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Tottallou has covered the "How to ERC Freeze." That should solve your main issues. What I was offering is to walk you through whole process of making a character, within the frame work of Daz products (as I understand it). I am a wordy son-of-fairly-decent-and-reasonable-person-who-nevertheless-seems-to-love-me, so it's a bad idea for me to info dump what I know on you.
Instead, I'm offering to help you, step-by-step make a complete character package. Interactively. I tell you the first step, you ask me about what you need to clarify, and then do the thning, and we move to the next step. It won't be super fast, but at then end, you should have a completed character, in a sharable state. And a rasonable nderstanding of how to do it all again, hopefully along with the reasons why you have to do the things.
Excellent! Thank you for the screen shot and directions - I think that's going to help a lot.
I'm trying it with a new morph (as I have so many versions of Belina now, I'm afraid of using the wrong file lol). So I loaded the new morph from ZBrush, adjusted the rigging to shape, clicked on edit mode and did an ERC Freeze, then got out of edit mode and clicked on the little gear icon and went to Parameter Settings where I named it and picked a path for it (Actor/Full Body), then I went to File >> Save As >> Support Asset >> Morph Asset. Is all that right?
Here's the morph (attached) - could you test it for me, if you have the time?
Thank you for all your help! :)
Oh wow! That's very generous of you! :D That would be wonderful!
I tried one more time based on the feedback I've gotten so far. Could you test the attached morph? If it works then YAY! I won't need any more direction. If it doesn't work, then yes, I would REALLY appreciate some step by step help from you! :)
This one works with poses & expression well - When I first loaded it in, I got a duplicate formula error but it loaded anyway
2017-07-07 00:18:00.418 WARNING: fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(5942): Duplicate formula found linking xEnd & Value in H:/MyRT/data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/Female/Morphs/Diva/Diva Super Slim/Diva Super Slim.dsf.
I resaved the Morph & now it loads & works fine so the duplicate formula might be something at my end but I thought I would mention it anyway.
She is certainly a super slim lady :)
Oh good! I'm so glad it worked!
It's just a body morph (no head morph). I wanted to do a morph that was pretty extreme, just to make sure I got the rigging set right. That's why the SUPER SLIM. lol :)
Are you seeing the icon under Actor >> Full Body?:
Yes I see the icon - I meant to say I like that as a reminder , I will make icons when I finish my next morphs
Singular Blues should publish his character making tutorial as a lot of people ask about creating morphs/characters & we can all chip in with the bits we know :)
YAY!!! That's great! I finally did it! hahah :D
Thank you so much for all your help! And thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and help - I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise. This is such a great community!
Now hopefully I'll remember all the exact steps for doing it again. I'm going to try and do a lot of morphs and share them just so I can get used to doing them and get the steps down - it will give me good practice and hopefully I'll get better at it.
If all goes well I'd love to EVENTUALLY (though it might be a long way off) be able to get good enough to be a PA. lol It might be a pipe dream, but you never know. *shrug* lol For now I'm glad to be learning new things.
Thanks again for all your help!
I thought that would fix things, the ERC. That's why I wanted to offer to share the whole enchilada, as far as I've puzzled it out, at least. Let's give an example.
This is Sabrina. She's an entirely custom character. Some day, I'm going to dig into creating a fully custom skin for her. She has Iray materials for G8, but I rendered her toon in blender because I was busy and I can limit Blender renders to using 2 CPU cores, while Iray will use all four and slow down everthing else. Sabrina goes about 5'2" (157.48cm for silly metric people). Compare to G8 base female who is a shade over 5'9. When I designed Sabrina, I wanted her to work well with either Base female or Victoria poses. Since I don't have any V8 poses, the most recent iteration of Sabrina was built on proprotions similar to G8/G3. She has a full suite of Joint Controled morphs. Sadly, there is more work to do on them. Right now, her armpits show an unseemly gap, so that's going to require reworking the shoulder JCMs. She also has custom expression control MCMs that alter her base level emotes to fit her character. This is as close I've gotten yet to professional level character.
I wasn't planning to go over how I do all of that, but I was going to hit on a key point. Sabrina being so much shorter than G8 Basic Female.
It's not a good idea to make short morphs. There are some elements, like the various height moprhs that could be used, but the key thing is that it's hard on the figure (specifically, it increases the chances of bad results with rigging) if the size difference between the base shape and the morph is very large.) The image blow illustrates a lot of how I dealth with that.
