Parental Love: character assets

[plottwist69]

The 'official' character assets were released by Luxee a few months back...

They were shared in this post here,
And uploaded here:

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If you are trying to do a custom dial, you could load the 'original' characters alongside your efforts, to give you reference points. Otherwise, if you want a 100% match, well those are the .dufs used ingame that Luxee shared with us, can't get more accurate than that!

If a screen pops up with a bunch of missing assets listed when you load them into Daz Studio, screenshot it and maybe share it here if you can't figure out what's missing

Best of luck with your efforts!

I'm using the official assets and character presets. I have no errors about missing assets. Everything else looks correct except the face.
I've also tried to make Jenna and she looks as she should.

The problem only appears on Elly and Ada.
I think I'm missing a head morph or something similar, but I get no pop-ups about missing assets.

 

[fried]

I'm using the official assets and character presets. I have no errors about missing assets. Everything else looks correct except the face.
I've also tried to make Jenna and she looks as she should.

The problem only appears on Elly and Ada.
I think I'm missing a head morph or something similar, but I get no pop-ups about missing assets.

You might have some "bad" assets in your library which have morphs pre-set to non-zero values and are impacting the base figure load. This is frustrating, but can be diagnosed and fixed:

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[slarb259]

Here's my stab at Sis and Ada...

View attachment 598236

Not quite happy with my body morphs, so I'd recommend that you work those out on your own, based on the source art as appropriate.

As for what I used.

Sis:
SASE Nathalie for G8F over at Renderosity:

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For the skin textures AND the face. The body morph isn't a bad starting point, but you will need to do some tweaking.

Hair is Voss Hair, as mentioned above.

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This does seem to be a very close match to me.


Ada:
Skin:

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, also available via the

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Pretty much a dead on match, with some translucency color and percentage tweaks. You can use this skin for her sister as well, they have the same freckle patterns and such, although you might want to need to dial a bit of red into her skin to make it a bit more rosy if you think it needs it.
Face:
VYK Tasmin is fairly close, particularly with the nose shape.

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There may be a closer match.
Body:
VYK Tasmin isn't a bad starting point, but you will need to make a number of adjustments, such as Youth Morph (I went with 30%), and others to taste. Hence, I'd recommend grabbing

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I did a number of adjustments to the body, and so far I'm not 100% happy with it, so hopefully others can find a shorter quicker way to get there.

Hair is Gwenilli Hair of course... which incidentally is a FREEBIE!

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As for Ada's sister, her body shape does seem to be a 'progression' based on age, with the breasts enhanced by a whole bunch, so once you dial either of them in, I'd suggest using that as your starting point for the other sister.


In either case, the skin textures suggested above look to be pretty much dead on to me. As for the eyes, not 100% sure on those, so feel free to experiment with irises from various figures until you find one that you like.


Consider these suggestions as starting points for your own efforts in dialing these characters in. I'd recommend picking up a few morph packs as well, so that you can tweak the breasts, glutes, and such. Hopefully someone with better morph tweaking skills than myself can come up with a decent facsimile.

Hi
OhWee can you or someone else please tell me the name of the bra and panties Ada is wearing in your posted render. I know I've seen them before but I can't remember the name of the assets they belong to and it's driving me up the wall.

 

[OhWee]

Hi
OhWee can you or someone else please tell me the name of the bra and panties Ada is wearing in your posted render. I know I've seen them before but I can't remember the name of the assets they belong to and it's driving me up the wall.

Hmmm... not sure on the top, the thong is the Sweet Nothing Thong...

Edit: (took a while to find and load my file)

The top is the Japanese Fundoshi Top

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[slarb259]

Hmmm... not sure on the top, the thong is the Sweet Nothing Thong...

Edit: (took a while to find and load my file)

The top is the Japanese Fundoshi Top

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Ah I knew those assets looked familar. Even had the Fundoshi Top.

Thx for the help OhWee

 

[m4dsk1llz]

One is Luxee's DUF file and the other is a complete G8 conversion. Can you tell which is which?

 

[AlexStone]

View attachment 1276489

One is Luxee's DUF file and the other is a complete G8 conversion. Can you tell which is which?

G3 from the right.

