Unfortunately, my original tutorial posting described how to transfer the UV maps from the shell to the character, but I didn’t cover what you do with them.
First as a reminder, when exporting from DAZ to another 3D application you don’t want to export the shell, so once the UVs are transferred in DAZ, delete the shell in DAZ before exporting. This is because during the DAZ exporting process, the Geoshell geometry mesh gets merged into the character geometry mesh as a single object, but the shell gets exported as a static separate geometry mesh and no longer has any value (as well as it won’t move with the character).
Second, it’s important to understand what DAZ does Geoshell geometry mesh materials during the exporting process. Even so the Geoshell geometry mesh has been merged with character geometry mesh, it still exports Geoshell geometry’s materials and UV selections as separate materials. This is why users will see more than one “Torso” material.
For users that don’t know how 3D materials are exported, I’ll give a quick description. Except for eyelashes and brows, your character is a single 3D geometry object made of polygons. Each polygon (and its four corner points) is assigned a unique ID number. All Genisis 8 females with the Golden Palace Geoshell have the same ID number regardless of the body shape. This is an important note as once a new UV map is created, it can be simply copied to other characters, again regardless of their shape. The UV map tells the 3D application where to put the flat 2D materials (images, colors, displacement, etc.) on the geometry mesh, hence why its called UV wrapping. On our Genisis 8 female characters, we want to use more than one material for the single geometry mesh. To manage this, a polygon selection tag is exported for each material. Each polygon selection tag tells the 3D application what collection of polygons belongs to each material (using their ID numbers). Since the UV map is flat (2D), some if the maps polygons can be very small even if the geometry mesh polygons are very large. This results in material to look “blurry” or lack of detail a common issue with the Golden Palace (and all other gens products).
When DAZ exports, it creates a polygon selection tag for each material including one for each material from the Geoshell including the polygons that overlap with characters polygons (this is where the additional Toros materials are coming from).
To use the exported materials (images) without modifications, it’s best to “merge” as many polygon selection tags as possible and delete the redundant materials. This will greatly reduce render time because the 3D application doesn’t have to load the same images multiple times. The other benefit of doing this is when using a high-end render engine such as Arnold, VRay or Redshift like I do. When using Sub Surface Scattering (SSS), most render engines will have “bleed” where two materials come together. This can show up as dark or gray seams. This is why I merge the lips and ears to the single face material and delete the separate lip and ear materials.
For Golden Palace (and other gen products), I don’t simply do what many others do by just merging the selections tags. I merge some of the Golden Palace UV polygons to the Torso material where the polygons are already small and don’t require the detail, so I have more room to expand the remaining Golden Palace UV polygons to obtain more detail and hide the material seams.
Since this process is unique to each 3D application, I can’t explain how to do this. I can though create a FBX file that you could import into your 3D application then simply delete your character’s existing materials tags, selection tags, and UV tag, and copy and paste the tags from my FBX imported file. If interested, someone will need to explain how to attach a file to this forum.
Bruce