mding said:

Amazing, @richardandtracy!

Could you share it at https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/108001/the-older-generation-victoria-2-3-michael-2-3-and-their-children-renders/p23, please?

Actually that's the thread where the image is uploaded, it's on page 17 . 

Regards

Richard

Amazing, @richardandtracy!

Could you share it at https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/108001/the-older-generation-victoria-2-3-michael-2-3-and-their-children-renders/p23, please?

richardandtracy said:

Cabin crew with beret. Going as far back as Victoria 3 there is this: Flight Crew. There are others, do a store search for "Cabin Crew". Hope these are vaguely along the lines of what you're looking for. Regards, Richard

Thank you. The search term "Cabin Crew" was indeed helpfull:

https://www.daz3d.com/sexy-stewardess-outfit-for-genesis-8-female

richardandtracy said:

Erm... Because I didn't try to extract the obj from the cr2 because.. err.. it has a different extension & additional info. In all honesty, and without flummery, not having tried it, I don't know if it'll work. Will have a bash at it (tomorrow if things don't fall apart like they often do). (Why do I always seem to learn shortcuts after they'd be useful? Hrrumph.)

CR2 files rarely contain any geometry. They reference a separate OBJ file, usually in the Poser "Runtime" folder, under "Geometries" and "DAZPeople". The base geometry without any pose or morphs can be imported directly with the OBJ file there. If you're not sure where the Runtime folder for your Poser format files are, you can also get the figure's OBJ file from the figure ZIP file.   

I'm not a complete expert in all things Poser, but I know almost of the formats and can edit them by hand when I need to. Older versions of Poser didn't save some things correctly, so I learned to fix them myself. 

I have got poses close enough for the autofit clones, and they're in the thread or the installation package for the tutorial. Not perfect, but close enough to be usable. In an effort to do a bit better after the tutorial was published, for the G8F clone, I actually bought SY's V3 & M3 autofit clone set, and then reversed it to get a G8F shape for V3. That one is a bit (but not hugely) better, but the fingers are a bit dodgy for things like rings.

Regards,

Richard.

Huh...I thought I had all of clones for older figures. I'll have to see if I can get it while it's on sale. 

Erm... Because I didn't try to extract the obj from the cr2 because.. err.. it has a different extension & additional info. In all honesty, and without flummery, not having tried it, I don't know if it'll work. Will have a bash at it (tomorrow if things don't fall apart like they often do). (Why do I always seem to learn shortcuts after they'd be useful? Hrrumph.)

I have got poses close enough for the autofit clones, and they're in the thread or the installation package for the tutorial. Not perfect, but close enough to be usable. In an effort to do a bit better after the tutorial was published, for the G8F clone, I actually bought SY's V3 & M3 autofit clone set, and then reversed it to get a G8F shape for V3. That one is a bit (but not hugely) better, but the fingers are a bit dodgy for things like rings.

Regards,

Richard.

Edited to add. I know now.. (it is a bit of a 20-20 hindsight ) It means the same process can be used for all morphs and autofit clones, be they G8, G9, V4, etc or Generation 3 unimesh. It  means you learn 1 process, not 2.

DollyGirl said:

Oooh Halloween! Nope can't guess. Who is it?

richardandtracy said:

@Semicharm, it is nice to see someone new joining in with the older generations, great images full of action & character.

If I have to guess as to the newer figure, I'd say the ghost sheet in the lowest image. IIRC in the last year or two there was a ghost sheet figure released.. Where from I can't recall, but it rings a [faint] bell.

It seems the "bookmark" system keeps breaking. It will randomly stop sending notifications for replies and I lose track of theads without them. Er...

The "new" figure is the vampire girl in the background. It's a character I made for Poser's La Femme. I think the ghost was Maddie, as is Bo Peep. The wizard was Luke, Scarecrow was Kid 4, and vampire Michael 4. 

BTW, I'm curious how you got G8F outfits on Victoria 3. You mentioned about converting V3 to DS weightmaps, but I'm a bit lost after that. I don't think the shape was that close to G8F to just do a generic refit in DS. 

Less than ideal to release all your best character PAs on the same day. But I've been waiting for bluejaunte's new release since Victoria 9.

Elor said:

crosswind said:

Yep, you can. Just like using an FBM on the figure with setting it as Auto Follow. Then save the Auto Follow morph as a Modifier Asset with the shoes to control another corrective morph on the shoes as needed.

