Matt_Castle said:

Sure, things could be done better about G9, but I think the things that G9 has tried to do are good ideas in principle.

My personal problem with G9 is a purely financial one. Having to buy a lot of stuff *again* that I already paid for before to use G3/8 (where at least some if not most was compatible) is beyond my financial means for a pure hobby. And as G3/8 are working good enough, the need to jump on the G9 train for me (!) is zero. Up to now I have seen not many G9 products that I would really NEED, except maybe be for a few characters, which still rather are in the "nice to have" category and make me wish for a G9->G8 figure transfer product.

So yes, the idea behind G9 is a good one, in principle and for many customers, but it's also easy to live without G9. And I am sure that DAZ can live without the little money I usually spent here.

Matt_Castle said:

 

The clothing items above are things I had to convert with a much more rigorous process than simply auto-fitting them.

Was it easy for you to do the image of the three separate look alike figures?

Me? Yes.

Most people, probably less so.

Being immodest for a moment, I am above the curve on my ability to transferring asset between figure bases. I had this uploaded the same day AM's Rabbits came out, and let me tell you, there are no existing auto-fit clones to go between Genesis figures and the rabbits.

OK, so if it was easy, then you killed the point of your argument.  

Who cares about cross gender stuff when there are tools available to get by on the few occaisions when it is needed?

Why have a figure that's more difficult/time consuming to work with within the confines of a vast majority of your work?

Honestly, I would have transitioned to G9 - I really wanted to, and tried, as I still use Genesis 3 mostly.  
But working with females most of the time, the mesh isn't friendly to us mere mortals that are unable to morph in HD.  The mesh doesn't flow with the female anatomy in the chest.

Daz could mostly fix my gripes with G9 by giving us mere mortals access to SubD morphs, especially over the ZBrush bridge. Is anyone listening?  DO IT!  
 

ERC Freeze is a basic tool - it links one controller to one or more  subcomponents using addition with a scalar to ensure that when ther controller has its   currenmmt value the sub-components have their current values. Optionally it can add a single attentuator, which will multiply by the selected property (so you can use it to set up your basic bend correction that is triggered only when both the bend and your morph, as the attentuator, are in effect). Abything beyond that level of complexity will require working in the Property Hierarchy - whether you go there straight off or do an ERC Freeze first is a matter of convenience, workfloww, and possibly the actual types of links needed.

Really appreciate the quick response. Updating the plugin fixed this issue !
Note that the add-on version in Blender still indicates 4.2.1, even after a full uninstall/reinstall. But I was able to see the right version number in the DAZ Setup panel.
--
Unrelated: morphs transfer to clothes seem to fail entirely when the character has a necklace on. So I had to import the clothes and necklace separately.
--
Lastly, 2 suggestions. I could see the value of new options for:
1) merging or skipping duplicate morphs at import. Useful when there's some duplicates coming from load favorites or DAZ favorites, for instance.
2) "bake everything but selection" for "Morphed (Characters)" imports. This would be helpful to keep the list of sliders that are generated in the Runtime panel short. The idea being to only keep the morphs specifically selected by the user editable in Blender, while the rest would be baked for convenience.
--
Anyway, love the plugin ! It's much more consistant than the "official" one. Thanks for the hard work ! 
 

Gator said:

You acknowledge that it's best practice to work on the base shape, but then go on to say you can use the transfer utility to skip that step.

Aren't best practices given to us to avoid issues down the road?  It's N+1 amount of work.  Maybe not a big time investment, but the industry generally moves toward less work not more.

"Best practices" aren't "only practices".

The feature does exist and it does have uses, so it would be silly to say it should never be used.

So it's less work for rigging things between sexes - how many care?  I think a lot more care about having a better base to work on for male and female renders (the texturing issues you acknowledge) vs. a bit less of a one-size fits all.  To be sure I wasn't taking crazy pills, I went to a virtual machine that I don't use to browse the internet with on a VPN for a totally clean session - I briefly scanned through a few dozen or so pages of art (well over 100) and didn't see a single instance of an art subject dressed in a unisex style, or opposite of traditional gender norms, or different sex siblings - so less than 1%.  

On the other hand, I've had to do it on many occasions, know people who do it regularly, have heard hundreds of complaints about things like women only getting the skimpy armour sets, etc.

To pull out a couple of examples of my own over the last year where I've had to use G8M assets on G8F...

Putting the centaurisation aside, Crusher Armour had to be converted to fit the G8F upper body, because the armour was only released for G8M:

There is no hi-vis vest I know of for G8F, so this had to be converted from the G8M-only Road Work Outfit:

Just because you might not obviously spot cross-gender clothing or conversions doesn't mean it isn't a feature people can and will use.
 

