Digital Art Zone

All I can say is Yikes! No wonder no one has made the 3d coat applink.

And since Daz most likely will not address the shortcomings of the SDK in functionality and documentation this is a futile wish.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.
-M

Fenric - 14 September 2012 11:36 AM

In Carrara, morphs are handled by a two-layer system of “Morph Area” and “Morph Target”.  For native figures, it is pretty straightforward - you usually only bother with one area.

For poser figures, there is one morph area for each rigging group, and then targets under that.  The first trouble is splitting the newly imported morph up into the groups: getting the loop to work properly, handling name collisions, handling welded vs. unwelded groups, and dodging around alternate geometry all get fun.

Another trouble is that your new morph won’t show up in the tree view.  The sliders there are not directly tied to the “real” morph targets, but the linkage is not documented or exposed to the API - this would need to be fixed.

A third problem is that Carrara only adds the morph area if the item’s CR2 file actually had morphs.  If you load a shirt, for instance, that has no morphs, it will have no morph areas.  If there are no areas, you can’t create a target.  I don’t know what magic is required to get CreateMorphArea to do its thing, but I can’t get it to work on a poser figure.  I think it might tie in to the previous issue as well - there is some behind-the-scenes magic going on that just isn’t in the SDK.

And I already mentioned that the UV functions in the SDK do not work on Poser figures as far as I can tell.

Fenric - 14 September 2012 11:37 AM

Supporting the freebies is even worse, surprisingly enough.  I’ve never had so many aggressive and impolite emails as I got because of my port the Ivy Generator.

I am god-smacked that anyone would do that. Morons. Your plugins are the only things that have kept my interest in Carrara. I have purchased all of them. I definitely would have moved onto another software package without them because Carrara V8 has been a disappointment to me. C8.5 is a lot better and somewhat stable but I still get the occasional crash on something simple like particles and move back to C7 and it works fine. Enough of my complaining. I am off my little girl just woke up. Going to go hold her and feel better.

Oh she is one week and 4 days old. She is beautiful to watch.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8xqos0u7hocwz8h/0006.jpg

Again sorry to hear that people would be so rude.

More people should be fun loving and experimental like Wendy…

Yes, unbelievable rudeness for free things is the Poser way….

I like Fenric…a lot. I thought he was god until he told me he wasn’t. I think he just said it to stop me from stalking him.

Seriously, people writing hate mail to the creator of a freebie is just…sad.

Fenric - 14 September 2012 11:37 AM

Because there are many irritable and unforgiving people who shop at DAZ, use Poser 4 compatible figures exclusively, and who will expect everything to work seamlessly and flawlessly.  They will not read the documentation, and will not accept limitations or work-arounds.  If I try to explain the limitations, they get angry.  While it’s amusing on some levels to have people assume that I am a DAZ employee and threaten to get DAZ to fire me, it is still stressful to have to deal with.  And I simply do not make enough money from these plugins to be willing to put up with much of that at all.  (Supporting the freebies is even worse, surprisingly enough.  I’ve never had so many aggressive and impolite emails as I got because of my port the Ivy Generator.)

Ouch :/ unfortunately that mentality is out there.  I appreciate the additional functionality you have added to Carrara both in what I have purchased and what you have graciously donated.  So Thank you!

I am going to point this thread in the bug and see what they have to say.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard of this behavior. Unfortunately, it’s the entitlement/customer is always right mentality that has run rampant here with some DAZ users and over at Renderosity with some Poser users. They just don’t get it. Sometimes I want to think it’s people who are immature but I’ve been shocked in the past by retirees who do it, too. You can get the drift by just reading the forums and not even be a PA/merchant. It’s very sad. But it’s also something that is a problem almost anywhere when you deal with the public… I’ve had it happen working at radio station promotion events - free concerts for gosh sakes! And my younger brother went through it for years working at a couple different public libraries and at Borders. He doesn’t get that treatment in his current non-retail line of work - he doesn’t have to see the public. Sometimes I think it’s worse on the Internet because people think they can hide behind screen names.

It was also sad seeing DAZ and Poser users whining over at the messiah forums when they were practically giving away their software. But the longtime messiah users swatted them away like flies or flat out ignored them.

Haven’t been on this forum awhile, but this topic caught my attention.

I have 3DCoat and Zbrush 4R4.

There is an applink for Zbrush from 3DCoat and back.

Not that would be helpful to anyone, but thought I might mention it.

BTW, the 3DCoat version now is using the beta tools for the upcoming 4.0 tools and it’s really, very very nice.

Muphasa - 14 September 2012 08:22 AM

Hi Fenric great to hear from ya.Thank for the break down in what is achievable atm.

Yea I think most people would wish for the ability to do morphs on poser/genesis products.

What can Daz do to help this project? What things about the SDK need to be changed or explained?

 

And thecatsmith you are welcome. My pleasure to help.

Make sure you go to https://bugs.daz3d.com/view.php?id=47504 and add your voice, not sure what good or not it will do.  But it can’t hurt anything to make sure everyone adds it.

Fenric - 13 September 2012 09:48 AM

I have looked into this before, and my opinion is…

Getting an applink for just painting any mapped vertex-based object (rigged, unrigged, native, poser, whatever) would not be too hard.

Getting an applink to do anything to a not vertex-based object (plant, spline, metaball) is pretty much impossible.

Getting an applink to morph/retopo/uv a generic vertex object would be ok (understanding that the result of retopo would be to import the new object and delete your old one)

Getting an applink to morph or uv a native rigged vertex object would be possible (you simply can’t retopo a rigged item).

Getting an applink to do anything other than paint on a Poser object will be quite challenging.  Morphs might be possible with a lot of effort - remember, DAZ had access to the Carrara source code when making the GoZ plugin: I wouldn’t have that resource.  I have yet to make the SDK functions that change UV mapping work with Poser figures (not saying it’s impossible, but I’ve not been able to)

Unfortunately, I have a pretty strong suspicion which of those operations above is the one most people are hoping to do.

I was thinking about this, I wonder if we could do a bug report to request the missing SDK API’s perhaps?  I am not sure all what is needed unfortunately.