Digital Art Zone

I downloaded the freebie Genesis proportions morphs noted in the freebie thread above.  Like all things Daz, however, there are no instructions.  I see them in the content library, I click on them, the various body shaping dials flicker…but I see no new controllers to make proportion adjustments.  Making a character taller or shorter…with longer or shorter legs or torso…should be a basic controller.  Any suggestions on making the morph work?

If you are referring to Adam’s Genesis conversion of the Stephanie 4 proportions, they are sliders and can be found under Parameters->Actor->Universal->Proportions.

Unless you have the Stephanie morph injections for V4, I have no idea what you are seeing in the Content Library.

The instructions are in the original post as well as being included in the Readme inside the zip file.

Install:
Unzip to the same directory that your DS4 Default Content is installed to.

Usage:
You will find these morphs via the Parameter’s pane under Actor > Universal > Proportions or via the Shape Pane under Universal > Proportions.

The one I downloaded was:

Proportions Gn by AMR
by Adam Rasmussen

And I didn’t notice any new sliders in the Shape Panel.  I did find a bit of a work around on my own:  that is to use the Child Slider and turn off the restraints.  This allows me to make a much larger adult.  I’ll still use all your tips to try and change proportions of each body element.

Here’s a tangential question:  Sometimes when I increase the size of the characters chest, the arms bend oddly at the shoulder, resulting in arms that are too tight agains the side of the body.  I assume it’s the rigged bones that need adjusting…to move the pivot point of the shoulder joint outward.  Is there a way to do this?

Check the parameters panel instead of the shaping pane please.  There is a bug in certain versions of DS4 causing the shaping panel to not show all morphs.

CAn’t find them there.  Maybe I put them into the wrong folder.  I put the Morphs folder in the My Library…People…Genesis folder.  This is part of the documents and not the application folder.  Is that right?

The correct Folder is: My Library\data\DAZ 3D\Genesis\Base\Morphs\adamr001\Proportions Gn AMR

But you should only have to copy the “data” folder from the morphs package and paste it inside “My Library”, it should install correctly.

That did the trick.  I had it in the wrong folder.  Still learning the hierarchies of the program…with half of it in the Applications folder, and another half in the Documents folder.  So the tree I have is Documents/Studio/ My Library/data/daz3d/genesis/base/morphs.  Thanks for the help!

dkutzera - 16 July 2012 01:54 PM

That did the trick.  I had it in the wrong folder.  Still learning the hierarchies of the program…with half of it in the Applications folder, and another half in the Documents folder.  So the tree I have is Documents/Studio/ My Library/data/daz3d/genesis/base/morphs.  Thanks for the help!

Okay, phew!  Glad you managed to get it sorted.

The sheer length of that path makes evident the need for an optimization in the folder structure.

Yes, the path seems long.  I have yet to figure out what elements Daz finds on it’s own and puts in a left side director, and what elements I have to hunt for in the right side directories.  IN a way, their Smart Content system makes things more confusing.  I’d recommend distinct files on characters, morphs, poses, etc…that directly relate to tabs in the program.  And I’d have all such elements keeps in the Applications folder, not the Documents folder.  Is there a tutorial on file structure?

Everything Content wise was moved to Documents because of Read Write issues in the new operating systems. The Apps folders are no longer viable as content storage areas. Read only data is fine but we need a place to save our work. Thus the move of the content folder.

tralen - 17 July 2012 08:22 AM

The sheer length of that path makes evident the need for an optimization in the folder structure.

I disagree, The point of a folder hierarchy is 1) to provide a logical representation of the data held within that allows someone who understands the structure to find what they are looking for without confusion and 2) to divide up the data in such a hierarchical fashion that any risks of data being misinterpreted, misrepresented or misunderstood are reduced (and in the environments I’m used to 3) convince customer and regulator QA of all of the above). Any ‘simplification’ or ‘optimization’ of the folder structure would result in files from different products or suppliers being held together, creating rather than preventing confusion. The structure in the given path starts with the data folder (everything prior is just addressing), drops down into a supplier specific folder (daz3d), a product specific folder (genesis), sub-product (base) and then the specific component within the product (morphs). If you look in morphs then you’ll start to see the complexity that the folder structure is simplifying out, with a sub-folder per supplier (15 there already in my runtime, with 1700 files), and within those a sub-folder per individual morph product (DAZ3D alone has 22 sub-folders, and almost 1300 files). When it comes to sorting through that many files for the one I want - and I have edited files at this level just this week - I for one want them as split up as the folder structure allows. Having been a configuration management engineer in a CMM level 4 organisation, I give the Studio folder design my thumbs up.

Unfortunately not all PAs do a good job of following DAZ’s example - some even seem to have trouble spelling their name the same twice running! so we get a lot of parallel entries outside of DAZ folders, but outside of data you can pretty much re-organise files to suit yourself (the sole caveats there being the geometries and textures folders under the runtime hierarchy inherited from Poser, but if you know what you’re doing and are willing to edit files you can even reformat those).

dkutzera - 17 July 2012 08:22 AM

And I’d have all such elements keeps in the Applications folder, not the Documents folder.

A general principle of good software engineering design is not to mix executables and data. Things in your content are data, things in the application folder are the executables. The later versions of Windows now have issues with data in the applications folder, so good principle got turned into necessary move.

I’m personally not a fan of the My Documents folder, but I’ve had my runtime separate from my DAZ installation pretty much from the word go back in version 2 (maybe even v1), and many people have multiple runtimes, often spread over different hard-drives.

IN a way, their Smart Content system makes things more confusing.

If you organise your content folders to suit yourself you don’t actually need smart content, and it’s easy enough to turn off and set Studio to display your actual file hierarchy.