By the same token of using the Transfer Utility to skip a step rigging as you mentioned, you can use the transfer utility on your female article of clothing and transfer the male rigging to it or vice versa.

No, you can't.

If you are rigging well, Transfer Utility is merely a first step, not a complete rigging process. You then have to go in and refine the weights and correctives it gives you. This is why auto-fit alone is - while better than nothing - still inferior to content that has been properly set up by a capable creator.

To me, this is sounding quite a lot like you've never actually done any of the work past the basic auto fitting stage. As a creator, having to *maybe* do some refinement on the G9 feminine shape barely changes anything when making clothing well means you've normally already got to do fits for multiple core characters, the spectrum of generic body types, a panoply of different breast shapes, several JCMs/CBs (including multi-axis ones that have to be handled in the right order) and all that. As for why it's maybe do some refinement, G9 has much more robust autofit templates than G8, and they already have basic projection fits for most of the major shapes. If they're used correctly, setting up G9 fits is way faster than G8 ones.

The clothing items above are things I had to convert with a much more rigorous process than simply auto-fitting them.

Was it easy for you to do the image of the three separate look alike figures?

Me? Yes.

Most people, probably less so.

Being immodest for a moment, I am above the curve on my ability to transferring asset between figure bases. I had this uploaded the same day AM's Rabbits came out, and let me tell you, there are no existing auto-fit clones to go between Genesis figures and the rabbits.

While I may have a less burning need for G9's integrated compatibility, I am intensely aware of how much work has to be done to fully transfer things between bases.

THAT is why many of us are complaining, we'd rather have a separate female and male mesh to mitigate those issues as much as possible without diving into extra work.  Personally, I'd rather optimize for the 95-99% use case than the 1-5%.  (Throwing in a few percent to err on the side of caution).  

If a set of textures were originally made for the morph it was associated with, then the UV stretch and squash will already be baked into the maps.

If you are using such a set of well made feminine maps on a different feminine figure, then it's the difference between those shapes, not the difference from the base shape that matters.

Doubtless some smart alec will then question what the utility of being able to load G9M maps onto G9F is, and then I'll smartly point out that there was enough demand for that, despite some of the drawbacks, that G3 and G8 actually had products specifically for the purpose of achieving that.

Gator said:

Isn't it cheating with having them clothed?    

Timbales said:

You posted three women with breasts and tops on. Try doing three shirtless men without full defined pecs and see how far you get with G9.

I'm hearing excuses and deflection.

Any "G9 can't do masculine/femine shapes" (I've heard both) claim eventually comes down to a general assertion that base figures have an indelible fingerprint. And if they do have such a fingerprint, it would hold that anyone should have a better than random chance of getting the question right (and even if it were random chance your odds aren't that bad)... but for all people claim that G9 is fallible in this regard, it's now very much looking like no-one's actually all that confident in this claim.

Hi, it is indeed P3D Ursula, but I dialed her head morph in for 70% :)

Sorry if this is confusing, I really hope I can explain this good enough. I've figured out a decent amount but am struggling to make sure during testing I am doing everything correctly still.

So, I am currently creating JCM's that should only trigger if multiple bones are moved. This is all on a custom character morph and these JCMs will not tigger on a default genesis.
Examples.
Bend joint  =  Bend only JCM (Bend as the 1st stage controller + Character morph as 2nd Stage controller on the bend morph I created). Seems to work.
Bend + Side to Side  =  Bend + the Side To Side morph I created on top of the Bend morph. From what I can tell, this does not have a 1st stage controller for any joint. Instead in the 2nd stage controller of the morph needing to be activated, I have Character Morph + Bend + Side to Side so this way it will only trigger if these conditions are met. If this is the correct way of doing something like that, is an ERC freeze needed? I would think so. Do you perform an ERC Freeze on the character morph at that point after you test it all and make sure it is working? Or would you just simply save these JCMs at that point to retain the information?
EDIT :
Messing around a bit more. On these morphs that trigger only when multiple bones are moved... it looks like maybe the character morph should be the 1st stage controller? Maybe? It seems to be working correctly.

Matt_Castle said:

Gator said:

Keep in mind that line is out of context, after I listed many cons to the single multi-gendered mesh.

I may come from an older era of forums, but I do not like the increasingly common approach to quote an entire post AND all of its nested quotes in order to respond to it.

It's particularly frustrating when reading the forum on the frankly very-poor mobile implementation, where after a couple of levels of nesting, the innermost posts are reduced to a one letter wide column that goes on for hundreds and hundreds of rows.