On the left, in the white, is Sabrina, again. She divides into two morphs and two character controllers. So on left is the Full Sabrina dial. Next to her, in green, is only the Full Body Morph (FBM). The first thing you notice is the FBM is much taller. Very much taller. About 7 inches. Next along, in yellow, is just the FHM (Full Head Morph). What may be hard to see at this point is that the FHM is about the same size in that third case as it is in the first and last cases. The last case, in blue, is an alternate, more fit version of Sabrina.
Because I wanted to keep her proprotionally the same for poses, she's somewhat unrealistic. She should be a bit less skinny and probably a bit longer of torso compared to limbs, but that's the price one pays. I suspect I can deal with skinny, but I haven't decided if I will because I may have to remake all the body JCMs to do so.
In order to get the right effects (shorter, but otherwise normal, thus requiring a fairly constant head size), what I did was scale the whole figure down to 86.84%, I think. Then I used Head Propagating Scale to restore the head size. Leaving aside the Head scale, which was personal choice, this is how Daz wants you to make figures. One reason is it's hard on the tools trying to deal with extreme changes, but another is that it makes mix and match easier. If you "bake in" a height change, then you decide to mix the character with another, you must always have the height change, meaning using height or scale morphs to deal with it. If, instead, you set the height change to live on the main character dial, you and mix and match the individual body and head morphs and the figure will maintain, roughly, her supermodel height until you get around to specifying how tall you want her to be.
This was one of the things I wanted to cover, along with how to create separate head and body morphs. (Something I knew how to do for a while, but never got around to dealing with. My previous comment about G8 making it easier is that there is a tool in the Dev folder for making those separate morphs.)
So did you box model and sculpt Sabrina in Blender and then create the rigging, weight maps, MCMs, & JCMs in DAZ Studio? That is a A -Z tutorial I would buy from the DAZ Store or elsewhere just to have a reference I can send to a professional printer although I understand most (or may not!) of the details of box modeling / sculpting in Blender might be left out.
Oh, gods no. Full human figures are beyond my ability. That's Genesis 8.
I rather laboriously, and through many iterations, reshaped Genesis 3's head until I was happy. Took about 4 months. The body went much faster. Heads are hard. Of course, I'm still finding JCMs that need creating. Since transferring her to G8, I've discovered that she needs something to kick in when both Ab1 and pelvis are bent forward, because the existing G8 JCMs result in… weirdness.
She's probably still a bit exaggerated around the nose. I'm just not sure. In the long run, it doesn't matter. I do like her as a rather different kind of face. Baring in mind she does suffer a bit from RBF. It's not her fault. I made her that way.
Organic modeling is not really one of my skills, and I find sculpting to be a bit of an odd way to go about making morphs. (I'm sure there's some connection HD and ultra HD that I don't understand because trade secrets, but the less said about that, the better). I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation, it's just outside my area of interest.
That being said, would I know how to do the rest of that? Rigging, weight mapping, etc? Yeah. I got it from a Daz tut, though. It's on the web. Not sure I could make it more clear. Given how bad I seem to be at instruction, rather the opposite in fact.
OK, I can do the Blender modeling and stuff although it's nothing to write home about.
I thought you might have or know where a good written PDF tutorial on the just the DAZ part of it was available. I think I will buy the one from I think his name is Kevin in the DAZ Store then.
I do quite like your character's nose. I've know a few people with such a nose but the are not so common noses like that.
It was a deliberate descision, that nose. I decided against anything less than provocative. A good bit of the final revision was toning it down, actually. It got a bit out hand for a while.
There's a statement there. Basically, "This did not come from a store." I wanted this character to far from generic. I knew that would turn people off. (Some of the reactions I'e seen to V8 are along the same lines. V has a lot less softness compared to V7, and people have complained, leaving aside the mixed reactions to the HD expressions.) I would say many of the details were developed with that "not generic" theme as the aim, but I'm pretty sure it's only the nose that sells it, in the end. Without that, she'd be just another too perfect face. (Still is given her perfect facial symmetry, but you can't have everything. Where would you keep it?)
