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Once you have the normal detail maps, it is a matter of copying the material settings from a G9 that you like. These are uploads of the converted detail maps. Some people do it differently, so some might work better than others for some characters.
Mouth textures
This full character conversion has the detail maps plus some reflection maps.
There are others, but my search didn't find them.
As you might notice, these are for females. I thought there was a male version. I made these myself, though. You can easily convert female textures to male inside Daz itself when they are the same Genesis. Actually you can convert textures inside Daz for others but it gets messy. Most people are probably using Wrap3D to convert these. That is a whole different ballgame. If you are not used to other software like that, it is best to just use what others have done. Learning Wrap can be a time sink. But it is rewarding if you do. It is not necessary though.
You also need the Daz Iray PBR Skin shader that comes with Daz. Apply this shader on each skin surface of your G8 first. You do not need to do all the surfaces, only the skin.
Load up a nice looking G9. Copy a surface of their skin. Paste this to your G8 surface, repeat until each skin surface is done.
On the G8, replace the G9 texture with the G8 equivalent.
Once done, your G8 should look just as good as the G9, and some might look better than the G9. It depends on the original skin. You may need to adjust some surfaces to taste, as there is no one setting that works for every skin type. Characters with darker skin will probably need adjustment.
For eyes, you can also copy and paste them from any G9 that you like. With G8.1 this will work natively. With G8 you will need to have the 8.1 UV map for 8.0. This can be done inside Daz.
If you are recreating old models for G9, then you might want to learn Wrap3D, as I think that is a good way to do it. But I very much prefer G8 over G9. If I convert a character, it is the opposite path, G9 to G8.
This video shows how to use Wrap to convert 8 to 9. It can work for any model once you get comfortable with Wrap.
The 8k normal maps for G9 are doing a lot of the detail you see in G9. But there downloads that have converted these textures to G8, so if you like G8, you can get the detail from G9 on your favorite G8 characters. One of these also converted the gen map.
The gloss textures have been converted, too, and some full G9 characters have been converted.
You can also use the G9 eye textures on G8.1 straight up. The UVs are almost identical.So you can recreate your favorite G8 with these normal and reflection maps. Use a similar material setup to a G9 you like. Best of all, you can use this set up for all your G8 characters with just a few tweaks. You can still use the old G8 normal maps for some characters, as the 8k normal goes into the detail section, leaving a space for another normal map if you wish to use it.
The mouth and lacrimal and the only things not covered by conversion, and maybe nails, but G8.1 already has great textures for these. Just use those.
If Genesis 8 clothing is genuinely selling 85% less as someone claimed, then it is because Daz chased those shoppers away by producing the trash that is Genesis 9.
I believe the bulk of people buying Genesis 9 right now are fairly new to Daz, thus people who would be buying the newest Daz products because they do not know better. You might have some of the old die hards who will buy everything Daz puts out until the day they die, but they are a dying breed.Genesis 9 is NOT new. It came out in 2022. If Daz acts like they used to do for Genesis 1, 2, 3, 8, then Genesis 10 is coming out this fall, just a few months from now. Genesis 8 was the odd ball, the only Genesis generation to last longer than 2 years. So going by their history, Genesis 9 is on its last legs already. You will not be getting much content once Genesis 10 arrives. A lot of people hate Genesis 9, rightfully so, and will be ready to ditch it the moment 10 releases. And then you get to go through the fun of starting all over again with a new figure if you plan on keeping up with Daz.
You can still find popular vendors selling Genesis 8 content in other stores beyond Daz. Some vendors made clothes for Genesis 9 and then almost immediately switched back to Genesis 8 because G9 was not selling so great after all.
If you look at the Daz store right now, many of the clothing makers are pretty new in that store, while a number of old timers who made quality content have left. Not only that, but many of these new vendors are foreign, perhaps living in places where the cost of living is not as high as the US. All of the new content is designed ultra cheap because they are making very little money on anything these days. Daz has taken a quantity over quality approach for years, but now it has become even worse. However, there have been days when there are no new product releases in their store. Considering how much Daz desires quantity, this is a further sign that they are struggling to get vendors to keep pumping it out, even with such low standards.
