Charlie/Neve textures on Genesis 2

These skin textures (Charlie & Neve for V4.2) by Callad and Moonbunnie are one of my favourite textures. Not only are they great for Victoria being rendered within Daz Studio they are also very good when used in LuxRender, via Reality, thanks to the ACSEL settings supplied by Callad.

They also work a treat on Genesis, but along with every other Generation 4 texture they will not work 'out of the box' on the new Genesis 2 figure (of which only the female version currently is available). The issue is that the Genesis 2 Female (G2F in future) does not come with 'the understanding' of the UV maps of the Generation 4 figures.

The good news is that there is a product by MallenLane which will permit you to use the textures onG2F. You will also get a 'Victoria 4 clone' which will permit better auto-fitting.

Sadly the process is not as simple as you might wish, as the application of textures on G2F has to bedone using files in the .duf format. Since most skin textures for the original Genesis do not use that format (in my experience they use either .ds scripts or .pz2 files) it will come as no surprise that even with the correct UV maps for G2F we need to jump through another hoop!

The general process is quite simple: load V4. Load texture set. Save as material preset. Load G2F,change UV map, load material preset.

Of course nothing is that simple, as each make-up, eye, lip MAT file for V4 will need to be done, making sure only the affected material zones are selected for inclusion in the preset.

You will then run into the 'well, where do I put them and how do I access them?' question. That willbe down to you, and I am only just decding on the approach I will be taking. As the .duf files are not recognised under Poser content my initial choice of creating a sub-folder under the original folder (calling that sub-folder G2F) did not pan out. Thus, I think what I will be doing is creating a folder under the People> Genesis 2 Female> Materials folder for each texture I convert. When you save the material preset the icon created is based on the current viewport, which may be what you want, but is very likely not!

Personally, my current plan of, what I am going to do is copy the original .png icons over, delete theones Daz Studio creates and rename the old ones I just copied. As Daz Studio names the icons as SavedFileName.duf.png the originals will not be over-written. It's a little fiddly, but it ends up with me having the same icons for the textures as I am used to seeing, which helps.

Now it is just a matter of deciding on the process to use to achieve this in the simplest way possible!

To start with, let's make sure we have somewhere to put everything we will be creating. In the Content Library tab (under My Library> People> Genesis 2 Female:

we will be wanting a new sub-folder so right-click on Materials and select Create a Sub-Folder:

As I am going to be creating .duf files for the Charlie/Neve textures I will call the folder the same asthe original.

At which point things crash to a halt as I stare at the screen and think … “duh, what IS the original folder called, and where, exactly, is it?” Ok, let's have a little rewind before we continue!

I know the texture application files are under Pose in my Poser library, so let's go look there. Just a small note here – I have not used the standard, default install locations, so the folder names will look a little different to yours, but you should be able to follow easily enough.

Everything from /runtime/ onward to the right should be the same, it's the bits to the left which will differ. What we can also do, which is useful, is to get Daz Studio to open the folder contests in Explorer:

As you can see we have a couple of types of files, those that INJect/REMove morphs and those that will actually apply textures, along with .png icon files. Before you say anything, the “a_full_Donna” files were created by using Decal Master after I applied a tattoo image to the base CharlieNeve texture so if you have this product and are thinking, “where did they come from, I don't have them …!”, don't panic!

Ok, now armed with this information (the folder name) we can whizz back to where we were (My Library> People> Genesis 2 Female> Materials and go through with creating the sub-folder. As mentioned I plan on calling it the same thing so, when prompted, will enter Charlie_Neve for the

name.

And after clicking OK, we will have or new sub-folder waiting for us:

Before we blast into doing this, let's have a quick re-cap and think about what is about to happen. We will be loading a Victoria 4 figure. We will be loading onto that figure, one after another a texture preset, then saving that as a material preset into that new sub-folder we created. Each time we do so we will be prompted to give the .duf file a name. Daz Studio will then create for us our .duf file, called whatever_we_called_it.duf as well as a whatever_we_called_it.duf.png for an icon.

The original files are called what_it_is_called.pz2 and what_it_is_called.png.

After we have created the .duf files we can delete all the .png files Daz Studio created for us and thecopy across the original .png files. We will have to rename them, adding .duf before the .png, bit that is a small price to pay.

One more thing to bear in mind is how to identify which material zones of Victoria have been affected by the texture application. In over 90% of cases it should be obvious in the the zone(s) in question will have a diffuse map added. Some textures may not load a map, so we need to be a little more sneaky!

My intent will be, after loading Victoria, to modify every material zone in the same 'abnormal' fashion so it will be obvious what has changed. After each such load/material preset save I will use Daz Studio's Undo function (Ctrl-Z or Edit> Undo) to remove the change and return Victoria back to the abnormal state to make the next texture application simpler to spot.

So, after loading her, we select her in the Scene tab and wander off to the Surfaces tab to 'work our mischief' …

Select the whole figure under the Surfaces tab and then apply something strange!

My first attempt at the will be to use the in-built Shader preset for Glass:

Back in the Editor tab we can see that the Shader has changed to Caustic Glass. I have high hopes that no skin textures will use that, so any material zone that is no longer under that Shader will havebeen updated by the texture application and will need to be saves as part of the material preset.

A quick way to check for this would be to click on the top material zone in the list, then use the down cursor key to select each in turn, keeping an eye on the Shader name.

