It's 2018, converting V4 poses and peoples to G3,G8 and such...
in The Commons
Figure it's time for another check-in since Daz is blowing out V4 older items.....
Most of the searches on this topic lead to dead-end threads and a links to Deviant Art scripts and some rather lengthy hoopla-hoops to jump through.
Lots of products out since then, maybe....possibly.
So let's recap for 2018.
1) What's the easiest method (hopefully Daz-store sourced) to convery a V4.2 character into a Genesis 3 character. So you basically want the head and skin on a genesis generic body.
2) Also, how do we convert V4 era poses into g3 poses. Last info was a double step of going to G2 first and then converting again....

Comments
For textures :
For morphs :
GenX2 with both G2 and G3 add-ons will enable you to convert morphs from V4 to G3F. Due to the PA passing away there's no G8 add-on.
Right now, that's an expensive endeavor. We'll see what happens during March madness. Sheesh
You can convert morphs and even textures for free manually, but you asked for the easiest method.
You right. Thanks. Those are bookmarked.
For poses I use V4 to genesis 2 pose convert to bring it up to Gen 2.
Then I use genesis 2 to genesis 3 female pose converter... And yes finally I use Genesis 3 to Genesis 8 pose converter.
I avoid the pose converters which require I unlock arms at each step. Not into that.
Please post a link(s)
https://www.daz3d.com/v4-pose-converter-for-genesis-and-genesis-2-female-s v4 to genesis 2 converter
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-2-to-genesis-3-pose-converter Genesis 2 to 3
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-to-genesis-8-pose-converter 3 to 8.
How do you keep track of all the poses, though? The last one places the converted poses into Smart Content, so that's easy to work with. But what about the others? How do you even know what V4 poses you have that you might use with G2, or G3, or G8?
I use the Zev0/Draagonstorm script products, which require the forearm unlocker Serene Night mentioned. They allow you to choose an output folder for the converted poses (e.g. People/Genesis 3 Female/Poses/M4V4 Poses Converted). I don't use AllegedlySmartContent, so I can't help with that.
ETA: There are several products for converting M4/V4/K4 skins to Iray. I favor NGS Anagenesis 2: select the character, use the Genesis 1 preset, and away you go. The single hardest thing I've found about converting skins of that vintage is saving out .duf presets for them, because they will not apply to G3 otherwise (most of them are in poser format, or ds). The geografts involved in Cayman's UV conversion product also don't seem to play nice with DForce, btw. The G3 to G8 morph conversion tutorials should also work for M4/V4/etc to G3/G8. If you have only a few characters you want to convert, it's probably comparable in difficulty/time investment to GenX, and it's free.
Personally, I've found only a handful of skins that old to be worth the trouble of dragging into the Iray era, mostly Faber, Morris or Surreality creations, although some of Liquid Rust's work also holds up.
@Ati
Zev0's pose converters place the converted poses where ever you designate as the destination. I typically make a "Converted Poses" folder in the same location as a given character's poses (e.g. G3F Poses).
If you batch convert, the converter script will preserve paths inside the destination.
As far as "How do you even know what V4 poses you have that you might use with G2, or G3, or G8?", how would we answer that for you? Three obvious choices (to me): 1. Don't convert any poses, 2. Batch convert all poses from given set(s), 3. Convert poses individually when you decide you want to use an old pose on a newer generation.
I ALWAYS use the store's search function find out what I own. Too many products have names that do not correlate with what they are (for).
It's terrible - and older products are always in Lost and Found.
The way I know what poses I have is I go to smart content, and choose all the, let's say sitting poses.
Suppose I have a sitting pose from the V4 era, converted to G2. Because I converted all V4 poses.
How would I know that pose exists, when searching for available G2 sitting poses? How do I get that converted V4 pose to show up among the G2 sitting poses in smart content? I mean, other than individually going through every single pose that I convert--which would be a huge problem with thousands of poses.
After you convert a given group, you can go in and assign metadata, including categories and figure compatibility. It's tedious, yes, but you'd need to do the same thing with freebie poses or poses from other stores.
You can designate a folder to save you poses in. i don’t use gen4 any longer but there are dozens of great sets you can convert It’s nice also to have the poses for each generation. I back it up so I never have to do it again. It would be awesome if there was utility though to do them all.
