Genesis 9 to Genesis 8 Hair conversion

dissectionalone · 2023-07-25T18:25:20-04:00

Hello everyone, I've been tinkering around and since I use mostly Genesis 8 I have at present a greater interest in using Genesis 9 stuff on Genesis 8 rather than the other way around, so I've set out to find out if it would be possible to get hair items working (clothes are simpler) and turns out it is possible. We all know if you use Autofit, you might retain presets that rely on morphs but anything that depends on Posing Bones gets lost with Autofit. Even using the Transfer Utility won't work because while you may keep the Hair item's original Posing Bones, the weight maps aren't preserved which isn't at all what someone would want. But turns out, just like you can get Genesis 3 Hairs on Genesis 8/8.1 you can with Genesis 9 stuff. What is needed to pull this off? Well, first you need to get the Genesis 8 clone of your choice dial projected onto the Genesis 9 hair item; Load Genesis 9 Dev Load, dial up the Genesis 8 clone (Female or Male) and Load the Genesis 9 Hair we want to convert; Unfit the Hair from Genesis 9; Delete Genesis 9; Load our target Genesis 8 Dev Load figure (Female or Male) Dial the Genesis 8 Clone morph back up on the Hair; It's a good idea to set the Hair resolution to Base and export this Genesis 8 "fit morph" out as an .obj file (it'll likely be needed later) Genesis 9 has very few bones named the same as Genesis 8 (The head being the most obvious) We need to rename the bones which aren't the "special" Posing Bones of the hair to match Genesis 8's bones: Spine1 needs to be renamed to Abdomen Lower; Spine2 to Abdomen Upper; Spine3 to Chest Lower; Spine4 to Chest Upper; Neck1 to Neck Lower; Neck2 to Neck Upper; Now with that in mind, in order to change the bones' names we need to use the Joint Editor; Select each bone, right click on the Viewport then select "Edit... Rename Node" to change its name; The pop-up box has 2 names: "Node Name" and "Node Label"; The first is the actual bone's name. The second is the name that's displayed on the Scene Tab. The "Node Label" is usually written with Upper Case initials and a soace between names (like Neck Lower); The "Node Name" on the other hand starts with a lowercase first name, an Upper case second and has no space between both words (neckUpper); Now with this information, we can proceed and rename the bones, leaving the Posing Bones alone (nodes like LBangs1 or rFront2, etc.) If the Hair has Thigh bones, we can delete them with the Joint Editor (right-click the Viewport, select "Edit...Delete Bone") Once we've renamed all the necessary bones, we're going to rename the facegroups to match them, by changing their names on the "Geometry Editor"; Here, the naming scheme is the one from the "Node Name" (lowercase first name, no space, Uppercase second name) If you don't find any facegroup named Spine1, proceed to renaming the other ones accoording to the Genesis 8 naming scheme (so spine2 becomes, abdomenUpper, spine3 becomes chestLower and so on) Once that's taken care of, we want to right-click on the Scene Tab and select "Edit... Scene Identification" On the "Preferred Base" we want to change from "Genesis 9->Base" to "Genesis 8->Female or Male" (depending on which figure we're converting to) On the "Autofit Base" we can go ahead and change from "Genesis 9->Base" to "Genesis 8->Female or Male"; The "Compatibility Base" should stay as it is and it's a good idea to change the Label of our hair figure (to give it a different name like with _G8 on the end or something like that) Now with the "Joint Editor" active in the "Tool Settings", we're going to select our target Genesis 8 figure, hold Shift then select the Genesis 9 Hair. Now we're going to right-click on the Scene Tab and select "Edit...->Rigging->Transfer Rigging(Figure Shape)..." At this point, the Genesis 9 hair might have shifted position on the Viewport... If that happens, Dial down the Genesis 8 Clone morph; Right-click the Scene Tab and select "Edit->Figure->Geometry->Update Base Geometry"; We have 3 options and only the last 2 allow us to update our selected figure's geometry with an external file (The Genesis 8 fit morph for the hair we exported previously); We're going to be choosing option #2 - Update...Vertex Positions and selecting our exported obj file; This should place the hair back where it fit Genesis 8. If it doesn't, don't worry that can be fixed; If the hair is correctly placed on Genesis 8's head, we can test the "Fit to" option; If it worked correctly, we can test loading up some poses to make sure it's following properly. Once that's done, we can test the Hair's own presets ; If it's like one of Out of Touch's hairs, it has Bllow presets and Style Presets; Test them out (they should be working normally) Next find the "Movement" morph dials on the Hair and test them out (they should also be working) If it's all working, we can proceed and save our converted Hair; If the hair somehow changed position when you used the "Fit to..." option before, redo the "Update Base Geometry" Setp then proceed to testing the presets; Good luck, happy tinkering and Cheers :)