Mesh Grabber to Geometry Sculptor "conversion" tool

svenm

I've been lurking for a while, benefited a lot from many of the discussions in this forum, but haven't really posted before. I've created a tool that some might be interested in, so I thought I'd find out if there's enough interest for me to make it available to others.

I use Mesh Grabber a lot. It's my go-to tool for quick fixes of clothing poke-through, body hair poking through clothing, or sometimes hair scullcap issues, or putting a little deformation in furniture when characters are supposed to be sitting on something soft/pliabble, etc. I consider it one of the most indispensable tools for my scene work. This means many of my scene DUF's have Mesh Grabber transformations in them. As you may know, Mesh Grabber was bought up and bundled into the DAZ Studio Premier features as "Geometry Sculptor." Normally, this would be of no concern to me in the short to medium term, except: I bought an RTX 5090 GPU, and nVidia iRay rendering on that hardware only works in the 2025 Alpha version of DAZ Studio. For a while I've been editing in DAZ 4, then loading my scene in 6 (2025) for rendering. This is cumbersome, and since the Mesh Grabber plugin is not available in 6, I lose any transformations I might have applied during editing. So, reluctantly, I've decided to start using 2025 for editing despite crash issues. This meant getting a Premier subscription so I can use the Geometry Sculptor tool that "replaces" Mesh Grabber, as there's a question about whether Mesh Grabber will ever be updated and made available in 6. Things sort of work, although my 3D mouse isn't being recognized and I've had to do some ugly driver emulation workarounds to get some kind of 3D mouse functionality in v6. The problem is that I have hundreds of existing scenes, many of them with Mesh Grabber transformations in them. Sometimes I have to load an old scene, tweak it, re-render it, or maybe use it as a base for a new scene, so I need my old DUF's to be compatible with the new workflow.

Premier is also available in v4, so if I could get all my DUFs converted, I'd be able to load them in 4 or 6, and they would correctly load the transformations (as long as I remain a Premier member, anyway). So, that's what I want to do, convert all existing DUFs to Geometry Sculptor!

I found a thread where someone explained that it's actually pretty easy to edit a DUF manually and "convert" the transformations so Mesh Grabber "becomes" Geometry Sculptor. Two simple string-for-string search and replace operations is all it takes ("MF_MeshGrabModifier" becomes "DzGeometrySculptModifier", and "manfriday_mesh_grab_modifier" becomes "geometry_sculpt_modifier"). I tried this manually in a test scene, and it worked nicely. The problem is that many of my DUF's, even compressed, are hundreds of MB in size, with one decompressing to as much as 1.5GB! Manually un-GZip'ing all the files, then editing in a text editor, and finally re-compressing, would be intensely tedious, and human-error-prone. A good text editor can open and manipulate a 1.5GB text file, but it's sloooowwww! I usually use rrep console utility (I'm on Windows) for quick bulk search-and-replace operations on text files, but that tool chokes on the larger DUFs I have. I tried several other free tools of this sort that I found online, and all of them either have OutOfMemory issues, or other errors, or are extremely slow (on the order of half an hour for a single large file). Not to mention the need to decompress all the files first, etc.

Given the potential tedium of manual edits, or of finding a bulk replace tool that works reliably, I decided that this is a very simple scenario, so why not dust off some of my .NET/C# skills and just write a console app to do the job? I've done that, and I'm in final stages of testing. Given a root folder path, the tool enumerates all the .duf files in it, on-the-fly decompresses any that have gzip signature (magic header bytes), parses text line by line, does the replacements to "convert" from Mesh Grabber to Geometry Sculptor, and writes to a new file (compressed, if the source was compressed) in a separate folder structure. I wrote it to use streams with line-by-line processing (not attempting to load entire files into memory, as most of the existing tools try to do), and to avoid using string allocations in all the string comparisons involved (as that would also create huge memory pressure). The tool seems stable and has acceptable performance for larger files, and most importantly it provides a fully automated solution that does the gzip decompression and compression also. As a nice side benefit, the resulting .duf files are noticeably smaller (higher gzip compression level) than the ones DAZ Studio generated, yet are still compatible (Studio loads them fine).

Is there anyone else out there who uses Mesh Grabber, and is looking to move to Premier (e.g. due to use of DAZ Studio 2025 Alpha), and who needs/wants to convert existing DUFs in bulk like I want to do? If so, I can look at posting the tool on GitHub or elsewhere, once I've finished testing it and am satisfied with stability and function. It's .NET Core, by the way, so should run on Mac also (as long as it has the Core runtime installed), but I have no Mac to confirm that with.

crosswind

Right ~ that was the way of 'conversion' that I ever posted. And I think you've proposed a great idea ! I'm interested in it and looking forward to the further progress that you'll make.  

Richard Haseltine

There is the intent  to have DS 2025 convert Mesh Grabber modifiers or Geometry Sculptor at load time, in a future build. That doesn't guarantee it will be successful but if it is it will address the main use-case here.

svenm

If this were added to DS 2025 as an automatic "conversion" feature, that would indeed take care of the use case. Until then, let me finish the tool. Need to run it on my complete library (make sure it doesn't choke on any of the files), and on some test files with test transformations, to make sure it works correctly. Any suggestions on where to put the tool when it's ready? GitHub?

crosswind

Could be published in Freebies sub forum.

svenm

Found one issue where the tool choked on a file that had a single line of text that was 90MB in length (!), some kind of giant value array. Got that figured out, and am having it run against a set of about 600 DUF files now, about half of which have Mesh Grabber transforms in them. If that succeeds, and after some spot-checks on the output files, I'll be ready to post.

I see that when people post in the Freebies sub-forum, they're providing links to other places like DeviantArt or Google Drive, etc. Let me think about the best place to put the actual assets, then I'll create a Freebies thread for this tool with a link.

svenm

OK, I "published" the tool to my personal OneDrive, and created a thread in Freebies. Thanks!