Unfortunately gen 4 poses are getting a bit long in the tooth. Even with conversion they lack good articulation in the hands and still require adjustment
You ignore SmartContent, and go to your mapped directories, using the "Content" pane. G2F poses are normally under People/Genesis 2 Female/Poses, for instance. You search for sit, and see what comes up (basically a list of files with sit in the name), or you glance at the names of the subfolders you scroll through them, and rule out ones that are unlikely to have sitting poses (CutesyPooFairyFlight Poses, ScarySneakyNinja Poses, SuperAction Poses for SkinnyNoodleArms, etc)
A lot of names for both the individual poses and the directories they are contained in are pretty bad at describing the nature of the pose. Some poses are just numbers. Smart Content, where available, solves that.
Yeah, this is what I want to avoid. We're talking about thousands of poses, and I really don't want to add the correct metadata to every single one of them one by one; and I really don't want to go through folders to guess where certain poses might be, and then loop through folder after folder to see if there's anything I like.
Thanks for making this clear, that there's no better way.
At this point, this remains my biggest issue with all the different generations.
One of my biggest issues with metadata has been how tedious it is to add it manually, either to conversions, non-Daz store products, or freebies.
It's made a little easier by being able to mutli-select on the editor tab, but it's still a lot of opening sub-windows and such. And I know there are dangers in messing it up, but I'd be willing to risk it for access to the database in a nice spreadsheet format, if only because I type much faster than I click, so combined with autofill, I'd be able to add new metadata significantly faster too.
Yeah, with the older stuff, what you're saving in money, you're spending in time, usually. Sorry for being gruff.
It’s a pain and kind of tedious but so are many things with Daz like converting and saving clothing to the current generation. If there was a tool to convert poses to any generation I’d buy it instantly if it didn’t require me to do more like unlock arms etc.
same goes for a clothing refitting tool. Seems like something that could be made.
I also like the Texture Transformer by Blacksmithover at Rendorosity mentioned by outrider42 as you can, with the appropriate plugins from them, convert everthing from V4/M4 to G2F/G2M to G3F/G3M at which point you can convert to G8F/G8M by saving as a material preset.
Weirdly they didn't make a plugin to convert from Genesis 1 to other Genesis generation though and I'm not sure if Genesis 1 skin textures can applied to V4/M4 and saved as material presets for V4/M4 so that you can convert to G3F/G3M.
With that product you don't wind up with a lot of weird UVs that you later will wonder if they were an original part of a DAZ Original product you bought or not and you needed worry ever again about remembering and figuring out which product to use to convert the old product to use on a new product.
Well, not at least until Genesis 9 maybe....
@Ati "How would I know that pose exists, when searching for available G2 sitting poses? How do I get that converted V4 pose to show up among the G2 sitting poses in smart content?"
I must be the only one that finds the number of continuing issues folks have with "Smart Content" to be (humorously) ironic.
I'm not sure I understand. What do you mean? Smart content does what I need it to do with native poses. The G3->G8 converter adds the converted poses to smart content, so there's no problem there either. Mine is not an issue with smart content itself, but with the older converters not adding the converted poses to it.
If anyone is still looking for Pose Conversion solutions, here is a great free converter that works for all the Geneses from G1 through G8. It works for V4, too, since V4 and G1 have very similar armatures. Only caveat, if the poses are PZ2, they will need to be saved back to the library as DUF before conversion.
https://sharecg.com/v/89846/view/8/Script/Daz3d-Pose-Converter-Standalone
@Ati
The forum is full of posts complaining that the user(s) can't find their product in Smart Content. To my thinking, that suggests that Smart Content isn't too smart. Just a thought from someone that considers Smart Content useless. YMMV
I tried that too ... excellent! Works beautifully.
As for Smart Content, I don't use it because I like to organise my content myself so I hide the Smart Content panel.
I am curious why this free converter is not commerical use? Does this mean poses I convert with it are not usable in scenes commercially?
For scripts it typically means you can't copy the scripts and then turn around and package them for resale in the DAZ 3D Store or elsewhere. That actually happens quite frequently and lots of freebie open source developers don't like it.
However, the pose is the pose so the converted pose falls under the same license terms as the original pose, they legally can't restrict you there when a license already in place for the pose.
Thanks! I was curious and wanted to try it, but didn't want any restictions on the output. That makes sense.