margrave said:

marble said:

It seems to me that exporting to Blender for animation has one big drawback - and I think this has been discussed elsewhere (I know I have asked about it in other threads): clothing.

The problem as I see it is that there is no way to animate a clothed figure unless it is conforming clothing with no possibility of draping. Otherwise you have to turn it into Blender cloth and use the cloth sim which is another learning curve in itself and, from what I understand, no better than dForce, especially for imported clothing. So animating naked figures or super-heroes with skin-tight suits is about all you can expect to work with.

Again, I'd like to be mistaken but I believe that @Padone has a request logged for Thomas to look at this issue for Diffeomorphic.

Given all the skimpwear in the store, I doubt that's much of a problem. 

Though I haven't tried animating Daz characters with anything but conforming clothing, I've seen other ways to do it. Many ripped video game models use bones to control hair and clothing. There's also the Data Transfer modifier, which supposedly acts like Daz's projection maps, allowing one mesh to follow another--though it's quite a fearsome beast and I've yet to crack it.

FWIW, I find Blender's cloth sim to be more robust than dForce. dForce is more user-friendly since most of the heavy lifting is done by PAs, but Blender has more options to tweak, more kinds of force fields than a wind node, and full integration with the rest of the sims. If you want, you could have falling rain particles and a cloth sim dress both be affected by the same wind force field, and use Dynamic Paint to make the rain droplets dampen the dress by acting as a wet map. It'd take a hell of a lot of tweaking, simulation time, and material set-up, but you could do it.

That dynamic paint idea sounds amazing! I need to learn dynamic paint, that's one thing I've never really delved into. 

It looks like that editing my morph asset with ERC Freeze fixed the problem. Thank you, Frinkky. I got what I had asked for.

I also found out why figure Hercules HD is more aestheticly defined than figures Hercules SD and Genesis 3 Male when they all have the morph "Hercules Body HD" dialed at 100%: Hercules HD's SubDivision Level and Render SubD Level (Minimum) is set to 3. In comparison to Hercules SD and Genesis 3 Male, their SubDivision Level and Render SubD Level (Minimum) is set to 1 and 2, respectively. Therefore, setting Hercules SD figure's or Genesis 3 Male figure's SubDivision Level and Render SubD Level (Minimum) to 3 will have their muscular body be as aestheticly defined as Hercules HD.

chris-2599934 said:

There's some awsome renders (and products) in this thread. In the future, could you include a link to the product page in the entries you make? Or at least name the product. This is the second thread I've seen praising that promo of the cloak with all the morph dials, but I'm still none the wiser as to what product it is!

It's this one - the way FirstBastion links the images, if you hover over the image you can see the SKU id of the product (in this case 68599) and plug it into the store search box.

Whaddya know - I already OWNED that one! Even though it's evocative of "Maria," turns out it really is a long way from her actual lines. I may need to create a morph or prop to get her mecha-Roman nose. Still, with a bit of mixing and matching from a couple other outfits, she looks plausible from 20 feet ...

smaker1 said:

Did you apply a collision setting against your character ? Generally black marks are due to interpenetration between the hair and head

I do not believe so, I simply created the character and that is what showed when I applied the SideB hair. I noticed this happens with a lot of the hair in Daz3D. This is a character created using face transfer, however, the problem occurs with the basic Genesis 8 characters also. Do I need to apply a collision and if I do how would I apply the collision?

marble said:

It seems to me that exporting to Blender for animation has one big drawback - and I think this has been discussed elsewhere (I know I have asked about it in other threads): clothing.

The problem as I see it is that there is no way to animate a clothed figure unless it is conforming clothing with no possibility of draping. Otherwise you have to turn it into Blender cloth and use the cloth sim which is another learning curve in itself and, from what I understand, no better than dForce, especially for imported clothing. So animating naked figures or super-heroes with skin-tight suits is about all you can expect to work with.

Again, I'd like to be mistaken but I believe that @Padone has a request logged for Thomas to look at this issue for Diffeomorphic.

Given all the skimpwear in the store, I doubt that's much of a problem. 

Though I haven't tried animating Daz characters with anything but conforming clothing, I've seen other ways to do it. Many ripped video game models use bones to control hair and clothing. There's also the Data Transfer modifier, which supposedly acts like Daz's projection maps, allowing one mesh to follow another--though it's quite a fearsome beast and I've yet to crack it.

FWIW, I find Blender's cloth sim to be more robust than dForce. dForce is more user-friendly since most of the heavy lifting is done by PAs, but Blender has more options to tweak, more kinds of force fields than a wind node, and full integration with the rest of the sims. If you want, you could have falling rain particles and a cloth sim dress both be affected by the same wind force field, and use Dynamic Paint to make the rain droplets dampen the dress by acting as a wet map. It'd take a hell of a lot of tweaking, simulation time, and material set-up, but you could do it.

