I’ve been asked for a step-by-step tutorial on how to get Genesis 3 figures working in Poser. I’ve not had time for anything truly exhaustive but I hope that this might be of some help.

Although very short, I’m going to have to split it over three posts as there seems to be a limited to the number of images allowed on each one.

First of all you need the following:

1. Poser 11. While Genesis and Genesis 2 figures work just fine with some of the older versions of Poser, you’ll need Poser 11 for Genesis 3 as it supports the features required for the expressions to work.

2. DAZ Studio – you’ll need this installed to prepare your conversions. I don’t have the newest version installed, so there might be some small differences in my screen shots to the interface you are working with.

3. You’ll need a Beta of the DSON Importer plug-in for Poser – you should be able to find this in your downloads as shown below. If you don’t have that, then I would shy away from using Genesis 3 as the release version causes some serious problems with both the mesh and the expressions for this model.

1. You’ll need to locate, download and install Willdial’s Genesis 3 Poser Updater – a quick search at the Renderosity store will locate it. Like the DSON Importer, it’s free.

[https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/genesis-3-poser-updater/76121?item_id=76121&page_number=2 ]

Runtime Folders

After installing DAZ Studio, locate it’s content folder – within it, you will find nested a Poser Runtime folder.

This is where Studio keeps all it’s textures, along with any Poser Companion Files (PCFs). It is also the Runtime that you should be working with to use your Genesis 3 figures in Poser, so you’ll want to do a little preparation toward that end.

First, within each of the Library folders (such as Character, Hair, Poses, etc), create three subfolders: Genesis 3 (for products used by both male and female figures), Genesis 3 Female, Genesis 3 Male. Within each of these last two, I would also create further subfolders for Figures and Clothes.

Now open up DAZ Studio and looking at the contents, find where it lists the Poser Formats.

If it’s not already there, add the Studio Runtime to that list (just right-click and add folder).

Open up Poser and again, add this to the list of Runtime folders. You are nearly good to go.

Return to the Studio Content folder and under People, create a new subfolder for Temp Conversions.

You can now install the Genesis 3 Starter Essentials to the Studio Content folder and you’ll be good to go.

Continued in next post...

Conversion (part 1)

Open up DAZ Studio and load a Genesis 3 figure. Under Edit>Figure>Rigging Convert General Weight to TriAx Weight.

When complete, save the figure as a scene subset in your Temp Conversions folder.

Choose a name…

… then make sure that the Genesis 3 figure is the only one selected.

Find the figure in the Temp Conversions folder and create a Poser companion file for it.

Make sure that you’ve selected the correct destination runtime…

Continued in next post...

Conversion (part 2)

Start Poser and in the Studio Content Runtime, find the Poser Companion File and load into the scene but don’t do anything with it yet. While this figure will poser correctly, it’s expressions won’t work at all.

Now save it back to the folder you want it (Genesis 3 Female>Figures) as a CR2, then clear the scene.

1. Run the Genesis 3 Poser Updater, click Open and navigate to this new save, then click Update. The message will say ‘processing’ for a few moments before changing to ‘saved’. You should now be able to load the saved figure with all it’s expressions working properly.

You will find all of the morph dials, including expressions, in the Body part of the figure. Full body morphs are under the Actor group, with other shaping morphs under groups for individual body parts. Posing and Expressions are under the Pose Control group.

The DAZ character shapes that you can buy, such as Darius 7, Lee 7, etc, all have their own UV mapping, so you will need to do this process for each of the characters. You will also need to do the work of building the material settings – my own are rather crude but that’s because I don’t render for photorealism – however, you should remember to add any normal maps (these are the blue coloured ones) as they add a lot of the finer detail that would otherwise require high defination morphs.

Also, when you save the figure to Poser’s library as part of the conversion, you will ‘bake’ in the morphs you have, so you will need to repeat the process to include new morph purchases.

Another consideration is that as you get large library of morphs, you may find the figure becoming less responsive when posing – you can get around this problem by creating ‘lite’ versions of the figure, each retaining only the morphs for a particular character. I’ll put together anohter tutorial on doing that another time.