Sorry, I meant using a controller from the figure, a controller without autofollow, to control a morph on the shoes: body_ctrl_ProportionHeightScaleNeg is not set for autofollow, and on the shoes, I only saw a negative value for Proportion Height.

Got it ~ Yup, if a property on Genesis figure is not set as Auto Follow, like body_ctrl_ProportionHeightScaleNeg, it'll also work if you set it as a Controller to activate corrective morph(s) on the shoes.

Understood~ But to me, the defect of negative Proportion Height just comes from  the improper value set on Metatarsals. It's easy to fix it and it won't bring issues to existing characters as well as shoes / heels etc. products with negative Proportion Height dialed.

I made a corrective modifier as attached. You may give it a try by extracting the data folder to your Daz Lib. I tested it with Hanako 9 / Victoria 9. It works as expected and even fixes the heel deforming issues with Proportion Height dialed from -20% ~ -200% with high heel shoes... So far so good ~

Perhaps you might not need to make corrective morph for the shoes ~~ In the below screenshot, Hanako 9 on the right has the corrective morph for negative Proportion Height. You can see the difference on the heel of the shoes ~~

It's a bit strange honestly: your corrective morph is solving the problem for some shoes but not the others where instead, it'll make the heels higher.

Apparently, having an existing CBS is one of the reasons it's fixing the problem (I checked with City Sandals by HavanaLibere or Tifa High Heels by Prefox) but I also found pairs of shoes without an existing CBS that did work fine with your corrective active (PFX Helene Heels, from the cooperation between Prefox and Belldazine, the Kuro shoes from Mada). And on shoes like the Mabel ones from HavanaLibere, your corrective is making the heels higher.

I suppose it'll depend on how each pair of shoes was set up 

After testing City Sandals with both G9 Base as well as Hanako 9, actually I found my corrective modifier make the shoes / heels look more correctly and even better.

You can see the screenshot 1 down below. Without corrective modifier on the left, the heels cannot touch the ground which make the sandals look weird, while with the corrective modifer on the right, the heels are right on the floor... then you don't have to tweak them. I have to say the default shape of these City Sandals are not correctly made.  However, City Sandals do have fixed bs for Hanako 9 that make things really work. (like Gracie High Heels that I tested in above screenshot... they also have fixed bs for Hanako 9)

Mabel Strappy Sandals don't have fixed bs for Hanako 9, so they make things worse. (screenshot 2)

So, I think we may have to fix them case by case. For the cases like Mabel ones, you may click the link icon of "overrides controllers" on cbs_ProportionHeightNeg and Alt Click to zero it. But still, you have to fix its blend shape as per the character you use.

crosswind said:

Yep, you can. Just like using an FBM on the figure with setting it as Auto Follow. Then save the Auto Follow morph as a Modifier Asset with the shoes to control another corrective morph on the shoes as needed.

Sorry, I meant using a controller from the figure, a controller without autofollow, to control a morph on the shoes: body_ctrl_ProportionHeightScaleNeg is not set for autofollow, and on the shoes, I only saw a negative value for Proportion Height.

Understood~ But to me, the defect of negative Proportion Height just comes from  the improper value set on Metatarsals. It's easy to fix it and it won't bring issues to existing characters as well as shoes / heels etc. products with negative Proportion Height dialed.

I made a corrective modifier as attached. You may give it a try by extracting the data folder to your Daz Lib. I tested it with Hanako 9 / Victoria 9. It works as expected and even fixes the heel deforming issues with Proportion Height dialed from -20% ~ -200% with high heel shoes... So far so good ~

Perhaps you might not need to make corrective morph for the shoes ~~ In the below screenshot, Hanako 9 on the right has the corrective morph for negative Proportion Height. You can see the difference on the heel of the shoes ~~

It's a bit strange honestly: your corrective morph is solving the problem for some shoes but not the others where instead, it'll make the heels higher.

Apparently, having an existing CBS is one of the reasons it's fixing the problem (I checked with City Sandals by HavanaLibere or Tifa High Heels by Prefox) but I also found pairs of shoes without an existing CBS that did work fine with your corrective active (PFX Helene Heels, from the cooperation between Prefox and Belldazine, the Kuro shoes from Mada). And on shoes like the Mabel ones from HavanaLibere, your corrective is making the heels higher.

I suppose it'll depend on how each pair of shoes was set up 

Elor said:

She looks a lot like Victoria 9 wearing her makeup:

https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-9-hd

https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-9-hd-makeup

Edit: the discussion's title could be more clear.

Regarding the title, clearly, you never saw my mother...   (O:

Elor said:

Thank you both, I'll see what I can do.