Hence, usually, I will reduce posts I'm quoting to key points.

~~~~~

But, if we're taking that argument...

Gator said:

What are the long list of benefits exactly? 

To understand my perspective, I'm a Daz user that significantly customizes their things.

And I'm pretty sure I'm in the upper percentiles for doing things the vendors didn't plan for.

(Well, I say that, but by this point Lyoness absolutely anticipates me doing stupid stuff with her products. She certainly didn't plan that originally though).

The single mesh has some significant drawbacks.  Big one that immediately comes to mind is that you have texture compression and stretching issues.  It's most apparent in the chest.

True on every generation, if textures are not actually painted onto the morph they're being used on. I've had enough cases where both large and small breasted G8F characters had problems with stretched textures in the chest area.

I'm far from an expert in content creation, but for someone who doesn't care about cross gender clothing it seems like more work.  From what I recall, it's recommeded to model to the gender neutral base figure, and then morph to your intended gender.  I forget the details, but in any event the times I did it meant modeling/modifying the clothing for two figures (gender neutral and female) instead of one.

Making any clothing item to a good standard already needed manually fitting to major morphs.

Even if you completely disregard any idea of making the clothing work for cross-gender, there's functionally no difference between having to make your clothing fit G9 base, G9 Feminine, Victoria 9, Olympia 9, etc as it was was with G8 base, Victoria 8, Olympia 8, Monique 8, etc. Either way, you already had to make the clothes fit a base shape and then a load of morphs. But on this one, you can be assured that everyone already has G9 Feminine, and a lot of characters sold on the store therefore use it as a shape to sculpt over.

Also, if you're genuinely planning on making the clothing only for one base, then while I hold it's best practice to start on the base shape, the transfer utility *does* have the Reverse Source Shape from Target option, so you can actually model on G9 Feminine, then have Transfer Utility fit to that morphed shape rather than the base shape.

It also means modeling on this totally non-natural genderless figure with fires off my uncanny valley response to 11.

Whether the base figure triggers your uncanny valley response is irrelevant; lots of what we do in the process of developing an asset will look like a distorted version of the final result we're aiming for.

If you don't like the base G9 shape, don't put the base G9 shape in your renders. What shape the figure starts at is not what's important, it's what shape it ends up as - and, indeed, the exact base shape you start from has little limitation on what shape the character can be.

I mean, here's the same character on Genesis 2, Genesis 8 and Genesis 9, despite all of those bases having a different initial shape.

I'd challenge people who think the base figure shape leaves an indelible fingerprint on the characters to put their skills to the test and make a correct call on which base each of these is using.

(And I promise, they are genuinely on Genesis 2, Genesis 8 and Genesis 9; I've not used the same base three times).

Another potential - has there been an improvement with handling a large number of morphs when loading a figure?  With G9 now it has to parse through two genders of morphs in your library.  I've tried, but I don't really use G9 so I don't have that much.

Yes, significantly so. Daz have brought down loading times massively from where they were, and we know that when we (finally) get DS 5, one of the main things they're trying to resolve is being able to multi-thread processes that DS4 currently can only handle single threaded. As mid-range modern CPUs tend to have about 8 cores, and higher end ones can have 16 or more, that's going to be around an order of magnitude of speed increase.

As for cross-gender clothing, I simply don't have any use for it.  Never have in over 10 years of rendering and probably never will.

Already addressed this one, but moving on to your reply...

For the cross-gender clothing support you also need to keep in mind at least today, there really aren't that many unisex outfits in the real world.  Even in 2024, our children go to a school that requires uniforms and they are different for the sexes.  Even something basic like a polo shirt, they are cut significantly different and fit differently between the sexes.  Sure, you can morph it, but you generally morph the crap out of it and wind up compression/stretching issues I mentioned in that post.  Same for the US military ACU, while similar the differences are beyond morphs.

Aside from the fact that having *a* matching polo shirt but perhaps not with a perfectly feminine cut is obviously better than having *no* matching polo shirt, if we're talking about singling out points from a post without addressing the entire thing, I address several other points where native cross-compatibility is a boon - anthros don't need the vendor to make two different sets of body fur, aliens don't need two different sets of geografts and HD morphs, male and female members of a family can actually share morphs to get resemblance, etc.

I'll even go so far to say my lack of need for unisex or cross gender is probably the norm - granted, feeds get tailored for what we all click on now but at the art rags I look at there simply isn't much unisex or cross dressing going on out there. 

 Possibly...

... but I would say that the greatest strength and the entire ethos of the Genesis lines are their flexibilty and compatibility. Victoria, Olympia and Josie aren't all stand-alone figures - we can share the same hairs between them, we can share the same clothes, the same skins, the same poses.

If you say "well, we'll take away a function because not everyone's using it", then suddenly you have no functions. (Hell, on the basis of sales figures, we'd probably have no male bases at all).

But that as an example strongly illustrates a point. Options have exponential potential; even if you don't use rock monsters very often, the fact that you *can* use a rock monster when a scene calls for it massively increases what you can do. Taking away men might be much more obvious in its drawbacks, but the number of scenes I've had to put to one side because I don't have a specific and niche-seeming item to complete them is considerable. (On that note, I have to fanatically promote GCJellyfish's Dirty Dishes sets, because the number of scenes where I've thought "there's no way I can finish this, I won't possibly have a posable banana peel in my library... holy mackerel, I do." Actually, GCJellyfish's sets are like this in general, and I *still* underestimate their feature sets)

Even if few scenes may use cross-gender clothes, I'm willing to guess that many people have done (or had to abandon) scenes that required a seemingly niche function. Taking away functions because they're not useful to you eventually gets to the point where the DS feature set is below the kind of critical mass it needs to be useful.

