...even in the city, being "automotively challenged" is a pain.  I've found items I could definitely use (like a nice solid wood half height dresser I found at my favourite second hand shop for 40$) but unless it's a big box, major chain, or department store, which are often ridiculously expensive, you have to figure out how to get whatever you buy home yourself. Yeah, for furniture particularly I like to actually see it, touch it, sit in it, etc. 

As for my stimulus, looking to get a 2 TB SSD to transfer my Daz Library to for improving response and then repurpose the HDD for storage. Would be nice to get an ATX  server board so I can increase the memory even more (maybe a dual socket and add a second Xeon X5660 for 12 cores 24 threads) but it would mean also having to find another copy of W7 Pro as the one I'm running is an OEM.  

s_j_gregory said:

2)  I should have known this from an earlier drive failure about a year ago.  I have, so far, segregated about 20 characters (and about 30 clothing items and MAT expansion sets) from my working runtime.  Now when I open a character, (saved with a scene or as a scene subset) there are character related .dsf files missing.  I thought the point of this exercise was to stop DAZ Studio from loading unnecessary files; so, the fact that it's looking for them anyways is a bit dissappointing.  As best as I can tell, the pre-existing scenes or scene subsets are not missing the files: they load fine.  I want to say that this is the 'non-zero default thing' but I think it is different because the 100% coinidence is too much for me to believe that there are that many non-zero defaults.  I think the scene/scene subset is keeping track of every character in my content at the time it is created/saved.  (I don't actually understand why this would be the case but. . . .)  Could this be a feature, bug or something I am doing wrong or is wrong with my setup.  I don't have metrics but this cannot help load times. . .

Any advice/comments appreciated.

PS.  If the item is (re) loaded and saved with the segregated content directory NOT mapped, then when the scene or scene subset is loaded again, it does not look for the segregated content.  I hope that this is clear and not further complicating my story - but it reinforces the notion the file knows the footprint of what existed when it was created and more is fine but less is not.  It could be the DIM uninstall leaves something behind that I don't when I do it manually. . . ..

The saved scene has settings for morphs which were present when the scene was created and were, in some way, used.  If you have the character selected for "Node" and "Node Recursive" or with any of the character bones selected (Hip or below) and "Object" set as the creation mode and then you create a key frame everything in the parameters tab, set or not, is perma-burned into the scene.  Now every character morph that can be applied to that character is required when the scene is reloaded.  This functionality is, in fact, correct - creating a key frame declares that you want to freeze even the zero/default settings in the parameter pane.

I create scene subsets for individual characters with the character unposed but dressed/equipped.  A lot of the problem morphs can be removed from the character by using the animation timeline, selecting the character "properties" node and deleting the keys for poses and expressions, plus the keys that are in the hidden node of properties.  I just spent time working through a few of the characters I'd saved as a scene subset and this is one of the things I did.

The more general approach is to load the scene subset in one instance of DAZStudio which has a minimum configuration, skip installing the missing packages and watch out for missing textures; this immediately tells me if I used a skin from a different character and, obviously, I need to fix that.  So I install the *different* character from DIM, delete the previously loaded character and reload the scene subset.  Now the list of missing .duf files just  lists the missing morphs, including the pose/expression morphs if I'm loading a posed character (or scene).

So I then complete the load, use the CMS to change DAZStudio so that it can see "everything" (I have a CMS set for that, but I've taken to just adding my three G8 "Unused" directories to the current set), delete scene and reload it.  Now it should load with no missing packages and I can step through the "currently used" pane for each character finding out what is actually used; e.g. nails from different characters, character morphs actually applied, poses, expressions.  I check the morphs by undressing the "everything" character (delete all the wardrobe), changing the skin surface shaders to flat red paint and merging the sceen back in - apart from the red eyes there shouldn't be any red showing through ;-)

It's tedious, but I only have to do it once per "old" scene and since I tend to re-use the same poses, expressions and characters with different morphs/mixes I'm gradually building a "default" CMS set that produces relatively few missing things with different "old" scenes.

I just had a crazy thought. Forgive me if I am being stupid, but could the problems with morphs located in 'Neck' and the hair not following a pose be related?

I noticed the V4 'skeleton' from the head down has joints labeled Head, Neck, Chest, Abdomen, Hip ....

G3 and G8 both have Head, Neck Upper, Neck Lower, Chest Upper, Chest Lower, Abdomen Upper, Abdomen Lower ...

Is it possible these different joint configurations are confusing the conversion process? The converter may find 'Neck' in V4 hair, so it does not know what to do in transfering it to G8. That might mean anything located below head is lost (or hidden). Instead, is there a way to tell the converter that if it finds a joint labeled 'Neck' then put anything it finds there in 'Neck Upper'? We could transfer Chest to Chest Upper and Abdomen to Abdomen Upper in the same way.

