Question about converting ancient poses

paulawp (marahzen)

For various reasons, I am considering a long-term project of mass converting some older generation poses up to G8 and G9. I have various converters that cover all of the generations, back to V4/M4. My question is: With "V4 Pose Converter for Genesis and Genesis 2 Female(s)" would you convert to G1 or G2 for this purporse? (I have means for converting both G1 and G2 onward to newer versions.) I seem to recall seeing that one or the other was considered more problematic.

I freely admit that I started to reading the dozens of existing threads about the subject, but after a while, figured I'd cut to the chase and just ask again. 

And yes, I have all of the relevant Minions and I love them.

richardandtracy

If I may chip in as someone who has written pose transfer scripts, I'd like to comment. Now, obviously my comments will be highly coloured by the way I wrote my scripts, and as I haven't figured out a way to do a batch conversion, my comments possibly don't apply to the commercially available scripts.

I have done a V3 to G8F pose transfer script, and in that script I know the transfer is pretty good in one step all the way from V3 to G8F. In this script I applied half the abdomen bend/side-side/twist to each of G8F's abdomen bones, same with the chest and neck, and played about with the rButtock/lButtock applying part to G8F's pelvis and part to the thighs to be added to the thigh values.

The V4 to G8F pose transfer script I did actually does slightly worse transfer than the V3 one unless limits are set to off. The reason is because the zero pose for V4 is close to being out of limits for G8F in terms of hand shape and finger positions even before any pose is added on top, so it's common for V4 poses to be out of G8F limits. If I had not tried to simulate the cupped palm of V4 with the G8F carpals then the pose would have looked less similar, but also be less likely to go out of limits.

Expressions - I must admit I didn't even try to convert expression poses because there is no facial rigging on V3/4 and would have to be taking the expression morph dial values and trying to convert that into appropriate G8F facial rigging settings. Also, with my (then) limited scripting knowledge, had the expressions not been injected into the base character before transfer, the script could have crashed DS. Hope I know enough to avoid that now.

I would strongly recommend that you don't have G2 as an intermediate step in a transfer. There seems to be odd linkages between foot and shin in G2, such that when doing a transfer between G2 and G8F the script has to reduce the shin angle, as if 88 degrees of G2's shin is 90 degrees inG8 and then reduce the foot bend by 2 degrees at the same time.

There are errors, differences and compromises in every conversion. Doing the pose transfer in 2 steps allows for 2 sets of errors to creep in in the transfer, if done in one step the result should be closer to the original. It's starting to look as if transfers to G9 are needed from every generation.

Regards,

Richard

For info, my 2 scripts are here:

V4->G8F    https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/448391/v4-a4-pose-transfer-to-g8f

V3->G8F   https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6136862/#Comment_6136862

Havos

If you have got a lot of poses, I suspect you will want to use a batch processor. You mentioned the V4 to G1/G2F pose converter from Zev0, that is a batch pose converter. I would convert to G2F, since there is no commercially available Genesis 1 to G3 or G8 converter. In fact G1 poses a problem to convert using the batch converter. There is a G2F to G3F batch converter,  and it will also convert G2M and Genesis 1 poses, since G1 and G2 have the same bones. However the default G1 hand is in a partial grip pose, and as such I find the hands do not convert well from G1 to G3. The V4 to G2F and then onwards to G3 or G8 also struggles with getting the hands right.

There is free batch converter available here: https://www.sharecg.com/v/89846/browse/8/Script/Daz3d-Pose-Converter-Standalone. It currently supports G1, G2, G3 and G8, although in my experience it does not do any better a job going from G1 to G8 than Zev0's batch scripts. The minions from Riversoft do make a better job with the hands when converting from G1 to G8, but there is no batch option, so it is pretty tedious to convert a lot of poses.

Personally I have used Zev0's scripts to do all my converting. 

paulawp (marahzen)

Thanks for your comments.

Basically, while there are several things I might like to do one day, what's pushing me to action at the moment is that I have a lot of interesting and viable older poses that are overlooked on an everyday basis - many acquired elsewhere, some just lost in Lost and Found - and a newly available, vast expanse for my custom content directory. I'm thinking of converting them and gathering the converted versions under a single, easy-to-find folder. Right now, they're scattered all over the place - under the Poser folders, or in the various generations, under often-unfamiliar PA or product names. Of course, once I find them, Minion works great, but what happens now is that I don't take the extra step of going hunting for them.

I remembered reading back in my early Daz days something about at least one of G1/G2 having some specific weirdness that made it harder to convert to later versions. I figured if I were remembering that correctly, I could convert V4/M4 to one rather than the other since that product does both.