ehh were you here for the v4 era? pre genesis morphs didn't load until you told them to aaaannd people hated it. it was an awful design

you had to manually load in any morp sets you planned to use one by one  to load the figure you: loaded the figure scrolled to the head  and body morphs clicked the preset to load them in waited for them to load and set up - oh you have some after market fix morphs for bending? scoll to where they are click the preset let them load. Oh you want to use some of the head or body morph from this character scroll to their folder click the presets let them load and on and on and on.

The loading speed could improve for sure, but I still find it faster to set up a genesis character with that load time than systems where i can just load what I want but I have to manually select what I want, and with the front load time I can just go away and do something for the minute it takes to load - with something more manual, even if it were faster, it would still be active time as opposed to time I can just switch over and browse the interwebs on.

again not saying its pervect but there are very valid advantages to the design

This makes no sense to me. The core characters usually come in a bundle and if you buy the bundle, you will already own the core character, so all you’re getting is the HD morph. Also, this doesn’t let you choose which core characters and I’ve been passing on many these days. Plus, I don’t like the shaders in G8.1 anyway, so I may be done with purchasing new characters that don’t use the original iRay.

No biggie. I have enough content to last the rest of my life and scooped up a ton in the $2.99 sales. I really don’t see the point of this promotion. And it’s really trying to pull money from artists hoping to win contests rather than companies who could better afford this. I have literally no interest in this. 

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

How can you say you can't know the details, then assert that DS is doing something it doesn't need to do - especially here, where the reason for loading all morphs (to get their relationships) has been explained repeatedly?

Because I made a distinction between things we can observe externally without knowing the internals, and the things we cannot know. Many people have observed it empirically by having their character distorted by an errant morph that the scene does not even explicitly use.

that happens when the asset is icorrectly saved with a non-zero default value - oe when the relationships on a correction are not set properly

And just because a particular has been explained, repeatedly as you say, does not mean that the behaviour represents a good design. My point is that a design that requires loading morphs that are not even used, for whatever reason, is not a good design. It may have been an acceptable at some point, but it didn't scale and today it is not. I don't think the people suffering from its artefacts are very much consoled by the "explanation"; my doctor telling me "Well, you see, your head hurts because your hair appears to be on fire" doesn't make it any less painful.

Let's stop making apologies for a bad design that needs to be re-thought for DS to keep moving forward.

It isn't bad design, though - it is the latest iteration in a process that enables a figure to be given extra morphsin a flexible manner. It's very good at that, but there is an overhead. Perhaps the next iteration will be able to build further.

If you only imported it as a morph target onto the original model it won't mess up the joint weighting at all. When you dial the morph to zero does it look ok?

Macislav said:

I'm talking about a problem, which occurs more in the close-up view. (but not only)

As games are getting more and more realistic, Daz3d needs to keep up with the development.

Either the base mesh quality has to improve (Genesis 9) by some low two digit percentage or the 1st subdivision should be made accessible (bone driven morph targets included) for blender/UE4.

This would be the new LOD_0 and the current base mesh would then become LOD_1 (in Unreal Engine). This would be the most simple solution and would bring results comparable to the new MetaHuman as it seams to be just a very high poly body mesh and no unknown magic.

Currently as it stands, the faces have a too low polycount, the mouth interior included. In comparison Reallusions CC3 has much more refined faces (more triangles), the problem is esp. visible on the nose and chin, cheeks and ears...

Another problem are the elbows and the knees, which do not look so good, when bent (visible and sticking out edges).

The toenails and the balls of the feet need a better resolution as well and last but not least the ankles and shoulder blades need to become better defined.

My suggestion is to go for the "1st subdivision access" way, thus the characters would look more like they were originally intended to look.

What could help as well, would be to allow exporting a mesh with the "high resolution" setting: A setting that smoothens the edges of the base resolution mesh. Or is this just some modifier?

well to be fair the bridge does allow you to export the level 1 hd, then you can have both level 0 and 1 and make a sort of "LOD" using both, also all is matter is the game and "how close to the character the cam is, for exemple for games with cam far away from the character then level 0 is fine for games with extreme close-up you can use level 1. 

I exported an obj of the garment to maya where I moved the verticies around to shorten the legs a bit of the base shape, I then exported an obj of the new shape and imported it into Daz via the morph loader pro onto the original garment using the default settings.

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

Paintbox said:

Daz_Jessica said:

Jason Galterio said:

Sevrin said:

Jason Galterio said:

Honestly I don't see this any different than purchasing store credit.

When I buy the credit, I am spending money on future purchases where I have no idea what they will be. I'm just locking in my future purchase at a discount by promising to buy something.

Now I just got an additional discount, since I used store credit, for items that I won't know what they will be. But odds are I would have purchased the base characters anyway...

