Digital Art Zone

I have some older content products that shipped with PMDs.  None of these seem to work properly in DS4P 4.0.3.47 64-bit on Windows 7.

When they are in a Figure, DS4P will complain if it can’t find the PMD file (e.g., a number of these are from 3D-Age, and their older products were loaded directly into Libraries/Characters, while all the new stuff is in Libraries/Characters/3D-Age and I wanted to consolidate them all into the 3D-Age subfolder and thus had to hand-edit the cr2 files to include this new sub-directory in the morphBinaryFile lines for DAZ to load the cr2 without complaining about a file-not-found).  However, none of the morphs in the PMD actually work.  When any morph is adjusted, the geometry “explodes” for lack of a better term.  This happens with ALL products that use PMDs that I have, regardless of vendor.  Exnem is another example where all their products have been saved with binary morphs and do not work properly in DS4P.

For props, it seems the PMDs are not even loaded at all.  I’ve found some entries about editing them to use morphBinaryFile instead of morphPmdFile, but if they’re just going to turn into exploding vertices like the figures do, that’s not gonna help much.

I’ve seen stuff about using scripts to inject the PMDs into Studio, but those seem to reference DS2 and DS3.  Is this still something one is supposed to do with DS4, despite it appearing to at least recognize the morphBinaryFile elements?

In general, is this stuff supposed to “just work” work in DS4P? If so, why isn’t it for me? And if not, how do I go about fixing it?  I don’t own Poser, so I can’t just load them and re-save them with binary morph targets turned off.  Converting them to weight mapped for Genesis allows them to be adjusted based on Genesis morphs.  But there are many things that don’t convert well to Genesis (particularly shoes/boots)...

Thanks

Well, I just tried hand-editing one of the props that uses PMDs to use morphBinaryFile and to move the line up to before the prop statement as per the stuff I found Googling around.  However, it still doesn’t work in DS4P.  I don’t get exploding vertices, but I also don’t get any response at all when I move one of the morph sliders in the Properties tab.

If I recall correctly pmd files are poser files. There is a script somewhere that will import Pms for ds

Daz Studio doesn’t natively support PMD morphs.  There did used to be a free script (on the old forums) for using them in DS, but I’m not sure the script was ever updated to work with DS 4.

I asked about this resiliently in the “General Freebie Requests- thread” at Freepozitory.. Kerya kindly provided two links.

Kerya - 22 June 2012 12:55 AM

PMDs ...
here:
http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=3211827#3211827
or Kuroyume’s free software MorphExchange
http://www.kuroyumes-developmentzone.com/poser/freebies/

InjectPMD for DS4.0 is still in development and MorphExchange do not handle injected PMDs and I have not tested it myself yet.

.pmd files should be supported for figures, at least, though the syntax ddi keep changing. However, if they are failing (with bad vertex order) only in DS4 that sounds like a bug and should be reported (again).

The problem is that many venders have no idea that the modelling programs they use don’t do single skin mesh with soft split grouping, which is what Poser & DS prefer, but instead do multi-part mesh, so instead of a single welded mesh you end up with a mesh with duplicate vertices along all of the group edges.

Now the problem with this in DS4 is that it would appear to be welding the mesh when it loads it, which is changing the vertice order, but surprisingly it only ‘blows’ the morphs when they are in PMD form, if they are built into the cr2/hr2/pp2 then it appears DS is able to compensate and the morphs work.

Richard Haseltine - 30 June 2012 07:42 AM

.pmd files should be supported for figures, at least, though the syntax ddi keep changing. However, if they are failing (with bad vertex order) only in DS4 that sounds like a bug and should be reported (again).

Absolutely. My copy of DS3A has no problem with PMD files. Exploding vertices and non-working morph channels occur in DS4 only.

cwichura - 29 June 2012 03:50 PM

IWhen they are in a Figure, DS4P will complain if it can’t find the PMD file (e.g., a number of these are from 3D-Age, and their older products were loaded directly into Libraries/Characters, while all the new stuff is in Libraries/Characters/3D-Age and I wanted to consolidate them all into the 3D-Age subfolder and thus had to hand-edit the cr2 files to include this new sub-directory in the morphBinaryFile lines for DAZ to load the cr2 without complaining about a file-not-found).

Just as a general comment on this, I recommend creating a Morphs folder under runtime/libraries and moving all .PMDs out of the character folders and into sub-folders of Morphs, that way you can change the references in the .CR2s to point to Morphs and they won’t break if you subsequently move the character or whatever (I do similar for any item that includes .OBJs or textures in with the main PP2 or CR2 folders). Just because the PA has broken the ability to freely rename item folders doesn’t mean you can’t put it back!