HOME | DD

Description
So I've got a pretty large catalog of video game ports that I've collected over the past couple years. They...can be a bit hit or miss. Often the textures need quite a lot of work, the morphs and models can be a bit (or sometimes a lot) wonky, and often things don't really match up perfectly with other Daz figures. In particular, the hair. I've found that game port hair tends not to sit properly unless used on the exact model it was created for. However, I finally figured out a pretty good way of getting thigs to fit right. It doesn't always work, and it's far from perfect, but it's made it possible to get more use out of all of these. And of course, the original model has to be designed well enough for use in photorealistic renders, at least for what I'm doing.

The great thing is, most of these were free (thanks Shinteo for that, most came from their work). Which makes it even more worthwhile to put the work in to improve them.

I'm curious, which hairstyle do you like best on this character, and can you name the games/characters that these all came from?

Anyway, what I did for all of these is basically this:

1. Add a generic haircap to the character. I know there's freebie versions out there, I just use one that came with a hairstyle from the Daz store
2. Merge the hair into the scene
3. Reparent/refit to the haircap
4. Disable or ignore local transforms on the hair (this is a hidden property)
5. Edit geometry to convert to sub-d and potentially add a smoothing modifier with the collision item changed to the character (this isn't always necessary or successful)
6. Retexture the hair using any of the universal hair texture packs that are available (Colorwerks by Sloshwerks is particularly good)

Boom, there you go. It's bit of a niche thing, but hopefully this helps if you've run into problems with 3rd party hair. It's a pretty good way to open up possibilities and expand your model collection.

Description
So I've got a pretty large catalog of video game ports that I've collected over the past couple years. They...can be a bit hit or miss. Often the textures need quite a lot of work, the morphs and models can be a bit (or sometimes a lot) wonky, and often things don't really match up perfectly with other Daz figures. In particular, the hair. I've found that game port hair tends not to sit properly unless used on the exact model it was created for. However, I finally figured out a pretty good way of getting thigs to fit right. It doesn't always work, and it's far from perfect, but it's made it possible to get more use out of all of these. And of course, the original model has to be designed well enough for use in photorealistic renders, at least for what I'm doing.

The great thing is, most of these were free (thanks Shinteo for that, most came from their work). Which makes it even more worthwhile to put the work in to improve them.

I'm curious, which hairstyle do you like best on this character, and can you name the games/characters that these all came from?

Anyway, what I did for all of these is basically this:

1. Add a generic haircap to the character. I know there's freebie versions out there, I just use one that came with a hairstyle from the Daz store
2. Merge the hair into the scene
3. Reparent/refit to the haircap
4. Disable or ignore local transforms on the hair (this is a hidden property)
5. Edit geometry to convert to sub-d and potentially add a smoothing modifier with the collision item changed to the character (this isn't always necessary or successful)
6. Retexture the hair using any of the universal hair texture packs that are available (Colorwerks by Sloshwerks is particularly good)

Boom, there you go. It's bit of a niche thing, but hopefully this helps if you've run into problems with 3rd party hair. It's a pretty good way to open up possibilities and expand your model collection.