IFF you buy every base character, it's not a bad deal.  I buy one in two or three (one since 8.1), but I don't know how typical I am.  You do get that sexy forum badge and 2 things that may change your life for the better, along with something to do with a contest.

I also don't mind supporting new things that DAZ wants to try...  as long as they are at least associated with the base product.

I'd rather this not be a 4x a year thing though. Once or twice a year I could swallow, more than that and I'd have to take a pass.

We don't yet know if this will be a once a year thing, twice a year, etc. We want to try new things and see what works. 
 

I pitched this in the NFT thread, but hopefully you'll note this, I like the ability to give some store credit to some folks on the gallery. So maybe a button to easily transfer a small amount to images I like, so I can support favorite artists on here. I think it will be nice to community build like that. You can even keep a percentage up to 25%, if that pays for the development of the function.

In many countries, this would be counted as income, so the artists would have to report and pay taxes, so probably not that appealing to many people. 

Yes, I think you can count out all EU member states. 

Paintbox said:

Daz_Jessica said:

Jason Galterio said:

Sevrin said:

Jason Galterio said:

Honestly I don't see this any different than purchasing store credit.

When I buy the credit, I am spending money on future purchases where I have no idea what they will be. I'm just locking in my future purchase at a discount by promising to buy something.

Now I just got an additional discount, since I used store credit, for items that I won't know what they will be. But odds are I would have purchased the base characters anyway...

IFF you buy every base character, it's not a bad deal.  I buy one in two or three (one since 8.1), but I don't know how typical I am.  You do get that sexy forum badge and 2 things that may change your life for the better, along with something to do with a contest.

I also don't mind supporting new things that DAZ wants to try...  as long as they are at least associated with the base product.

I'd rather this not be a 4x a year thing though. Once or twice a year I could swallow, more than that and I'd have to take a pass.

We don't yet know if this will be a once a year thing, twice a year, etc. We want to try new things and see what works. 
 

I pitched this in the NFT thread, but hopefully you'll note this, I like the ability to give some store credit to some folks on the gallery. So maybe a button to easily transfer a small amount to images I like, so I can support favorite artists on here. I think it will be nice to community build like that. You can even keep a percentage up to 25%, if that pays for the development of the function.

In many countries, this would be counted as income, so the artists would have to report and pay taxes, so probably not that appealing to many people. 

Paintbox said:

Daz_Jessica said:

Jason Galterio said:

Sevrin said:

Jason Galterio said:

Honestly I don't see this any different than purchasing store credit.

When I buy the credit, I am spending money on future purchases where I have no idea what they will be. I'm just locking in my future purchase at a discount by promising to buy something.

Now I just got an additional discount, since I used store credit, for items that I won't know what they will be. But odds are I would have purchased the base characters anyway...

IFF you buy every base character, it's not a bad deal.  I buy one in two or three (one since 8.1), but I don't know how typical I am.  You do get that sexy forum badge and 2 things that may change your life for the better, along with something to do with a contest.

I also don't mind supporting new things that DAZ wants to try...  as long as they are at least associated with the base product.

I'd rather this not be a 4x a year thing though. Once or twice a year I could swallow, more than that and I'd have to take a pass.

We don't yet know if this will be a once a year thing, twice a year, etc. We want to try new things and see what works. 
 

I pitched this in the NFT thread, but hopefully you'll note this, I like the ability to give some store credit to some folks on the gallery. So maybe a button to easily transfer a small amount to images I like, so I can support favorite artists on here. I think it will be nice to community build like that. You can even keep a percentage up to 25%, if that pays for the development of the function.

It's a very interesting idea. I think it could be very nice for the community.  Currently we don't have the infrastructure or sytems to handle this and there are some tax questions we'd have to investigate.  but it's on my list of great ideas though and we'll see what's possible. 

Daz_Jessica said:

Jason Galterio said:

Sevrin said:

Jason Galterio said:

Honestly I don't see this any different than purchasing store credit.

When I buy the credit, I am spending money on future purchases where I have no idea what they will be. I'm just locking in my future purchase at a discount by promising to buy something.

Now I just got an additional discount, since I used store credit, for items that I won't know what they will be. But odds are I would have purchased the base characters anyway...

IFF you buy every base character, it's not a bad deal.  I buy one in two or three (one since 8.1), but I don't know how typical I am.  You do get that sexy forum badge and 2 things that may change your life for the better, along with something to do with a contest.

I also don't mind supporting new things that DAZ wants to try...  as long as they are at least associated with the base product.

I'd rather this not be a 4x a year thing though. Once or twice a year I could swallow, more than that and I'd have to take a pass.

We don't yet know if this will be a once a year thing, twice a year, etc. We want to try new things and see what works. 
 