 

[m4dsk1llz]

AlexStone

Hah, my morphing skills must be improving, G8 on the right. After I get a couple more done I will post the morphs. It is a good bit lighter than the DUF provided by Luxee. The right image was created with the single morph, hair asset and skin asset, that was it.

Working on Elly today.

 

[m4dsk1llz]

Arrgh,

So many useless morphs in Elly. Why use a morph if you are only going to nudge the dial to 1 or 2%! It made this a very hard character to convert, but it is done. See if you can tell which is which. There are subtle differences between G8 and G3 to begin with and the dials used do not fully cancel out those differences. Also some of the morphs used by Luxee are just utter crap and cause problems in general when converted.


One is straight from Luxee's .duf file with the clothing removed and the other is a single G8 morph with same hair and skin textures.

Why more devs don't convert their characters to single morphs is beyond me, all you need is Hexagon installed and it is free. Please note this is not specific to Luxee and I want to thank him for being forward thinking enough to allow us easier access to the source for making fan art.

Will post the morphs later. By the way, these work on G8 and/or G8.1. Just dial it up to 100% and you have your Fan Art character!

 

[OhWee]

(snip)
Why more devs don't convert their characters to single morphs is beyond me, all you need is Hexagon installed and it is free. Please note this is not specific to Luxee and I want to thank him for being forward thinking enough to allow us easier access to the source for making fan art.

There's a process to combine morphs into a single morph that doesn't involve Hexagon. It can all be done inside of Daz Studio. Let's see if I have that link handy...

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or this video:


Jay's video essentially visualizes the same process that is explained in the digi dots link.

Note that distributing morphs combined in this way is technically 'sharing' the morphs that you used, some of which you may have paid for, and this is frowned upon by PA's, Daz Productions, etc.. However, this being a buccaneer forum and all...

If you want to be 'completely legal' though, yeah you'll want to make people purchase/acquire the separate morph packages (acquire by other means if they are free morph packages to meet the 'legal' thing and distribution is 'OKed' fur such freebies). If the morph package used to create your custom morph is a Merchant Resource, then it may be 'OK' to combine such morphs into a new morph for sharing purposes, but I'm not 100% sure on this point.

If you mix in another character morph to create your new morph, odds are good that this will be frowned upon (example, mixing in Aiko 7, Victoria 7, etc.). If it's a 'free' character that you grabbed on ShareCG or something, then you should look over the usage rights.

Of course, you will then need to make sure you track down the relevant files to package them for sharing purposes. My Dee for G3F morph in that other assets thread should give you an idea of which folders to look for, and where they are in the folder structure depending on where you saved the morph.

I will say that if you are combining several morphs into a single morph, this can make it harder to recognize which exact morphs you may have used, and who knows, you may have used ZBrush or something for all anyone knows...

Just FYI, to make you aware in case you worry about such things.

 

[bluehill84]

Why more devs don't convert their characters to single morphs is beyond me, all you need is Hexagon installed and it is free.

How do you do that in hexagon? I haven't found hexagon very easy to use and online help resources aren't as plentiful as they are for DAZ and blender.

 

[AlexStone]

Note that distributing morphs combined in this way is technically 'sharing' the morphs that you used, some of which you may have paid for, and this is frowned upon by PA's, Daz Productions, etc.. However, this being a buccaneer forum and all...

"There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not:
The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid."
Proverbs 30:18–20

Well, the fifth thing is the custom morph in DAZ Studio. If it's created from an OBJ file, copyright issues are meaningless.

 

[m4dsk1llz]

How do you do that in hexagon? I haven't found hexagon very easy to use and online help resources aren't as plentiful as they are for DAZ and blender.

If you have Hexagon installed (that means go to the file menu and you should have a Send To choice, then select Hexagon.

Here is a step by step, no need to export to .OBJ like the digi dots link provided by OhWee above. It basically is the same steps but simpler.

1. You have to have a properly set up character, morphed the way you want it. Make sure Resolution is set to Base and Subdivision is 0. No eyelashes, no genitalia or other grafts.
2. Select your model, then FILE >> SEND TO >> SEND TO HEXAGON. Hexagon will load and then go to Hexagon and select your character, then go to FILE >> SEND TO DAZ
3. The rest is just like the WPGuru video.

