Any idea why it's not converting any items?

 

I need the log to tell you why.  But you can select them all and use Force Convert Item(s)

Thanks, the force convert worked, but the initial results are not that great. Very loose fitting and a bit warped on the mesh. Will keep trying to get better results t5hough.

The warping can depend a lot on the conformer used.  Try other ones.  For the looseness, that is intentional to make sure the conformers grabbed everything correctly.  Use the Tighten All morph (or any of the other morphs added to the item) to pull it back in.

I did try other conformers and the results didn't change much and that is very unfortunate on the looseness since that is unexceptable for my needs. I don't have many fancy, detailed outfits with special fit needs, most of what I have is normal tight fitting clothing and autofitting to G3 and then changing the scene identifier to G8 gives me the desired results I need and I was hoping this product would automate the process and allow me to do all of my V4 runtimes.

I have the same issue as Illidanstorm on it detecting items in the 3DAge folder, only half of them were detected and here are the less than favorable results from their conversion. The yellow one is the old conversion method and the white is this product. You can clearly see the looseness and the warping.

Did you try the tighten all morphs?  They are working quite well for me.

Honestly, V4 clothing is such a mess most of the time as far as the way it was labelled and organized I'm still shocked they could do it all.  I don't even care if I have to go through and force convert every single item, this is still a super useful tool for me.Its not any more difficult to hit force convert than it is to hit the other button.  I can't speak about anyone elses wardrobe, but the force convert is working just fine on the clothing that I have.

So very pretty DD :)

thanks for a great product and also, thank you tons for including the morph types in the promo images. 

@amyw12  You are so very welcome!! Im glad you are enjoying it!!

Sorry about the fairly rough render, but I'm opening with a modelling/texturing project that involves a lot of rapid fire testing; as my system is fairly low end, trying to render backgrounds or lots of iterations just slows the process down.
The G8F underwear range is heavily skewed towards lacy nothings, with little choice when something more everyday like a t-shirt bra would be more appropriate. The G8F Basic Wear that comes in the Starter Essentials is sort of in the right area, but like a lot of those initial freebies, it's good enough to prove the program works, but also bad enough that you'd prefer to use a commercial asset instead. The cut is odd, and the texture quality is out of place alongside other assets.

However, those are soluble problems for my level of Blender and Photoshop skills (and in many ways I guess I'm more of a creator than an artist), so I've tried to see if I can improve this ubiquitous asset to the point I might actually choose to use it.
This is still rather WIP (some of it stuff that needs tweaking, some of it stuff I've not done yet), but a reshaping morph, an (optional) new UV to add a seam, and several new texture maps, and I think it's starting to get somewhere.

I think I may have to put together some JCMs to improve the deformation now that the rigging doesn't quite match the altered shape, but that's going to be a later step in the process.

The end plan is a fairly broad choice of textures (some with and some without seams on the cups), but this one is giving me a rough idea about how I need to straighten up the new UVs (they are a mite wonky). If anyone has particularly good recommendations about good places to get free-to-use seamless textures, I'd appreciate it.

As far as I know, I think I should be able to release these changes for others to use once I'm done, as the new maps were done from scratch (and all the textures I've used are either my own resources or appropriately licensed for free personal and commercial use, with no attribution required), the alternate UVs were completely redone, and the rest is morphs that are useless without the original.

 

 

Sven Dullah said:

I understand what you're saying, no doubt:) But with 3DL it actually IS a geometry issue, just as I said in my first post. Don't know about Iray, I don't use it. Unfortunately this piece of info won't help the OP, so... carry on;)

The geometry is independent of the renderer. It can't be "too close", at least with an authentic G8F geometry (I don't know what that carrara plugin is doing in Wendy's case) . Or maybe you have some other morphs affecting your base setup. Check what is "currenly used" in the parameters tab.  Maybe some eye buldge or iris morph interfering, or adversely affecting things.

 

Look at the geometry editor in DS or any 3D program at the base G8F. If you look at the polygons, the eye moisture and cornea are adjacent at the same level. It's essentially 1 contiguous layer, only the polygon selection group artificially separates them.  If you change the cornea color and eye moisture level to the same, you will see they are contiguous. You can delete polygons groups to triple check this. Delete everything exept for the cornea and eye moisture.  So the geometry is fine - I'm 100% certain. It's essentially a buldged sphere. If you need screenshots or a demo to illustrate this I can post it.