I pitched this in the NFT thread, but hopefully you'll note this, I like the ability to give some store credit to some folks on the gallery. So maybe a button to easily transfer a small amount to images I like, so I can support favorite artists on here. I think it will be nice to community build like that. You can even keep a percentage up to 25%, if that pays for the development of the function.

onix said:

How do you even explain the situation when some rogue morph file, which is not even referenced by the used anywhere, is messing up the figure? 

That looks more like a bug than a feature. Such files should not have any ability to get injected into the model.

I can only guess that the reason why this was done was to allow some kind of plugin style morphs where you install some corrective stuff which gets turned on without user consent just by the mere fact that it exists.

But by all sane logic that should never happen. Morphs should be turned on only if the user decides to do so or some other morph specifically references them.  Installing third-party models should not in any way affect the base model without user consent.

It is even a serious security issue because someone can deliberately or accidentally ruin someone's else product and make it behave in a very strange way

+1000

@onix you said it better than I did. In no other area of computing would this be acceptable. This is the equivalent of Windows 3.0 and no one wants to be the equivalent of Windows 3.0

It's a bad design. Period.

How can you say you can't know the details, then assert that DS is doing something it doesn't need to do - especially here, where the reason for loading all morphs (to get their relationships) has been explained repeatedly?

Because I made a distinction between things we can observe externally without knowing the internals, and the things we cannot know. Many people have observed it empirically by having their character distorted by an errant morph that the scene does not even explicitly use.

And just because a particular has been explained, repeatedly as you say, does not mean that the behaviour represents a good design. My point is that a design that requires loading morphs that are not even used, for whatever reason, is not a good design. It may have been an acceptable at some point, but it didn't scale and today it is not. I don't think the people suffering from its artefacts are very much consoled by the "explanation"; my doctor telling me "Well, you see, your head hurts because your hair appears to be on fire" doesn't make it any less painful.

Let's stop making apologies for a bad design that needs to be re-thought for DS to keep moving forward.

I can see why the OP, as a content creator, needs so many characters and their morphs installed. My load times, by comparison, are very short - <10 seconds for a G8 character. I assume that is because I have only around 20 characters in my library. I do have a lot of morph packs though - mosty from Zev0. So maybe the solution is to buy less pre-made stuff and dial-in more shapes using the morph packs? I know that some people have hundreds of characters and that they have excruciatingly long load times.

Matt_Castle said:

Why hasnt Daz Studio got Soft Body Physics like Blender?

A large part of it is that many or most of the existing clothing assets out there simply aren't made to work with it. Because of the limitations of dForce, a lot of items are not fully dynamic, and there's no documentation as to what is and isn't.

With dForce, it's more or less okay if the clothing has dynamic physics but the figure doesn't, because you still get much of the effect. It doesn't work so well with DS.

That said, I have actually done experiments with using dForce for soft body stuff, and it has been somewhat successful. It's limited to the base mesh resolution, but even so, that's still often a dramatic improvement to the end result.

How did you accomplish this? Paint a dForce weight map on the figure (obviously) and then reduce the size of the garment on the timeline? 

I've run into a general issue with smoothing modifiers on clothes, since most clothes use/need them. If you morph the body to 'bulge' from the clothing, then the clothing just smoothes itself out to match, thus defeating the purpose of morphing the body. The only way I've gotten around this is to export the clothing to obj and then reimport as a new object that won't react to changes to the body.  

What would be useful is Daz telling us what they see as the primary issues/areas of potential improvement to work on.  No promises, no release dates.  And I'm not going to base 2021 buying decisions on features that might not be available until 2026, or might never come to be, so giving us some sense of where Daz is going in an imprecise "long term" isn't going to have any effect on current content sales.

What I see as primary issues/areas of potential improvement:

1. I use Daz Studio almost entirely for still renders.  Other users want something that would be a platform intended for animators.  Others want an application for manipulating items for export to another platform.  Is it viable or wise to develop two or three separate applications, or is there a way to serve three different markets well with newer versions of Daz Studio?

2. Relatively few potential users of Daz Studio or content can always work on high-end machines with enormous RAM and ultra-fast processors.  The world of consumer devices is moving toward smaller, lighter, and more portable. Those devices will have inherent limitations vs. a high-end desktop. How will Daz remain relevant in a world of tablets, smartphones, and PCs that aren't state-of-the-art?  

3. Is there a way to make dForce and rendering meaningfully faster?  Hoping that everyone will have a supercomputer won't solve the problem.  The machine I'm using now is much better than it was 8-10 years ago, but the scenes I'm rendering are more technically demanding.  My process from start to finished render takes almost as long now as then, and the improvement is only because I have a better idea of what I'm doing.  

4. What areas of figures/characters can be improved?  How about deformation of soft tissue?  I still see weird torsion of the upper arms.  We've seen great improvements from the Generation 3 & 4 figures I started with.   Maybe fibermesh eyebrows that don't look like eyebrow toupees (Eyebrow merkins?  What would the term be?) made of steel wool.