Don't be silly. V4 had baked in shadows and details that do not work in a render engine like Iray. Many textures were less than 4K in size, and they were badly compressed on top of that small size.
Texture compression is a great evil in this field, and too many PAs compress the crap out of their textures still. But they have got a little better, some of them them at least. When you see textures that are just a couple hundred KB in size, that's not a good sign. When it comes to the important detail maps, you may as well just use a random noise map at that point.When it comes to Genesis 9, a number of PAs have slowly started to ship less compressed textures. They also started using different sources for them, likely through Daz's deal with XYZ Texturing, though that trend started with 8.1. I know it is easy to crap on G9, it is bad, but this is one thing that is not that bad. The detail normal map for G9 is the best normal map I have seen. No other even comes close.
However material settings play a massive role, and this is a problem. The PBR Skin shader that Daz came up with isn't anything special, and many characters have a skin setting that casts a black shadow around the edges of the skin. Why PAs keep doing that, I don't know, but that certainly is not how skin works. It gives G9 characters an outline that makes them stand out a mile from anything else as well as being obvious CGI creations. For all the hype around the new eye, the eye tear prop looks like this milky material instead of, well, a tear, and it is perfectly smooth and unnatural looking. As for the eye textures, you can use the G9 eye textures on 8.1, BTW, with no conversion needed. If you do that, the "advancement" of 9 in the eyes is largely nullified.
Because the advancement was mostly from the texture.Iray is what it is. Most of the other render engines are doing some form of cheat to be faster or look the way they do. But regardless, Iray is just a plug in for Daz. They can use any number of other render engines. Daz still includes a 3DL plugin, and don't forget Filament.
So they can add another render engine, and still keep Iray for compatibility.The same goes for Genesis. Daz can make a new figure that is not Genesis, but still include Genesis just like they include Victoria 4 still to this day.
It wouldn't even make sense to exclude past content, that absolutely would sink the company. Granted the company is sinking, but killing off Iray and or Genesis would capsize the boat mush faster. They need to do something, but not that.All that said, I think Daz 5 is largely vaporware. They have like 1 guy doing the actual programming, and he's not getting younger. DS5 clearly broke a couple years ago, and they have spent all that time trying to make it work. That is a massive red flag. The software will be outdated the day it ships if it ever does because of all these delays. But I think it is just as likely Daz will go out of business before DS5 ships. They might try to get it out the door unfinished at the last minute as a desperation play.
4.6 is outdated, lacking several features that are handy for making morphs. Having 4.6 installed causes some issues with a current install. Even when you install them on totally different drives all DS versions still keep some data on the OS drive in one certain folder. This means that they share settings, and 4.6 missing many newer features causes some settings to reset when you go back to open your newer DS. These are not major issues, but they are annoying as you need to redo these particular settings every time you switch between 4.6 and a newer version. You can avoid some of this by using the beta as your primary DS since the beta branch keeps its settings in a different location (also on the OS drive.) But still, it is annoying.
You also have to prep everything for 4.6, as it does not have Iray shaders. 4.6 can open a file with Iray, but it takes forever as it converts the shader to default DS. So you really don't want to forget converting all your materials to DS default. You basically have to take extra steps for everything because of 4.6 limitations.
So while it is certainly possible to use 4.6 to run the HD importer, I would not say it is exactly convenient. I was hoping when you said "easy", you meant something new.As for G9,
G9 really is just for pretty portraits of headshots and that is about it. The body is an afterthought and abysmal as a result. Anyone who says G9 poses better is lying to themselves. Some people will eat up anything Daz makes and will adjust their thinking accordingly to accommodate it. It is a creepy cult-like mentality.
However these fanatics cannot sustain Daz by themselves. They can only buy 1 of a given product, which is a big reason why Daz pumps out so much low effort content every day.Even G9's UV mapping is dumb. They have it so that there is a skinny little strip of the torso UV sandwiched between the arm and neck UVs. Who thought that was a good idea??? By doing this they have a section of the torso with very few pixels dedicated to it, and if you zoom in enough you can clearly see the difference between them. The arm UV should just go up to the neck in this situation, that would be the logical way to do this. It would also make it easier to paint textures.
