Getting a head mesh from 3ds max into Daz Genesis
tarekokail
Posts: 0
All right. After weeks of trying to figure this out, I'm turning to this forum to see if someone can help.
I have an idea for a character, an Asari from mass effect. I've managed to extract the relevant meshes from the game's .pcc files.
I'm having a bit of trouble loading the correct textures, but that's not all that big an issue.
What I'm having trouble with is getting the head, particularly the back of the head and the neck, into Daz to work with Genesis.
I'm aware of Dariofish's HFS shapes; I do not like the HFS asari morph as it is not accurate, so please do not point me to it.
Other things I've run into in the process; there are no 'back of the head' morphs that shrink that area of the skull to let the Asari mesh fit.
How would I go about getting the model to work with/as part of a Daz genesis figure?
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Comments
Do you understand what a morph is? A morph is pushing and pulling the vertices of a mesh into a new shape. A morph most have the same number of vertices as the mesh it is for and those vertices most be in the same order. Some random mesh you pulled out of a game cannot be used as a morph for Genesis.
I was led to believe that this was a forum to help new users figure out ways to achieve a goal, by pointing them to tools and approaches that would get them there. Your response was far too literal and uninformative, and did not suggest a course of action.
Yes, it is, and what you are trying to do is not the right way of doing it. You cannot just glue a mesh onto the genesis mesh and it will work.
The right way of doing is to open the Genesis Mesh in a 3D program, and sculpt it as the mesh you have, aka create a morph for Genesis. How that is done is between you and you 3D application of choice, but you cannot alter the number of polygons or vertrices, just alter them. Then you save the new mesh out, load that as a morph for Genesis.
The difference between your reply and jestmart's is like night and day. You gave me a course of action to follow that will be tedious but get me where I want to go. His reply was "You can't" with the implication that I should just give up. I started this thread very well aware that it wouldn't just "work" , two weeks of experimentation and editing and reading told me that.
Now, I'm wondering if there are any tools that will automate or at least speed up the process, as I am not looking forward to moving each vertex by hand, mirrored on an axis or no.
Thanks, I do have Hexagon, and I suppose I'll have to learn more about that, earlier than I'd planned.
I have no clue as I don't own any of the huge and expensive 3D packs, but you could ask the rephrased question on a forum specific dedicated to 3D modelling like a forum for ZBrush or Maya or 3DMax.
I create morphs generally using one of two methods (often a combination of these) both of which move a localized group of vertices at a time. It isn't necessary, and not usually desirable, to move each vertex independently one at a time.
One method is called proportional edit (in Blender) or soft selection (in Hexagon). You select a vertex or a small group and in this mode and when you move the selection the surrounding vertices move proportionally and smoothly with it. You can change the area of influence of the tool but it's functions are much more limited than the second method.
The other is sculpt mode, in which you cannot see individual vertices and the whole mesh is treated a little like a continuous shape on which you can use a variety of sculptor-like tools (sometimes called "brushes") to move the mesh around, almost as if it were clay. The program ZBrush specializes in this method, but many modelling applications have a sculpt mode (including the free Blender, which I use). Sculpting applications generally have a mode where vertices are added as you work in detail and you need to be sure you aren't using this mode, as of course for a morph you can't change the number of vertices or their order.
Although you must export Genesis to the modeller in base resolution, you can temporarily add a level of subdivision using a modifier when editing or sculpting so that you see how the morph will look, as you work, when it is applied to Genesis in DAZ Studio at high resolution. The subdivision modifier needs to be removed before you save, or not "applied" when saving.
Well, the important part was mentioned. A morph must have the same number of vertices, and more importantly the same vertex order. If you were to try and use any old mesh as a morph it would fail. When modifying your model in Hexagon, bear this in mind as any additional subdivision, surface cutting or added vertices will effectively break the morph rendering it unusable.
It is possible to add extra vertices for bonus detail, but that requires geografting which effectively replaces parts of the mesh with an entirely new one. Some faces do need to remain the same at the point of grafting though so that it seamlessly integrates with the figure.
Hiro:
Ah, I'd wondered why Blender and ZBrush were so popular. I can see that the sculpting tools would be far more efficient a way of modeling.
Herald:
Jestmart's response was still uninformative. Yes, it said why it can't work straight out of the box, but this was information that was obvious from knowing how computers work, simple observation, and two weeks of research and testing methods to try *some* way to get it to fit, either as a headpiece .obj or some other method. It also did NOT say anything else important, like how to increase the number of vertices or failing that, 'copy' the shape of the model.
Your response was helpful, as it explained the conceptual basis of how 'Anatomy' parts work in Daz. I was not certain what geografts were.
In my research, I did stumble across a program that takes a 2d face and exports it as a Genesis mesh. I am wary of the program, however; $99 for the face exporter plugin is more than I'd want to spend right now, and I have no idea whether it would work on the important parts; i.e. the scalp crest and neck ridges, the things that make an Asari distinctive.
I have facegen, it rocks, the demo works if you do not mind SI branded foreheads
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/15280/
I see that it does faces fairly well, but in this case, it's not the face I'm concerned with. It's the back of the head and the back and sides of the neck.
There is a free head morph set of various Mass Effect races for Genesis available from shareCG.com. There is, of course, a limit to what can be done with a morph of an object, particularly one like Genesis which has a fairly low poly count. A more detailed effort would require either a separate hair-like follower model (using transparency to blend) or a Geo-Graft figure which, in practice, would require a custom texture for the head (if not the whole figure) as well as the graft, to eliminate texture seams. But then you would likely be creating a custom texture in any case on an alien figure such as an Asari.
DarioFish did an excellent job with those morphs, and he's working on more :)
[Dryly] I believe I mentioned, in the first post, that I found Dariofish's Asari head morph to be unsatisfactory because of how inaccurate it is. If I had found it satisfactory, there would have been no need to make this thread. [/Dryly]
I suppose you could fit your extracted mesh if it is for your own use NOT redistribution to Genesis's head as a hair or bodysuit using the transfer tool.
and save as a clothing asset for your own reuse.
Of course it's for my own use. The most public it might get is if I post renders and scenes as fan art to somewhere like Deviantart.com.