~~~~~

Sure, things could be done better about G9, but I think the things that G9 has tried to do are good ideas in principle.

Whew... there's a lot there.  You acknowledge that it's best practice to work on the base shape, but then go on to say you can use the transfer utility to skip that step.

Aren't best practices given to us to avoid issues down the road?  It's N+1 amount of work.  Maybe not a big time investment, but the industry generally moves toward less work not more.

So it's less work for rigging things between sexes - how many care?  I think a lot more care about having a better base to work on for male and female renders (the texturing issues you acknowledge) vs. a bit less of a one-size fits all.  To be sure I wasn't taking crazy pills, I went to a virtual machine that I don't use to browse the internet with on a VPN for a totally clean session - I briefly scanned through a few dozen or so pages of art (well over 100) and didn't see a single instance of an art subject dressed in a unisex style, or opposite of traditional gender norms, or different sex siblings - so less than 1%.  

By the same token of using the Transfer Utility to skip a step rigging as you mentioned, you can use the transfer utility on your female article of clothing and transfer the male rigging to it or vice versa.  Was it easy for you to do the image of the three separate look alike figures?

True on every generation, if textures are not actually painted onto the morph they're being used on. I've had enough cases where both large and small breasted G8F characters had problems with stretched textures in the chest area.

THAT is why many of us are complaining, we'd rather have a separate female and male mesh to mitigate those issues as much as possible without diving into extra work.  Personally, I'd rather optimize for the 95-99% use case than the 1-5%.  (Throwing in a few percent to err on the side of caution).  

Quickly and easily create hair morphs to use your hair with different hats and caps, even sunglasses and hairbands!  Hat Check works by using a sphere, cylinder or cube to define an Effect Volume which you position over the hair.  Any hair vertices inside (or outside depending on the options) the Effect Volume will then be pulled close to the head of the figure.  Any hair vertex outside the Effect Volume, but within the feathering distance, will be pulled partially towards the head of the figure.

Hat Check creates 2 morphs for the hair based on the label of the "hat": one using the label name (e.g., "RS Fleur Hat") that controls all hair vertices inside the Effect Volume, and one using the label name plus "feather" (e.g., "RS Fleur Hat Feather") for all the vertices at the edge of the Effect Volume.

• Quickly create hair morphs
• Includes 2 scripts for creating hair morphs
  • Use Effect Volumes (Cube, Ellipsoid, or Cylinder) to specify the hair vertices to morph
  • Use Selected Vertices to specify the hair vertices to morph
• Morphs can be saved separately or as part of the scene file

Morphs created by Hat Check are a Merchant Resource, which you can distribute with your Hair product.

It'll be more clear to understand exactly what you are looking to do I suppose.

Is it the graft you wish to morph or the base character?
If it is the base character, you will want to remove the graft from the character, send the character to whichever software for sculpting you are using and then reapply the graft after using morph loader / goz.
If it is the graft that you wish to create the morph for then, you just sculpt the graft and not the main character (make sure to mask the edge vertices of the graft so you do not change them at all).

Either way, make sure the mesh is in base resolution ofcourse.

How to custom morph a body that has already a graf?
Doing the regular method using morp loader, doesn't work, cos the geometry not the same.

Hey guys,

I hope you are all set for the holidays coming up and your families are well!

I am setting up my first real attempt at building a very heavily customized character with all the JCM's it will need.