The male genital UV is even worse, it is a bad joke. I truly believe they made the male gen mat bad on purpose. That is the only explanation for why it is like this. It is like they forgot what a large portion of their user base is doing with this software.There was nothing wrong with the UV maps they had with 8.1. 8.1 largely fixed the issues of awkward UVs. They redesigned G9 to be as different as possible just for the sake of doing so. They want people to have to buy all their old stuff all over again...now as G9 products. While they allow some PAs to sell converters, they know most people will not use them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the 4000 series, gaming laptops generally have a GPU that is one tier below the desktop equivalent. For example, the "4090 laptop" is actually the same chip they use in a 4080 desktop, plus it is clocked much lower. You can spot this easy because the 4090 laptop has the same 16gb VRAM as a 4080 desktop. You also pay much more. The 4080 laptop has the same 12gb as a 4070 desktop. The 4070 laptop has the 8gb that a 4060 desktop does. The 4060 laptop also has 8gb, but the 4050 laptop only has 4gb.
For rendering the same rules apply to laptop as desktop for Daz. GPU is the main thing. If you have a junk GPU then it doesn't matter how awesome the rest of the specs are, you are not rendering much. Keep an eye on VRAM. As I said above, laptops are a tier down, and the tier down can have less VRAM. Some laptop GPUs have less VRAM as well, like the 3060 laptop having only 6gb instead of 12. The 3050 laptop has only 4gb, again half the desktop amount. If you are used to a big GPU, then 4gb is going to suck hard.
The best deal I have seen on laptops is a 4060 for $800 at Best Buy. This one has 8gb, and the 4060 laptop is maybe ok. I have seen other 4060 laptops go for twice this price. I don't know why, it is just a 4060. The 4050s can go for what this 4060 laptop costs, which make no sense. Like the Victus, they have a 4050 listed for $950. The 4070 laptop might be a bit faster, but it only has 8gb VRAM, so you are not making bigger scenes with it. I would not consider any laptop that only has 4gb of VRAM. You will kick yourself. Hard. You know how memory hungry Daz can be. You can't even do a 3d background with 1 character under 4gb these days. You would need to strictly use HDRI backgrounds and even then you might run out of VRAM with some of these hairs and characters with lots of large textures.
But there is one important thing.
The real problem with laptops is going to be cooling. Running Iray for long periods of time will likely kill them over a few years. This is even more true of cheaper laptops where they cut corners. Since you already said you don't want to spend too much, that kind of puts you in the cheaper zone by default. $800 for a gaming laptop is considered dirt cheap.
If you insist on using a laptop for rendering, do it in cool places. If you render in a hot hotel room, you may as well forget it. Run the AC hard and make sure the laptop is getting as much ventilation as possible.
And hope for the best.If your renders are quick then maybe it isn't as big of a deal. It is best to keep your render times low.
Omniverse uses Iray, straight up, they just call it a different name because "Iray" is so niche nobody knows what Iray is. It isn't a special or different version of Iray. However, they do get the new Iray updates much faster, so it might perform differently than Iray in Daz. Omniverse always has the latest version of Iray available. Currently, the Iray in Daz is very outdated, it is like an entire year behind. The Iray in Omniverse has numerous enhancements, including better support for the 4000 series.
My personal excitement for Omniverse comes down to the ability to use USD. USD is being supported by many apps, and it will make transferring content both in and out of Daz easier than ever. That is assuming they do not screw this up, my concern is that they do something stupid like making USD an export only option. But as long as USD becomes an import and export option in Daz, it opens up all kinds of possibilities.
For one, you will not have to wait for Daz to get around to updating Iray, you can send your scene to Omniverse and render it there in the latest version with all the enhancements. It will make the fan artists really happy when they can use Blender to send any model extracted from a video game to Daz or Omniverse via USD. They will not need to do nearly as much work.
So it is more about USD support than Omniverse itself. But Omniverse does give you access to many different render engines, including game engines, to make animations. However, Omniverse isn't the most user friendly thing right now. It needs a little work.
