Transfering morphs between DAZ generations in Zbrush or Blender?

faramata

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Mar 13, 2022
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I would like to transfer some older figures to Genesis 8 and I don't know how. The tutorials I've found suggest modifying the Genesis 8 figure in Zbrush to create a morph but that would not work since the older figures have a different poligon layout. I tried a tool found on DAZ which seemed to transfer Belle 6 somewhat correctly to Genesis 8, but somehow the end result just didn't look the same (perhaps because it only transferred the geometry and not the textures). The only thing I've seen which tells me that it's clearly possible is Deepsea Adam HD for Genesis through Genesis 8 found on DAZ 3D which according to its description works on every Genesis generation all the way to 8 and the face looks absolutely the same on all of them).
Maybe something like shrinkwrapping the Victoria 4 model on a Genesis base object and doing the same with the textures? The problem is I don't know what to look for because I am sure there are tutorials out there about this. Obviously I'm first and foremost concerned with the faces, but I suppose the process could be applied to bodyshapes as well.
I'm not sure I can post links yet
 

osanaiko

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Jul 4, 2017
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There are products in the marketplace (I think by Riversoft?) that do this auto-magically. I believe that internally they use a combo of morph transfers and alternate UV sets. And the advice on how to take an older generator figure up, e.g. G1 to G8, is to do it in steps G->G2, G2->G3, G3->G8.

Of course, the oldest products would not have the same visual quality as latest releases, nor would they have iray quality materials. So you might not end up with great results. But if you have specific figures you *want* as G8, then give it a go.
 

faramata

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Mar 13, 2022
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Why doesn't anybody carefully read nowadays? I specifically mentioned I already used those. Riversoft Gen 2 to Gen 8 seemed to work for the females but the male version had a bug where it would distort the resulting head and elongate the neck (although that may have been a conflict with some other morph from another product, DAZ quality control doesn't seem that great). GenX had very unclear installation instructions and there were a bunch of addons to install and there are several installers floating around. As for texture conversion there was Blacksmith 3d on Renderosity which is no longer for sale. Hence why I would like to know how to do something like converting the textures and wrapping the morphs in a sculpting tool like Blender or Zbrush and cutting out such blackbox proxy products, which may or may not always work.
 

Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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Out of the box, No.
As far as I know, Blender has no pre made tools to allow for such functionality (uv transfering between mesh of different topology). However, you can work around this using a technique call UV projection painting (a good similar to what you'd need to do). In order to do this however, you would need to get the G8M (or what ever figure you want to upgrade) to a shape that closely matches the source character. You would have to make a second UV map, which you will constantly be remapping based an a camera (uv/project from view, do this while in camera view). you will then make a render (set render mode to EEVEE, go to color managment, set view transform to STANDARD, and look to NONE)
1676090122213.png
what this will allow you to do is set the source character material to a Emission type, and plug in the texture, the character will then 1 to 1 use the texture as the surface material without any fancy rendering, material effects, light effects, or color correction), and then render the scene using the camera the UV projection was used with. Following the video linked, you can set the texture mode to take your rendered image (say the front view, which has been uv maped by the camera projection), and paint or copy the pixels from the render to a new UV image. You do have to paint this by hand because the technique is limited by distotions from the camera projection, so as you will see in the video, the process will need to be repeated at several angles to create a clean final texture. In the end the result will be: the Blacksmith's texture will be copied but now match the G8M topology. This means you are not modifying any G8 figure data, and you can just use the new texture on G8 figures without any issues... the problem is that this is tedious (but still able to generate a good result), and you need to repeat the process for every texture you want to convert (roughness maps, make up layers). Idealy if its a mesh I'm going to be using a lot, such as a custom made low topology game model, I'd just map its uv by hand to mimic G8... but I'm still convinced Blenders UV tools is its weakest feature and I hate it.

The only good reason I have for this technique is when I want to either texture bake a character's clothes to their low topology character model, and the automatic tools aren't good enough, or if I'm making a quick and dirty model such as for table top simulator where there is little to no shading in engine and can get away with decimating by voxel retopology. there's no way to get a clean UV with decimated models, but projection painting can get around this as a fix.

Now I know with alpha/beta 3.x the gemometry nodes are crazy powerful. For the life of me I couldn't find my UV to Shapekey tool from years ago, but now making something using geometry node is stupid simple... but I avoid using 3.x cuz I need stability and file security. perhaps with gemometry nodes a tool can be made that does what you need, but I don't use geometry nodes enough to speculate.

if you can get the morphs to match in daz, you are golden. because trying to manually make morphs is a pain. shrink wrapping is not as powerful as people think it is, its a very dumb algorithm. In fact that's what I think is best about daz is that it has some of these automated tools that would be impossible to do outside of programing a fancy algorithim. If however the morph isn't prefect, then yeah, I'll move things over to blender to clean up, but working on morphs that way is a whole other project.
 
