Genetics as morphs? (Morphs as genetics??)

yinliang9 · July 2019

So I have a little project I'd like to do. Essentially, I want to model a family tree for a broad-sweeping Game of Thrones-style story I've been writing, and I was hoping to use Daz to do it. The thing is, I'm not content to merely generate some characters, give them appropriate hair and eye colors, and call it a day. I want them to, you know, resemble one another. To that end, here's the topic I'd like to raise for discussion:

On the matter of modeling genetics from one character to another, does anyone have any particular suggestions? My initial thought was to copy the morphs from one figure to the next and tweak them slightly, but the thing is, that doesn't account for the opposite gender parent's genes. It's fine for G8F to G8F or G8M to G8M, but I can't think of an easy way to transfer morph targets between the figures. In other words, short of a product that does this (which I'm about 99.99999% sure doesn't exist), does anyone with more in-depth Daz experience than myself have any suggestions for ways I might go about this without burning out my eyes scrolling through dozens of active morphs and finding them on the next model?

esha · July 2019

This is an interesting question. I don't know if you can transfer morphs from female to male or the other way round, but I also doubt that the results would look good even if it were possible.

any suggestions for ways I might go about this without burning out my eyes scrolling through dozens of active morphs and finding them on the next model?

If they have the same names, you can select one figure, press Ctrl-C and paste the values to the second figure with Ctrl-V. That will transfer the values. Of course, if the names are different that won't work.

Btw. you can also type a few letters of the morph name in the search field in the parameters tab. To avoid scrolling, I mean.

Odaa · July 2019

My impression is that the core facial morph dial kits (as in the main Daz Original set, and Dogz's 200 Morphs) have identical naming conventions between the male and female figures. This wouldn't help you if, say, you've "cast" Alexandra as your Cat Stark analogue, and you want your Rob Stark analogue to look like his mother, but if you've come up with a purely dialspun face (for G8F let's say) with no named characters involved, you could try saving it as a shaping preset and see if G8M would accept the shaping preset.

Oso3D · July 2019

My recommendation, based on similar thoughts, is to pick a small set of dials for head shape and face, maybe some basic build and proportions, and make that the ‘base’ for the family.

If you can keep it to a dozen or so dials, it shouldn’t be so terribly hard to hunt and peck through similar ones of the other sex.

And then from there you can tweak individuals, age, etc.

Hylas · July 2019

It's possible to transfer morphs across gender, I just recently did it for the first time and it was quite easy!

https://www.deviantart.com/sickleyield/journal/Tutorial-Transferring-Character-Morphs-G1G2G3G8-409437916

On the left is a dial-spun G8M character. On the right the same character with some Aiko 8 dialled in. My intent was to find a way to "animefy" male characters, but I suppose the character on the right could be the son of Aiko 8 and the character on the left.

Gordig · July 2019

Thought I'd take some time off from re-re-re-rendering the same scene to put this together as an example. Here, Victoria and Michael are the parents of Charlotte, with different amounts of each parent dialed in. These are all simple character dials, so it wouldn't scale smoothly to more intensively dial-spun characters (unless one converted those characters to their own dials), but it will give you some idea of how well this approach would work for what you're trying to achieve.

3Diva · July 2019

Perhaps you could dial in a strong character like Edie 8 and Ollie 8. I always thought they looked very much like part of the same family.

Gordig · July 2019

If you're addressing me, those are three of the only five G8 characters I own. I suppose we could see what Mr. Woo and Makayla's children would look like...

And I imagine Edie and Ollie's similarity was deliberate, since base characters tend to be released in pairs.