clothing to be used on your Generation 3 TriAx character in accordance with the tutorial at the top of this thread.
Regards,
Richard
The kids work, too, for MTs on that: Luke, Laura, Matt, Maddie, MilBaby3, as well as David3 and Freak3, if you have any of the above. You can also use the fit-shape figures that came with the Millennium3 Young Teens and Preschoolers, and the M3-to-M2 guy who came with M3, to make clones for most of the Millennium 2 series. The V3-V2 figure won't work, but you don't need it: V3's mesh is the same shape as V1's and V2's--just with better joints and topography. Stephanie (S2, the Millennium 2 original version) has a slightly curvier body than V2, but the same rigging as V2.
Something that will help tremendously with the Aiko morphs before converting to Triax: https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/31148/group-morph-dials-2
It's nearly 20 years old, but it's still there and more importantly, it works in DS 4.22!, grouping the morphs. They work aftrwards, even after changing the rigging to Triax (just tested, as I wasn't sure).
It's a series of poses that groups the poses of Aiko 3, Hiro 3, Stephanie Petite and David 3 in a similar way how to V4 and M4 morphs ar grouped. There is another one that does the same with Vicky 3, Mike 3, Freak 3 and The Girl.
If needs to, I can make a mini-tutorial to show how it is done.