I've seen this posted in various places, but the answers seem to be a bit scattered. The issue happens when I bend their leg/arm too far, then their joints look odd. Now I did look for the JCM morphs, but they didn't seem to make the effect that I was looking for. I attached a picture of what I'm trying to acheive. The products that I've seen people suggest are these - 

https://www.daz3d.com/bend-control-for-genesis-8-female-s-46267

https://www.daz3d.com/ultimate-natural-bend-morphs-for-genesis-8-female

https://www.daz3d.com/z-utility-bending-down-poses-and-partials-for-genesis-3-and-8

Are these the only products that I would need to make the contortionistic poses that I'm going for? Or is there some other morph/feature that's already in Daz that I could be editing to make this happen? Thanks for any help.

PerttiA said:

First you need to remove those added Content Libraries, which are not real Content Libraries from DS

Can you please walk me through it?

2021-02-16 16:21:46.999 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7032): Duplicate formula found linking yEnd & Youth Morph Muffin in /data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/Female/Morphs/Angel - Wings/Youth Muffin/Youth Morph Muffin.dsf.

2021-02-16 16:21:47.004 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7033):   owner: Genesis8Female

2021-02-16 16:21:47.004 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7034):   output: upperFaceRig:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Genesis8Female.dsf#upperFaceRig?end_point/y

2021-02-16 16:21:47.004 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(7035):   input: Genesis8Female:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/Angel%20-%20Wings/Youth%20Muffin/Youth%20Morph%20Muffin.dsf#Youth%20Morph%20Muffin?value

I know I am commenting on an older thread.  (I have no idea how to monitor threads myself so wouldn't know if any of those originally in this discussion have a way to know I commented.)  Anyways, I too am intrigued by the observation that AFE uses a graft.  I cannot say if AFE was the source or something alse was going on but I found AFE to be a real drain on my system.  And it seemed to auto load on every G8 figure once installed: maybe I had installed it incorrectly.  I am perhaps slower than most but because it has non-zero default values I found it very difficult to track down what was happening/use/isolate.  I suspect it has tons of potential that I could never figure out how to exploit: sadly it is placed in my discard pile.    ....But I do find myself wish I could make an HD morph or some other trick to create piercing indents for earrings etc. . . . 

This isnt working I am assuming its the spaces in the names, if that is correct how do I handle spaces, is there an escape character to use for the spaces or something? Thank you for any help!

oSettings.setStringValue( "rules", "Adj Abdomen Upper\nExport\nAdj Arm Lower L\nExport");

Was following this from the documentation:

// Morph Rules
// Format for rules is "Match1\nAction1\nMatch2\nAction2\nMatch3\nAction3",
// where Match# is a string to search for and Action# is one of Bake|Export|Ignore
// The names of the morphs are in the form: node_name.parameter_name
// The default action is to Bake
// So "FBMHeavy\nExport\nThin\nExport" would export all morphs that have FBMHeavy and all morphs that have Thin in the name
oSettings.setStringValue( "rules", "" );

plasma_ring said:

GeoffreyHawkins said:

Hey all, I'm working on a Batman design and I'm trying to track down a good cowl for either G3 or G8.  I like MightyMite's stuff over at Rendo but I only see his Adam West design.  His Red Robin (Mask 42) would be perfect but it doesn't indicate that it has batear morphs.  Trying to avoid autofiting back to M4 stuff that's out.  Any help would be appreciated.

For one of mine I use SickleYield's Super Suits cowl with the bat morph from RawArt's No Suit. Finding a kitbashable piece is surprisingly hard! Most artists don't create masks that come down over the nose.  

If I can't come up with anything else, I'm going to probably do a similar mashup, using the MightyMite Mask 42 that I mentioned and the cowl from the G3 Super Bodysuit as it has ear morphs.

GeoffreyHawkins said:

Hey all, I'm working on a Batman design and I'm trying to track down a good cowl for either G3 or G8.  I like MightyMite's stuff over at Rendo but I only see his Adam West design.  His Red Robin (Mask 42) would be perfect but it doesn't indicate that it has batear morphs.  Trying to avoid autofiting back to M4 stuff that's out.  Any help would be appreciated.

For one of mine I use SickleYield's Super Suits cowl with the bat morph from RawArt's No Suit. Finding a kitbashable piece is surprisingly hard! Most artists don't create masks that come down over the nose.  

3141592654 said:

Another option would be to make a morph in Hexagon ... That can work great and be quite detailed ... If you have already become familiar with Hexagon though.

