Digital Art Zone

Hello! First of all I’d like to say thanks for tolerating my many newbie questions, this forum has been very helpful.

Today I’d like to understand how to add fantasy body parts to a model, whether a Daz model or a custom one. I’m creating a series of characters with features like wings, horns, and tails. With my current knowledge, I think I can handle modeling and rigging these without help. What I’d like to learn is how to attach them to the body of my model. Is there a tutorial on this somewhere? Thanks in advance!

In general you want the items to match the parent figure’s grouping and positioning at the point of joining, then you can use the parent figure as a skeleton donor, add the extra bones needed for the item, and make it a conformer. For Genesis (and any other TriAx rigged figure) in DS4 you can also match the precise vertices at the joint ad use GeoGrafting to attach the item more smoothly.

Thanks, Richard. I found a tutorial here: (http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=184183&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0) about geo-grafting and was able to pull it off with a simple graft item. I’m not sure what you mean by skeleton donors and conformers, though. Could you explain that a little more please?

If a figure, not a static prop, is to follow another figure then it needs to have the same bone names and locations for the application to match it up - it can then have extra bones beyond that, as a wing would, but it needs to overlap and match in part. otherwise you can simply parent the add-on figure to the appropriate part of the parent figure.

Thanks for explaining. The tutorial I read seems to cover that, the Transfer Utility gave the graft item all the same bones as Genesis. What the tutorial did not cover was how to save grafts to a figure. I’ve created and rigged my own character, which I’m going to graft wings, tails, horns etc. to. I’d like the grafted items to already be attached when I load my character. How do I do this?

Anyone know the answer?

Sorry, I missed your reply when the forum ate my new post markers. You need to export your add-ons as DSF figures in order to preserve the setup information for grafting. File>Save as>Support Asseet>DSF Figure or prop, as I recall (the menu location has been soemwhat changeable as new betas have been released).