Just putting a thought out there anyway.  

 

Editing to add: Checking the joint structures of the V4 hairs (converted and unconverted) they show: Head  - opens to - Back01, FrontR01, SideL01, SideR01, FrontL01 .... these four branches open further to show 'FrontR02, FrontR03, etc... 

Normal G8 (and G3) hairs have joints which match the figure. That is 'Head', Neck Upper,' Neck lower, etc etc, at least down to the hip. Additional joints for tails and such like are located in one of those bones (usually Neck Lower or Head)

So there's no matching bones for V4-G8 coversions below the head. So perhaps the converter should also transfer the G8 bone structure to the V4 hairs? Additionally, the 'Back, FrontR, SideL, SideR, FrontL joints can be transfered beneath the 'Head' branch as they are in V4. Or is there an option for this I've missed?

lilweep said:

Morphs can control other morphs.  You can create master/slave relationships between different parameters via ERC.

In Daz terms, master is the "Controller" and slave is the "Sub-component".  So you would have the Pose Control dial set up as Controller and your morph as Sub-component.

I can't remember how to set them up.  I think you can just drag and drop the relevant morph into the Controller or otherwise Subcomponent slots in the Property Heirarchy.

 

Thank you, I've done some searching about Controllers and Sub-Components and found some instructions. A tad outdated, but I think I've figured it out. Cheers!

Nope, the ears are part of the head morph. You could try this product that lets you split morphs, but i doubt it will work just for the ears https://www.daz3d.com/shape-splitter

alapoubellelesspams said:

what's the name of the model and where can it be purchased ?

 

it's not a morph for a DAZ figure, just a plain 3d model https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/character/fantasy/popeye-d191c909-a066-4896-bd7b-03751dfb96da

 

if it's a full body morph I just slightly dial in another elf ear morph on the figure so it also appears on the hair then negatively dial that one, then undial the extra one in the figure 

The "standard" DO Elf Ears control has, I believe, got "Auto Follow" disabled in its settings. If you're using a different one, make sure that is indeed disabled.

(Alternatively, you can go to the item in question and dial out the auto-follow morph there, which is useful if you want auto follow on *some* items, but not others, or need to adjust its strength).

If it's a very special morph then one could go via Genesis - first get the M3 'shape' for Genesis, then get the legacy morph transfer utility (I think it's called Gen-X, something like that) and also its V3/M3 expansion.

amysparkles said:

I recently purchased this converter and managed to have a little play with it today.

I converted eight different hairstyles. Four converted to G3 perfectly fine and work well with the Growing Up Youth Morphs. All these hairs were by the same vendor - 3DUniverse.

However, three G8-G3 conversions did not fit the hair properly to the G3 scalp. Instead, the three hairstyles were placed somewhere inside G3F's head. No amount of morph slider settings fixed that. The same thing happened with both the G3 base figure, and after applying the Youth Morph. Coincidentally all these hairs were from EmmaandJordi. I really like their hairstyles as they work well with the Youth Morph and render quickly in both 3Delight and Iray. So it is sad they're not fitting correctly.

Another point I will add here, is that I also attempted to convert hairs that had already been converted from V4 to G8F. I had hoped at least some of them would convert again from G8 to G3, but unfortunately they do not appear to have worked. At least, they're not in the folder I specified and smart content is not detecting them. So I think they did not convert.

I also tried converting a DForce hair from G8 to G3, and Daz Studio crashed during the conversion process.

I will attempt some other hairstyles from different merchants later and see if there's a pattern. It seems though that the hair converter does not like EmmaandJordi hairs. Is there any reason why this happens?

A lot of EmmaAndJordi are hair with hats integrated.  The converter cannot convert multipart hair.

For the V4->G8-G3, I would need to see the log on trying to convert one of them to tell you more.  You might have to try Force Convert.

Robinson said:

PerttiA said:

Making the  visemes and G8 base expressions (and any expressions that are using them) work on G8.1 requires removing dummy/placeholder expressions that are installed to G8.1 morph folders - These dummy/placeholder expression files have no other function than to prevent the base G8 expressions from loading. 

The dummy/placeholder files are located in;

...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Base Pose Head\ (255 files)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Expressions\ (24 files)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Male 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Base Pose Head\ (255 files)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Male 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Expressions\ (24 files)

Please make sure you are removing the files from G8.1 morph folders and not G8 morph folders.

What does it break?

Nothing.

If you open the files in Notepad++ you can see that they are masqurading as the G8 ones but without any function = There is nothing inside to make a dial with.

Two or three of the G8 expressions are labeled the same as G8.1 expressions but that is easy to change.