@crosswind: I can use the value of a property on the figure to control the activation of a morph on shoes fitted to her?

Yep, you can. Just like using an FBM on the figure with setting it as Auto Follow. Then save the Auto Follow morph as a Modifier Asset with the shoes to control another corrective morph on the shoes as needed.

About fixing Proportion Height, I'm nowhere near the level needed to create a proper bs to fix it on G9 directly: I'm already sweating bullets while trying to get clothes fitted correctly on various body shapes when the clothes are following a body shope very closely (less when they are more loose).

And I suppose at that point of the life of Genesis 9, it's unlikely to be fixed by Daz if I opened a ticket because it would likely mess with all the shoes already released with CBS for characters like Hanako who are using Proportion Height, especially considering that Victoria 9 does use it too (even if it's only at -4.5%) and she's likely one of the most popular figures for G9.

Understood~ But to me, the defect of negative Proportion Height just comes from  the improper value set on Metatarsals. It's easy to fix it and it won't bring issues to existing characters as well as shoes / heels etc. products with negative Proportion Height dialed.

I made a corrective modifier as attached. You may give it a try by extracting the data folder to your Daz Lib. I tested it with Hanako 9 / Victoria 9. It works as expected and even fixes the heel deforming issues with Proportion Height dialed from -20% ~ -200% with high heel shoes... So far so good ~

Perhaps you might not need to make corrective morph for the shoes ~~ In the below screenshot, Hanako 9 on the right has the corrective morph for negative Proportion Height. You can see the difference on the heel of the shoes ~~

I will confess my first thought was MSO Reese

But it's vanishingly unlikely a G8F character would be the promo character for a G9 set. So.. possibly V9 with an un-tanned freckled skin and make-up face.

Regards

Richard

Thank you both, I'll see what I can do.

@crosswind: I can use the value of a property on the figure to control the activation of a morph on shoes fitted to her?

About fixing Proportion Height, I'm nowhere near the level needed to create a proper bs to fix it on G9 directly: I'm already sweating bullets while trying to get clothes fitted correctly on various body shapes when the clothes are following a body shope very closely (less when they are more loose).

And I suppose at that point of the life of Genesis 9, it's unlikely to be fixed by Daz if I opened a ticket because it would likely mess with all the shoes already released with CBS for characters like Hanako who are using Proportion Height, especially considering that Victoria 9 does use it too (even if it's only at -4.5%) and she's likely one of the most popular figures for G9.

joanna said:

What I was pointing out is the three tiny black triangle shapes to the right (looking at the picture, to the left anatomically) of where her navel would be. If you're viewing it on a phone, it might not be visible, but on a PC monitor, they're quite clear and standing out, and they look like texture/lighting issue.

Sorry, I watched the picture on my computer but didn't open in a new window and I didn't see the triangles you were speaking about 

Looking at the shadows around Tiana's left breast, they are a bit blocky: maybe raising the SubD render level on the dress could make the triangle shadows a bit less sharp too? At least if the dress responds well to SubD (I don't have it). An example:

'Olympia 9 by night'

While they were walking back to their home after a nice dinner out, once they stepped on the bridge, Olympia thought absently that the buildings on the opposite riverbank would likely provide a nice bokeh.

And she was certain that tonight, as always, wherever they went, a camera went along.

She didn’t say anything but could hear the wheels spinning in the mind of her SO and after a minute or so, she heard, in a whisper, ‘The bokeh will be fabulous.’

‘Yep,’ she thought before saying innocently, ‘We do have some time, but don’t forget we hired a babysitter.’

That render was sitting on my computer for a couple of months but when I saw the recent Artissane set by fabiana, it felt like the missing piece, especially because it has bracelets.

One great thing about the various jewelry products she released is that pendants are easy to use with necklaces from other sets as long as they have a pendant connector. In this render, I simply removed the pendant I used, keeping the necklace already simulated around Olympia's neck, before loading the pendant and seeing it appear exactly where it should (note that Artissane doesn't have any necklace included but everything else is usuable without it).

I forget to mention it on the gallery, but I think I tried to add a bit of noise with Affinity. I'll have to check later because the effect is minor and I'll try to add the raw render later if I did shared the postworked version.

And while I was playing with the Artissane set, I found a couple of minor problems with the Genesis 8 version, so why not make a render with them, worn by a Genesis 8 character to see if there was another problem (I think the answer is no and the two problems is really minor), in this case, Clara 8.1. No story because I simply repurposed a scene I created to have a nice icon for a persona preset loading Clara 8.1 wearing the dress and the shoes shown on the render, which I suppose will be upgraded by a version with the scarf and the jewelry 

'Clara 8.1'

No postwork on this one.