There's some awsome renders (and products) in this thread. In the future, could you include a link to the product page in the entries you make? Or at least name the product. This is the second thread I've seen praising that promo of the cloak with all the morph dials, but I'm still none the wiser as to what product it is!

You can use G8 textures on G8.1 with no problem.  With that said, the texture looks like Katherina's but the morph is not.

Hi all, I need a real boy morph other than Growing Up, primary school age. Any suggestions for appropriate loose clothing would help.

I have also problems with the smart content. I got more and issues lately with orphaned procucts (all installed via DazCentral), missing icons, duplicated icons pointing to the same file location etc. Under DB maintenance I tried to re-import the metadata which made it even worse (more duplicates and orphaned product...). Then I reset the DB and re-imported the metadata but I still have issues with many Lost and Found entries (even if some seem properly categorized and installed they appear also in Lost and Found). I couldn't find a solution to fix for example the issues with the morph extensions, however the morphs seem to be all there under the Parameters tab. To uninstall it via DazXentral and re-install it does not fix it.

Any ideas to fix my smart content lib? Thanks in advance for your help.

Anyone knows what texture was used in The Look Morph Face Resource main promo by P3Design?

Is it P3D Katherina HD or Genesis 8 Female?

The morphs are described in the promo, but the texture is such a HUUUUUGE part of that fabulous look...

Amazing product, btw!

Thanks

daveso said:

I suppose though, you could get a nice male crotch bulge with dforce pants if you had them attached. 

A simple "bulge" morph often gives better results than trying to use clothes with the geograft.

you can also use the transfer utility or various other transfer tools to transfer morphs from one gender to another - I actually dial in bits of male morphs on fermale characters a lot

If you make the discerning feature/s out of a morph pack that has both male and female counterparts just dial in the same features on each character (eg. https://www.daz3d.com/200-plus-head-and-face-morphs-bundle-for-genesis-8-female-s-and-male-s or the Genesis 8 Head Morphs male/female sets).

MimicMolly and Luciel both have good methods. I do something similar to Molly's method, myself. For figures that share the same base, you could use a common morph for them and then just make adjustments so they don't look identical. For example, if your father character's head is based on Michael 8's head at 50%, have the sons all have the Michael 8 head dialed in at some percentage to give them some features in common, and then add whatever other morphs on top that you like.

Another option would be to use a gender-swapping morph and do essentially as Luciel suggests by building your characters on your preferred base and then dialing in the opposite gender shape to change them from male to female or vice versa. I think there's a way to do it manually within Daz Studio without any extra products. It came up a lot when the Genesis 8 Female came out before the male counterpart.  This thread might have some advice you could use. There are also some things in the store that could help you do it, like this one. There's also a freebie called Transgender Genesis 8 by agentunawares over on DeviantArt, which is basically the same, just without all the extra morph options. If I remember correctly, it's just two morph dials, one for G8M and one for G8F, that give them the overall shape of the opposite gender. Good luck! I hope you figure out a method that works for you. :)

daveso said:

i'm still confused why people not using 8.1. is it becasue of having to upgrade to 4.15? Otherwise, the 8.1 male and female are free. 

I use 4.15, but don't use 8.1 when I can avoid it because the powerpose templates are still broken, and it needs workarounds to do some basic 8 stuff.

Also, the new UV layout is a bit pointless, and vellus hair is only needed in extreme closeups, so there isn't really much point over the normal base other than for women with dangly bits.

But if they fixed all the powerpose/missing morph problems, then it would be more tempting. 

scar_hand said:

I had followed the steps that Frinkky had suggested for creating a morph asset that can reduce the size of a Hercules HD figure that has its "Hercules Body HD" morph set at 100%. When I got to step 4 of the testing phase, I have found that the Hercules HD figure's fingers and toes are not bending correctly. How can I fix this?

Sorry, it looks like you'll have to do an ERC freeze:

1. With g3m completely zero'd (it's probably better to start over with a fresh G3M to be sure), apply your morph to 100%, perform the adjust rigging to shape. 
2. Right-click in the list of morphs under the parameters tab and click 'Edit Mode'
3. Right-click your morph and click 'ERC Freeze'
4. Leave options as default but ensure the only properties in the 'Freeze Properties' section that have a tick next to them begin with the following:

xOrigin & xEnd
yOrigin & yEnd
zOrigin & zEnd

1. Click Accept
2. Set your morph back to 0. Perform the 'Save' steps above.

Edit: I've added an ERC freeze section to my initial instructions above, in the appropriate order.

https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-pbrskin-manager

Ultimate PBRSkin Skin Manager is the best and most efficient tool ever made to adjust, customize, or even completely set up any existing Iray skin based on the new PRBSkin shader (and will work with Generation 4, Genesis, Genesis 2, 3, 8 and 8.1).

Thanks to a clear and synthetic overview and control of all the surface key properties determining the final look of the skin, sorted by categories of effects and organized in four tabs (Tone, Gamma, Gloss/Bump (Details), Additional Effects), you will be able to reach the skin characteristics you have in your mind fast, easily and efficiently. The organization of these key properties has been carefully thought so that everybody, beginners and advanced users, gain a huge amount of time, and get a clear overview of the whole skin shader while they customize the skin of a figure.