PerttiA said:

Making the  visemes and G8 base expressions (and any expressions that are using them) work on G8.1 requires removing dummy/placeholder expressions that are installed to G8.1 morph folders - These dummy/placeholder expression files have no other function than to prevent the base G8 expressions from loading. 

The dummy/placeholder files are located in;

...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Base Pose Head\ (255 files)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Expressions\ (24 files)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Male 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Base Pose Head\ (255 files)
...\Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Male 8_1\Morphs\Daz 3D\Expressions\ (24 files)

Please make sure you are removing the files from G8.1 morph folders and not G8 morph folders.

What does it break?

Sevrin said:

Random said:

Improvements in expression would be great but perhaps it is more difficult than some may think. There's a very thin line between expression and caricature especially in a 2-d image and with iray renders seeming to emphasize line a bit it is all too easy to go too far. My personal opinion, but 8.1 facial expressions tend to go over the line.

That's why it's always better to use sliders than one-click expressions.  One-click expressions have always been problematic.  What's more, the emphasis with G8.1 is on the Face Control rig, which provides a more intuitive and granular interface once you get used to it.

(Primarily G3 user.) Sliders are better. My trick is to use the sliders until the expression gets a response from me that a real person would. For example, I want to smile back at my smiling character. I feel it gets me more realistic expressions, especially combined with small changes to some of the face morph sliders. It can take me a while to get what I am looking for.

I have an issue regarding geoshell to blender. After I merged the geographs(golden palace), the geograph area cannot be weight painted. 

My workflow is

1. Add geograph in DAZ then follow Dazimporter tutorial to import to blender

2. After merging the rigs, I imported shape keys then merge the geographs. 

When I pose the character, I noticed that the geograph area doesn't have the same weight paint as the rest of the body. Did I do anything wrong in my workflow? 

I tried to do "data transfer" for vertext groups, it didn't work. It seemed that the vertesies are residing in another universe.

 

 

@gerster I'm not an expert on this subject, but from what I understand daz studio uses mesh templates for conforming. That is, when a figure is morphed the template is morphed too, then the outfit is conformed to the template. May be you can use the "mesh deform" and "surface deform" modifiers in blender to get something similar.

What is unique to daz studio is "morphing armatures". That is, the genesis figures allow to morph the armature together with the shape of the figure, in animation. That's not possible in blender or any other platform afaik. And that's probably why ik doesn't work in daz studio animations, since I bet a ik solver would have some hard time with a morphing armature, but this is my very own guess.

Fleet admiral , awesome work those figures are absolutely amazing . Will they be something that will be shared with the community? I have a little update of my own . you all might remember I said that there will be character packs to go with the digital toy box uniforms ..... so without any further ado ta.. da... And it kind of even gets a little bit better because these morphs will work with just about any Genesis 3 male or female character morph . so you can virtually populate your bird of prey bridge with motley Crue of your favorite Genesis 3 figures

Update. I finally learned how to use the transfer utility and now he has his proper uniform. 

 

I should mention I have a huge wardrobe of 'Trek costumes to put them in. I could do DS9 era Kirk if I wanted to.

Hello all! Maybe someone's already reviewed or talked about Mesh Grabber (MG henceforth) here, but after FINALLY diving into using it (after having purchased it back when it first dropped) I'm really hooked!  Using it to tweak clothes or objects to fix poke-through or to create soft-body deformations like when people sit on a couch are potential uses that spring to mind (and it works easily and well for those things!) but I wanted to see how it would work, along with the geometry tool, to wreck stuff!
Sometimes, just removing or hiding a part of something just is not enough to convey the effect you want. Using a slime prop, scaled, placed & reshadered, I created areas of wrenched, twisted and slagged metal to edge a ruined section of spaceship after explosion using MG; just hiding/deleting bits by geometry tool left a too-clean, broken-3d-structure sort of unsatisfactory void. Using the RAND falloff in MG (instead of smoother falloff options) lets you create cool changes in the mesh because it  randomly affects different polygons in target at different intensities.  Very cool and potentially useful for different effects in Daz Studio.

