If I want to use LAMH presets created for dog 8 (here in the forum as freebies in the dog 8 thread) on dForce Oso Pooka for Daz Dog 8 instead of the dforce furs, does anyone know how that would work? Same curiosity for the dForce Oso Lechuza for DAZ Dog 8, too.

More curiosity ... if I want to use the fur from Big Cat-Dog for Daz Dog 8 on the dachshund, make him have tiger or lion fur, how would I do that? I'd love a lion chihuahua, lol. Does anyone know how to morph a chihuahua? And how hard would using the skins and hair and tail morphs from Anubis Hound for Daz Dog 8 on any other dog 8 breed be?

@SBibb I did a render of Cinder without Kanade 8 for you. I stopped it early because I noticed all the lines on her texture so there are stilll some fireflies. I'm not sure if those lines are from my lighting or her skin, possibly set with the wrong UV. I'm investigating it with different lighting now to see if those lines still show up.

As for her morph, it's distinctly different without Kanade 8 mixed in. She sort of looks like an older, more wiser version of Kanade. My first instinct on seeing her in the viewport was to say she is the one figure I might consider telling people not to buy unless you get the required figures because she looks terrible. But, that's only in the viewport. Rendered, she actually looks like an interesting character, especially with the makeup that drew me to her in the first place. She has a more Gothic feel to her that I love.

I have not rendered her with Kanade 8 yet. Once I suss out the issue with the skin, I plan to render a side by side. Assuming I can figure out the skin issue, I think she's worth getting even without Kanade 8, depending on what style you go for. I won't put the image in the post. I'll wait until I have a proper full render for that, but you should be able to click on the attachment to see it at full size in a new tab.

edit: I thought it wasn't going to a new tab so scratched it out, but it looks like it actually is so I undid the strikethrough.

I must say.  I am interested in this mostly because it looks like the japanese style of orc. Who are much more like bigs and still with ork like tusks

i will add this then i have new salary. since those paypal stuff apears days and days after i bought it. and it makes it hard to realy know how much i realy have on my bak account :/

which means i need to watch out before I buy stuff ..and get a message in like 3 or 5 days about no money left -.-

i would be interested about.. how much more can i morph the face to e pig? 

there was a game i loved to play, called die by the sword. with orcs who are just human bodies with a boar head

Thanks for responding, Richard. I'm trying to make sense of what I'm seeing, and I appreciate your effort to debug my perceptions of things. Please tell me if/when I say something that isn't true:

If, in Blender, you import a Daz Model at base res and subdivide it, for example the lips pull away from each other and what looked perfect at base resolution, can look grotesque at high. This is because of the way SubD works; without SubD, surfaces GO THROUGH the vertices. With it, surfaces are INFLUENCED by the vertices. I think they are splines, and so the mesh will always receded back into concave curves a bit, and pop out of convex ones. But only one of these can correspond to the artist's original vision.

I think some PAs realized this, and at least on created a morph called "HD Lips Contour". It doesn't seem to truly be an HD Morph. All it does is to adjust the vertices around where the lips meet, such that the model may now look grotesque at base resolution, but when it is subdivided, it more closely preserves the artist's original vision. That is, the morph accounts for the fact that you really can't use a base resolution model not intended to be subdivided, as a SubD cage and expect them to have a high degree of fidelity relative to each other without having to morph the model a bit. Even the model at subd level 0 in some areas looks nothing like the base resolution model. And how could it? A  mesh and a SubD cage interpret the vertices in completely different ways.

Or is it the case that users are never supposed to actually render the base resolution models, and the lowest poly model that represents the artist's vision is always SubD level 0?

Thanks for your attention, Richard.

Quite a lot of promo artists have their own character morph that they use. 

If y ou had the figure posed or moved at all when you sent the clothes to Hex you have to checkmark reverse deformations in the morph loader popup box, that's usually the cause of that moving clothing thing.