Not counting the scarf which was offered on St Patrick day on Renderosity, only one product from a recent sale was used: https://www.daz3d.com/fk-artissane-jewelry-set

A couple of products I like a lot that I had for a longer time in my library: 

• The bridge is not very visible on Olympia's render, but still more than on my render with MSO Lacey and Victoria 8.1 last month: https://www.daz3d.com/fn-bridge
• The dress worn by Olympia is very nice. I didn't use the jacket so I have no opinion about that part of the outfit, but the dress worked nicely: https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-cb-kiki-clothing-set-for-genesis-9
• The Feisty feather bun hair is superb: https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-feisty-feather-bun-hair-for-genesis-9
• Everyone should have the Secret Garden Shaded Haven used on Clara 8.1 render, and while it's not new, I think the automatted iray converted worked nicely on this one. I thought about changing the floor textures, but it would likely require more work that I was willing to do to create a texture keeping the two tones used here.

Blando Calrissian said:

I already have a Jeep in my collection, but AcharyaPolina's AP Archaeologist 'Truck' is pretty neat, and a nice value at the moment. 

I hesitated to buy when it was released, but I decided against it because I already have enough cars in my library.

I does look good on your nice render though.

Lorraine said:

Study in Cream

It's a nice selections of white or white adjacent colours. Almost the opposite of my render with Clara 8.1, almost because I added a bit of colours with the scarf after trying to use a black and gray motif.

She looks a lot like Victoria 9 wearing her makeup:

https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-9-hd

https://www.daz3d.com/victoria-9-hd-makeup

Edit: the discussion's title could be more clear.

zacharymeyer64 said:

Damn thats crazy, you have this pack as well? Or is it a presistent problem known with it? I'd assume if it was presistent the author would have gotten a few tickets for a fix, reguardless when i get the time I will put in a ticket if not for a fix for myself then to at least let the author know its a problem that is occuring. I didn't even notice it at first as all my renders with the model had her farther back, or she had shoes on lol

When using it, my guess is that people are looking at the chest or navel of a character, not their feet, and I suppose when the PA and Daz QA tested it, they were also looking at these areas.

It's also not equally visible on all characters: after you shared the solution, I checked with a couple of characters (Victoria 9, Michael 9, Hanako 9 and Genesis 9 Base). On some of them, it's barely visible while it's the most visible on Victoria 9 among them.

Matt_Castle said:

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

No one will ever convinve me that when there was ultimate freedom to determine how the framework would work, that the only way to make an extensible framework was to load all the morphs.

This is fundamentally flawed.

You are completely missing my point. Completely. You bring up, in fine detail, the problem space that a design is supposed to navigate and provide a satisfactory user experience. It doesn't. It is irrelevant if the problem space is convoluted or not; that is what the design was supposed to account for. If it does, it is a good design. If it does not, it is a bad design. Ful stop. No ammount of hand waving or creating empathy for the complexity of the problem can mutate this fact: the design was supposed to account for that. That is why architects make as much money as they do: the buck stops with their design. There is nothing else to blame.

Let's look at how the Genesis 9 figure works.

Let's not. If it is complicated, and I'm sure that it is, it was the design that determined literally everything that you wrote. There is no other place to lay the details of the current state of affairs but at the feet of the original design. Saying "But it is a hard problem" does not mean that an inefficient design is some how excusable. Engineers get paid to make the proper space/time tradeoffs until the user experience is satisfactory. I know of no principle that says that that is the engineer's responsibility "unless the problem is hard, in which case you can go with O(n^2) and expect no one to call you on it".

Genesis 9 is a mesh that is weighted to follow the bones of a virtual armature. This is strictly inaccurate to how people actually move, but as a technique it's been used for decades because the full physical modelling and simulation of a skeleton, how muscles fit to it, how those muscles fit against each other, where the internal organs go, where fat layers sit and how the skin is attached and stretches over all of that would be ludicrously intensive, and a weighted mesh is generally an acceptable compromise.

Even more so if you are prepared to go in and create corrective morph shapes to improve the weighted shape to something closer to physically accurate.