 

If there is a problem with a certain renderer only - that strongly suggests a renderer setting or material issue. It there was a 3DL bug, I would expect it to be fixed too, at high priority level like iray

Some renderers might expect you to do it slightly differently - In the texture folder for the G8F base , there are alpha mattes - G8FBaseEyesTr_1007.jpg and G8FBaseEyesTr01_1007.jpg. You might have to set those up as the transparency or alpha matte ( or perhaps inverted) as a cutout. This will not be as good, because having that eye moisture and cornea layer with appropriate material settings makes it look more realistic. I doubt this is what you have to do - I suspect it's specular or transparency settings with ray depth setting that you need to adjust

 

 

Everything you say makes sense, but there is a default bias hardcoded into the 3DL renderer which makes it calculate things incorrectly in some cases, and this seems to be one of them. I doubt the DS devs can or will fix it, as there are multiple bugreports open, that are many years old by now, nothing will ever happen, it's all Iray now. Only thing that can be done is to create shaders that take this into account. Luckily for me, I use scripted pathtracing with the aweSurface and one of the developers of this shader has found a workaround which will be added to the next build. I hope the OP finds a solution to her/his issue, it may well be a materials thing, but I'm not really convinced, I've seen quite a number of post mentioning problems with eyes topology. But then again, what do I know... just a regular user:)

Sven Dullah said:

I understand what you're saying, no doubt:) But with 3DL it actually IS a geometry issue, just as I said in my first post. Don't know about Iray, I don't use it. Unfortunately this piece of info won't help the OP, so... carry on;)

The geometry is independent of the renderer. It can't be "too close", at least with an authentic G8F geometry (I don't know what that carrara plugin is doing in Wendy's case) . Or maybe you have some other morphs affecting your base setup. Check what is "currenly used" in the parameters tab.  Maybe some eye buldge or iris morph interfering, or adversely affecting things.

Look at the geometry editor in DS or any 3D program at the base G8F. If you look at the polygons, the eye moisture and cornea are adjacent at the same level. It's essentially 1 contiguous layer, only the polygon selection group artificially separates them.  If you change the cornea color and eye moisture level to the same, you will see they are contiguous. You can delete polygons groups to triple check this. Delete everything exept for the cornea and eye moisture.  So the geometry is fine - I'm 100% certain. It's essentially a buldged sphere. If you need screenshots or a demo to illustrate this I can post it.

If there is a problem with a certain renderer only - that strongly suggests a renderer setting or material issue. It there was a 3DL bug, I would expect it to be fixed too, at high priority level like iray

Some renderers might expect you to do it slightly differently - In the texture folder for the G8F base , there are alpha mattes - G8FBaseEyesTr_1007.jpg and G8FBaseEyesTr01_1007.jpg. You might have to set those up as the transparency or alpha matte ( or perhaps inverted) as a cutout. This will not be as good, because having that eye moisture and cornea layer with appropriate material settings makes it look more realistic. I doubt this is what you have to do - I suspect it's specular or transparency settings with ray depth setting that you need to adjust

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That said, one thing that I have really wished for would be a smile morph that stretches the upper lip thinner. Right now if a character has those bee-stung lips, when she smiles they remain thick and full. In real people they strectch out and look thinner, especially the upper one.  I don't have pics handy but google, for example, Jessica Alba to see a particularly dramatic example. She looks like she has a different mouth when she smiles but the standard smile morphs don't do that to DAZ characters.  To me, that looks unnatural and it really looks most noticable when it's a character with large lips.  I guess not just smiles, it's any extreme expression ought to effect that I suppose. 

Any idea why it's not converting any items?

 

I need the log to tell you why.  But you can select them all and use Force Convert Item(s)

Thanks, the force convert worked, but the initial results are not that great. Very loose fitting and a bit warped on the mesh. Will keep trying to get better results t5hough.

