Projection Templates How To?

Heatherleea

Is there a tutorial anywhere that covers how to create projection templates for Studio?

Kattey

I have this piece saved on projection templates

YouТre welcome to share the method if you wish.

To create a projection template, you must first create a body suit, dress, or other clothing item that fits the body closely but not too closely (ideally it should fit about how you want the clothes to fit). Try to have it be higher poly (or rather, more poly dense) than the base figure for smoothest deformation. DAZ's native templates are pretty low-poly, which is why they tend not to work as well.

It can't have buttons, collars, or other submeshes. That is, it can technically, but they will sometimes cause irregularities in a commercial item. It must cover all the areas you want to be able to rig for. I recommend gloves and shoes separately for morph reasons, but that is up to you. There's no point in doing platform/high heels or anything that sticks out far from the body because it will not be "read": the program can only "see" things that are quite close to the body surface in my testing. It will extrapolate the rigging outward when the template is used (I've converted an M4 batman cowl with no ear crumping using a "sheer" hood template).

Import this into Studio as an .obj.

Rig it to Dawn (or whatever) using Transfer Utility. If you want a good skirt, fix it up with the weight brush (it will need a lot of smoothing in the middle at all rotations) and change both the id and name of the thigh and shin bones to left/right Upper Handle or whatever you choose. You do this in the bone editor. Its icon looks like a bone with a band-aid across it. Right-click with the bone selected and choose editЧrename.

Save it as a clothing item (not a wearable, use file -> save as scene assets -> figure/prop assets). Note where you save the data files because you have to go get them.

Now comes the tricky part. Genesis and G2F in their data files have subpaths that go:

data/daz 3d/genesis or genesis 2/projection templates
data/daz 3d/genesis or genesis 2/tools/projection templates

One of these contains the .duf files for projection templates, and one contains the .dsf, uv and morph files. (It doesn't use the uv, but it requires that it be there for some reason.) Copy your item's .duf and data files accordingly. You can look at the Genesis or G2 folders for how the structure is usually set up if they don't release Dawn with any templates.

Now a quick test with transfer utility and another item should show your template under the Projection Template options.

The hardest part is morphing. You basically have to create morphs for the "clothing" version that you created, then copy that Morphs folder from the data files into the data files of the projection template. This works with Genesis; IТm still trying to get it to work with Genesis 2. These files will refer to the УclothingФ data files rather than the УprojectionФ ones, so you can either release both sets or try to text-edit the projection copy of the morphs in their uncompressed form to not require the clothing data files version.

I don't recommend messing with the text if you can get it working the other way. You need a good mastery of Notepad++ and mass-editing text files, and even then, it's easy to screw up. You need to save the morphs uncompressed if you want to try editing them by hand.

I think the author is SickleYield.

Heatherleea

thanks will see what I can do for Dawn

Kattey

Well, it is written for Dawn but it can be done for any other TriAx figure, I think.