Same JCM fires differently on the same wearable seemingly at random across different load instances
mmdestiny
Posts: 192
Evening folks,
This program is gaslighting me. I've got a wearable that has JCM's that will be different seemingly at random from one load to the next. Sometimes I'll load it and the shin bend 90 JCM will look really nice. Other times it'll look jaggy and gross. I can't isolate anything that would explain this. It's loaded on the same figure every time. No smoothing modifiers to interfere.
EDIT: I've solved the mystery but I don't entirely understand why this would be causing the issue itself. The control instance I was using had a custom facegroup on the figure. (to hide the specific polys on the leg covered by the boot on the Toon Outline, since the boot is actually smaller than the figure so the leg is hidden and the relavant polys need to be hidden on the toon outline too or it floats in space). Any instance I loaded where it was just the shaping morph applied did not have this face group defined, so no issues were observed. Any instance I loaded where I used a character preset (which had the facegroup baked in) would have the issue.
Why would a face group affect JCM calculations though? I thought they were just Daz's version of selection sets. UI elements essentially.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
That seems to me the issue of settling of High Resolution meshes, to the skin binded... This glitch sometimes happens in certain cases and it's a long standing issue in DS ~~
You can check if it is the case... by : checking what is specified in Resolution Level of the pants. If it's High Resolution, it should be the mentioned issue. If it's Base, there might be other culprit ~
Edit: Sometimes, toggling Geometry Editor / Universal Tool... (or rotating the Viewport.... ) may "fix the issue" ~~
Seems you were typing your response JUST as I was submitting my edit with the "resolution."
Any thoughts on this new development?
The geometry of thigh / shin are hidden by using Face Groups ? I couldn't reproduce the issue...
What character / wearable products were you using ?
Coincidentally I just had this issue this week as well. Crosswind, thanks for typing your comment, it's reassuring to know that it's nothing I did wrong and that it's just an issue that hopefully gets patched one day.
I'm able to resolve it by setting the base mesh resolution to base, saving the scene file, reloading, and then setting it to high resolution again and doing any rendering I need to do after. Suboptimal but better than nothing.
I think there's a misunderstanding here about my workflow so let me explain (images attached). It's a game asset ripped and then rigged to a G8F. The issue with using assets designed for different character rigs is stylistic proportions, especially with anime-like characters. In this case, the game characters had long thin legs with small feet. Instead of trying to match the G8F propotions exactly, it's much simpler to simply hide any area on the G8F that the clothing would cover (in this case, the lower leg and feet).
I applied the Filatoon Shader to everything. The problem with Filatoon outlines is that they continue to show on hidden parts of the figure as solid black regions, and you have to turn them off unless the clothing is fit far enough away from the body for the Outline to not be visible. This is complicated by the fact you can only hide the Filatoon Outline shell by Face Group or by Region, so if your wearable doesn't line up exactly with a Face Group or Region, you'll have either a small bit of Outline poking through, or a small bit of Outline hidden where you want it visible.
I THOUGHT a clever workaround to this would be to redefine the Face Groups on the leg so that they were split exactly along the areas I want the Outline to be visible and the areas I want it hidden, but immediately after changing the facegroups, this is when the JCM blows up. I've been able to recreate this. In the OP, the screenshots with the jaggys on the boot behind her knee line up exactly with the custom Face Group I made originally.
Oh, got it ~ So it's an issue of outline, and actually you manipulated Face Groups on the geo-shell of outline ~~ But, still I don't think the settings should influent a pJCM / cbs
I further tested a couple of cases in almost the same way as you did... but couldn't reproduce the issue.
Screenshot 1: a corrective morph triggered on the boots by Shin Bend, with ouline all on; (I modified the correctiver morph in Blender and imported to update it so as to make it look more obvious...)
Screenshot 2: turned off some Face Groups on the shell, no change was found to the corrective morph.
Edit: I did it by hiding bones of thighs / shins as well as using Auto-Hide on the facets of figure's thighs / shins...., then I got the same result with no issue ~
If you want two different geometries then you need two different figure assets - each geometry is loaded only once, then anything using it gets an instance of that to which it applies a stack of modifiers (the joints are modifiers, just as morphs are). The behabviour varies with load order depending one which version gets to define the base geometry.
But look in the second image at the skin of the thigh. There's no Outline on it, which was the issue I was trying to solve for originally that lead to my ill-fated Face Groups re-defining that caused me to make this thread haha.
Right, I just wanted to firstly make sure that manipulating Face Groups on a geo-shell shouldn't affect morphs on the conformed wearables. Then let's come to the root problem ~~
I understood the original issue you had. Yes, the filatoon outline solution is not perfect due to the limitation of geo-shell in DS. The case you have is fairly typical. You cannot make an easy but a perfect fix.
So, firstly, I'd like to suggest you do it with the way of Auto-Hide rather than hiding bones and setting geo-shell's Face Groups... because Auto-Hide can be set based on selected polygons which'll make the settings of hidden geometry more precisely (screenshot 1). In that way, you can keep the proper outlines while hiding figure's thighs / shins / feet 'n toes... according to the shape of wearables...(screenshot 2 ~ 3)
Only in your case, you might need to tweak the top edge of the boots a bit to make sure it can properly cover the hidden facets on the figure...
Alternatively, you can make geo-grafts to reserve the outlines in partial body parts by adding more surfaces onto the geo-shell... but that'll require more efforts ~~
Edit: In case there's any poke-through on the top edge of the boots, you can easily fix them either on the toon figure or the boots by using some tools like Mesh Grabber or Blender. If any PBM from the toon figure brings poke-thru or deformation on the boots, you also can fix them by zeroing out the Auto Follow hidden properties on the boots or by using a Rigidity Group.
All these ways can bring a nearly perfect result... I believe.
Thanks for your efforts crosswind, I'll play around with the auto-hide in the morning - way too late here for me to dive into a new approach haha. I definitely want to get this nailed down right, I really enjoy filatoon and am using it extensively now -- but I think a lot of assets in my library are going to need treatments like this.
Oh, and I see where the misunderstanding was in regards to the JCM thing -- I was redefining/adding Face Groups on the G8F itself, not the Toon Outline geoshell. That's where we got crossed up after my explanation (no pun intended).
That was what I thought from very beginning ~~
With Geometry Editor ?
Fortunately I still have a save file with the bad stuff. Polys were taken from lThigh and lShin to create lLegMiddle. This gave the perfect Outline (boot is obviously hidden for illustration) but blew up JCM's. I don't know why they would use Face Groups for driving JCM influence, that just seems like bad practice when in every other software I've used selection sets are purely a UX/UI element for convenience.
I'm not with my PC but I just assume if you did so, that would impact the transferred weight to the conformed wearables. For instance, when Shin Bend, you'll see the different shape around the knee back area...rather than a "different pJCM" per se ~~