Compatibility

While almost all products in the Genesis and Genesis 2 product lines were compatible with Poser (there are some exceptions), there is a much greater number of products in the Genesis 3 line that just wont work at all. In fairness, this product line was never promoted or sold as compatible with Poser, so to a large extent, we have to risk our money on trial and error.

The majority of clothing products will work, while on the other hand, the majority of hair products don’t. I have a thread in the Poser forums at DAZ where I’m starting to post the results of my own conversions which should help take some of the risk out of purchasing. I’ve a lot more products to post about but not a lot of time lately but I will get around to expanding it soon.

WOW thanks a Super Bunch :)

philebus posted at 6:22PM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4378430

Conversion (part 2)

Start Poser and in the Studio Content Runtime, find the Poser Companion File and load into the scene but don’t do anything with it yet. While this figure will poser correctly, it’s expressions won’t work at all.

Now save it back to the folder you want it (Genesis 3 Female>Figures) as a CR2, then clear the scene.

1. Run the Genesis 3 Poser Updater, click Open and navigate to this new save, then click Update. The message will say ‘processing’ for a few moments before changing to ‘saved’. You should now be able to load the saved figure with all it’s expressions working properly.

You will find all of the morph dials, including expressions, in the Body part of the figure. Full body morphs are under the Actor group, with other shaping morphs under groups for individual body parts. Posing and Expressions are under the Pose Control group.

The DAZ character shapes that you can buy, such as Darius 7, Lee 7, etc, all have their own UV mapping, so you will need to do this process for each of the characters. You will also need to do the work of building the material settings – my own are rather crude but that’s because I don’t render for photorealism – however, you should remember to add any normal maps (these are the blue coloured ones) as they add a lot of the finer detail that would otherwise require high defination morphs.

Also, when you save the figure to Poser’s library as part of the conversion, you will ‘bake’ in the morphs you have, so you will need to repeat the process to include new morph purchases.

Another consideration is that as you get large library of morphs, you may find the figure becoming less responsive when posing – you can get around this problem by creating ‘lite’ versions of the figure, each retaining only the morphs for a particular character. I’ll put together anohter tutorial on doing that another time.

Compatibility

While almost all products in the Genesis and Genesis 2 product lines were compatible with Poser (there are some exceptions), there is a much greater number of products in the Genesis 3 line that just wont work at all. In fairness, this product line was never promoted or sold as compatible with Poser, so to a large extent, we have to risk our money on trial and error.

The majority of clothing products will work, while on the other hand, the majority of hair products don’t. I have a thread in the Poser forums at DAZ where I’m starting to post the results of my own conversions which should help take some of the risk out of purchasing. I’ve a lot more products to post about but not a lot of time lately but I will get around to expanding it soon.

Big Thank You, philebus

I found an unexpected spare moment, so here are a few notes on things like fit control and creating light figures...

Addendum #1: Fit Control

One product for all the Genesis line that I’ve found very handy is Fit Control. This is a set of morphs that, with a script launched from the contents folder, will transfer fitting morphs to clothing. This can be very useful for dealing with poke-through as well as avoiding the shrink-wrap look that particular plagues breast shapes.

There is a problem though. If the morphs are present in the Genesis figure when you create your poser version, then the dials in converted clothing items that have the morphs applied will be tied to the dials in the Genesis figure in the same way other body morphs are.

The solution is to locate the morphs and move them (and the FC Addon if you have it) to a temporary folder while you create your poser version of the figure before reinstalling them to be available to apply to clothing prior to converting them for Poser use.

Addendum #2: Building Lighter Figures

I’ve mentioned that when you have a lot of morphs installed, you can find Genesis figures lose some of their responsiveness.

This problem was most pronounced in the original Genesis line, which had all the male and female morphs in a single figure. It was much less of a problem for Genesis 2 with just over a dozen Base morphs for the female. The Genesis 3 female has, including creature Bases, like the vampire Lavinia, over twice that number – and it shows in the performance in Poser.

Of course, if you only have a dozen or less Base characters, then you probably don’t have to worry about this tutorial at all. However if you do, whichever version of Genesis you are using, then the answer is to create light figures with a reduced selection of morphs. It’s a time consuming job but once done, you will really notice the difference.