And G9 does quite a lot of those. Here's a list of the primary Corrective Blend Shapes of Genesis 9:

body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l; body_cbs_shoulder_x30p_l; body_cbs_shoulder_z55p_l; body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_r; body_cbs_shoulder_x30p_r; body_cbs_shoulder_z55n_r; body_cbs_upperarm_x95n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_y110n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_z40n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_z90p_l; body_cbs_upperarm_y110n_z40n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_y110n_z90p_l; body_cbs_upperarm_x95n_r; body_cbs_upperarm_y110p_r; body_cbs_upperarm_z40p_r; body_cbs_upperarm_z90n_r; body_cbs_upperarm_y110p_z40p_r; body_cbs_upperarm_y110p_z90n_r; body_cbs_forearm_y75n_l; body_cbs_forearm_y135n_l; body_cbs_forearm_y75p_r; body_cbs_forearm_y135p_r; body_cbs_hand_y28n_l; body_cbs_hand_z70n_l; body_cbs_hand_z80p_l; body_cbs_hand_y28p_r; body_cbs_hand_z70p_r; body_cbs_hand_z80n_r; body_cbs_head_x25p; body_cbs_head_x30n; body_cbs_neck1_x25n; body_cbs_neck1_x40p; body_cbs_neck1_y22p_l; body_cbs_neck1_y22n_r; body_cbs_neck1_z40n_l; body_cbs_neck1_z40p_r; body_cbs_spine3_x35p; body_cbs_spine3_z20n_l; body_cbs_spine3_z20p_r; body_cbs_spine2_x40p; body_cbs_spine2_z24n_l; body_cbs_spine2_z24p_r; body_cbs_spine1_x35p; body_cbs_spine1_z15n_l; body_cbs_spine1_z15p_r; body_cbs_pelvis_x25n; body_cbs_pelvis_x25n; body_cbs_thigh_x35p_l; body_cbs_thigh_x90n_l; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_l; body_cbs_thigh_z90p_l; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_z90p_l; body_cbs_thigh_x35p_r; body_cbs_thigh_x90n_r; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_r; body_cbs_thigh_z90n_r; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_z90n_r; body_cbs_shin_x90p_l; body_cbs_shin_x155p_l; body_cbs_shin_x90p_r; body_cbs_shin_x155p_r; body_cbs_foot_x45n_l; body_cbs_foot_x65p_l; body_cbs_foot_z45n_l; body_cbs_foot_x65p_r; body_cbs_foot_x45n_r; body_cbs_foot_z45p_r; body_cbs_toes_x40p_l; body_cbs_toes_x60n_l; body_cbs_toes_x40p_r; body_cbs_toes_x60n_r

And this is a list that omits things like all the ones on the fingers or toes. This is just the larger joints.

Now, if we look at the first on the list, body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l, this is a shape which is intended to be active when the left shoulder's X rotation is negative 30 (shoulder for shoulder, x30n for negative 30 x, and _l for left).

We immediately have our first case for wanting bottom-up links. We do not want to have the primary bend parameters of a joint to need to be changed every time someone wants to hitch a new control to them. So, in this case, another file, not the primary rigging, will have to tell Daz Studio that body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l is something that should be linked to the shoulder's X rotation. And, fundamentally, why have an entirely separate file to do that? Why not have it in the header section of body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l? DS can look in the top of the file.

Okay, now let's suppose we want to install another character on to G9. Victoria 9's morph changes the shape enough that the original CBS shapes are no longer quite right, so she's going to need her own CBSs.

Even looking past how you drive her CBSs (it's much more practical to just hitch them onto the base ones rather than have to set up all the rotation multipliers separately), her CBSs however need to only activate when her shape does. So you want all those new shapes to have a link to her main morph. Now, Daz *could* put all those links in her shape, but that would mean that if Daz decided she needed an extra CBS they'd missed before, then that means adding a new CBS, and also adding links to it into her main morph file, and generally causing havoc with versioning. If those links could only be saved into her file, it would also be a nuisance any end user deciding that she needed an extra CBS, because then they would have to edit her file, and re-edit it every time a product update came through.

