Odalisque-ish

Meet Andrew G8M (version 10) and Alessandro G3M (version 4 ... I think).

So. Way way back in the mists of prehistory (... or June of last year, whichever), I tried bringing Andrew from G2M to G3M; it wasn't terribly successful -- version 9 just looked ... odd -- and I figured he'd be forever orphaned back in Genesis 2.

Enter Singular Blues G3M-to-G8M script.

The thing about the script is, it's designed to work in the following way: you favorite the desired morph; the script reads ... something in Studio that tells it what morph has been favorited, and then it copies and translates the morph from G3 to G8 ... along with every other morph in the directory.  Most character creators do two levels of directory: one for themselves as PA, and one inside that for the individual character, so that the script's need to take entire directories is generally self-limiting.

Generally.

This is not the case for morphs that have been transferred via GenX, which are all in one directory based on the source character.

What I was trying to do at the time was to transfer Rob Elite's head morph -- which I'd transferred intact to G2M ages ago, and then to G3M as a single morph with all sorts of non-Michael-4 G2M stuff added in. When it pulled over Rob's G2M version, it also pulled over every other morph I'd transferred to G3M from G2M. It took me a while to figure out what had happened; I'd been puzzled because a process that Singular Blues said should take no more than a few minutes took over an hour. That it had pulled over the entire thing explained it.

Among the things it pulled over was the G3M version of Andrew that I really hadn't liked much. And ... it fixed most of the things I didn't like. His body shape was mostly right, the scary big eyes were back to normal size (oddly enough, a result of the different geometry between G3 and G8 -- Singular Blues' script tends to make eyes a bit too small, which was exactly what was needed to make them balance out). He was just about perfect....

Except.

I can't figure out if this is a G8 thing or a script thing or maybe both, but whatever it is, it HAAAAAAATES Michael 4. (And also Victoria 6, but that's not relevant right now.) It pulled over the Sloshwerks version of the G2M Michael 4 shape that I'd transferred to G3M to see if that could be used in place of the Dimension3D Michael 4 shape, which tends to bring the Michael 4 pose along for the ride. Either G8 or the script hate Michael 4 so much that depending on what you're doing, it will forcibly dial the shape out without any input by you. On one figure, I tried autofitting Oh My Brows to a character that had the shape dialed in at 100%, and there was this weird, visible sort of POP! and suddenly the character head's shape was just odd. It took plowing through the sliders to realize what was going on. With Rob, what it's doing is another weird variation; it's basically now saying, "You want Michael 4 in that character? fine, I'll forcibly dial out EVERY OTHER SHAPE without you asking for that." I'm guessing this is a byproduct of Michael 4 from G2M via G3M being so thoroughly off that the script probably didn't translate it correctly, and G8M being unable to properly work with the incorrect shape. (I didn't think that Studio had the logic to try to get around that type of issue, somehow.)

Anyway, for Andrew, what that meant is that his hands were off. WAY off. He had the longest fingers I'd seen since I was trying to do the OBJ morph transfer method, and doing the ERC freeze incorrectly. But in this case, the ERC freeze actually was done correctly by the script. When it's done wrong, not only are fingers sometimes very long, but they get even longer when you move them. Andrew's fingers didn't stretch out that way; they were just really really long to start with.

What I wound up being able to do was to not only dial out Michael 4, but to actually make it negative, until his fingers were a bit longer than normal (I just this minute realized I needed to dial out M4 another -0.2 beyond where he was), and then to use Darius 7 to replace him. Weirdly, that one-to-one swap didn't visibly change his overall shape a huge amount. Also, the program seems perfectly happy with negative Michael 4, for some reason.

Once that was done, I decided that I might as well rebuild his boyfriend Alessandro from the ground up. In this case, for G3M rather than for G8M, because he's older than Andrew and uses a raft of Aging Morphs, which aren't available for G8 as yet. (Once they're available, his other underlying morphs are already in G8M, so bringing him over won't be hard.) He uses the texture for Dylan G8M now (not a fan of Alessandro's previous texture, really) and his underlying morphs are a combination of William mature version and Alexander for Kimo (but without Kimo), both by Darwin's Mishap, plus a bajillion other sliders. I also figured out how to use a combination of UHT2 and Hair Lustre shaders to make Gwyn hair ... not look every second of its age, let's say. There's a very tiny amount of his original base shape in there, entirely without Michael 4, just for the hell of it.