In my case, I’m creating an individual figure for each of the main DAZ Base characters that includes only that character and what I think of as the core morphs: the DAZ head and body morphs for customization, along with utility morphs for such things as ageing, creasing, improved bending, etc. I will also do one figure of the Genesis 3 base which will include all the Base creatures I have, along with, again, all the core morphs. Finally, I will have a figure that is focused just on toons, such as Star, Toon Generations, The Girl, etc.

On the subject of what I call core morphs, I would just note that products such as Ultimate Natural Bend Morphs and HD Folds & Creases, work just fine with Poser – you’ll just need to remember to bump up the mesh resolution a notch prior to rendering.

It’s best to create a temporary folder with the same file structure as the Studio Content one, as this helps to keep track of where you need to replace the folders to.

Take a look at the morph data folder for Genesis 3 Female:

Most of the non-DAZ 3D folders are going to be utility morphs but anything that is Base character specific, I move to the temporary folder, keeping a written note of which Bases each folder relates to.

Then in the DAZ 3D folder, select the Base character folders only and move them to your temporary folder as well.

You can now start adding some folders back to build a figure to convert to the Poser format. I shall start with Victoria 7.

In Studio, refresh your Genesis 3 folder.

Load Victoria 7 – under the shaping pane, you’ll see that she has a limited number of full body morphs but plenty of morphs with which to customise her as needed.

Following the instructions from the tutorial above, convert the figure to TriAx weights, save out as a scene subset, and then create a Poser Companion File.

In Poser, refresh the Studio runtime and load this new figure before saving out again and run the Genesis 3 Poser Updater.

You can now remove the Victoria 7 specific files again and replace them with those for the next Base character base. Once you're done, just put everything back where it was.

Great info, thanks for taking the time to put this together.

Wait ! ...Your V7 has a booty Nice write up :) Thank you.

this is great thank you so much :)

Thanks for this .

Thanks from me also! I'd previously tried to get Genesis 3 into Poser using two different methods, without success - this time it worked! Actually, a large part of the problem might have been that I wasn't expecting Genesis 3 to have expression dials only in the body, so I may have had a working figure before now without being aware of it. That part of your tutorial - minor as it may have been - has made all the difference, if so.

If I may add a couple of additional points:

• Only visible parts of the selected figure will be transferred, so make sure all required parts are visible. I opened a pre-existing G3 scene in DAZ which happened to have body parts hidden (because poke-through) and, like the Poser mesh exporter, hidden parts are excluded.

• Convert clothing and hair as a sole item in the scene: load each item individually into an empty scene in DAZ. If they're conformed to a figure, you seem to get a copy of that figure in your scene preset even if it was deselected.

Now I just need to get materials sorted out. I assume there's no easy path to doing that? I've got a simple diffuse map attached to the first material in the list in all my transferred items, but everything else is empty. (Correction - the G3F figure itself has transparency maps applied to EyeMoisture and EyeLashes, but no diffuse maps.)

EnglishBob posted at 6:39AM Thu, 06 February 2020 - #4379234

Thanks from me also! I'd previously tried to get Genesis 3 into Poser using two different methods, without success - this time it worked! Actually, a large part of the problem might have been that I wasn't expecting Genesis 3 to have expression dials only in the body, so I may have had a working figure before now without being aware of it. That part of your tutorial - minor as it may have been - has made all the difference, if so.

If I may add a couple of additional points:

• Only visible parts of the selected figure will be transferred, so make sure all required parts are visible. I opened a pre-existing G3 scene in DAZ which happened to have body parts hidden (because poke-through) and, like the Poser mesh exporter, hidden parts are excluded.

• Convert clothing and hair as a sole item in the scene: load each item individually into an empty scene in DAZ. If they're conformed to a figure, you seem to get a copy of that figure in your scene preset even if it was deselected.

Now I just need to get materials sorted out. I assume there's no easy path to doing that? I've got a simple diffuse map attached to the first material in the list in all my transferred items, but everything else is empty. (Correction - the G3F figure itself has transparency maps applied to EyeMoisture and EyeLashes, but no diffuse maps.)

Hi,

Sadly, there's not much we can do about the materials. For most things, I do make PCFs from any 3Delight material settings a product might be supplied with (don't bother with IRay settings, virtually nothing carries over to Poser) - this provides a starting point. It is worth noting that Studio does not include displacement or normal maps when generating PCFs (DAZ has never liked to support these features in Poser), so do check a product's texture folder to see if any are there.