As such, it is better for the links for character specific CBSs to be bottom-up links exist in those CBS files themselves.

~~~~~

Now, even if we for some reason assume that it was even viable to have only top-down links, Daz Studio still needs to know more about each DSF file attached to the figure it has than just what its file name is.

Firstly, DS needs to know what the morph should actually be called on the user side. It's all very useful to have a behind the scenes convention for file names, but they're ugly and unfriendly on the user side. "Victoria9_figure_ctrl_Character.dsf" is informative for technical purposes, and avoiding spaces in the file name makes certain things easier (although admittedly Daz have been inconsistent about enforcing that as a standard), but "Victoria 9" is what end users want to see.

DS also needs to know what the limits of that morph are. Is this something like a height slider which can go from -100% to 100% to make the character taller or shorter, or is this a character morph that would be an eldritch horror if it were dialled in backwards?

They need to know whether the morph should be shown to the user at all. Imagine if all the CBS files across every character were permanently visible.

They need to know "hey, this slider has a picture to help the user see what it does".

They need to know "this slider is tinted light blue to help differentiate it as a morph from the G9 Body Morphs set, where as this shade of yellow implies that it's a core character."

To be functional, DS needs at least this "metadata" about every morph, even if it does not attempt to load any of the actual shape information about the morph. This is not feasible to encode into a filename. Even if you tried, you'd end up with a colossal problem every time you had to update something, because now that old scene file where everyone's Daz Studio is expecting that a character should have 50% of some morph file with an outrageous file name dialled in now can't find that filename any more.

So, Daz Studio needs this information before it can display the figure controls correctly, and thus it has to load this information about every DSF file.

Now, at present, this is all deliberately stored at the top of the morph files. Daz Studio can look in the top of the file and read that information. And, indeed, it actually stops when it gets to the end of that, and does not load the morph shape itself until the morph is actually activated on the figure. You can see this in the log file if you activate a morph you haven't yet; it will tell you that the morph deltas for that morph have just been loaded.

~~~~~

The only even marginally feasible workaround I could see to this that doesn't force the user to manually specify what morphs they want loaded is permanently maintaining a database for every last figure (be it Genesis, a clothing item, a car, etc) and prop which collates all of this stuff and just that stuff. But that would itself need to be rebuilt every time the figure's morph library changed. And this would necessitate a large increase in the amount of drive space used by morphs, because not only do the morphs themselves still need to contain the information in order for such a database to know what to do with them, the database would itself end up duplicating all of that. 

But if you have a suggestion for how Daz Studio could genuinely work by just being able to skim read file names and not know anything about what's inside them, then by all means, let us know. We would all love Daz Studio to be faster.

And you've proven my point better than I ever could. You've pointed out in much greater detail that I knew how to, that the design has serious inefficiencies where some tradeoff should have been sough, but wasn't.

Otherwise, your claim that you're unconvinced by the solution they've implemented is empty.

OK, I guess we will just have to let history be the judge.

That's probably the best argument for Open Source-ing DAZ Studio that I've ever heard.

That I think would be a bad idea, because ultimately the entire Daz infrastructure relies on having a concrete framework upon which others can build and work. Making that kind of thing work requires oversight and direction.

What you've accomplished is to clarify your opinion that DAZ would not be capable of providing oversight and direction. Open Source has worked out exceedingly well for so many projects that I'm not going to bother to name any of them.

That said, except for a couple of their more proprietary techs, Daz Studio formats are mostly well documented.

If I am wrong, then pease excuse me, but you have never actually tried to write a non-trivial plugin, have you? The problem with what you wrote above is that, yes, DSON is better documented than the SDK, and JSON is to some degree self documenting, but the problem is that DAZ Studio is not a purely data-driven application, i.e. the DSON does not tell you the whole story. As you say, I suppose I can forgive DAZ for not documenting their secret sauce for HD and autofitting since it is a rare far-seeing company that realizes that holding on to their IP, no matter how trivial it is probably retards the growth of their product, but there are things that you simply cannot divine how DAZ Studio goes from DSON to finished geometry from looking at it. And there are important things that a programmer needs to know that have nothing to do the data format.

If someone else was of a mind to, they could absolutely make another program read Daz Studio format directly (maybe even as a direct Blender plug-in, for example), and handle things that way.

This is the same falsity that I keep hearing over and over, by people who I'd wager have never written a non-trivial plugin. Knowing the DSON like the back of one's hand is not sufficient to duplicate everything DAZ Studio does. There is a lot of functionality in DAZ code, as opposed to the DSON. Again, it is not a purely data-driven app. There's logic in the code. I know this for a fact because I've been figuring things out for Sagan for 7 years now. Like memory ownership rules. In C++, when a function accepts a pointer, does it take ownership of that memory? Do I still have to free it up? Does it deep copy it, or just copy the pointer? Can I pass a local object or does it have to be on the heap? There's very little const correctness in the SDK, so will the function modify my object or not? It's very, very difficult to correctly guess all of these things, and even the shortest, simplest, yes-or-no questions go ignored in the SDK forum, if only a dev can answer it.