This, btw, is where I got everything I know about figure set up: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/creating_content/rigging/tutorials/basic_rigging_preparation/start
Thank you for the great topics - those are things I, of course, hadn't considered. I'm sure the community (myself included) would be really happy to have a good tutorial on custom character creation. It would probably be a HUGE help to not only myself but many others who wish to learn how to do this. :)
Or if a tutorial is too much work (I'm sure it would be a really big undertaking) perhaps a thread started where people who want to learn can ask questions and get help specifically for this topic.
You can actually set DS or any other program to use any number of cores you want. I'm using Anvir Task Manager to do it (not sure if the free version can this though) but AFAIR it can be done in other ways also I just don't recall how ATM.
EDIT: just checked, the free version of Anvir has this option too, just select the Processes Tab, right click on the process and select Set Affinity from the context menu.
Set Affinity is available free in Windows. You start the Windows Task Manager, click the detail tab, and then right click DAZ Studio & there you see Set Affinity so select it & your see a list: All, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... according to the number of cores. If I don't uncheck at least 1 core when DAZ Studio renders on my PC since it CPU renders DAZ Studio monopolized the CPU cycles at times freezes the UI.
Yes, that was what I was thinking of, thanks!
The solution to "I'm busy" is not, "let me install more software!"
As a rule, I don't like limiting software via Task Manager for stability reasons. Studio is already crash prone. I will do it, if necessary, but I prefer not to. Also, another element I didn't raise orignally: Running up the Iray vs Toon comparatator, render times were Iray image at 512x512 1 hour 22 minutes, at which point I canceled the render as "good enough." 86% I think. Cycles at 1024x1024, 9 minutes.
Cycles is not (to my knowledge) fundmentally superior to Iray. The issue is that Iray mats are typically packed with options that aren't doing anything, but still end up in the render calculation stack be virture of being presets. I haven't (and probably never will) have time to do a deep dive on how the Daz Node systems works or how the Iray mats are stored, so I could be wrong on that point, but I suspect I'm not. My Cycles mats are pretty comples, but I think not so much as Iray Uber, over all. And every bit is (for the most part) active. Not much in the way dangling processing paths that don't contribute (most of what I need to clean out terminates before output and if a path doesn't lead to output in Cycles, to Cycles it doesn't exist. OTOH, a path, even with switch that renders it off, connected to output is calculated for every pixel.)
Technobabble aside, my toon shader is more efficient than iray uber, so it renders faster. Also, Cycles may be faster, but I don't have a true head to head. As I said, Iray Uber is a bit blaoted, and it would take a while to make a comparable cycles set p. Seemsa bit much for pissing match. Cycles can toonify my figs in 1/6 the time on half the processors. I only need iray for moments when it seems wothwhile to demonstrate that this really is being done in Daz Studio.
I would be happy to do a tut. I just know I'm not very good at that sort of thing.
I mean, I have a website, and if I could tutorialize my knowledge easily, I'd probably drive enough ad revenue to pay for the site bill :) I'm really just not very good at it. Which is why I suggested the more Q&A format. People could learn best practices, debate my interpretation of the same, and give me feedback on where I'm losing them before I get too far off the plot. Which is otherwise inevitable.
Studio crashes less on me when I take away one of the cores so that the computer's processes and DAZ Studio don't become I/O bound, the other thing that helps is I increased RAM from 8GB to 16GB.
I'm stuck with a lappy, for now. One day, I hope trial a demand instance on Azure with an ungodly number of GPU cores, but I havent researched whether those are nvidia. I think they're CUDA, which is why it seems attractive, both Cycles and Iray run on that architecture. But before I do that, I want to have a business plan so I can offset the cost. I'd hate to prove the concept and then find that I can't afford to actually do it. I first considered AWS but Azure's price is better, and the specs on the GPUs more readily accessible.
It does sound like a bit of work, so if you don't want to, don't sweat it. :) Maybe people can just ask you questions if they get stuck?
Alright, here's a new morph, Diva Karli. Could someone test it for me?
I need to know if she poses ok, and if you can see her icon under Actor >> Full Body.
Her icon should look like this:
Here's a couple renders of the character.
The file for the character morph is attached in the zip file - just unzip it, open the "Diva Freebie" file and drop the "data" folder into your My Library. The character morph should then be under Actor >> Full Body >> Diva Karli. If someone would take a couple minutes to test the character for me, I'd appreciate it! :)
Oh, no. I don't mind the work. Keeps me in practice, thinking about it. It's not that hard. I'm just a poor instructor. (which is a disappointment to me, because, like I said, what I know could at least pay for my website, if I weren't.)