@WillowRaven Dog 8 comes with a "Tail Dock" morph and crop it like that. /data/DAZ 3D/Dog 8/Dog 8/Morphs/DAZ 3D/Base/PBMTailDock.dsf from the File List. IDK about the LAMH presets, haven't used it for that.

Thanks. I'm confident now I can acquire the tools I need for this job. :)

Another option would be to take a look at the characters you already own for whichever figure you decide you want to use and see about mixing and matching the morph dials and skins. I've been able to do quite a few characters that way and it makes the most of what you already own!

Elli

Homebrew creation by Propschick, I would assume. Looks kind of like Clary skin and maybe morph with some additional facial morphs dialed for a softer chin.

Arrgghhh!!!    Lies everywhere.....there is also no female morph...there is a fat and skinny morph

So sorry everyone...so many mistakes

Well they could dial in the hidden female clone and adjust rigging to figure space 

Arrgghhh!!!    Lies everywhere.....there is also no female morph...there is a fat and skinny morph

So sorry everyone...so many mistakes

A question to better understand the product - and as it is not a transfer-morphs-product. If I pick a character, dial in some other morphs, save it as a new character preset. Could I convert that preset? And if so, are the several morphs still adjustable or would it be just one "converted-morph" which is dialed in with 100%? 

Yes, there is Daz Decimator. We have missed the sale a few days ago, unfortunately, but "there's always another sale." Character Creator 3 reduces all Genesis models to  ~31,000 triangles and has an excellent one-click polygon reducer but this deletes your cloth morph sliders, so the Daz Decimator may still be desirable. I am unfamiliar with other third party polygon reducers but am interested to learn more if anyone can share info.

An update.

I did get everything to work via the hack of writing out an OBJ file per frame in Daz, and then processing each of those to create the abc file. This did work, and I got my animation and cloth sim done in Blender, but 300 frames took a couple of hours and over 200 gigs. It was only acceptable because I had no other choice: I was forced to export the already subdivided mesh because, and I really don't like the way Daz does this, there's no distinction between the base resolution model and the Subd cage suitable for subdivision; they're one in the same. That's why there are products called "HD Lip Contours" that morph the lips to look like a SubD cage, so that it looks wierd before subdivision, but perfect after. Trying to export this morph to Blender defeated the entire purpose of using Alembic.

I'm not quiye sure what you are meaning here. HD moprhs work on the virtual vertices created by SubD, while "SD" morphs work on the cage. I was under the impression this was a standard way to implement multi-resolution morphs, and is in the OpenSubDiv standard (which is used in DS and 3Delight, but not I think in Iray - hence the need to bake the mesh to a set "Render Division level" for Iray).

But while I was wracking my brain trying to figure out this problem, it dawned on me that I was missing the forest for the trees: Daz is closed source, but they provide a decent SDK. Blender, my target app, is open. I should be able to write a "Blender Bridge" as a plugin that runs in Daz and automagically transfers the entire scene to Blender.

I've never written a Daz plugin before now, and I swore that I would never program for Windows ever again, but I'm extremely excited about the prospect. I've already got a dialog box to come up in Daz that allows external apps to connect and request the vertices, normals, and UVs for all the objects in the scene for a given frame. I think I've figured out how to get all of that information, and a wire protocol to send it. The test will be to write a simple app to connect to the plugin in Daz and write out an OBJ file that can be loaded in Blender. If it looks right, then I'll hack Blender to connect to Daz directly, with no intermediate files. The Daz scene should just appear in Blender automatically, and you should only have to texture it once fo EEVEE or Cycles.

And while I was figuring out how to write the plugin, I realized that, duh, the plugin approach would solve the original problem with Alembic of having to write out the OBJ files. I think I could compile the Alembic reference implementation in Windows, but honestly, I remember how much I really hated coding for Windows and don't want to do it :( If someone were interested, I'd give them the code so that they could implement the last 10%. But then again, as I understand it, the only problem that I solved that still plagues the newest official Alembic exporter is the "unexpected error" with duplicate object names, so it may not be worth it.