Most long hairs are for G8F, but they should work on G8M if you change the figure's scene ID.

These are varying levels of Legolas-ish:

Arwen Hair for Genesis 8 Females

Anita Hair for Genesis 8 Female(s)

dForce Rose De Mai Hair for Genesis 3 and 8 Females

Briggs Hair for Genesis 8 Male and Females

dForce Duchess Hair for Genesis 8 Female

Adeline Hair and Circlets for Genesis 8 Female(s)

Tasha Hair for Genesis 8 Female(s)

Nerea Hair for Genesis 8 Female(s)

dForce HS Helena Long Hair For Genesis 9

These are for G9, but you could just parent them to the figure's head:

dForce Joanie Hair for Genesis 9 (this one is most like Legolas', imo)

Soft Curls Ponytail for Genesis 9

This is the store link for all long hairs for any figure: https://www.daz3d.com/long

TheMysteryIsThePoint said:

No one will ever convinve me that when there was ultimate freedom to determine how the framework would work, that the only way to make an extensible framework was to load all the morphs.

This is fundamentally flawed.

Let's look at how the Genesis 9 figure works.

Genesis 9 is a mesh that is weighted to follow the bones of a virtual armature. This is strictly inaccurate to how people actually move, but as a technique it's been used for decades because the full physical modelling and simulation of a skeleton, how muscles fit to it, how those muscles fit against each other, where the internal organs go, where fat layers sit and how the skin is attached and stretches over all of that would be ludicrously intensive, and a weighted mesh is generally an acceptable compromise.

Even more so if you are prepared to go in and create corrective morph shapes to improve the weighted shape to something closer to physically accurate.

And G9 does quite a lot of those. Here's a list of the primary Corrective Blend Shapes of Genesis 9:

body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l; body_cbs_shoulder_x30p_l; body_cbs_shoulder_z55p_l; body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_r; body_cbs_shoulder_x30p_r; body_cbs_shoulder_z55n_r; body_cbs_upperarm_x95n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_y110n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_z40n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_z90p_l; body_cbs_upperarm_y110n_z40n_l; body_cbs_upperarm_y110n_z90p_l; body_cbs_upperarm_x95n_r; body_cbs_upperarm_y110p_r; body_cbs_upperarm_z40p_r; body_cbs_upperarm_z90n_r; body_cbs_upperarm_y110p_z40p_r; body_cbs_upperarm_y110p_z90n_r; body_cbs_forearm_y75n_l; body_cbs_forearm_y135n_l; body_cbs_forearm_y75p_r; body_cbs_forearm_y135p_r; body_cbs_hand_y28n_l; body_cbs_hand_z70n_l; body_cbs_hand_z80p_l; body_cbs_hand_y28p_r; body_cbs_hand_z70p_r; body_cbs_hand_z80n_r; body_cbs_head_x25p; body_cbs_head_x30n; body_cbs_neck1_x25n; body_cbs_neck1_x40p; body_cbs_neck1_y22p_l; body_cbs_neck1_y22n_r; body_cbs_neck1_z40n_l; body_cbs_neck1_z40p_r; body_cbs_spine3_x35p; body_cbs_spine3_z20n_l; body_cbs_spine3_z20p_r; body_cbs_spine2_x40p; body_cbs_spine2_z24n_l; body_cbs_spine2_z24p_r; body_cbs_spine1_x35p; body_cbs_spine1_z15n_l; body_cbs_spine1_z15p_r; body_cbs_pelvis_x25n; body_cbs_pelvis_x25n; body_cbs_thigh_x35p_l; body_cbs_thigh_x90n_l; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_l; body_cbs_thigh_z90p_l; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_z90p_l; body_cbs_thigh_x35p_r; body_cbs_thigh_x90n_r; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_r; body_cbs_thigh_z90n_r; body_cbs_thigh_x115n_z90n_r; body_cbs_shin_x90p_l; body_cbs_shin_x155p_l; body_cbs_shin_x90p_r; body_cbs_shin_x155p_r; body_cbs_foot_x45n_l; body_cbs_foot_x65p_l; body_cbs_foot_z45n_l; body_cbs_foot_x65p_r; body_cbs_foot_x45n_r; body_cbs_foot_z45p_r; body_cbs_toes_x40p_l; body_cbs_toes_x60n_l; body_cbs_toes_x40p_r; body_cbs_toes_x60n_r

And this is a list that omits things like all the ones on the fingers or toes. This is just the larger joints.

