G9 to G8 Hair
morrisonmp
Posts: 152
in The Commons
How well does G9 hair fit to G8/G8.1 characters? I've liked some of the new G9 only hair that's come out but if it's going to be a superb pain to fit it to G8/8.1 it's not worth it.
Anyone have any experiences trying this? How did it go?
Comments
Just position it and the parent it to the head, or use G9
MMX Genesis 9 Clones for All | Daz 3D
This is what you need.
+1
Ditto. I use it routinely.
But if you autofit hair, it can mess it up and you can lose any bones used for posing, that is why I always just parent them when using G8 hair on G9.
Also true. It happens with some hairs. In my case usually the other way around (G8 to G9). I'll try to parent those I know have this issue, for both generations. Thanks for the tip!
Yeah. If you autofit hair item with bones it'll remove all bones and rigging. It's better to position the hair, then parent it to the head the way many older hairstyles were working. Then you can add smoothing modifier so the skull cap fits the head better.
G3, G8+ and G9 are made to the same scale and their skulls are of similar size even if G3-G8+ are supermodel tall.
Spent hours trying to get one product working. Set up a clothing clone etc which is working so far for the couple of clothing bits I tried.
Just proping it in place like suggested above wasn't an option for the sku I tried iirc [might be because I wanted it to behave better than an old v4 prop?] Gave up for now. Haven't tried others. Interested in how others are getting on before I retry.
Yeah my post in "G9 train" thread about this was totally ignored re: MMX. So nice to see someone pointing out a possible technical caveat.
Seems tradeoff is still that hair-cap may not fit right with just-parent, and I am trying to be economizing with smoothing modifiers for scenes with more nodes, as 3D is still stuck with single-core processing. Have seen smoothing cause delays on redraws.
Unless someone can say MMX translates everything near close to perfect for hairs, so you don't lose some key things, like hair bones.
I remember seeing mention quite a while ago about a free utility by someone (iirc, it was Richard Haseltine) that was a global toggle (on/off) for smoothing. Perhaps you might be able to search it up, or Richard will let us know if he is responsible.
This one https://www.dropbox.com/s/bwgw8ckbk46ysif/ToggleSmoothing.zip?dl=0 ?
Thks Xyer0 for idea.
And thks Richard for script link (always like more scripts , even if just for more resources for building own)
TBH am shying away from doing as much off/on as i can. So much already to adjust, so workflow is set to avoid doing some things. So if i smooth this and that, then it stays on.
If was making portraits, then think that off-on would be a good option.
Another problem with autofit is that long hairs can conform too much to the body shape in unexpected ways. for example a ponytail that should be hanging straight might bend and contort in some spots that it shouldn't be. It is especially noticeable when using hair morphs or bones, or on a body shape that is more extreme. Funny enough this can happen even on the generation the hair is intended for! If you have used a hair on a character and wondered why it behaves oddly, autofit without proper weight mapping is probably a reason.
So parenting hairs is often the best way to go. You keep all the bones if it had any, and you don't get unexpected contortions. You can use any existing morphs the hair has to help position it better, along with smoothing. Smoothing can have negatives, too. Depending on how the hair is made, smoothing might cause hairs to break in places, like where the part is located. It all just depends on how the hair is made you want to use. Some hairs are going to work great, and some might be more challenging.
I have a rather crude, but effective hack for getting hair to fit the skullcap with smoothing, but avoid having to smooth the rest of the hair (because some hairstyles actually deform with smoothing as they weren't modeled and weighted for this).
Load the hair model once, then delete all the geometry except for the cap, then autofit this to the character. Now load the same hair again, delete only skullcap surface and parent this to the character head.
It's a bit of work with geometry editor, but usually worth the time and sparsely you run into a hair model that can't be forced to work this way.
@PixelSploiting That sounds like a good workaround. Having mish-mashed hair, it sounds familar. Though didn't consider that for adapting G9 hairs for G8.
Are there any G9 hair issues for that? Also can't say have looked to see which hairs have caps and how they might differ. Can say being able via PA moprhs to adjust the hair forward & up & wider etc is a big plus. Buy assets accordingly. Exception being Linday dforce cloth hair, which doesn't have this option sadly, but like the hair too much not to buy.
Would this adj hair position still work with auto-fitted cap vs parented hair? Normally i'd just try myself, but maybe some can say?
There are some great hair models for G3 female that I've parented to G8F with no issues. I bought some hair for G9 and as I always do parent it to the head. However, I seem to have poke through in the back of the head. If I rescale then the hair is too big, if I move the hair XYZ it still doesn't fix the poke through. I guess I'll have to keep working on it to find the right spot.