For the Genesis figure itself, I started with one of the Base Characters and built a very simple material which I saved out as an mt6 and then applied to each of the other characters which have their own UVs, simply swapping out the different maps before saving them again.

For clothing, you might want to have a look through your library of Poser products for material settings of different fabrics, saving screen shots as a quick reference - it saves a bit of trial and error. Because I don't render for realism but with a view to creating faux paintings, I'm afraid my crude settings wouldn't be of much use to others, or I would share them in free stuff (still, if I do get around to improving the settings I'm using at the moment, then I'll probably try to do that).

With regards to clothing - I mentioned that I use the Fit Control product, so my process is this...

1. In Studio, load a Genesis 3 base and then load a complete outfit.
2. Select the Genesis figure from the scene tab and then run Fit Control to transfer these morphs to all the clothing items. I then select the individual clothing items in the scene tab, right-click and unparent them.
3. Next I convert the rigging on each item to TriAx.
4. Save out each item as a Scene Sub-Set to the same temp folder I used in converting the figures (you'll need to uncheck the other times from the list on each save).
5. Select the clothing items in the scene and delete them.
6. You can now move on to the next set of clothing with Genesis still in the scene.
7. Once you've worked through all the clothing items, go to the temp file and create PCFs for them as you did for the Genesis 3 figures.
8. In Poser, load items (Genesis figure or clothing) on their own and with no other figures in the scene, build the material and then save back to the Poser folder.

Do make sure you create PCFs for any foot poses as well and in Poser apply them to the figure before loading the footwear.

I don't want to sound like a shill but I've found the Fit Control products for all three Generations (I've yet to work with Genesis 8) to be a worthwhile investment as it doesn't just provide morphs to avoid shrink-wrapping but also some extra options for fitting I can use before breaking out the morph brush.

Spoke too soon! The scene I saved, containing G3F plus clothes and hair, crashes Poser when I try to re-open it. I'll have to try each item individually so I can isolate the one that's causing the problem. Hopefully it is just one...

I didn't think there would be any sensible way to convert Iray materials to Poser ones (although it would be nice if all the maps were there, at least). I was just hoping to avoid unnecessary Work... As you say, once I've created a material library file for each converted item it will be simple to change it for different maps.

philebus posted at 4:48PM Thu, 06 February 2020 - #4379255

With regards to clothing - I mentioned that I use the Fit Control product, so my process is this...

1. In Studio, load a Genesis 3 base and then load a complete outfit. [...]
2. You can now move on to the next set of clothing with Genesis still in the scene.

This is odd, because when I tried this the saved library item also loaded another copy of the figure. I'm sure I had the right stuff selected when I saved the scene preset, but I'm a raging newbie with DAZ so I'll try it again. For my immediate tinkering needs, loading clothing individually works out fine.

I sorted out the crashing, anyway, and I'm now getting some reasonable results. The step I was missing was to save all converted items from within Poser before use, not just the figure.

There's still something going wrong with the conforming of her boots (which is why they're cropped off), and this can change in interesting ways when the scene is saved and reloaded - but we can't expect everything to work perfectly, I guess.

One way to get around conforming problems is not to conform... We could go back to the old Poser 3 way of doing things, before conforming was invented. Copy the figure's pose, and apply it to the clothing. The boots' toes are still not perfect, as you can see, although it's good enough that I could postwork around what remains. To be fair, those boots seemed a little distorted around the toes even in DAZ Studio.

However the really weird thing about this scene is that visibility no longer seems to work. I hid the figure's feet to help with that pokethrough, but they didn't disappear. Poser is Weird, we know that, but this is taking things to extremes!

EnglishBob posted at 10:53PM Tue, 11 February 2020 - #4379731

One way to get around conforming problems is not to conform... We could go back to the old Poser 3 way of doing things, before conforming was invented. Copy the figure's pose, and apply it to the clothing. The boots' toes are still not perfect, as you can see, although it's good enough that I could postwork around what remains. To be fair, those boots seemed a little distorted around the toes even in DAZ Studio.

However the really weird thing about this scene is that visibility no longer seems to work. I hid the figure's feet to help with that pokethrough, but they didn't disappear. Poser is Weird, we know that, but this is taking things to extremes!