Now, if we look at the first on the list, body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l, this is a shape which is intended to be active when the left shoulder's X rotation is negative 30 (shoulder for shoulder, x30n for negative 30 x, and _l for left).

We immediately have our first case for wanting bottom-up links. We do not want to have the primary bend parameters of a joint to need to be changed every time someone wants to hitch a new control to them. So, in this case, another file, not the primary rigging, will have to tell Daz Studio that body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l is something that should be linked to the shoulder's X rotation. And, fundamentally, why have an entirely separate file to do that? Why not have it in the header section of body_cbs_shoulder_x30n_l? DS can look in the top of the file.

Okay, now let's suppose we want to install another character on to G9. Victoria 9's morph changes the shape enough that the original CBS shapes are no longer quite right, so she's going to need her own CBSs.

Even looking past how you drive her CBSs (it's much more practical to just hitch them onto the base ones rather than have to set up all the rotation multipliers separately), her CBSs however need to only activate when her shape does. So you want all those new shapes to have a link to her main morph. Now, Daz *could* put all those links in her shape, but that would mean that if Daz decided she needed an extra CBS they'd missed before, then that means adding a new CBS, and also adding links to it into her main morph file, and generally causing havoc with versioning. If those links could only be saved into her file, it would also be a nuisance any end user deciding that she needed an extra CBS, because then they would have to edit her file, and re-edit it every time a product update came through.

As such, it is better for the links for character specific CBSs to be bottom-up links exist in those CBS files themselves.

~~~~~

Now, even if we for some reason assume that it was even viable to have only top-down links, Daz Studio still needs to know more about each DSF file attached to the figure it has than just what its file name is.

Firstly, DS needs to know what the morph should actually be called on the user side. It's all very useful to have a behind the scenes convention for file names, but they're ugly and unfriendly on the user side. "Victoria9_figure_ctrl_Character.dsf" is informative for technical purposes, and avoiding spaces in the file name makes certain things easier (although admittedly Daz have been inconsistent about enforcing that as a standard), but "Victoria 9" is what end users want to see.

DS also needs to know what the limits of that morph are. Is this something like a height slider which can go from -100% to 100% to make the character taller or shorter, or is this a character morph that would be an eldritch horror if it were dialled in backwards?

They need to know whether the morph should be shown to the user at all. Imagine if all the CBS files across every character were permanently visible.

They need to know "hey, this slider has a picture to help the user see what it does".

They need to know "this slider is tinted light blue to help differentiate it as a morph from the G9 Body Morphs set, where as this shade of yellow implies that it's a core character."

To be functional, DS needs at least this "metadata" about every morph, even if it does not attempt to load any of the actual shape information about the morph. This is not feasible to encode into a filename. Even if you tried, you'd end up with a colossal problem every time you had to update something, because now that old scene file where everyone's Daz Studio is expecting that a character should have 50% of some morph file with an outrageous file name dialled in now can't find that filename any more.

So, Daz Studio needs this information before it can display the figure controls correctly, and thus it has to load this information about every DSF file.

Now, at present, this is all deliberately stored at the top of the morph files. Daz Studio can look in the top of the file and read that information. And, indeed, it actually stops when it gets to the end of that, and does not load the morph shape itself until the morph is actually activated on the figure. You can see this in the log file if you activate a morph you haven't yet; it will tell you that the morph deltas for that morph have just been loaded.

~~~~~

The only even marginally feasible workaround I could see to this that doesn't force the user to manually specify what morphs they want loaded is permanently maintaining a database for every last figure (be it Genesis, a clothing item, a car, etc) and prop which collates all of this stuff and just that stuff. But that would itself need to be rebuilt every time the figure's morph library changed. And this would necessitate a large increase in the amount of drive space used by morphs, because not only do the morphs themselves still need to contain the information in order for such a database to know what to do with them, the database would itself end up duplicating all of that. 

But if you have a suggestion for how Daz Studio could genuinely work by just being able to skim read file names and not know anything about what's inside them, then by all means, let us know. We would all love Daz Studio to be faster.

Otherwise, your claim that you're unconvinced by the solution they've implemented is empty.

That's probably the best argument for Open Source-ing DAZ Studio that I've ever heard.

That I think would be a bad idea, because ultimately the entire Daz infrastructure relies on having a concrete framework upon which others can build and work. Making that kind of thing work requires oversight and direction.

That said, except for a couple of their more proprietary techs, Daz Studio formats are mostly well documented. If someone else was of a mind to, they could absolutely make another program read Daz Studio format directly (maybe even as a direct Blender plug-in, for example), and handle things that way.