I just figure if I were to do the thing, it would be best if I said some thing like, "Look, this will involve steps A through G. You need to have this this and this ready for Step A. If you don't knwo those things are, let me know. Here's how you do step A. Questions?"
Because left to myself, trying to lay out all the steps at once, I'll probably make it more confusing, not less. But keeping is bite sized means better feedback about what I'm making muddy instead of clearing up.
Mostly I want to help people understand what's up with these things. I figure I could take the lessons I would learn and maybe get better at teaching, too. But I think I know my limits.
Anyway, it would give me another thing to distract from the frustration of trying to understand Dazscript. (which is more an issue of not having a full handle on the object model and how it interconnects. It's, otherwise, close enough to javascript that I can grok. Though it's showing me holes in my understanding JS, too)
Will try to have a look at the character in a bit.
I can't find her. I might have to restart DAZ, I will let you know in the morning, She looks cute BTW, you posted your custom shader before but I can't locate it can you repost?
Duplicate formulas. There's scaling baked into the eyballs, Y and Z left, Y right. That is, not an issue, itsellf, but it's backed in twice, which is were dupe formula is coming from. If you don't know how to pull that out, let me know.
Here's the post with the link to some of my latest shaders: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2594376/#Comment_2594376
Let me know if you have any trouble with it. :)
Karli being kicked in the face - poor Karli! lol
Yes, I'd love to know how to fix the duplicate file issue. Thank you! :)
This is a special case, owing to the fact that I know which formulas are dupes. It's not normally this easy.
In parameters tab find the Karli Morph. Right click, and select edit mode from the menu. Right click the morph again, and select "Show in Property Heirarchy."
A new (and tiny) window should open. You'll want to resize it or dock it to the veiwport area if you you're comfortable with adding an removing tabs. This isn't a window you need very often.
You may need to drag the heading bar out, as well so you can see what's in the left most column. The Karli morph should already be highlighted. Click the triange to expand it. It will show a few options under it. You want Subcomponents. Again, triange to expand. Two more options. Only First Stage will have triangle. Click to expand. This is the tedious part. Start scrolling down. Watch the right column, the one headed "Node." You're looking for "Left Eye" which should appear after Right Lip Upper something. There are more than one entry for each node, so there will be a bunch of Right Lip Upper before you get to the Left Eyes. And it's going to ways down. Don't scroll to fast or you'll overun the Morph Entry. The Property Heirarchy is huge, so you can get lost. (If you do, try filering by the Morph name, or go back to the Parameters tabm select the morph and click "Show in Property Heirachy" again.
When you get to Left Eye, look back in the left column. You are looking for YScale (YScale) and ZScale (Zscale). There should only be one entry for each, if I understand correctly. This because Studio will have rejected the duplicate entry. If I'm wrong and there are two, then repeat this step. (because I don't think you mean to have the eyeballs scaled like that, do you?) Select Each of the Scale lines, right click and choose "Remove" from the menu. Scroll down a bit more. Not far. You're looking for Right Eye, which will be just below Left Eye. The only one here is YScale (YScale) do the same as with the Left Eye. You can close the Property Heirarchy.
Now resave the morph as you would if it were new. Close studio. (You need to force Studio to forget about the last time it loaded G8. This is the only way to be sure)
Open Studio, reload G8. That should clear the duplicate warning, unless there are dupes in other morphs.
As for where these are coming from, the mostlikely culprit is multiple ERC freeze. If you freeze a value, change that value, and free again, Studio will record the two as different links, one at the first value and the second at the difference between the second and the first. Because the formula evaluator only cares about what is linked to what, not the values, the two links are considered dupes the next time figure is loaded. Basically, if you ERC freeze, then later realize you want to add something else to the freeze, it gets very tricky. I can't think, off hand, of a truly safe way to do it.
Also, it's okay. Karli is going to dodge. After all, she's over half a foot taller than Sabrina. She has a reach advantage.
Also my experience.
From a quick going over - except for the Duplicate error - I haven't found any problems. She's got a nice curvyness to her I like.
Personally I would prefer seperate head and body morphs.
Just a quick render of her using theMRL Willow texture.
She's cute, love the curvy shape. Wasn't able to dial in Bellina though