Digital Art Zone

Hi all

I’ve just completed rigging my first tri-ax model in DS 4.0.3.47 - it went very well and I must congratulate Daz staff on the improvements on the improvements over DS3 Figure Setup - with a couple of exceptions.

When testing, I found one bone which was wrongly parented - very easy to make this mistake when you have over 80 bones and the hierarchy lines and parenting don’t show, as they did previously.

With the old FST, this was easy enough to fix - just “copy from selected”, fix then “copy to selected”.  I don’t find any such option in this version and they only way I can get it “fixed” is to create a new figure.  This gives a duplicated figure with the bones correctly placed, but they are in default position and all the weight-mapping is gone, which means that I’d gave to go through the whole process again.

Please tell me there is a method of fixing such errors without going to such lengths - and is there any method of checking parenting, other than eyeballing a very complex structure?

In fact, is there any in-depth documentation on the CCT?  All I’ve seen are a couple of superficial tuts.

Any advice will be gratefully received:-)

With the Joint Editor tool, right-click on the bone and from the contest menu choose Edit>Reparent bone….

The docs are here, but they are very much a work-in-progress. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/creating_content/start

Thank you, Richard - to the rescue again!

Lots of handy tools there and the documentation will come in very handy.

It was working so nicely this morning - a couple of areas needed more weight-painting to better smooth transitions, but I couldn’t get any brush to take.  The only smoothing I can do is to select the face group, expand the selection, fill 100% then smooth - 10% according to the tut on the duck - although I did vary that according to placement.

The areas that needed more smoothing needed in one direction, not all-round, but couldn’t get that to work - any hints there.?

Then I messed up somehow and the bones don’t show, although they can be manipulated from the parameter sliders - all I get is a tiny manipulator in the centre of the figure - In Carrara there is also just the one manipulator in the centre.  The rotation of the bones in the body work fine, but the feet, fingers and tail translate instead of rotating.  Because I can’t see the bones, I have no idea what their orientation may be, so can’t manually align them - changing the rotation order has no effect.

I guess I’ll have to start from scratch - any ideas on what may have happened, so I can avoid it next time round?

I see in the duck tutorial that the default rotation order is left at XYZ and the bones manipulated manually - would that be a better way of doing it?

Thank you for the help

Nothing helpful to suggest for smoothing, but the missing bones sounds like what happens if there’s no group for the bone - in general bones are sized and positioned to fit inside their group’s bounding box, along the principal axis (which is also a reason to set the axes) so if there was no group they’d be tiny, and misplaced so that applying a bend would appear to move the whole affected mesh.