The warping can depend a lot on the conformer used.  Try other ones.  For the looseness, that is intentional to make sure the conformers grabbed everything correctly.  Use the Tighten All morph (or any of the other morphs added to the item) to pull it back in.

I did try other conformers and the results didn't change much and that is very unfortunate on the looseness since that is unexceptable for my needs. I don't have many fancy, detailed outfits with special fit needs, most of what I have is normal tight fitting clothing and autofitting to G3 and then changing the scene identifier to G8 gives me the desired results I need and I was hoping this product would automate the process and allow me to do all of my V4 runtimes.

I have the same issue as Illidanstorm on it detecting items in the 3DAge folder, only half of them were detected and here are the less than favorable results from their conversion. The yellow one is the old conversion method and the white is this product. You can clearly see the looseness and the warping.

If you pose, or on default load?

This looks as if a morph is activated that shouldn't. Please check out in the Parameter or shape tab "Currently used" if some morph is activated that shouldn't be.

Thanks a million-    this is what did it-Finally i get a real solution to my problem

If you pose, or on default load?

This looks as if a morph is activated that shouldn't. Please check out in the Parameter or shape tab "Currently used" if some morph is activated that shouldn't be.

I've just bought this product and look forward to using it. However, because I don't use any installers but always load into my Directories manually, can you suggest what area I should load it to, or where it would go, if left to install on its own?

Would you call it a Morph, a Prop or an Addon? I could always give it a new Section all for itself if need be.

And yes. Any video, preferably with sound, (as a video without sound is like an Egg Timer without sand) would be really helpful.

Cheers

Gray

Hi Tiffani, thanks for the list.! 

Does it do paintovers? 

Ie can you bring your render in, add a layer on top, and then paint on that layer while picking up the underlying colours of the base layer?

 

that would be a winner for many artists

Sorry, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Would it transfer the colors from below to mix with the brush use above? Sort of, depending on how you set the layer blending.

Could you use the colors from the image as a color picker to paint? Yes, just save it as a stored image and activate the dropper on the stored image.

If you painted directly on the layer above, it will still show the image below. Think, like glazing in Oil painting, Or painting over dried watercolor with more watercolor.

If it's something else you are asking, then I'm not understanding you, so give me more examples!

I just found this:

https://www.daz3d.com/liquid-pack

I assume it's Iray only? 

 

Thanks for all the comments people. I already saw Gore-Dom, but it's not really what I'm looking for - I actually have morphs for G8 which simulate a belly ripped open, and I need something to put into the hole :D So primarily I'm looking for intensines and thick blood splatter props, but yeah... as far as I can see, everything is made just for IRAY. Guess I'm gonna have to figure out how to convert these water shaders to 3DL  and make them red :P

Actually no need trying to convert anything that doesn't have textures/maps. Just apply the 3DL shader you want to use, and adjust diffuse color/strength, opacity, glossiness, reflectiveness, refraction index and so on. I would definitely use a shader that has SSS, like OmUbersurface or AoA SSS. The DS default shader is too limited for this purpose IMO. Happy to help you with settings if you need it;)

Also, could you elaborate on these settings? :)

Hmm I made this very quick (and bad) testscene using AoA lights and the DS default shader applied to the blood props:) +added the settings I used, you can probably use roughly the same settings but apply the Ubersurface or AoA SSS shader, that would give you more options to fine tune the result, using SSS to add some scattering to it. Not sure about the liquid pack being Iray only, but those props look nice, so applying 3DL shaders and make it look descent shouldn't be a problem;)

I can try to make some blood using the AoA SSS shader just out of interest, but not right away, have some other things going atm. Hope this'll get you started:)

 

 

Note, to make it darker, darken refraction color and possibly diffuse color/strength.

Superb, thanks! Where did you get the blood props? 

I used https://www.daz3d.com/rigged-water, Sickelyield has a number of products worth checking out.

And in other words (not sure if I understood it): you could simply load an .obj prop into DAZ, and just apply a standard DS shader without any additional textures, tweak it and it'll work too?