So, unless someone wants the Alembic code, I'm going to stop posting here, and will report back when I've got the Blender Bridge working. It's going too well, so I know that I'm going to hit a critical problem with something undocumented, like the Daz thread model or something, and as usual no one in the SDK forum will be able to help, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Donald

Gallery link

I have a lot of free time lately. Can you tell?

First of all, yes, this lady hails from a universe where everybody - yes, also the men - leap into battle in fetish lingerie. Don't shame her for her cultural heritage!

All buffoonery aside, I wanted to create a character that was tough and sexy, but not too glamorous. I was thinking Rune 7, or Lucy Lawless as Xena. I'm not trying to recreate their actual faces, but a character in that spirit. Opinions are welcome, as always.

Currently cooking up a 2nd render with the same face, but a less ridiculous body morph and getup.

Freebie credits:
Morph by squarepeg3d: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/fantasy-amazon-bundle-for-g8f---100-free/79046
Sandals by Troglofauna: http://www.sharecg.com/v/89258/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/G8F-Tyris
Pose by Thorvan: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/30-mirrored-poses-for-genesis-8-male/77781

Small content-bearing error in popup_5.jpg: "your new, converted hair" should probably be "your new, converted character", I think.

A question about the merchant resource paragraph: I'm not a published artist or anything like that, but won't anyone planning to use this to recreate sellable characters need to also have created, not just owned, the character in question? (Sorry, I just remember a couple of weird tussles over language about merchant resources now and again. Since the product page and/or readme are likely to be all the information people really see about merchant resource rights, it helps to be precise up front.)

Practically speaking, unless Daz has done it for you (like with the "Figure 7 for Figure 8" packages), people should either expect to do map transfers to Base Female or get RedzStudio's Genesis 3 UV products if they want to use Figure 7 G3F maps on the characters they transfer to G8F, right?

All that aside, this looks like it will be an interesting product. I hope it sells well enough to justify trying a male version, as well.

Nice eagle eye.  Good catch.

I am not a lawyer.  What I was getting at is that you retain whatever rights you have to your morphs and won't lose them because of my product (I am not restricting you).  It will depend entirely on what rights you have to the original morphs.  If you created the morphs yourself, you can do whatever you want.  If you bought the morphs, it depends on what rights they gave you when you bought them. 

For the maps, with the Daz original v7 maps, the maps usually have problems.  I have had a lot of luck with other characters.  But the converter only copies with the character the maps that are on the character when it is loaded.  Some characters have no maps and will come across with no maps. No material presets are created so smart content will not show the original v7 material presets for the character.  Edit: mostly, the eyes have been problematical copied over.

Genesis 3 is a fine model to work with. That generation has a male anime character. On the down side, Aiko 7 looks more Asian than anime, at least to me...

The only thing I recommend, at least when you're just starting out, is to focus on only one generation.

***

Now, the following is not exactly beginner's stuff and might be a bit much if you're really just starting out with DAZ, but it's actually not that hard to tranfer morphs from G3 to G8, or from G8F to G8M. If you're willing to get into that, there's two things you could do:

- Get Aiko 8 and Kenji 7. Transfer Kenji 7 to G8M. Now you have both a male and a female G8 anime character. Or...

- Get Aiko 8. Transfer her head morph to G8M. Now you have a decent base to create your own G8M anime character.

Here's the morph transfer tutorial:
https://www.deviantart.com/sickleyield/journal/Tutorial-Transferring-Character-Morphs-G1G2G3G8-409437916

An update.

I did get everything to work via the hack of writing out an OBJ file per frame in Daz, and then processing each of those to create the abc file. This did work, and I got my animation and cloth sim done in Blender, but 300 frames took a couple of hours and over 200 gigs. It was only acceptable because I had no other choice: I was forced to export the already subdivided mesh because, and I really don't like the way Daz does this, there's no distinction between the base resolution model and the Subd cage suitable for subdivision; they're one in the same. That's why there are products called "HD Lip Contours" that morph the lips to look like a SubD cage, so that it looks wierd before subdivision, but perfect after. Trying to export this morph to Blender defeated the entire purpose of using Alembic.

