Daz 3D Genesis 9 – Breasts!

TLDR;
Beware: “Vo Sorg HD for Genesis 9”

They F*”(“§!!! freaking – did it again!

ARRRGHHH!
I spent days tracking down this “bug!”

Alright, let’s talk about this.

The people at DAZ don’t seem to grasp that humans come in two different genders. Yes, they sell tons of clothes and hairstyles, but when it comes to primary or secondary genitalia, they turn a blind eye.

To make female models appear more natural, I use a package called “Strix – STX Nipples/STX Navel.” It adds enhancements, like more detailed geografts. Until recently, this worked great (which is more than I can say for other packages that made similar promises).

Then, DAZ released a new version. I’d been using DAZ 4.22.19, and the new version is DAZ 4.23.01.

Finally, I had time to render again, and, as you can see in the intro image to this post – the left part of the image.

ARG! Geografts visible!

You can clearly see the geografts from the Strix package. What the…! I adjusted dozens of settings—surface options, shaders, everything—but couldn’t get satisfactory results.

Eventually, I was ready to give up. I decided to roll back to the older DAZ version, 4.22.19. How hard could that be?

Spoiler: Rolling back DAZ is a nightmare.

ARG! DAZ 4.22.19 is no where to be found!

DAZ 4.22.19 is nowhere to be found! There’s no way to officially download an older DAZ version. What sense does that make? Never heard of incompatibility issues or rollbacks? What kind of company doesn’t allow this?!

Ok.

I tried to calm down and hit up Google. After some digging, I found a copy on a shady WareZ site. After running nearly a hundred virus scans to ensure it wouldn’t nuke my hard drive, I installed it in a different directory.

But wait – Hahaha, ROFL… Mega-ROFL! No, it wasn’t that easy. I had to manually edit every directory path to ensure my “new” DAZ install wouldn’t interfere with my original.

Is it really a surprise that people might want to run two versions of the software? To avoid bugs or simply for workflow purposes? Apparently, it’s forbidden to run multiple versions at once. WHAT?

Anyways…

After installing the minimal packages needed for that image, I tried rendering again.

YES!

It worked! The image was clean again! (see the right image) Phew! I can render again.

I started reinstalling missing packages—manually, with DIM, and with DAZ Connect. About 300 packages later, after spending half a day on it, I started rendering again.

NAY!

Bam! Geografts visible on Julia’s chest again… What? Ok, I’ll give DAZ this one – ultimately, the new DAZ version wasn’t the cause.

ARG! Geografts again!

After a while, it dawned on me that one of my reinstalled packages might be interfering with my render. And it was clearly something that wasn’t directly used in the scene, as the render had worked fine before.

ARGH!
I tried everything. Something in some folder in DAZ—unrelated to the actual scene—was interfering.

Here’s my detective process:

1. Uninstalled everything via DIM. Somehow, uninstalling takes MORE time than installing. (This wasn’t the first, nor the last, time I sat there fuming!)
   
   No change.
   
2. Deleted manually installed assets. Painstakingly, I went through each “source” zip, located the corresponding files in the library, and deleted them. Some needed to stay, as they were required for the scene.
   
   No change.
   
3. Tried to tackle online content. There’s practically no efficient way to uninstall it “officially.” Yes, you can navigate to the right-click menu to uninstall, but I’d be doing that for half a month.

So I opened the file system and navigated to the “cloud” folder. 173 packages were installed. Jesus.

These assets aren’t easily identifiable; the top directory is just a number, the product ID. Drilling down to /people/genesis/morphs… etc., you can figure out what each asset is, but it’s not practical.

Time for binary search.

I divided the set in halves, rendered, halved again, and repeated.

After 8 renders – each taking about 10 minutes – I finally found the culprit:

THAT package!

The problematic package was somehow changing my female figures so that “Strix – STX Nipples/STX Navel” showed its geografts. This package had absolutely nothing to do with the scene I was working on. I hadn’t even rendered that character! It was just sitting in some DAZ folder, minding its own business.

WHAT software changes its behavior based on an unused asset?!

ARRRGHHH! AGAIN!

The exact files causing the issue were:

.\data\daz 3d\genesis 9\base\morphs\vootw\vo sorg\vo sorg body hd details lv3.dhdm

.\data\daz 3d\genesis 9\base\morphs\vootw\vo sorg\vo sorg body hd details lv3.dsf