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It is a help. It takes some of the grunt work out of the process. It doesn't solve the eyes or mouth issues. Grunt work is still involved with those aspects.
Is there a good tutorial for rebaking textures (G9 to G8 in this case) using Blender? I've heard that Ultimate Unwrap 3D does a very good job of that but I haven't been able to get my hands on a full copy and hesitant to pay for something that may not even work out the way I hope for.
This is not from personal experience, because I will not install G9, but have done quite a bit of reading around the subject at launch.
I am not convinced that G9 texturing is an improvement TBH.
It is certainly isn't as well optimised as the better G8 skins.
There is a disproportionate focus on face textures,and they attempt to offset the relative lack of attention to the body by cranking up the resolution.
That is not a well optimised way of doing things!PS see InverseKinematic's Aug 15th posting in this thread.
:/
BTW How are things progressing with this project?
The only G9 textures of real value are the large normal maps that they included with starter essentials. Just convert those and insert them into your G8 characters. I used wrap3d, which mostly works. There are couple of small spots on UV boundaries that might be noticeable with extreme close ups, mainly on the toes and fingers.
Somebody posted Victoria 9 converted to G8 here, and it includes the normal maps. It isn't super seamless, either, but pretty good for 99% of pics.
Actually it is only the textures they converted, not the shape. I forgot. But they converted all of the textures, including the G9 normal maps that basically every Daz core uses.
There is no material preset. But you can make your surfaces PBR skin, then copy Victoria 9 materials and paste on your G8, then swap the textures out. From there you can save this as a preset. Then you can just swap in your favorite G8 defuse and sss textures for other characters if you want that Genesis 9 look for all your characters.
I might try this ultimate unwrap if it works. If you can set wrap3d up right you can get pretty solid results. The trick is to wrap as little as possible. You want to have the G8 and G9 mesh lined up perfectly by using clone morphs before export. Use Texture Atlas to make one giant UV on the donor, G9. Texture Atlas is ancient, and only recognizes Daz default shader, so you need to convert the G9 materials to the DS default and drop them in slots it can use. Once that is done, you export this, and with this you can get UV conversions in wrap3d.
I have plenty of decent quality G8F skins, so I am not bothered about using G9 textures.
As I have said many times, I am hoping for a solid script to take G9 morphs to G8 / 8.1 F.
I am aware it is a big ask.
🙂
Update:
Took a bit to get around to it, but finally installed
...a week ago (ups to @because789), and can attest that (so far) it seems to work as a solution for G9 to G8/8.1 texture conversion.
(Note: A bit tricky to use the first couple times and get correct, but follow instructions explicitly and it does work.)The cayman stuff can work as long as you only use G9 textures and nothing else. It doesn't actually convert the texture. It creates new UVs on the G8 mesh to make the G9 texture fit. So this adds a bunch of extra material zones.
What they really want is the texture fully converted to G8 UV, so it can be used like any G8 texture and with other G8 textures. You cannot do this with cayman. Cayman also has another flaw, because some parts are mapped in strange places, some skins with unique features like a scar or birthmark might end up in an unwanted place, and if one happens to go across a UV boundary, that line is going to show up badly. It isn't cayman's fault, there is no way around this possibility.
Making a script to texture transfer would be tricky because of how different G8 and G9 are. You may not notice, but the clones for G8 and G9 are not perfectly matched. They are very close, but the nipples do not line up at all. So if you go and convert the textures with the clones in Daz, the nipple are going to be in the wrong place. I think the belly button is off a bit, too.
You can fix that with photoshop, but this still isn't ideal.New clones would need to be made then, since the official ones do not serve this purpose. That is where wrap3d comes into play. You can use a tool in wrap to gently push the nipple into the correct place while still maintaining the mesh.
It is tedious to set it all up, for sure. But once you do have it set up the process gets much easier the next time. You can save your wrap3d scene so that you only need to pop in a new G9 texture. At this point, the most tedious part is getting the Texture Atlas setup. Once you do it a couple times, it becomes second nature. Since we are not converting a mesh, the process isn't as involved as converting a whole character. Maybe not as fast as a script, but if you consider how painfully slow Daz can be sometimes, maybe not that much slower. You can also make a texture atlas preset to speed it up a bit.
I'm not an expert of these things. But I need to tell something. If you want same realism on G8 characters with the G9 textures it is impossible because the G9 is different shader system than G8.
IMO there is nothing wrong with re-using a better quality G8F skin.
It is the morphs that I am interested in.
The PBR system is used from G8.1 onwards. It's not superior to the Uber shader just different names and a microdetail map added. Technically both are PBR.
The PBR Skin shader is just that, a shader. It can be used on anything, including G8, including rocks and tress if you want to.
PBR Skin offers tiling, so you can have a repeating texture like a skin swatch without tiling the other textures on that surface. This kind of tiling can be helpful. You can use this to make leather or rocks, it is perfect for that.Daz used PBR Skin on G8.1 first, they tiled a small patch of skin over and over. But this had issues of its own, a repeating pattern is not exactly how skin works.
So with G9 Daz took a different method and commissioned somebody to craft a highly detailed normal map, with each texture being 8k in size and at a low compression. The head normal map is almost 95mb in size, which is massive for one texture.
Nearly all of their core G9s use these normal maps in the detail slot. Some 3rd party PAs also use them in their own characters. The textures come with the start essentials pack, the free pack you get from Daz.
These textures are legit. They are the best normal maps I have ever seen for any character. They absolutely are worth having. You do not need to use PBR Skin to use these, you can slot them in the regular old normal map if you want. But PBR Skin allows you to use two different normal maps, you can use a regular normal and this new detail normal at the same time.
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