One more tip before we make a start. When we do our material preset saves we will be prompted for a location to save them. Daz Studio will remember the location after the first save so we only really need to do the navigation to our new location once. To make that even simpler, remember how we used the right-click pop-up menu to get Daz Studio to open up the original folder loaction for us? Go and do that for the new location:

Not unsurprisingly, the location is empty!:

But that is not what we are after. A handy little trick is if you click the mouse pointer in the address bar the style of the path details will change to a 'proper' path:

And, if we now, as the text is high-lighted for us, is copy (Ctrl-C) to the clipboard, we can paste thatpath into the folder location name when we are prompted for the save, saving us the bother of manually navigating there.

Right, I think we are now ready to begin. This is just a manual, repetitive slog. Apply the original texture file. Check affected material zones, save material preset with only those zones selected.

The first texture I applied is the a_FullTexture.pz2:

If you look at the Shader you will see that it says “DAZ Studio Default”, which means that all of theselected material zones (all of them here) are using the same shader so all the surfaces have been affected so we need to save them all as part of the material preset.

To do the save we need the File> Save As...> Material(s) Preset menu:

Once we make this menu choice we will get prompted for what to save, and where. Once we have done that we will get asked what we want to save (as in what material zones):

Assuming you have not put anything else into the clipboard we can now click in the address bar andpaste in our new location and press Enter (to get Explorer to update!):

then in the File name entry type in the name of the .duf file we want (in this instance it will be a_FullTexture):

and click Save, and we will then get show a list of material zones to save. By default all are selected, which in this case is what we want:

Just click Accept and we can go and do another one which does not affect all the material zones.

Don't forget to do an Undo (Ctrl-Z) at this stage to back out the change made by the application of that texture file – and we should see our Victoria go back to being 'made of glass'.

This next texture we do will the MUblue_Dark.pz2.

Apply the new texture, and then off to the Surfaces tab to see what has happened:

In the viewport we can see that only parts of the figure have been affected, which is confitmed by looking at the Shader which now says: “<Multiple>”. Now we need to see which material zones were affected. As mentioned before, click on the top zone name and keep a track of the all the zones which are NOT Caustic Glass:

Tapping the down cursor key should move you down to the next material zone:

And down arrow again (or mouse-click on the next material zone name in the list):

We have our first winner! Make a note of the 1_Lip material zone and continue down the rest of thezones …

With this texture application we will find just the 1_Lip and 1_SkinFace material zones were affected.

Now, lets us do the material preset saving (File> Save As …> Material(s) Preset) where you should see that Daz Studio has remembered the path of where we saved the previous preset so we do not need to change that, all we need to do here is type in the name (which was MublueDark). When weget given the list (with all zones selected) we have two choices of how to proceed. We can either click on the check box to deselect all the zones we don't want which in this case is all bar two of them. We really don't want to do that, do we? If it was the inverse (i.e., we wanted every zone except 2, we'd be happy to just deselect the two we didn't want).

Luckily Daz Studio offers some help here. Click on the little context-sensitive menu button (top right corner of the dialog box) and we will see:

If we select the Uncheck menu option here we we will see a couple more options, of which we wantthe Uncheck All:

I'd like to be able to say that under the other option of Check> Check Modified or Check Only> Check All Modified Only we could do this even easier, but they do not seem to do what I'd expect or want. Therefore we do it manually. As we have to select under half of the items we uncheck them all then recheck the ones we want (in this case just the two material zones we noted above):

Yes, that 1_SkinFace IS checked, honest – if you click away from that check box it will show up thesame as 1_Lip:

Click on Accept and this one is done, time to move on to the next … Not forgetting to Undo to get back to our base, bizarre Victoria!

But, has it all worked? Only one way to find out, and we shall do that now before we go off and mess around with the icons.

We can either get rid of Victoria, or keep her if we have more to do), and load up a Genesis 2 Female figure. To make things clearer I will remove Victoria.

Now, I shall do things in reverse order to make things a little more obvious. First I shall load the make up material preset, then the full tetxure, and finally the make up again. This will, hopefully, show that only those material zones we selected will be affected – we should NOT see any bit of Genesis 2 Female turning to Caustic Glass!

What we will also see, doing it this was is see how the UV maps do not, to begin with, work. We will correct that in two ways.

Going to our new sub-folder we see the two textures we created, along with the icons created by Daz Studio at the time, from what was visible in the viewport:

Applying the make up texture we end up with:

And, immediately, we can see the classic signs of UV map mismatch – grey lines on seams (verticalfrom ears – the seam between the 1_SkinFace and 2_SkinHead zones)) and textures not aligning with where they should be (lips and eye shadow). The rest of the figure is unchanged, which is bothwhat we wanted and expected.

After applying the FullTexture material preset we will see more grey lines at seams, plus we will see the make up change back to the default, showing that it has been over-written since the texture set applied had all the zones selected.

If you check under the Surfaces tab you will see that the UV map is 'Base Female' and that the figure has DAZ Standard Shader on all material zones now (it was <Multiple> being either DAZ Standard Shader or omUberSurface when Genesis 2 Female was first loaded).

The first way to get things to look correct is to change the UV map here to “Victoria 4”. The other way is to use the script that comes with the Victoria 4 for Genesis 2 Female product which will do itfor you on any selected Genesis 2 Female figure (obviating any mistake in not having all the surfaces selected). However using the script will also revert all textures back to a state of being a base grey, untextured, so use that method before applying any custom textures!

All that is left now is to delete the DAZ Studio created .png files in the new folder, copy across the original ones and rename them.

That can be done in various ways, and I leave that to you to use whatever method you feel most comfortable with! Have fun, and enjoy!