Yup, good call, and it's free. Personally I haven't tried to use it in years, was quite unstable on the Mac so gave up trying to learn it, should have a new go at it now

justanother__boy_ca94588ae2 said:

j cade said:

The problem is You're going to get different advice from everyone - some of it conflicting

 

 My personal tastes/habits

• Use spectral rendering 
  • as a result using Isadorekeegans method of a trasnsmitted color of .99/.99/.99 to fix the chromatic sss spectral bug

I'll try to go point by point here, sorry for late response by the way, the forums made it seem like my post wasn't posting and honestly i just gave up and assumed it wasn't going to work, didn't realise the post actually went through xD

 

Spectral rendering;

I've tried to mess around with spectral rendering before but it's honestly just confusing for me xD It's meant to make the colors look more true to life, but whenever i try to use it, it makes the colors feel wrong, off, desaturated, i don't know, it just doesn't feel right, is this at all related to the point you mentioned after?

as a result using Isadorekeegans method of a trasnsmitted color of .99/.99/.99 to fix the chromatic sss spectral bug

If so, could you possibly elaborate a little more on that? It's generally a good rule of thumb to treat me like a toddler and explain a little more than is neccessary xD

 turn down/off burn highlights/crush blacks they make things look awful - if you need to adjust contrast later do i with something that doesn't turn highlights weird colors

Okay so that's an interesting one, i found pretty good results upping the 'crush blacks' a little bit more and definitely agree with turning down the burn highlights, but i didn't really consider turning them both off (To 0 i presume?), do you keep your burn and crush at 0 and simply work with various elements of contrast in post? I'll have to give that a go :3 I think i get a bit caught up trying to minimize my post-work and perhaps do a little too much of the work in Daz itself xD

avoid rendering in a void: use a floor or scenery or physical backdrop for improved bounce light that blends your character into the scene

I've only just recently started really getting away from rendering in a void hey xD It really does make such a huge difference, completely agree :3 I love transparency, i am an absolute glutton for transparent background xD But including basic scene elements changes the game SOOOO dramatically yeah in terms of the lighting and just the overall DEPTH of the render which is huge xD

realistic morphs: a lot of daz characters can be semi-stylized. Piling realistic textures shading etc on an unnaturally shaped character is never going to look right

Ugh okay, yes, completely agree, it is REALLY... REALLY hard to get naturally feeling characters, i've tried so many times to use references to get everything just right, overlayed proportion diagrams and stuff to make sure everything is correct, i even tried to mess with Wrap3 and some other stuff to get perfectly natural characters, nothing ever works, EVERY SINGLE RENDER i can look at and be like "Ugh, something is still off with this character -_-"  I wish there was a better way but honestly i think without sculpting the morph yourself, it's just a losing battle xD 

LEARN AND USE STRAND BASED HAIR!!!!!! It will absolutely take time and effort but what's your altenative? waiting for some magical fix to come in and complaining about how bad it looks when you have another option right there? even if it takes you literal years to learn thats still faster than waiting for something. I refuse to believe that I am the only person capable of using it. So I am going to keep beating this horse until everyone grows sick of it and hates me.

Okay let me just take a moment to point out that i just LOVE strand based hair xD

It never quite agrees with me, and i've flirted with the idea of getting Zbrush, learning blender hair, trying to do haircards for laziness, blah blah blah, but i feel like strand based hair is like my white whale, like i *HAVE* to make it work xD It's a beast i cannot fathom taming but i always try xD And 120,000% agree, it makes an INSANE difference in making a character look more believably human, so yeah, don't worry, i will continue to try to tame strand based hair xD IT MUST SUBMIT ONE DAY xD

 

Just for some like.. Context?

I've started messing with Michael 8.1 lately and so i've got a couple of terrible renders i've done to that end;

Try not to hate on some of the lighting, i was using references with harsh lighting and simply replicated it xD

 

DISCLAIMER: I make male renders, clothing is optional (EXCEPT FOR GENS, they will always be covered) and they are meant to feel more natural than studio, there are elements that intentionally lean more towards stupid insta pictures than photoshoots, this is, again, intentional, please don't hate xD

https://imgur.com/a/ASetfVH

So i mean, the hair is strand based, obvi xD But it doesn't really want to behave properly xD

I think some turned out better than others, again, pretty obvi xD

I've only JUST found the 8.1 face controls so there's some janky face stuff going on but yeah...