I'll have to give this a go over the weekend - it does seem odd, though I usually deal with poke-through using morphs or the morph brush (I think that's the way to go here).

I thought I would note something about the problems of saving DSON imported figures with conforming items. As a rule, very strange things happen if you try to save a figure with conforming items back to the library as a CR2. I have had more success by saving them as a scene file instead, either exported or using the scene folder on the library panel - you'll want to delete the lights before saving and then relight by clicking on the double tick option on the library to add to scene instead of to replace it.

philebus posted at 1:47PM Wed, 12 February 2020 - #4379999

I thought I would note something about the problems of saving DSON imported figures with conforming items. As a rule, very strange things happen if you try to save a figure with conforming items back to the library as a CR2. I have had more success by saving them as a scene file instead, either exported or using the scene folder on the library panel - you'll want to delete the lights before saving and then relight by clicking on the double tick option on the library to add to scene instead of to replace it.

Thanks, that's a useful tip.

philebus posted at 1:46PM Wed, 12 February 2020 - #4379998

I'll have to give this a go over the weekend - it does seem odd, though I usually deal with poke-through using morphs or the morph brush (I think that's the way to go here).

What seems to have happened is that the visible part of the figure is due to an actor named SD (standing for subdivision, presumably) - if I make that invisible the entire figure disappears. The individual body actors have their display modes set to something strange that I haven't figured out yet. The preview mode is outline (I think) but they don't render either, although their visibility is apparently set properly.

Now that I know this workflow can be effective, I'm going to try the figure conversion again. I need to do that anyway to reduce the morph load as you outlined above, because posing is extremely sluggish as it stands. While I'm doing that I'll pay more attention to other settings in DAZ Studio and see if I can get a cleaner transfer.

Genesis 8 Characters for Genesis 3

In a recent sale, I was able to pick up a Studio script for converting Genesis 8 female morphs to Genesis 3 (a male version is also available). While Genesis itself 8 can be converted for Poser in the same way as Genesis 3, I have the impression that most of the clothing items probably can't - or if they can, they won't have full functionality as most of them seem to use Studio's own flavour of dynamics.

I had picked up a handful of Genesis 8 morphs when cheap or free and so I've been trying it out. The plug-in seems to have some quirks but you can work around them.

First of all, it will want to save the characters to a different content folder - let it do that. However, when converting a character, it will create a folder in the morphs of your Genesis 3 figure called Genesis 8 - it will place all the morphs in there.

For some reason, even using an external content folder, if I try to convert a batch of characters at once, each seems to overwrite the others, so that every dial expresses only the last character you converted. Also, if you are not creating these as light figures (as described above), then you can be facing conversion times of up to 3hrs for some of the DAZ character bases. You can work around these problems.

First of all, you need to prepare to create these as light figures. So, move all the Genesis 3 morphs into a temporary folder and then copy back only the morphs you want present in the character.

Run the Character Converter for a single Genesis 8 character. Once the process is complete convert it right away to TriAx and save as a scene subset, from which you should then create a Poser Companion File. Go into Poser, load the character and save back out to the figure folder before running the Poser Genesis 3 Updater.

Now find the Genesis 8 folder that was created in your Genesis 3 morphs and delete the contents before returning to Studio, clearing the scene, and then running the converter for the next character. You don't need to close either Studio or Poser to work through the characters you have (you'll need to refresh Poser's content folder though), so it won't take long to complete the job (the character conversions done this way only take between 3 to 8 minutes). When you're done, restore the rest of the Genesis 3 morphs from your temporary folder.

Some of the base characters have conforming eyebrow figures - l didn't bother with those at all, as everything you need to modify face textures to have eyebrows baked is in the texture folders.

DAZ base characters have a lot of corrective morphs as part of their package and the good news is that the converter will convert these elements for Genesis 3 as well. On the downside, it doesn't appear to handle HD morphs.

it is also worth noting that you will be working with Genesis 3 expressions which will create a difference in how they look in their Genesis 8 promos.

Finally, Genesis 8 characters all seem to use the base Genesis 3 UVs, so there is no conflict using the characters' texture maps on the Genesis 3 versions you create.