Digital Art Zone

I was messing around with genesis the other day and decided to try some Gen3 items. The clothing sorta worked, but the hair… I forget the item for sure, but it was one with a long pony tail. After conforming completed it fit to the scalp quite well. Only problem was the movement morphs were all gone, the tail was sticking straight up, there was no rigging to control the tail and, even after disabling the protected topology, no morphs could be made.

Ouch.

I tried to see if the problem was just as bad in DS4.5, but—keep in mind I can’t stand DS and effectively never use it—I can’t get the hair to even appear. My gen3 runtime isn’t even available so I tried a gen4 hair. It loads (there’s a dialog) but never appears.

So, my question is what has been other people’s experience with genesis and non-genesis hair in Carrara. Particularly with longer where it will need to be posed. (I’m trying to gauge if I should post a bug report.)

I find it easier to just bring the hair into the scene without parenting it to Genesis and resize it to fit manually.  It’s usually pretty easy to do, and it keeps the movement morphs.

thoromyr - 21 November 2012 10:12 PM

I was messing around with genesis the other day and decided to try some Gen3 items. The clothing sorta worked, but the hair… I forget the item for sure, but it was one with a long pony tail. After conforming completed it fit to the scalp quite well. Only problem was the movement morphs were all gone, the tail was sticking straight up, there was no rigging to control the tail and, even after disabling the protected topology, no morphs could be made.

Ouch.

I tried to see if the problem was just as bad in DS4.5, but—keep in mind I can’t stand DS and effectively never use it—I can’t get the hair to even appear. My gen3 runtime isn’t even available so I tried a gen4 hair. It loads (there’s a dialog) but never appears.

So, my question is what has been other people’s experience with genesis and non-genesis hair in Carrara. Particularly with longer where it will need to be posed. (I’m trying to gauge if I should post a bug report.)

The trick, at least in DS is to manually transfer the hair…

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/1866/

mjc1016 - 21 November 2012 11:34 PM

The trick, at least in DS is to manually transfer the hair…

Thanks for that. Regrettably, it doesn’t appear that that sort of functionality is present in Carrara. On reviewing the situation the key problem is that the hair is boned and the process of conforming to genesis removes the bones.

What I’d like to confirm is whether or not DS also removes the bones from such hair. Given how genesis works I don’t see why the bones (which are rooted to ‘head’) would have to be removed but I could be missing something.

That is autofit at work. But as far as just dropping in and parenting hair to a figure in carrara, I have been doing it for years. Works nicely with hr2 or cr2 hair. Move it in to place, parent it to the head, then use modeling in the assembly room to fit it.

HI thoromyr

When you use Auto fit, ,, what happens is that the clothing or hair is “Converted” to fit genesis,.
it’s not simply auto adjust the dials to fit this figure,. since the product wasn’t made to ever work on genesis,.
There;s only one way to make it work, and that’s to take the basic model, convert it, and inject any morphs from the figure it’s being applied to,.. into the model that’s being applied,.

The same applies to using DSON in Poser,. where the user can “Transfer active morphs” from the figure into the clothing,  to make the clothing fit,. the same applies to hair or shoes, or anything else that was originally built for a different figure, and you’re now trying to convert to work with genesis.

In Carrara,. if you DON’T have any figure selected in the scene,,... then you can load a Hair model, and it won’t be “auto conformed or fit to any figure,.. then you can move it,. and parent it to the Head, or use a “neutral” parent, such as a Target helper, which can be parented to the figures head,.. and which you can also parent the hair to that target.

You’ll obviously need to make any Fitting adjustments manually,. but you would retain any morphs or bones, since this item isn’t being Converted,

Hope that makes sense

That process, I linked above, will usually preserve the morphs…especially in DS 4.5.

If you can stand to run DS for a couple of hours, then you can convert a bunch of hair props (especially if they happen to have Gen4 fits, it makes it easier)  and SAVE the converted items as new…which should then load in Carrara.

mjc1016 - 22 November 2012 09:54 AM

That process, I linked above, will usually preserve the morphs…especially in DS 4.5.

If you can stand to run DS for a couple of hours, then you can convert a bunch of hair props (especially if they happen to have Gen4 fits, it makes it easier)  and SAVE the converted items as new…which should then load in Carrara.

Yeah, there’s the rub. As noted above, I can’t get any hair to appear in DS4.5 although it obviously loads. Equally obvious is that I’m doing something pretty blatantly wrong. But experience has taught me that when it comes to DS I just can’t stand it long enough to learn to use it. Its a shame that Carrara is quickly losing ground to DS—there are still some limited ways in which Carrara is better, but there is an increasing number of ways in which it is not.

Sure, I could spend time trying to get a decent fit by manual effort in the modeling room, but honestly that isn’t why I’m creating 3D rendered images. The more drudgery that can be offloaded to the computer the better—it allows me to focus on setting a scene, adjusting shaders and setting up lighting. Those are the aspects that I enjoy, someone else might find any of those to be drudgery or enjoy fiddling with fits.

But there is no fundamental reason why auto fitting and morph projection must eliminate extended skeletons and original morphs. That is a limitation—how much effort it would take to overcome I’m not sure, but it certainly isn’t insurmountable.

Note that if you conform the aiko 3 hair to aiko, Carrara will go through the motions of morph projection but it does not eliminate the object’s skeleton so, in the case of the long pony tail, it can still be posed, nor are the hair’s original morphs eliminated.

I was going to crosscheck something I remembered and wanted to be sure of relative to this, but the beta nature of Carrara 8.5 has reared its ugly head: “fit to” no longer works. The dialog has two drop down menus, the first for the figure it was designed for and the second for the type of item it is. The figure selection still works, but the item type does not. It says ‘None’ and on clicking it expands with nothing in the drop down menu. This problem appears permanent as closing Carrara and restarting does not clear it.

thoromyr - 22 November 2012 11:12 AM

I was going to crosscheck something I remembered and wanted to be sure of relative to this, but the beta nature of Carrara 8.5 has reared its ugly head: “fit to” no longer works. The dialog has two drop down menus, the first for the figure it was designed for and the second for the type of item it is. The figure selection still works, but the item type does not. It says ‘None’ and on clicking it expands with nothing in the drop down menu. This problem appears permanent as closing Carrara and restarting does not clear it.

Well, the object type selection is forced to ‘None’, but it turns out it still fits to genesis correctly. At least some morphs survive this process (they are all still displayed, I only verified one) but as the tail is posed via bones rather than morphs it still cannot be used correctly.