Generartion 4 Textures on Genesis 2 & 3 - Opinions wanted
Charlie Judge
Posts: 13,251
in The Commons
Which you would you consider to be the best method to use Generation 4 textures on Genesis 2 and 3? Blacksmith's Texture Converter or Cayman Studios UV products?
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Comments
I use the Cayman Studios UV products and haven't had any problems with them
I have both but bought the Blacksmith Texture Converters so I could just save a preset once converted and be done with it. Also, with the Cayman Studios product you have to remember to convert all surfaces to iRay, including the Geografted surfaces, so with my memory that is just another forget point only to notice it 3 hours later into a CPU render.
However, they look the same after applying them correctly to me. And the Blacksmith product does warn of a few, not all, converted textures having problems that require manual editing in Gimp or Photoshop. I believe it said in the lip area was where the problems for some textures were. If I ever buy the V4/M4 Modeling Bundles I guess I will find out.
Cayman's, and I own both. Some people have no problem with Blacksmith, but when they brought out the first add on packs they wouldn't load properly on my system and their customer service people weren't helpful at all.
Caymen's products are easier in my opinion. You can convert the textures with Blacksmith, but if the character being converted has a lot of makeup and/or other skin options, you have to convert each one that you think you will need. With Caymen's you can flip through all the skin options on the figure itself until you are happy with what you see.
Once you have converted a skin using Caymen's products, and do all the IRay etc manipulation you want, all you need to do is save as a material preset, ie just one small duf file. With Blacksmith you need to convert multiple large image files, and still need to create a material preset with the relevant IRay shaders aswell.
I have both, and I find myself using Cayman's product exclusively lately. Texture Converter has the advantage of not having to deal with the extra geograft pieces, but I had errors such as only a partial transfer of textures on the nails.
One disadvantage to Cayman's when using with NGS Anagenessis 2 is a lot of fiddly work turning off limits in multiple places on every surface of the geografts. Unless I'm doing it wrong and there's an easier way (please tell me there's an easier way!).
Cayman's drove me nuts because if you are messing with the skin settings (which I like to do,) you have to make sure all of those extra zones that Cayman's creates match. Every single time. Once you have a texture transferred in Blacksmith, its a done deal, and you can further alter the settings with ease like any other skin, because it is a whole new skin. But Blacksmith can have its own issues, too.
For Genesis 2, you don't really need to transfer the textures if you have the correct products, they can simply wear V/M4 skins. Its only for Genesis 3 that you have to do all this extra work. (Thanks Daz.)
Yeah, I haven't picked up either the Texture Converer or Cayman's geographs for getting V4 textures onto G3. I'm leaning slightly more towards the texture converter, but under the right circumstances, I could go for either one.
For Genesis 2, I use:
http://www.daz3d.com/victoria-4-for-genesis-2-female
and
http://www.daz3d.com/michael-4-for-genesis-2-male
I'll frequently load Genesis, apply the V4/M4 textures and set up the skin there as I want, then save as .duf to apply to the appropriate G2 figure.