For the ones who already know "Ultimate Iray Skin Manager", this is the same principle, but everything was adapted for the new PBRSkin shader.

The rest of the interface has been developed in order to add a maximum of useful additional options and a great comfort of use, this is why you can directly from within the interface decide on which surfaces you work (skin including or excluding Lips and/or Nails, Lips only or Nails only), but you can also change the Viewport Style, the Environment Mode, the camera you use, the orbit node, the zoom, and the angle of the Perspective View, open the pdf documentation, etc, etc.

Don't be afraid to test new sets of parameters because save and load tools are also included directly in the interface. At any time during your skin shader adjustment, you can save in text files full or partial presets of the properties used by Ultimate PBRSkin Manager for your skin shader without leaving the interface. This way, you can load them later on, during the same or another session, on the same or on another figure, of the same or another generation (save/load skin properties without image maps). A specific script is also included in order to transfer the new properties of the figure to the surfaces of its anatomical elements.

Thanks to Ultimate PBRSkin Manager, not only you will find a synthetic and logical organization of the parameters you can change to reach the skin look you want, but also it will help you to make the skin adjustment process more methodical, faster, easier and more comfortable.

This is not a new shader, these are not shader presets. This is just a super efficient tool to adjust and customize PBRSkin based figure of any generation in a clear and efficient way. Considering the fact that there are not tons of PBRSkin figures right now, some of the promos were made using old figures that I converted to PBRSkin, before using Ultimate PBRSkin manager to adjust them. Furthermore, Ultimate PBRSkin manager can easily evolve to adapt to the eventual "new habits" PA will use to create their Genesis 8.1 figures.  Ultimate PBRSkin manager will work on any figure of any generation from Victoria 4 to Genesis 8.1 as long as their Skin+Nails+Lips and eyesockets when they exist shader use PBRSkin. I am developping an eyesocket patch which will be an additional file allowing the eyesocket conversion to PBRSkin, because it seems that some PA will forget to convert their eyesocket surfaces to PBRSkin.

Joined to this post as well as later on in this thread you will find two utility scripts allowing you to see what Skin/lips/nails surfaces are not PBRSkin in a figure, and to apply PBRSkin shader to Eyesocket (skin surface) and Fingernails and Toenails (nails surfaces). They are useful only if the author of the figure forgot to set up these surfaces as PBRSkin surfaces too. You can use them from your content library, or drag and drop them from anywhere on your computer on your selected figure. They will be finally included in PBRSkin Manager, either stand alone as it is the case here, or embedded in the main script.

This thread is here to answer any technical questions you could have. Please use this thread for this project, and not "Ultimate Iray Skin Manager" thread, so that things remain clear for everybody. Now a few images.

NorthOf45 said:

brettnuckles said:

NorthOf45 said:

The biggest source of delay for loading figures is all the morphs that need to be initialized that really slows things down, if you have a lot of them.

 

Thanks for the input! I do have a pretty crazy amount of morph packs, maybe I will uninstall some because I have a bunch I don't use often. Did not know that was a primary source of loading delay so this is very useful! Makes perfect sense. No wonder my figures started to load slower and slower over time -- I was accumulating more morph packs!

I did see someone in another older thread suggest using the "compress contents to save space" option in the Windows folder properties, which they said would make my library take up less space without messing with loading times (much?). Anyone know anything about whether that's accurate?

NTFS compression will benefit the text files and optimize the cluster usage, but will have little or no effect on the bitmaps, as they are already compressed about as much as they can be. Access time won't be much affected, and you might get 10-15% more disc space, but it's not like you will double your capacity. Depends on how much you expect to add to your library. Keep it in perspective. If you've spent a car's worth on content, don't skimp on the tires.

I wouldn't start using compression for complete disks... When the smelly stuff hits the fan, you are way deep in it...

brettnuckles said:

NorthOf45 said:

The biggest source of delay for loading figures is all the morphs that need to be initialized that really slows things down, if you have a lot of them.

 

Thanks for the input! I do have a pretty crazy amount of morph packs, maybe I will uninstall some because I have a bunch I don't use often. Did not know that was a primary source of loading delay so this is very useful! Makes perfect sense. No wonder my figures started to load slower and slower over time -- I was accumulating more morph packs!

I did see someone in another older thread suggest using the "compress contents to save space" option in the Windows folder properties, which they said would make my library take up less space without messing with loading times (much?). Anyone know anything about whether that's accurate?

NTFS compression will benefit the text files and optimize the cluster usage, but will have little or no effect on the bitmaps, as they are already compressed about as much as they can be. Access time won't be much affected, and you might get 10-15% more disc space, but it's not like you will double your capacity. Depends on how much you expect to add to your library. Keep it in perspective. If you've spent a car's worth on content, don't skimp on the tires.