Digital Art Zone

Attached is my old wip of my stargate model.

altough I used blender to model, I have found hex invaluable with naming and grouping the model.

Due to too many errors I have to re-model.

The new updated version now has correct uv-maps, textures.

I have nine chevrons, each I wish to create a new morph; basicly all I wish to do is move the chevron down and then save this as a new morph.

Then in daz studio load this new morph into the param.

I am using daz studio 4 pro edition, If you could help I am most grateful.

First rule of morphs - you can’t add or delete vertices.  Second rule - morphs move in a straight line from origin to final.

How you would go about doing the morph depends on the structure of the model - if the chevrons are integrated in the model, I really can’t see any way of moving them any distance.

Maybe if you could post a sketch of what you want the final to look like?  Is the movement going to be animated in a video?

Roygee - 05 August 2012 10:59 AM

First rule of morphs - you can’t add or delete vertices.  Second rule - morphs move in a straight line from origin to final.

How you would go about doing the morph depends on the structure of the model - if the chevrons are integrated in the model, I really can’t see any way of moving them any distance.

Maybe if you could post a sketch of what you want the final to look like?  Is the movement going to be animated in a video?

Many thanks for your reply.

each chevron is a seperate object and not intergrated into the model.

I would like show a animation of each chevron moving into an engaged place, “stargate movie” ref.

I would also like to be able to change the texture of this new morph, only when correctly engaged.

Each chevron will move in a straight line from its holding postion to the new morph position, idealy i will be able to control this within the parm of the chevron: 0 holding 20 engaged, using a slider.

As this is my first ever attempt at trying this, I thought best to ask for advice and tips on the correct steps required.

If you could help, I am most grateful.

OK - that makes it a lot simpler.

Not sure how you have this set up, so just to test, I made a quick mock-up in Hex and sent it to Studio.  Saved it as a Daz scene and closed Hex.  Sent it back to Hex via the bridge.  In Hex, I selected each chevron separately by selecting a face and added to the selection by holding Shift and hitting the + on the numpad until all faces selected.  Moved to the centre of the ring.  Repeated for the rest of the chevrons and sent it back to Studio.  In my model I had the whole lot as one mesh, although not physically joined.

If you have yours as each chevron being a separate mesh, you can simply select each and move into position.

In Studio you get an option to save the morph - did that.  Have the morph set to zero at the start of the time-line and at 100% at the end.  Works fine.

I don’t know much about Studio’s materials, so can’t say whether animating shaders is an option - this can be done in Carrara.  Hopefully someone who knows more can jump in and help - or ask for help in the Studio forum.

Good luck with the project

Roygee - 05 August 2012 02:38 PM

OK - that makes it a lot simpler.

Not sure how you have this set up, so just to test, I made a quick mock-up in Hex and sent it to Studio.  Saved it as a Daz scene and closed Hex.  Sent it back to Hex via the bridge.  In Hex, I selected each chevron separately by selecting a face and added to the selection by holding Shift and hitting the + on the numpad until all faces selected.  Moved to the centre of the ring.  Repeated for the rest of the chevrons and sent it back to Studio.  In my model I had the whole lot as one mesh, although not physically joined.

If you have yours as each chevron being a separate mesh, you can simply select each and move into position.

In Studio you get an option to save the morph - did that.  Have the morph set to zero at the start of the time-line and at 100% at the end.  Works fine.

I don’t know much about Studio’s materials, so can’t say whether animating shaders is an option - this can be done in Carrara.  Hopefully someone who knows more can jump in and help - or ask for help in the Studio forum.

Good luck with the project

Thankyou very much for the help.

I used a different approach, each chevron is actually the front and the back pieces as a single .obj file with the piviot point in the center.

I was able to select the chevron within hex as a object and move it into the position needed.

Excellent use of hexagon and creating morphs, however it shows hexagon bridge within the parm is there a way to change this ?

I wonder could i create a new version of each chevron but with a new texture and load this as a morph and not use the bridge tool, just an idea ?

Again thankyou very much for your help

A pleasure to help.

I’m not very computer savvy - by parm I guess you mean the line in Studio that gives the origin of the morph?  Yes, you can change that in the drop-down list.

Another method of making morphs in Studio is to use Morphloader - that get complicated, which is why the bridge was invented.  For Morphloader, you export as .obj from Studio, do the morphs and load it back - then there’s a bunch of stuff you have to do to get it to work - I’m rusty on this aspect, but recall that in DS3 you had to have a couple of free plugins to do this - don’t know about DS4.  I only have DS4 because it is necessary for Genesis to work in Carrara - don’t use it at all.

Anyhow, using Morphloader, you can morph the object in any modelling app - not restricted to Hex.

As far as duplicating the chevrons, this would have to be done in the original, not the morph copy - that would be breaking rule number 1.  With that caveat in mind, yes, you could do it - I assume the purpose would be to turn visibility on and off along the time-line to make it appear that the colours have changed?  Always supposing that DS4 is capable of doing that?