A TIP for people who want to begin using MG: your mileage will vary, depending on the resolution of the mesh you work on. In 3pt image set I just did about spaceship wreck, the thing was huge, lots of details/parts but not real dense polygon-wise up close for trying to manipulate mesh with MG (or when deleting/hiding stuff with geometry tool in a way to simulate explosion damage:). So, (if subdivision is not the answer) you can use another prop or primitive item that has higher res/polygons count and add it over/onto the prop you're wanting to modify, and give it the same shader or materials as you want to make them work together; the higher res item will let you create more detailed changes to the item with MG. If you have, say, a very low res object and try to manipulate it with mesh grabber you'll get very simplistic, jagged shapes that just look like bad 3d from the dark ages. But if there's decent resolution in your mesh (as there was with Slime prop I used for slagged tortured metal), you can really push, pull and rotate those polygons around in a pretty fluid way and it's amazing to be able to remodel things directly in Daz Studio without having to attempt such things in post-work. Especially exciting if you're not a 3d modeller but wish you could! Some folks have lotta love for Daz Studio built-in deformer tool, but I struggled with that back when I tried it with frustrating and unlovely results; I found MG to be much more intuitive, personally, and somehow more direct and focused. First time clicking the tool I was able to readily wield it, unlike my Deformer experience. I think that since Mesh Grabber seems much like-and is accessed and used like-the geometry tool, if you've used that tool, you're pretty much at home with MG. (and I had successfully dabbled with geometry tool before getting MG.) YMMV of course; different strokes for different folks etc, but I'm really, really happy I'd purchased the Mesh Grabber, and then the add-ons.  Like the deformer tool, with Mesh Grabber you can make changes to a mesh and save out the change as a morph (if you bought the Mesh Grabber Morph Editor add-on or the MG bundle with all the add-ons), which gives us non-modellers an accessible way to make mods to objects right in DS that we can have available afterwards as morphs to use.  MG ROCKS. Try it!

Here's an example crop from pt3 of the 3 part spaceship wreck image series I did and uploaded to gallery that shows some Mesh Grabber mayhem; click through to see actual gallery image (and click again to maximize it).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Links to other 2 images in series:     Emergency Off Mars! pt1 FIRST STRIKE    Emergency Off Mars! pt2 ADRIFT

  ~Gen

Hello. I've had a few DAZ Studio crashes while attempting to fit figures one to another to port my morph from G3 to G8. It kind of worked... eventually, but after that I'm having some massive issues with Genesis loading. Any genesis, as it seems - well, 3 & 8 takes the most, earlier ones load faster, but still longer than before. After that it works about ok, at least at a glance.

It takes at very least 5 minutes of it being stuck on "reading assets" or "deleting scene" (even if there's nothing). Then it finally begins loading, and log file rapidly increases in size. Most of its content look like this:

2021-03-15 04:11:10.931 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(1660): Failed to prepare modifier: Left Hand Pose 14!
2021-03-15 04:11:10.931 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(5836): Could not find parent for modifier: Left Hand Pose 13.
2021-03-15 04:11:10.931 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(1660): Failed to prepare modifier: Left Hand Pose 13!
2021-03-15 04:11:10.931 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(5836): Could not find parent for modifier: Left Hand Pose 12.

2021-03-15 04:11:27.320 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(1671): Failed to create modifier: Center Pinch!
2021-03-15 04:11:27.325 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(1671): Failed to create modifier: Center Height Top!
2021-03-15 04:11:27.325 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(1671): Failed to create modifier: Center Height Bottom!

%208/Male/Morphs/enbis.main/Product/alias_Genesis8Male_XID_Genesis8Female.dsf#XID_Genesis8Female?value
2021-03-15 04:13:20.980 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7032): Duplicate formula found linking yOrigin & XID_Genesis8Female in S:/Net/My Library/data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/Male/Morphs/enbis.main/Product/alias_Genesis8Male_XID_Genesis8Female.dsf.
2021-03-15 04:13:20.980 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7033): owner: Genesis8_1Male
2021-03-15 04:13:20.985 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7034): output: rPectoral:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Male/Genesis8Male.dsf#rPectoral?center_point/y
2021-03-15 04:13:20.985 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7035): input: Genesis8Male:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis

I won't post the whole thing, since it's large and it goes through pretty must everything I have installed - while loading default figure which has nothing to do with those packs.

And the loading ends up "Duplicate formulas" error followed by a Missing Files window that says some of the files are missing, among which (!) is the .duf file I used to experiment in. Of course it's no longer there, it was temporary file I deleted, but how come the Genesis 8 Male/Female cares about that file now? And here I must note that "duplicate formulas" is something I had for a while, and it slowed down loading of some toons, but not the default ones, so I never bothered to fix it (actually, I tried, but couldn't find working solution).

I tried to re-install 3&8 Genesis Essentials, but that didn't help. Clearing temp folders and cache folders in AppData didn't work either (but the app itself loads somewhat faster than before). Anything else can be done? I don't feel like reinstalling the whole thing pack by pack, tbh. It's a lot, and my traffic is not completely free, as well as time. Any help would be appreciated. 

memcneil70 said:

Thank you so much Robert! That drove me nuts. 

Now, if we can get the PAs on DAZ to do a morph of a fur baby like him or of Novica's baby, that would be wonderful

Mary

No postwork was done on this. That is the real blizzard and taken on my new iPhone 12 Pro Max. Got it yesterday.

Your welcome and yes it would