UV set help needed

garadir

Can someone please educate me - in layman's terms - because this is giving me a migraine.

I'm trying to revive some legacy content - namely Genesis with Paul Lessards 4 arms attachment ... thing is I've never been able to use 4 arms because of the UVs and hit the same brickwall everytime ... whenever I apply a Genesis, v4, v5, m4 or m5 texture I see the seam.  I'm trying to apply a home-made v4 texture set I created years ago but have the same on purchased textures too. 

I cannot get any UV import tools/scripts to work as it's not the base figure.  If they do work I have the same result - including G2m/f and G3m/f UV's.  Attempts to load UV sets in the Surfaces tab fail because even though I've gone to a couple of locations (including my legacy Poser content folder from when I used that years ago) it tells me the "The UV map selected was invalid." --- now I assume that's because I'm loading a different figure .OBJ to Genesis mesh ... but that's my next issue ...
The Load UV import tool only points to .OBJ files, Genesis is a .dsf ...
The texture map transfer in surfaces doesn't create/load/transfer a UV map so that didn't change a thing even though it completed it's operation successfully...
I could export the geometry file like when I used to make my own v4/m4 morphs and try re-importing but as it's not reading official Daz geometries (accepting as above this may be because of the wrong figure and .OBJ > .dsf) is it worth the effort of trying? ...

I've only used the shader builder once, and to be honest ... I'm not sure how to use it properly, I had a glance at it for this but couldn't see an obvious UV source option and it seems massively complicated so that's a no go for me as I'm only a hobbyist and not a professional content creator

I have tried looking at the Daz wiki page and that says to load the geometry but then points to the geometry file as a jpeg which makes no sense to me ... http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/multiuvs/muv_adding

so I'm stuck .. again ... and having investigated more than I have previously I've given myself a headache lol.  So please can someone tell me the location of a simple, plain english step-by-step guide on how I actually can transfer UVs?

 

garadir

Update: I've just tried creating and exporting the geometry file then re-importing .... "The UV map selected was invalid."

May be it needs a custom set of options ..

garadir

So ... last update because now I'm out of ideas ... I went ahead and put in the effort, strained the old brain cells to remember the correct steps and settings needed for exporting an .OBJ and guess what ... on attempt 4 I successfully made a Genesis UV export that actually imported back on to Genesis.

So I went ahead and applied it to 4 arms ... "The UV map selected was invalid."

Now I'm blank, clueless, and looking for a wall to bang my head against.  Please help.....

Richard Haseltine

What exactly are you trying to do? A UV mapping isn't transferable to a different mesh, if that is what you want to do - it's essentially a list of texture coordinates, oner per vertex, in the same order as the list of polygons amking up the model so any deviation is fatal.

garadir

I'm trying to apply a different texture set to the 4 arms attachment, in the same way that with the add-ons i've bought over the years G8 can use v4, genesis, g2, g3 etc textures.

I assumed that as the attachment is designed and rigged for genesis which i seem to remember generation 4 compatibility was native, that this should work.

Leana

The geograft has its own UVs, it can only use textures made for it, not textures which would work on Genesis. That was one of the main limitations of that product.

garadir

well ... that makes me feel better at the same times as it sucks lol.

at least I know now it's not me being as un-skilled as I thought was.  It's a shame though, I've bought other mult-armed add-ons as recently as last month for g8 in the hope I could actually create my idea but sadly they look like they've ripped through the skin and don't follow the rigging right.  The 4 arms attachment is the only one i've seen that actually looks and works like it is a part of the body, hence my eagerness to use it.

Guess I'll have to go the harder route and try recreate the texture set to include a template for the 4 arms, sure I still have the photoshop files somewhere ....

Richard Haseltine

If you are willing to take the task one you might be able to bake the desired maps to the four arm model, though you'd still have to fix the seams. Many modellers will bake maps from one mesh to another - essentially you'd need to export both figures as OBJs (using the correct UVs for Genesis), then reshape the four arms to line up with the real arms, apply the maps you want to use to the full figure, and bake them to new maps on the arms - you haven't changed the UVs so those baked maps should be right for the arms in DS, even though you reshaped them in the modeller. Then you'd need to use 3D apint tools, or 2D tools and a lot of patience, to fix up the seams so the maps blended smoothly.

You could use the same baking method to transfer maps from one figure to another in the absence of a proper remap or other tools in DS.

garadir

I have a week's holiday from work so I might give that a try to learn for future projects.  Remaking the texture set if I can find the .PSD's sounds easier though as I know what I'm doing there.

garadir

Thanks for the help anyways