That's my 3 most current attempts minus one which has some inappropriate wording in it that i thought wasn't appropriate.

 

Oh, also, i welcome ALL opinions :3 Even if people have different ideas or opinions or advice, i wanna hear and try it all and find what works for me :3

I think that's the joy of a collaborative community, we can all have different opinions and ideas on what's right and wrong but in the end, two opposing opinions don't actually have to be mutually exclusive, they don't have to be right and wrong, they both just serve as different lessons on the path to the same goal ;3

 

1st of your strand based hair looks very good 

to answer some of your questions I like spectral rendering because I like the idea of accuracy, but mostly you can use slightly higher values for transmitted distance and scattering distance as I've found that as you use smaller values iray behaves in unexpected and funky ways. If (as I do) your using translucecy values from .95-.1 with spectral rendering off, If you want your skin not to look like jello, you need to use scattering distance values of .05 and DS really doesnt like that. With spectral on you can use higher values. 

the downside is that spectral has a bit of a bug so if you use a color in transmitted color you get weird dark seam lines - thankfully a user named isadorekeegan discovered that if you use non- colored value the seams go away so the fix is you use a transmitted color of .99/.99/.99 and a transmitted in the range of distance of .01-.03 things look very nice.

I also thinks spectral handles light a bit nicer which is the other main reason and leads into my reasons for tuning down burn highlights/crush blacks (typically I don't turn them all the way off, but down to .05)

Burn highlights/crush blacks are post render effects that up the contrast of your image (burn highlights also does it in a particularly ugly way that tends to turn highlights yellow) the thing with esentially just upping the contrast is you're then not creating that contrast with the lighting itself. so you end up using lights of lower strangth than you might otherwise. lets say you want some nice ear glow you need some rim lighting for that. If your highlights burn out the second it gets slightly bright, you use less bright rim lighting which means less ear glow. With burn highlight/crush blacks loweres you're more likely to use much brighter lighting so more light passing through the ears - more ear glow even though the scene is no "brighter"

I posted some images a few pages back but I think interiors is where this can really be demonstrated

heres a room it purely by the sun and sky - despite being lit by what is clearly sun streaming throught the window it looks like a dark cave. I could turn the light up, but the highlight on the floor is already comepletely burned out. Now I happen to live in a house with small windows much smaller than the room in the renders, and even on cloudy days they are perfectly capable of lighting rooms. I could fix this all by adding helper lights in the room, but obviously real rooms don't have those and still can be lit by windows, is Iray just broken? (spoiler: no)

well here's the same room but with the lighting set up with burn highlights/crush blacks tuned down. Notably I was able to turn the strength of the sun waaaaay up without blowing out the lighlights. Also the effect of the bounce light is suddenly much more evident - Peronally I think this setup makes not only makes the room look less like a cavern, but also makes the effects of light bouncing much clearer. look at the floor infront of the cabinet and how  much clearer it looks tinted brown as its lit by the light bouncing off the cabinet. 

No, it doesn't ask you when you are zeroing or memorizing, but when you save the "Modified Assets", it will tell you that the changes cannot be undone, are you sure - Or something similar.

The Duplicate Formula is because of Marina G8F, if you remove her or her morph files, the problem goes away - When did you install her?

The other problems you may have had for a long time, but since they don't give you any notice like the Duplicate Formula, you just haven't noticed

For troubleshooting purposes, do you have a file "eCTRLExcitement_HD.dsf" in folder; ".../data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 8/Female/Morphs/DAZ 3D/Expressions/" or if you search the drive where your installed content is, can you find it in some other location (where?)

Do you have several content directories specified in the "Content Directory Manager" under "Daz Studio Formats"?

Another option would be to make a morph in Hexagon ... That can work great and be quite detailed ... If you have already become familiar with Hexagon though.

... Have to say I am deeply confused by claims that blender has bad documentation.

A) pretty much every tool has pop ups with a brief description when you hover over it

B) The blender manual https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/keyframes/index.html is constantly updated and includes in depth decriptions of what every single feature of blender does with helpful pictures. 

I'll add to the blender love - I always found it pretty intuitive (well after the 2.5 overhaul, 2.49 and earlier were deeply painful) Meanwhile I've given Zbrush multiple attempts and me and its ui are not speaking the same language. 

I also don't agree that "you get what you pay for" more money means theoretically more money to pay people to improve your product (although plenty of time it means more money for your shareholders and management bonuses) But over the past couple of years blenders funding has increased pretty substantially to the point where they have a bunch more paid developers  (though still less than the likes of Maya and Zbrush)- and, because its open source, they also have a bunch of willing folk who can add features and fix bugs for free as well. 