But I do think it will keep improving. Omniverse is not going to fail. It certainly has a better long term outlook than Daz.I thought Poser lights were supposed to convert Iray when used, but I guess not. Or it could be that they are too dim to see much. The default values on lights are super low compared to what they need to be visible. You can try turning up the values. The numbers can get quite comical if using the base unit.
You have two issues. One is that all the materials in the scene are made for 3DL and not Iray, so they may look bad in Iray until you convert them. There are a ton of products that do this task for you to help out.
As for lights you can get a variety of things to help there. You can create your own, or use some from products. Ghost Lights can help add extra light in a dark room and fill things in.When lighting think of it from a photographer's view. Iray lights are realistic, so you can apply many ideas from real lighting to Iray if you have any experience with that.
It may be possible to cheat a bit. You can hide a wall to let HDRI light in the room. It is also possible make light that can pass through walls with is called a Iray Section Plane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCJfIlk-4Yo
So you can do any of these things.
My point is that 8.1 does allow you to do this. Victoria 8.1 has this right now, I just tried it. The material preset is right there in the V8.1 materials. Torment 8.1 also does, so Torment can have a female prop on him with a matching texture.
It is only a matter of the PAs supporting it, but whether PAs support it is entirely up to them. Daz cannot force PAs to make genital textures at all, a number of PAs do not create any gen mats for their characters. This is no different. Some PAs may not want to do this, and other PAs may not have the resources to do this. You have to consider that many PAs use merchant resources as their base, but you will not find a single merchant resource that has gen mats for both sexes on a given texture. That means anybody doing this will have to create them on their own.So far the 2 characters I listed support it. There are other 8.1 characters but they are not "officially" the same thing as Victoria. The new Cleopatra and White Priestess are not one of their own, even though they are Daz Originals. These are characters that Daz has licensed from Artstation and do not actually count as their main line. I know this is very confusing because there is nothing in their sale or store pages that address this. You have to find out from their forums.
However I have heard that Daz will support this feature with more of their main characters. So just look out for these. Every new main character always gets a thread at the Daz forums, and you can be sure somebody will bring up the topic of gen mats. If not, you can always ask yourself.
Besides, if they fail to support this feature, you can use their forum to bash them for not holding up their promise.
Maybe you can make a thread in the Daz forums that lists characters that have both male and female gen mats. That would actually be a cool idea. There are people who look for this.If you have the templates and a little photoshop skill you can create your gen mat textures for your characters. All you have to do is match the skin at the base. There is a Renderotica product that helps you create your own textures for the official prop, I can't think of the name right now.
I also have another tip. You can copy all of the morphs you have the the official 8 gen prop into the 8.1 data folders, and give all you new 8.1 futa the exact same morphs you enjoy with the male 8 characters.
Even better, you can also use the 8.1 male gen prop on old 8 females as well. I forget exactly how, but it really easy. I think it was a simple as copying the data folders from 8.1 to 8, and you can load the male gen prop on the G8 females.With that you can have all the tools to make futa to your heart's content. While Futalicious does the job, I personally prefer the official prop. There are a lot of morphs for the prop and Genesis tends to pose better with the official prop than others.
The genital textures have to be included, or you have to make them yourself. This is all new when 8.1 came out, and only a few characters have both sets. Making this more difficult is the fact that Daz does a really poor job explaining any of this, and they do not consistently list this on their own store pages.
For example, Torment 8.1 lists it quite plainly, look at the store page and the list of what is included, and you find it lists both male and female genitalia. So Torment has textures for both sets!
Victoria also has both textures, but her store page only says "03 Anatomical Elements Material Presets".So Victoria 8.1 has the textures for you, but you cannot just slap any other skin on Victoria 8.1 and expect it to work. You need the textures. You load Victoria 8.1, apply the male gen prop, and apply the male gen texture preset. If you alter this, you need to alter them all.
8.1 only adds the OPTION to use genitals on either male or female, but it still up the seller who makes the character as to whether they include any textures to use this.
I hope that explains things a bit. As time goes on, more characters should do this. Supposedly Daz has promised that their official characters will do this going forward, but that is only them.