5. Better clothing fit and adjustability.  Daz Studio still doesn't recognize multiple kinds of tops.  Blazers and sports bras are fitted to the characters the same way.  In real life, they don't fit onto the body in the same way at all.  Fasteners (buttons, zippers, etc.) aren't simulated well if you make significant morph changes (fatter, thinner, taller, shorter, big boobs, small boobs, pot belly, etc.).  The same is true for fabric print (plaid, floral, etc.) and fabric weave/mesh.

6. Autodetect of shoe geometry (high heels, platform soles, etc.) and auto-adjustment of  foot and leg poses.

7. Better parenting of props and accessories to figures.

8. Streamlining the Daz Studio interface.

9. (Alternate universe point--I've no hope on this one).  Making a minimal effort towards proper documentation and explanation of Daz Studio features.

(How have I survived without Platinum Forum Flair?)

So, let's say I have pants for Genesis 2 female that are otherwise perfect but I don't want them to go all the way down past the ankles, and so I make a morph where I raise the bottom most part to sort of be above the ankles, and it looks fine, so long as G2F doesn't move but as soon as the foot rotates or bends, it looks all wonky. 
What is the simplest and cleanest way to adjust the weights to reflect the new shape of the garment?

Richard Haseltine said:

Can you open that file? It may have been corrupted by a disc error. As for why it is being referenced, did you have any custom morphs (spawned from a dFormer or imported with Morph Loader) or other geometry chnages/additions?

Yes, I can open the file but DAZ says it can't find it, after loading it. There was a conversion from Gen3 to Gen8 in the file, but not there isn't. That morph was washed out two months ago thanks to other DAZ issues (rebuilt from scratch). Since then, I've done probably 400-500 renders with no issue, until now. I resaved the "missing" file without the now nonexistent conversion morph but I'm still getting the error.

felis said:

Can you open the actual scene file?

Is the character dependent on the scene file?

I assume this is a new error. Do you remember what the last thing you did prior to the error?

Yes, I can open that scene file. However, that particular file was one where I used a character converter to move a genesis 3 figure to genesis 8. Since then, I had to reinstall DAZ and wipe my hard drive (that was about two months ago). The old file can't find the converted morph because it no longer exists (had to redo it). So I opened that old file, and then saved it, overwriting the old one thinking maybe it was the nonexistent saved morph. THat didn't work either. Now, when I open the "missing" file, it loads, while telling it can't find that file.

No, the character loading has absolutely nothing to do with that old file.

The last thing I remember doing was a small batch of scenes for Patreon. Six, I believe. When my 1 year woke up from her nap, I started the batch render like normal and walked away. Came back to that issue.

Just for funnies, I just opened the missing file again. I find it kind of comical that DAZ has opened the file while simulataneously stating it can't find the file.

Richard Haseltine said:

How can you say you can't know the details, then assert that DS is doing something it doesn't need to do - especially here, where the reason for loading all morphs (to get their relationships) has been explained repeatedly?

You did not really explain that much WHY this is required. why do we need those relationships and can't just live without them

The reason why we can say that it is not required, is that we can just temporarily hide those unnecessary morphs, and everything works, so all that Daz has to do is just for the bare minimum is to replicate that hiding process and simply not to load things that are not in use.  If only we had the ability to load that hidden morphs later it would be near perfect solution.  It could even solve the problem that you cannot install new morphs on the already loaded figure, you have to reload the scene. On-demand loading would solve that as well.

Or maybe we just don't even know what is the real purpose of why we need those relationships in the first place. And maybe we can just turn off that "important" feature because it is not needed entirely? 

How do you even explain the situation when some rogue morph file, which is not even referenced by the used anywhere, is messing up the figure? 

That looks more like a bug than a feature. Such files should not have any ability to get injected into the model.

I can only guess that the reason why this was done was to allow some kind of plugin style morphs where you install some corrective stuff which gets turned on without user consent just by the mere fact that it exists.

But by all sane logic that should never happen. Morphs should be turned on only if the user decides to do so or some other morph specifically references them.  Installing third-party models should not in any way affect the base model without user consent.

It is even a serious security issue because someone can deliberately or accidentally ruin someone's else product and make it behave in a very strange way

At least in my understanding of how things should work is this:

1 read and parse every morph file just to build a list of sliders for the user to choose  but don't read anything further don't build any relationships just make a list of what is available

2  read the scene file to gets a list of what morphs are non-zero there.

3  check if those non-zero morph files do exist and if they exist then parse them look what kind of morphs they are referencing them parse those morphs and traverse the morph tree that way. This can be easily multithreaded as well because top morphs do not need to know anything about each other relationships. everything loads totally independent from each other.

Everything that was unreferenced is left unparsed and nothing about those morphs besides their names is even stored in memory.