One Skin Texture That’ll Fit Every Generation of Genesis & Michael 4 ?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,099
Is there a skin texure or resource I could use on all the generations of DAZ figures? Preferably Iray.
Post edited by Fauvist on
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No. Because all the figures have different UVs.
Nobody, in all these years, has come up with some solution or hack?
It's a square peg into a round hole sitation. And before some smart alec goes "Ah! They did that in Apollo 13!"... the technical approximation of that here would be Cayman Studios' UV geografts. It took a contraption that did the job of making it "fit", and that's what the geografts are here.
A vendor providing the same skin to all the different generation's UVs is *possible* (as is a technically competent end user doing it - permanent transfer between UV layouts be done through Blender or the like), but it's not generally worth their time. The number of users more than a generation behind is relatively small, and the potential sales increase negligible.
What I am aware of is Deepsea's Adam and Eve that do supposedly have G1 through G8 skins (although I can't confirm that, as I don't own them - mostly because, like I say, most people don't need to). As far as M4 skins... I've a feeling that it's possible that the UV layout was kept between M4 and Genesis, but I honestly don't remember for certain.
https://www.daz3d.com/deepsea-adam-hd-for-genesis-through-genesis-8
https://www.daz3d.com/deepsea-eve-hd-for-genesis-through-genesis-8
Thanks for pointing out the deepsea products - I don't understand how they work, but I'll try and find our.
How they work is pretty simple. Each UV is a map on a sheet as it were. It is possible to remap any figure (go google globe projections to get an idea of the possibilities). If you remap figures to a comfortable number of UV maps, you can thus place your own textures to fit your map. Deepsea's solutions only work with Deepsea's textures and UVs so it isn't a generalized solution to get a Genesis texture on a Genesis 8 figure since it specifically has to be the Deepsea texture and UV.
For a common base colour one could use a solid square filled with a skin tone; then add in individual detail for each character.
And create new UV maps for each character so they could use that solid square since eyes, nose, mouth, etc don't align using their default UV maps.
well DAZ could add triplanar
and use procedural shaders
i think I would be afraid that a triplanar/ procedural solution would only please people looking for less realistic renders. Image trying to create a tattoo or tan lines for a procedural texture! People would also be upset since it wouldn't solve any incompatibility with previously purchased textures; no one is likely to make new texture sets for deprecated figures and would definitely charge for new versions of old textures.
i suspect the intersection of an almost impossible topographic problem, the various levels of realism that came with different generations of characters, the relative rarity of people who have different generations, how rigid users are in their workflows and the quality of output, all make this an insurmountable problem.
How would it work if you Map Transferred, say, a G8M texture onto the Adam UVs?
There has been a product available in the past to transfer maps from V4/M4 to G1/G3 with Blacksmith3D's Texture Transformer. This worked quite well.
As far as I understood G8 is almost using the same UVs than G3.
The best way today would probably be via Blender. Thus you could probably include G9 as well.
I'm not sure if it is possible; map transfer works well enough between the official figures but I'm not sure how it would work on Adam or a cube for that matter. I suspect that it isn't infinite in its flexibility; you might have better luck in Blender. The next problem is that the resolution of textures isn't equal across generations. All of this going to be a lot of work so there won't be any simple solution.
I never suggested replacing UV mapping with triplaner
in Carrara and Octane I happily use both as needed
some stuff very difficult to UV map like splines and metaballs so procedural projection very useful
would be nice if we could do it in addition to using UV mapped textures
..and as for tattoos etc, iray has decals
Understood, I can see how that might be useful for a limited group of users though I am not sure a lot of Carrara ever used it. Decals can be wonderful but they are not always popular especially when you have two body parts get close and they have a significant learning curve. Deepsea's Adam and Eve are probably as close as we will probably get to what Fauvist is looking for.
The attached image shows something I've been doing since DS4.6, basically using autofit to turn Genesis into a "SkinSuit".
What you see in the image is G8.1F with one of my characters dialed in, deleted the 8.1 geografts, then autofitted Genesis to it, checked how well it fits, then hid 8.1, then applied the V4 purple undies preset to Genesis.
Poses and shapes are controlled through G8.1F, while materials are applied to Genesis.