As to blenders popularity - well yes it being free and having a bunch of internet tutorials is definitely a reason. Personally I like it because it very good sculpting tools with the ability to switch and also select and pull individual vertices if you need to. For making character morphs - for instance - the ability to move the teeth and eyes as units in edit mode but do the rest of the morph in sculpt mode is completely invaluable. 

richardandtracy said:

Another way with thin gloves might to be to use a geoshell around the figure and parent gloves to the geoshell rather than the figure. Then to alter the thickness you just change the geoshell offset. Will obviously need to make the Geoshell transparent in the render. [Then if it looks useful, could export the gloves in the new position with zero'd pose as an obj and re-import as a morph for the gloves for future use without the need for the geoshell.]

Just another way to achieve a similar result to Wendy's suggestion.

Richard

I'll give that a shot. Seems workable :-)

I'm not using 8.1 but I've had this very same issue with many G8F newer characters. I'm sorry I don't have an answer for this issue. Using the base figure and adding the head morph for the character defeats the purpose for having a custom figure.

JOdel said:

markgoode77 said:

Drip said:

Hopefully not before we get Cat 8.

Or a Whippet. 

Sparky has a greyhound morph for the Hivewire dog over on Philosopher's Egg. Isn't a Whippet mostly a matter of scale? 

Thanks for this, I'll check it out. 

markgoode77 said:

Drip said:

Hopefully not before we get Cat 8.

Or a Whippet. 

Sparky has a greyhound morph for the Hivewire dog over on Philosopher's Egg. Isn't a Whippet mostly a matter of scale? 

The MetaHuman hair is a blend of dynamic hair strands and hair cards (aka transmapped polygon hair for DAZ Studio users).  The Unreal Engine can then blend between the two, dropping to just hair cards for lower performance PCs which technologically seems way more sophisticated than DAZ Studios dynamic hair system.  I somehow doubt Epic will limit the creation of dynamic hair to their "PAs" seeing as how they open sourced their aquisition of Shave and a Haircut back in 2019.  You can tell by their aquistions (Shave and a Haircut, 3Lateral, and Cubic Motion) they are serious about building cinematic level human capabilities and technology.

If Epic builds a tool designed specifically for posing, animating, final frame rendering digital actors (or maybe adding this functionality to Twinmotion), they could have something that might be a disruptor to the DAZ Studio/Poser ecosystem.  If someone develops a system to transfer existing DAZ/Poser assets (morphing and re-weightmapping) clothes and hair from Genesis characters to retarget MetaHuman, that disruption might even be accelerated.  Epic probably doesn't care at all about the small 3D still pinup render market segment that DAZ/Poser operate in, going after serious TV and filmakers instead, however if there is software and content that is of professional quality at the free price point and at the current DAZ price points, there could be a stunting of the future growth of the DAZ/Poser ecosystems as new users would be unlikely to get started doing 3D with DAZ Studio or Poser.

I have a problem.

I'm importing a G8 Figure shaped with youth morph into ue4 (morph is not exported).

The mesh is fine, BUT when im creating an animation asset -> the face becomes distorted (see attachment)

Exporting the youthmorph with the figure instead is fine in the animation, BUT its useless, since the whole figure gets distorted with the morph applied because the skeleton isnt rescaling.

Is there is something i am doing wrong ? Ive tried anything possible on my mind so far.

Richard Haseltine said:

Novica said:

barbult said:

Just run Mirror Geometry and market as new?

So it's not just me LOL 

I'd say there were differences, look at the hair resting on the shoulders in both and the way the bangs meet the long hair:

https://gcdn.daz3d.com/p/80476/i/202103hairforgenesis8and81females00maindaz3d.jpg

https://gcdn.daz3d.com/p/77142/i/sweptbangshairforgenesis3and8females03daz3d.jpg

The promos are not identical, but dial the longer morph on one and the shorter morph on the other and they would look even closer. To me, one is essentially the mirror of the other, and since I own Mirror Geometry, I would never buy both. Other people may have a use for both or may prefer one over the other and buy only that one. I have so many hair products already, I look for something more unique these days.

ShadowSkillz said:

How exactly do I "accept" the morph, first time hearing about this?

Find the morph, click the gear, Parameter Settings..., click Accept

How exactly do I "accept" the morph, first time hearing about this?