Basically it sends Hexagon an OBJ without actually writing that OBJ to your storage drive, all done in memory.

OhWee we be pirates and not VN devs, so I will continue to make my G8 single morph. I think I am actually in a very gray area as a lot of the morphs used by these older characters do not have a G8 or G8.1 versions, so a character that is converted to G8 many times could not be simply dialed up with bought resources.

If I was a Dev, you do have to start somewhere, but I would still combine the morphs into a single one placed in a different DAZ Library as DAZ feels the need to load all morphs for the class of character you are working with, each time you load it. For instance, I have a specific Fan Art file library that only have the single character, the textures needed and environments, clothing and poses. No other characters or body morphs to get in the way of doing fan art. Other's do the same thing. It is my workflow and I am used to it that way.

Also I am not trying to build a Character Preset, it is just a modifier/morph to get to the final shape. No textures or other things included. Not building products or trying to 'sell' my work in any venue.

 

[OhWee]

AlexStone , etc.

Just covering the bases guys. That's why I mentioned the buccaneer forum thing first. And note that I also mentioned how it might be difficult to make a case on a specific character mix and which morphs are used. Of course, if the character still looks 95% like the base character (say if it's essentially a lightly tweaked variant of Ophelia 7 or somethng), then that's harder to pass off.

Some developers around here DO worry about legalities, hence why I felt the need to bring it up. And such developers do end up purchasing assets (eventually) to cover the bases as it were. Of course, if they are using a 'custom' Daz character as he/she/it appears in another game, then we are already talking a gray area, and if the character 'walks, talks, and is identified' as that other character...

Thankfully, Luxee shared his characters in this case, which does help encourage cameos in other games and such using the 'official' characters.

So yeah, just covering the bases for those that worry about such things, not passing judgement or anything on anyone.

My main point was to note out that you can export .objs directly from Daz Studio, no need to mess with Hexagon, etc.. and then re-import them using Morph Loader.

Also, I've had fairly bad luck trying to adjust characters in Hexagon, re-importing them afterwords had issues. And if you modify the number of vertices in any way, or move them a lot or something, you may lose texture data and such, or Morph Loader will simply spit out errors. Of course, people deal with these sort of issues all the time when using Blender or ZBrush to create custom morphs, but my point is that you can avoid other programs altogether when exporting and then reimporting .objs using Daz Studio only.

Also, with Mesh Grabber now being a thing, we now have the ability to adjust meshes more directly in Daz Studio, but like anything else this can take practice. Baby steps and all that!

I do use Hexagon often enough to adjust houses and such, though. And when trying to modify or create outfits. Blender might be easier though, but Blender's interface and methodologies do not agree with me...

Anyways, another way to help others cover their bases is to share the 'unmerged' version of a customized character .duf, as well as the merged morph. That way they can figure out which morphs may have been used, and purchase/aqcquire them as needed. If you do both, i.e. share the 'unmerged' .duf and also the 'single' morph version, this might be helpful in this regard. Also, the 'unmerged' version' might be easier for people that are just going to modify your work anyways, i.e. use the .duf file as a starting point as it were as I often refer to characters I share as I don't have the best eye for minor details and such.

Also, when using combined morphs, I've noticed that weirdness tends to creep in, depending on how heavily modified a character is versus the 'baseline' Genesis character. Dee's hair kink comes immediately to mind, and I've also had issues with clothes fitting high or low if the height differences and such are significant. In these cases, having the 'unmerged' morphs might work better.

But yeah, again just covering bases here guys, and pointing out the pros and cons and such.

Some people just post up their morph formulas as well, but often a lot of stuff gets left out I've noticed. This is why I ended up having to figure some characters out mostly from scratch anyways, as the advice given was essentially not very helpful.

BTW, I like to refer to this place as a buccaneer forum as it's the 'high seas' of the internet and there be rogues about! Also, using the other term makes it a bit more 'obvious' in google searches and such.

 

[bluehill84]

Thank you both for your detailed answers and info. Very helpful tips in improving my workflow. Thanks again.

 

[OhWee]

I really do get a little long winded in my posts sometimes! Anwyays, while I prefer G3 vs G8, I do think it's awesome that y'all are taking the time to make G8 versions of the characters, and do not want to discourage that in any way!