But while I was wracking my brain trying to figure out this problem, it dawned on me that I was missing the forest for the trees: Daz is closed source, but they provide a decent SDK. Blender, my target app, is open. I should be able to write a "Blender Bridge" as a plugin that runs in Daz and automagically transfers the entire scene to Blender.

I've never written a Daz plugin before now, and I swore that I would never program for Windows ever again, but I'm extremely excited about the prospect. I've already got a dialog box to come up in Daz that allows external apps to connect and request the vertices, normals, and UVs for all the objects in the scene for a given frame. I think I've figured out how to get all of that information, and a wire protocol to send it. The test will be to write a simple app to connect to the plugin in Daz and write out an OBJ file that can be loaded in Blender. If it looks right, then I'll hack Blender to connect to Daz directly, with no intermediate files. The Daz scene should just appear in Blender automatically, and you should only have to texture it once fo EEVEE or Cycles.

And while I was figuring out how to write the plugin, I realized that, duh, the plugin approach would solve the original problem with Alembic of having to write out the OBJ files. I think I could compile the Alembic reference implementation in Windows, but honestly, I remember how much I really hated coding for Windows and don't want to do it :( If someone were interested, I'd give them the code so that they could implement the last 10%. But then again, as I understand it, the only problem that I solved that still plagues the newest official Alembic exporter is the "unexpected error" with duplicate object names, so it may not be worth it.

So, unless someone wants the Alembic code, I'm going to stop posting here, and will report back when I've got the Blender Bridge working. It's going too well, so I know that I'm going to hit a critical problem with something undocumented, like the Daz thread model or something, and as usual no one in the SDK forum will be able to help, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Donald

Just wanted to pop in and let you know why this happens. Character makers make Character Presets to load their character in fully without having to dial, shape, add textures, etc to them. Generally, it's no biggie, but in a character preset, every dial that is saved-- for that preset-- has the default value set to whatever it is on the character preset. In this case Maia's preset was set to 100% on that character preset. When character makers are doing their final checks, sometimes (oftentimes) they will notice an issue with a morph dial, so they will fix and resave the morph. The problem is, if they fix it after having loaded the character preset, the morph they adjust will save with a default value of 100% instead of 0% because on the character preset, the dial has a default of 100%. It's *really* easy to do, and it's even easier to miss. Testing a product, you're making sure you don't get errors that something is missing. You don't get errors that something extra is there so it's really easy to miss. The fix is, like Hellboy said, setting the default to 0 in the parameters and resaving the morph dial. In our attempts to get stuff to you guys faster, we've missed some things, but we all know it's happened several times recently, and we're all trying to make sure we don't do it again, and we appreciate y'all's patience. 

Also-- how gorgeous is Maia, right? :D

Thanks a lot for the explanation ChangelingChick  it is very much appreciated!

Small content-bearing error in popup_5.jpg: "your new, converted hair" should probably be "your new, converted character", I think.

A question about the merchant resource paragraph: I'm not a published artist or anything like that, but won't anyone planning to use this to recreate sellable characters need to also have created, not just owned, the character in question? (Sorry, I just remember a couple of weird tussles over language about merchant resources now and again. Since the product page and/or readme are likely to be all the information people really see about merchant resource rights, it helps to be precise up front.)

Practically speaking, unless Daz has done it for you (like with the "Figure 7 for Figure 8" packages), people should either expect to do map transfers to Base Female or get RedzStudio's Genesis 3 UV products if they want to use Figure 7 G3F maps on the characters they transfer to G8F, right?

All that aside, this looks like it will be an interesting product. I hope it sells well enough to justify trying a male version, as well.