This sounds exciting, but I don't understand it. Do you mean any materials you use have to be Genesis? How do you autofit a whole figure to another figure?
A simple skin autofit on a later figure can look okay until the character opens their mouth, and then it looks like a horror film.
Map transfer only re-maps skins for UVs that are on the same figure. For example on G3F you can map transfer from G3F base to V7. You can not however use it to go from V4 to G3F, as no figure has both of those UVs.
@Fauvist
If i got it right, you can use any genesis 1/2/3/8/8.1/9 skin texture on every genesis generation and even between male and female using tools like
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-uvs-for-genesis
or the new
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-9-uvs-for-genesis-8-and-81-female
and tools like this to use the texture on another gender:
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-uv-swap-male-and-female-base
That is quite easy when you get used to it.
But there it ends, you can't go down to Michael 4 or Victoria 4 without doing all the work with photoshop or gimp yourself...
ETA: Of course, you can use M4/V4 skintextures on higher genesis generations, just like g9 on v4 / m4 is not possible with uv tools alone.
While I am deeply appreciative of Cayman's work, it should be noted that it does have some drawbacks; HD morphs won't work on the geografted portions, most geoshells for the base figure will no longer work properly, other geografts won't have the new UVs they need to work...
... so there are definitely reasons to want to bake over the textures permanently.
Well, on the above note, I have managed to abuse Cayman's UV geografts to resolve said issue.
With some modification, I was able to come up with a mesh that had full support for both G8 and G9 UVs, and from there permanently bake textures over to the G9 UVs.
(Admittedly, she was originally a G2 character who I'd already transferred to G8, but this was still a permanent G8 to G9 transfer).
@Matt_Castle: So that would be the solution for Fauvist - creating e.g. a mesh with support for g3 and g1 uvs (=v4) using cayman geografts and bake the result, save and load on v4?
Still, how did you do that- with hexagon or mesh grabber? i just can't imagine how you could create such a mesh. Maybe you should do a tutorial with digital art live...
something like map transfer but using other software works
the free one being Blender
I use Ultimate Unwrap 3D repaint and clone shapes mostly
if keen I use Zbrush and Zprojection but it's a lot of work
Blacksmith 3D another option
You don't really need to make the figure follow the old UVs, the other option is to make one figure's mesh the same shape as the other (an AutoFit clone would be a starting point) then, in various external applications, you can bake from maps on the original figure to maps on the reshpaed new figure mesh - the more exactly, and more smoothly, the two shapes match the better. Sadly this is all Daz IP material so it isn't permissible for soemone to do the work and share it - unless they can obtain permission from Daz (possibly making it a store product).
Yes, you can use G3 skins on G8. I do it all the time, I don't have a lot of G8 content. And Generation 4 skins work on Genesis 1. I don't know if this will help for the OP, but this video has some good tips on using the map transfer utility:
Many thanks Wendy, Richard and riftwitch!
Learning Blender seems to be inescapable for baking or converting texture maps...
The main part was Blender, because I needed to give the geograft access to the G9 UVs. As far as I can tell, the geograft is made from the G9 geometry, but it's made from a beta version of the G9 geometry, so the base UVs it has don't match the released G9 on the arms and armpits. Blender has data transfer modifiers where it can try to copy UVs between models - and while that's usually very messy if the meshes are unalike, with two similar meshes it's pretty reliable.
Once I had the correct UVs reimported into DS and did some surface reassignment (you need to be able to group the surface assignments both ways, merging that into one mesh that had both UV sets was a fairly simple OBJ export of that and its various UVs and then reimporting it back as one mesh.
(Now, yes, I could have just used Blender to do the texture baking, but Map Transfer is massively more convenient, as I can just load the material sets in DS without needing to do any transfer or much set-up, and it saves a lot of time)
@Matt_Castle: Thanks a lot, Blender really seems to be mandatory.
That really sounds very promising for many daz issues.
Thanks! This is something that can help me to get V7/M7 skins to G8, as the UV layout is a bit different. At the moment I focus on the G8 generation and as I have a lot of V4/M4 and G3 content, I try to get these textures to G8 format in order to mix them in photoshop.
For V4/M4 to G3/G8 I had success with Blacksmith in the past.