Understanding Alternate shapes for specifics characters (individual dials for face and body)

camilodiezr

Hey everyone! I'm quite new to DAZ and its figures. I've been purchasing and experimenting with some G9 figures and having a blast with some of the differents body and face shapes. Just today I came across a very interesting figure that is going on sale (Neanderthal 9), and saw that it has some additional alternate shapes specific to that character. These alternate shapes would work nicely on a project I'm thinking of, however, looking at the included files, these alt shapes seem to only come with the complete shape to apply, unlike the base character, that comes with a body and head shapes to add and dial individually.

I'm intersted in experimenting with only the body morph of these alt shapes for Neanderthal, but before I dip any money in them, I wanted to learn more about how these shapes work when the intention is to combine them with other characters' morphs (body and head separately).

An example of what I mean:

I want to use the female Neanderthal preset and dial-in some of Kala 9 head shape, and also significantly reduce the default female Neanderthal head shape. Since it's a full character preset, if I dial-down the %, will I begin to lose both the head and body shapes? Or since the preset is applied to Neanderthal 9, which does have a dedicated head shape dial, do I get to retain the body morph intact and play with the head by itself to create the character I want?

On an similar note, I noticed that all these alt shapes say to require the "HD" version of the base character. The alt-shape do seem to have a "non-HD" preset and an "HD" preset. Can I apply the "non-HD" version to my "non-HD" Neanderthal 9 and skip having to buy his HD sculpt?

 

Richard Haseltine

If there is a head shape you should be able to adjust it and the result will be the cumulative effect of head and body shapes. Essentially a morph is a set of new positions for the vertices (points) that define the shape, the percentage for a given shape controls how far the vertex moves along a line from base position to full shape, and the final shape of the model is the sum of those movements across all morphs. If there are no separate head and body shapes then there are a few ways to split a base resolution morph, but for HD morphs we cannot do anything.