Yes, as long as the product doesn't have an Iray customshader that utilizes texture maps in channels that 3DL doesn't understand. ( Well you can stil use it, but converting would be difficult).For things like blood, water etc, you really don't need maps if you don't want to create some special effects, so any .obj will work, as far as I know. Just apply the DS def shader, copy my settings and (depending on lighting etc) adjust things a bit and possibly apply one of the other shaders I suggested. Most settings will transfer well from the def shader, you might need to adjust the specular/reflection values a bit. I'll experiment with the AoA SSS shader when I get to my DS machine:)

Any idea why it's not converting any items?

 

I need the log to tell you why.  But you can select them all and use Force Convert Item(s)

Thanks, the force convert worked, but the initial results are not that great. Very loose fitting and a bit warped on the mesh. Will keep trying to get better results t5hough.

The warping can depend a lot on the conformer used.  Try other ones.  For the looseness, that is intentional to make sure the conformers grabbed everything correctly.  Use the Tighten All morph (or any of the other morphs added to the item) to pull it back in.

It should be fairly self-explanatory. At the top left of DAZ Studio there is "File, Edit, Create, Tools..." and so on.

Under "File" choose Export; it's the fourth choice from the bottom. So click two or more things and group them, or Export them individually. I would suggest creating a new folder for the exported items - choose a name that will help you to remember that this was were you put "your first exported objects in early 2019" sort of thing.

Very often exporting as .OBJ will cause you to lose stuff like your custom surface settings if any, not to mention available morph controls. Soooo... I'm not 100% sure but overall it's probably best to keep things as a scene or subset. For example on my copy of DAZ Studio 4.8 here my personal things (like the piece of pasta) are up in the top left corner of the "Content Library". I mean who can forget the "macaroni"... that was a great prop and so on, etc. etc.

Remember that you can always "merge" two of these basic scenes together... or "merge" something you have on file into the scene you are working on at any given moment.

I believe the cornea and eye moisture polygons are placed too  close together, I think you should try to bulge them outward, don't know how that would work with closed eyes though. It's definitely a geometry issue, as everybody seems to have problems no matter what render engine they use. Don't know anything about octane, but atleast 3DL has a built in default bias, so if you don't use some kind of bulge morph you'll have a hard time getting proper refraction and reflections.

For hair styles, you can always try and see if the parts you can't use are separate surfaces that you can hide by zeroing out the opacity on the surfaces tab. If you have hair shader products, you can even combine two different hairstyles by loading both, hiding the parts you don't like and then using the same hair shader on all the visible surfaces to make them look like they belong together.

For faery ears, have you tried either of these products: 

https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-8-female-fantasy-morph-resource-kit

https://www.daz3d.com/hfs-ultimate-shapes-for-genesis-8-female

With the hair, I could try it out and see.  As for the packages, the first one I have not seen before, but I can't really tell.   The second package, that might do it.  I have on my wishlist, I am waiting for it to go on sale.

Yeah V4 ruled from 2006-2011 I believe, right before Genesis 1. The G2F incarnation of Victoria is V6, which is just a character not a figure.

V4 has maintained popularity for a long time due to good compatibility outside of DS.

But if you will stick with DS there are downsides to V4... If I'm not mistaken there's no autofit or morph following for clothes, and morphs don't (probably can't) stray as far from the base body shape as Genesis morphs can.

I can tell it is older.  I was playing with the morphs for  V4.2  last night and I have to say, the head and face morphs are pretty good, in fact there are some options and setting  that I don't have with Gen 8.  I am sure they are available, as I am still new, but it seemed like I could do more.  Also I have noticed that with V4, some characters had likenesses of actual celebrities, such as Angelina Jolie, Mila Jovovich, and Rhinanna. (Even though I don't care for V4, I HAD to get Rhianna! Lol!).  However when it comes to the bodies, the adjustments are very limited.  Also, there  are anatomy issues.  the arm / shoulder crease is too high, making the shoulders more flat than rounded.  muscle attachment points are wrong and there are many issues that are more apparent if you want a more athletic or muscular character.   As it is, I am not fond of Genesis either.  Things get a bit better with Gen 2.  Gen 3 looks better yet.  If course my favorite is Gen 8.   With Gen 8, I noticed that the muscles contract when you move the joints.  While I probably will dabble withV4, I am not going to specifically but for it unless it is something for $2 or less.  I am mostly sticking with Gen 8.

