Alias files, What's the point?

can somebody explain what the purpose of an alias file is.

 

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 96,735
    edited December 2017

    In what context? Parameters in the Data folder? An alias makes a clone of a property on another node, so that changing that property on either node immediately changes it on the other too. For example, in Genesis 3 and 8 several limbs have bend and twist bones (because each bone can have only a single weight-map, but bending and twisting need different maps); the rotation parameters are cloned, one to the other, so that you effectively have the ability to pose both bones by selecting only one - making the experience much like working with Genesis 1 and 2 or earlier.

    Post edited by Richard Haseltine on
  • thanks richard, that was exactly what i was talking about, should have been a bit clearer, sorry about that.

    i can kinda understand the need in that situation,dual bones single WM, but in other situations it doesn't make sense to me.

    So let me clarify exactly what prompted the question.

    I've recently been cleaning up, modding and reinstalling a bunch of G3F content and was getting a butt ton load of errors in the log file.

    Invariably they were related to the alias_xxx.dsf files, mostly just minor typos in the end and i started testing whether the alias files actually seemed to do anything.

    From outward appearance they didn't seem to matter one way or the other as the base, i.e. pose control path,  morph dial worked just fine even if the alias wasn't present, deleted for testing.

    Mostly this was related to expression and head morphs, which i don't think have any double bones

    In most of the assets i tested it didn't seem to really make a difference if it was there or not.

    I guess what i'm really asking is if it's operationally necessary or not, and in which cases it might really be necessary as opposed to just a convience thing, superfluous redundancy or just something that's automatically created that  people forget to turn off the setting on.

     

     

  • In Genesis 3 and 8 a lot of the expressions are bones, not morphs, so they do need some kind of link (ERC or Alias) to appear on the figure node.

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