Keep up the good work guys!

 

[m4dsk1llz]

OhWee I do agree with most of what you wrote, so no need to beat a dead horse.

I do have a couple of comments about irregularities in heavily modified characters. So far in my research and by trial and error I find that most of these are introduced when shortcuts are taken or not all appropriate steps are taken to ensure that those irregularities do not pop up.

Let me outline my process using Luxee's .duf files as a starting point. First off, you need all the morphs he used, even if some are only slid to less than 1%. Since his start as G3 and I want a G8/8.1 I need to do a preliminary morph. Remove all grafts; remove eyebrow morphs, if any; resolution to Base, subdivision to zero; and all HD Detail sliders to zero. If you don't do that you can have issues with eyes and/or mouth. Also DAZ does not really like high polygon OBJ imports. Here is where you and I might diverge, you can EXPORT it to your drive, I just Send to Hexagon, then send it right back to DAZ, doing so pops up the Create a Morph dialog. Once I have the morph the first thing to do is save it. Then dump the character and load a base G3. Apply the new saved morph at 100%, you will have a perfect representation of the Luxee .duf file with a single slider. Then you need to use the joint editor to EDIT and align thew bones with the model, a lot of people skip this because it usually works perfectly fine without these steps if there is no real sizing differences. This next step is crucial and almost always skipped, you have to do an ERC Freeze and then save the morph again.

Here is how I now convert that single slider G3 morph to G8. First exit and restart DAZ, I do this routinely as DAZ has a lot of memory leaks and will crash or provide weird unexplainable results during the conversion process. Load a base G3 character and find your morph and favorite it. I do this because it is a requirement of XTransfer ( I tried Riversoft's converter and I don't like it for varying reasons). Do not apply the morph. Once XTransfer is done you will have an empty viewport and a new G8 morph, load a base G8 and apply the converted morph at 100%, At this point it should be working fine, but as a precaution you can ERC Bake (dumb name it should be ERC Melt) and realign the bones, re freeze and resave the morph.

Usually at that point I go to the morph directory and manually edit a few things and add a description, move it to the morph directory in my DAZ Fan Art Library, and it is done.

I still need the G3 characters for the skin textures and sometimes the G3 hair asset. But in the end I have a nearly 100% copy of the original G3 in G8. I say nearly because there are some very slight differences that creep into all this exporting/importing/converting.

With this workflow, I have no issues with fitting clothing or setting up poses, unless it is a crappy asset to begin with.

So basically all I do with Hexagon is save a few mouse clicks as it only involves two, Send to Hexagon and then Send to DAZ from the other end. No actual modding in Hexagon.

Oh one last thing. I usually then load the original .duf and place it in the exact spot as the G8, move the shoulders to ~ 45°/-45°, and the legs to ~ 6°/-6° to match the G8 'A' pose and then see if there is any bleedthrough. That is my way of visually confirming the conversion did what I wanted it to do.

 

[m4dsk1llz]

One last thing, I said I didn't want to beat this into the ground, but I have to add, that going from G3 to G8 has a list of challenges not present if you were only considering combining sliders into a single morph for the same Genesis class. For example, Luxee used a lot of morphs that simply are not available in G8. So there really is no way to reproduce his exact recipe when converting to a different Genesis series.

 

[AlexStone]

OhWee, we think the same way.
I strongly oppose piracy when it makes a fortune, often by corporations stealing something from individuals through a system of patents, licences and other legal bullying.

On the other hand, I am just as much against licensing "any sneeze" towards your assets. If a person uses a developer's morphs/textures/tools, they are effectively doing them free advertising. That's why big corporations get into schools, even providing their products there without payment. Because tomorrow these kids will grow up and use their products in their adult lives.

For example, what is Big Brother's success, even though the game has long been abandoned? Yes, simply that it has published all the assets on it at all. And now the game's fanbase is huge.

 

[m4dsk1llz]

I have a question about the cast of characters in this game. I did not play it because it simply is not my cup of tea. But his VN seems to have a lot of characters in it, would someone be so kind as the place them in order of importance so I can focus on the ones people really want to see converted to G8?