IF you can manage to create the shape you are aiming for in gen4 (V4), there's a fighting chance of being able to port it as far as G3 via GenX2. You'll probably need add-ons to get it past G1, but it *might* be doable. A lot depends on how much of a strain is put on the mesh.

But I've built a number of characters from GenX ports, since those come in with dials, so it's easy to mix them or add them incrementaly.

That is all beyond my capability at the moment.  Perhaps in the future, but I am still a beginner with 3d art.  I only signed up to Da z last month.   I already spent a fortune on it too.  I guess the initial expense is expected to build up a good working library.  As it is , I am trying to cut back on character purchases and I am making them more myself now.  I don't buy poses and those I have came with bundles.  I only bought 2 character pro bundles to date:  Karyssa and Eva 8.  they had the most items i could use and they were on sale too.  And yes I am PC+.   

But all in all of there was a way to extract that ear morph from that V4 Character and make it a control for the Gen 8, then that would be great.  In do have Blender, but don't know it that well.  

Broadly speaking, I think that if you want an attractive, not-so-young woman, Linday's Satine for G3F or maybe (for a thirties-ish, very early forties-ish woman) Genevieve 7 remain the best bets. Mabel, Alexandra, Penny, and Sydney are all "character" types rather than being all that pretty. Sydney feels like somebody's fun, globetrotting aunt: sort of a slightly younger, female version of Dr Henry Jones Sr that some Indiana Jones or Lara Croft wannabe gets saddled with, or a Katherine Hepburn character from a screwball comedy 20-30 years after the screwball comedy ends.

Thoughts on back-converting Sydney and associated characters to G3F:

-Under the HDRI lighting setups I normally use, I'm not finding Sydney all that orange, but her makeup options were so offputting that I didn't bother backconverting them, just the base skin.

-Rumer: the body morph won't transfer to G3F, but I managed to dial up something close enough. The head is a very cool, very angular face in the Belladzines tradition-not great for full face, but cool looking from other angles. The skin is also pretty traditional Belladzines: kind of stylized and with very gaudy "normal" makeups but some nifty fantasy makeups to make up for it. 

-Melinda: morphs transferred fine, haven't gotten around to backconverting the skin yet because I find all the makeup options intimidating. Very attractive character though.

-Alabama: No trouble with the morphs, but the base, dark-brown eye color came out silvery on G3F. I liked the makeup options and transferred over everything that wasn't LIE (I'm never sure how well LIE is going to cooperate on a figure it's not meant for). Like alot of Mousso skins, this one looks a bit washed out under default lighting, so test her with headlamps off and an HDRI setup that flatters human skins. I thought she looked kind of like Sigourney Weaver initially (only prettier), but after giving her dark eyes from a G3F character, and a Ripley-esque hairstyle and outfit, the resemblance doesn't seem as strong. Still a very attractive character.

This is the Freediver wetsuit and accessory set Sold here: https://www.daz3d.com/freediver-wet-suit-and-accessories-for-genesis-8-male-s

I think it turned out pretty nicely. Had a bit of trouble with lighting and the white fins.... White and I just don't get along.... But I added a very mild tint to them, and they looked less blown out.

There is no actual hood down morph that I could find. But you can make the head and upper neck hidden and just need to fix a few jagged areas at the neckline postwork.

I do have to add- there is an included watch in this set, that looks really nice.

Well, maybe for the right figure : https://www.daz3d.com/aurore-for-genesis-3-and-8-female

For the left : https://www.daz3d.com/treasa-hd-for-eva-8

If you have a face morph pack like 200 morphs plus, you can also tweak the shape a bit more.
But for real likeness you need to edit the texture probably.

If this is for genesis or genesis 2 (don't know about Gen3 yet) then it's pretty simple. After you send your shirt back into Daz from Hex, select it and go to edit->object->rigging->convert prop to figure

Make sure that triax weight map is selected and click ok

Then load up a gen or gen2 character, select it and go to edit->figure->transfer utility

On the left side under source select your gen or gen2 character and on the right select your shirt.

You can select a type if you wish

Click ok

Now you can delete the gen character and save your new item as a scene subset.

I know you posted this 2015. It was very helpful. Thanks dude.