creatiing morph targets with blender, and hiding the eyelashes?
Upirium
Posts: 727
This might be better suited for a blender forum but since it's about making a morph target I figured people here may have experience with it
I want to work on a face morph again but I can't ever get close to the eyes because of the eyelashes being there. If I try to move around the eyelids, I'm going to get the eyelashes. Is there any way I can sort of...make those as their own layer temporarily, so that while I'm working on the face I don't mess those up?
Also, if I mess with the eyelids is it going to mess up how the eyes sit? A while back I don't know how I managed to do it but when I was making a blender morph target, somehow it messed up the way the eyes sit, which is why I am now redoing that whole morph target. They were back in the head too far so that there was a space inebtween the eye and the face where it would just render black.

Comments
Which Daz figure(s) are you using? I ask because eyelashes on Gen 8 figures are a separate object; previously they were separate meshes but part of the figure object.
So with G8, editing the face (even the eyelids) need not affect the eyelashes anyway. I suggest you deselect them when exporting from Daz Studio. If you need them in Blender, export them separately from DS. You can put them on any layer (or in any collection in 2.80-speak) you like. Or you could select the eyelashes object in Blender and then use the eye icon in the outliner pane to toggle the visibility in the viewport.
For pre-G8 Daz figures, if I recall correctly the eyelashes are discrete meshes but not separate objects, so they will get exported from DS with the figure like it or not. You can select and then hide the eyelash verts in Edit mode in Blender (though this means they are ignored by any proportional editing of course).
The eyes are separate meshes from the figure and the lashes for G8 and earlier, so as long as you don't select any part of them when editing the face they should not get messed up, except possibly by proportional editing. You can hide the eye verts in Edit mode too to be sure they are ignored by proportional editing on the lids.
If you're using G8; delete the eyelashes before you export the G8 at base resolution. invis (I prefer to delete) everything you don't want to export, and for mothps you only want the item to export.
i'm using g2, so i cannot do that
so to get it straight, if i hide the eyelashes in blender they won't get messed up when i'm trying to mess with eyelids, and i can unhide them and export the morph out and it will be alright?
for reference i'm not actually using DAZ but Poser so idk what difference that makes but, I'm also using g2
it just seems like the same figure i messed with too, his eyelashes somehow are always messed up. i can use the exact same eyelash from another character who's eyelashes aren't messed up and these will look way too long and solid, so i have no idea what blender has done to them but i assume it was because i messed them up in blender
Dont hide the eyelashes then, just ignore them if you can, otherwise you have to make sure they follow what you are changing. One of the many reasons imo to use G8.
Whatever vertices you hide will not be edited. But as pointed out, that means they won't follow the changes you make to the lids. If you want the lashes to follow the lids, you will have to edit them separately or do as nicstt suggests and ignore them as best you can.
I can't see that Blender will care what other software you are using.
Maybe I am misunderstanding here, but the lashes will look solid in Blender until you put a material on them that uses the appropriate transparency map and render them, because they are a mesh sheet. The individual lashes are not modeled. They look solid in Daz Studio in smooth shaded mode too. I have not come across any instance of Blender itself making them longer than they are in DS.
One further thought: before you make any changes for your morph(s), create a shape key (called 'Basis' by default) and then another one. Select your second shape key and dial it up to 1, and make sure all your edits are done with that second shape key selected. Whenever you want to go back to the unchanged shape because something is messed up ,dial back the second shape key to zero, create a new shape key and off you go again.
Should probably have asked how you are importing the figure into Blender. I was assuming OBJ format.