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Synx

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Jul 30, 2018
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However, you can work around this using a technique call UV projection painting (a good similar to what you'd need to do). In order to do this however, you would need to get the G8M (or what ever figure you want to upgrade) to a shape that closely matches the source character.
Wouldn't it be easier to just add a second UV to a base G8M character, UV unwrap it based on the UVS from the old DAZ characters with a combination of carefully places seams and by hand, and then bake the textures from this second UV to the base G8M UV layout? Getting the right UV layout will take a while and is a tedious job, but you only got to do it once for all the UVs of every male character of that line (Like G2/G3/etc).
 

faramata

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Mar 13, 2022
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Reading all this I am not even sure which is the hardest part, migrating the textures or the morphs :|
 

Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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a combination of carefully places seams and by hand, and then bake the textures from this second UV to the base G8M UV
And this is where the technique is weakest. Yes, you are right, having a proper UV so you can transfer would be best, and making us of the default grid texture can help align the UV, and again you are right in that this technique is much more repeatable, once you get the UV to line up how you want (it may be a matter of workflow preference). the difference is while uv projection painting can be slower, and is slower, you don't need to be skilled, and you don't need to know how to use the program or know what you are doing. once you are skilled and understand a bit more, then yes the technique you suggest can be must faster, but since this is a particular use case, rather than something more general (such as projection painting) they aren't going to find tutorials on this, and I don't feel like going back in forth in private messages trying to tutor them how to do what they want, and I don't want to do the work myself. the next more advance step is, if you are making your own character topology, then again something similar to what you suggest is used.
 

Synx

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Jul 30, 2018
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And this is where the technique is weakest. Yes, you are right, having a proper UV so you can transfer would be best, and making us of the default grid texture can help align the UV, and again you are right in that this technique is much more repeatable, once you get the UV to line up how you want (it may be a matter of workflow preference). the difference is while uv projection painting can be slower, and is slower, you don't need to be skilled, and you don't need to know how to use the program or know what you are doing. once you are skilled and understand a bit more, then yes the technique you suggest can be must faster, but since this is a particular use case, rather than something more general (such as projection painting) they aren't going to find tutorials on this, and I don't feel like going back in forth in private messages trying to tutor them how to do what they want, and I don't want to do the work myself. the next more advance step is, if you are making your own character topology, then again something similar to what you suggest is used.
Is it thought? Your technique might looks simpler from the outside, but there are so much areas that will be a pain in the ass to do the UV projection on, like the fingers/ears. It will take ages to get those right, and will prob still not be great.

As far as I know the UVs from G2 and G1 aren't that massively different than the G3 and latter ones. You don't have to start from scratch, you can move around the G8 UV's to fit the old textures.

Reading all this I am not even sure which is the hardest part, migrating the textures or the morphs :|
It's the morphs 100%. You can't really migrate that since the base meshes are different. You could maybe try shrink wrapping it, but I highly doubt that will work. Shrink wrapping is mainly useful for wrapping a simple mesh around another mesh (that can be more complex), and not for wrapping 1 complex mesh around another.

Your best bet is just to try sculpt the base G8M mesh into the mesh you want.
 

Saki_Sliz

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May 3, 2018
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As far as I know the UVs from G2 and G1 aren't that massively different than the G3 and latter ones. You don't have to start from scratch, you can move around the G8 UV's to fit the old textures.
I can't say I've worked with the older ones. If the OP can figure out, good on them, it will save them a lot of hassle.
 

anne O'nymous

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I tried a tool found on DAZ which seemed to transfer Belle 6 somewhat correctly to Genesis 8, but somehow the end result just didn't look the same (perhaps because it only transferred the geometry and not the textures).
The reason is way more simple than this:

The difference between Genesis 2 (on what Belle 6 is based) and Genesis 8 do not limits to the number of polygons. The body shape is also slightly different, and like morphs are nothing more that variation between the actual position of the vertexes and their newest position, those differences are reported to the morph ; this even if you achieve to have a copy of the original morph that take into account the increased number of polygons.

Said otherwise, there's only one way to have a girl that looks exactly like Belle 6, but is based on Genesis 8, and it's to sculpt it yourself.
 

faramata

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Mar 13, 2022
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Well thank God for YT related videos.
Transfer Textures from one UV Set to another with Map Transfer in Daz Studio
Hopefully this does what I need. Now all I need is to transfer morphs between different figures.
 
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