The Short Beard for Genesis is a great little product, but it stopped being able to follow any facial morphs with DS 4.5. Now, pre-4.5 it required a little tweaking of the Auto Follow attribute in the morph files to broaden the facial morphs it would follow, but it always worked to one degree or another. As of DS 4.5, it would attach to Genesis, but would not follow any facial morphs. After trial and error, I have found the fix. With DS 4.5, many of the morph files have NO auto follow attribute listed, which is why the beard stopped working.
Here is my fix for any that may be experiencing the same problem (I use Wordpad to edit the files):
The new .duf files can’t edited in a text document. The reason is that with 4.5 those files have been compressed. There is a way to decompress them though. If you open DAZ Studio 4.5 and go to Window—>Panes—->Batch Convert it will open the Batch Convert Tab.
This tab allows you to convert any native DAZ format from Binary to Encrypted for older formats or from compressed to uncompressed for .duf/.dsf files. What you will want to do is choose the file extensions you want to browse for on the left. You only need to have DUF and DSF checked, but it won’t hurt to have them all checked.
You can then choose to add an entire directory or just single files. If you check the recursive box when adding a directory it will add the selected directory as well as all of its sub directories.
For this fix, choose as your directory “data->DAZ 3D->Genesis->Base->Morphs->DAZ 3D->Base”.
Once you’ve chosen the files that need to be uncompressed choose Uncompress Listed Compressed Assests and hit apply. This will uncompress all of the chosen files. If you chose to add an entire directory that contained files already uncompressed it will leave those alone.
You can now browse on your hard drive to the location of the files, open and edit the uncompressed files. When you are finished editing you can use the batch converter to recompress the files.
In your content directory go to data->DAZ 3D->Genesis->Base->Morphs->DAZ 3D->Base, and you will find “CTRL” and “PHM” files. For each morph you want followed, such as “MouthOpen”, you will have to modify both the CTRL and PHM files. In these files find “channel”, then after “label”, add the “auto_follow” line as I have in the below example. I am not sure if order matters, but the following works. You will have to make the change to EVERY morph that you want the short beard to follow. Do not forget the expression files, like Fear and Angry. A tedious pain, but to me the product is worth it. After making your changes, compress the files/directory.
“channel” : {
“id” : “value”,
“type” : “float”,
“name” : “Value”,
“label” : “Mouth Open”,
“auto_follow” : true,
“visible” : false,
“value” : 0,
“current_value” : 0,
“min” : 0,
“max” : 1,
“clamped” : true,
“step_size” : 0.01
},
My thanks to DAZ support and the vendor, Blondie9999, for their help with my finding the solution.