I have run into something with the thigh bending, twisting, and side to side that I would like to ask you guys about.

I've created the thigh bend JCM and have it working. I also created a thigh bend + side to side morph that is working (only triggers if both side to side and bend are used but not when only bend is used).

Now I need to make side to side only and I do not want it to trigger if bend is used. Hopefully that makes since. Basically if side to side is used I do not want the side to side + bend morph to apply, only the side to side.

How would I exclude the side to side morph if the bend is applied so that only the side to side + bend morph applies.

Man, I really hope that isn't too confusing lol.
Essentially

Bend tiggers only bend morph (Created and working)
Bend + Side to Side only tiggers Bend + Side to Side morph (Created and working)
Side to Side only triggers Side to Side morph (Thinking of a solution which is where I need help). I do not want this morph to trigger if side to side + bend is being used.

Gator said:

Keep in mind that line is out of context, after I listed many cons to the single multi-gendered mesh.

I may come from an older era of forums, but I do not like the increasingly common approach to quote an entire post AND all of its nested quotes in order to respond to it.

It's particularly frustrating when reading the forum on the frankly very-poor mobile implementation, where after a couple of levels of nesting, the innermost posts are reduced to a one letter wide column that goes on for hundreds and hundreds of rows.

Hence, usually, I will reduce posts I'm quoting to key points.

~~~~~

But, if we're taking that argument...

Gator said:

What are the long list of benefits exactly? 

To understand my perspective, I'm a Daz user that significantly customizes their things.

And I'm pretty sure I'm in the upper percentiles for doing things the vendors didn't plan for.

(Well, I say that, but by this point Lyoness absolutely anticipates me doing stupid stuff with her products. She certainly didn't plan that originally though).

The single mesh has some significant drawbacks.  Big one that immediately comes to mind is that you have texture compression and stretching issues.  It's most apparent in the chest.

True on every generation, if textures are not actually painted onto the morph they're being used on. I've had enough cases where both large and small breasted G8F characters had problems with stretched textures in the chest area.

I'm far from an expert in content creation, but for someone who doesn't care about cross gender clothing it seems like more work.  From what I recall, it's recommeded to model to the gender neutral base figure, and then morph to your intended gender.  I forget the details, but in any event the times I did it meant modeling/modifying the clothing for two figures (gender neutral and female) instead of one.

Making any clothing item to a good standard already needed manually fitting to major morphs.

Even if you completely disregard any idea of making the clothing work for cross-gender, there's functionally no difference between having to make your clothing fit G9 base, G9 Feminine, Victoria 9, Olympia 9, etc as it was was with G8 base, Victoria 8, Olympia 8, Monique 8, etc. Either way, you already had to make the clothes fit a base shape and then a load of morphs. But on this one, you can be assured that everyone already has G9 Feminine, and a lot of characters sold on the store therefore use it as a shape to sculpt over.

Also, if you're genuinely planning on making the clothing only for one base, then while I hold it's best practice to start on the base shape, the transfer utility *does* have the Reverse Source Shape from Target option, so you can actually model on G9 Feminine, then have Transfer Utility fit to that morphed shape rather than the base shape.

It also means modeling on this totally non-natural genderless figure with fires off my uncanny valley response to 11.

Whether the base figure triggers your uncanny valley response is irrelevant; lots of what we do in the process of developing an asset will look like a distorted version of the final result we're aiming for.

If you don't like the base G9 shape, don't put the base G9 shape in your renders. What shape the figure starts at is not what's important, it's what shape it ends up as - and, indeed, the exact base shape you start from has little limitation on what shape the character can be.

I mean, here's the same character on Genesis 2, Genesis 8 and Genesis 9, despite all of those bases having a different initial shape.

I'd challenge people who think the base figure shape leaves an indelible fingerprint on the characters to put their skills to the test and make a correct call on which base each of these is using.

(And I promise, they are genuinely on Genesis 2, Genesis 8 and Genesis 9; I've not used the same base three times).

Another potential - has there been an improvement with handling a large number of morphs when loading a figure?  With G9 now it has to parse through two genders of morphs in your library.  I've tried, but I don't really use G9 so I don't have that much.

Yes, significantly so. Daz have brought down loading times massively from where they were, and we know that when we (finally) get DS 5, one of the main things they're trying to resolve is being able to multi-thread processes that DS4 currently can only handle single threaded. As mid-range modern CPUs tend to have about 8 cores, and higher end ones can have 16 or more, that's going to be around an order of magnitude of speed increase.

As for cross-gender clothing, I simply don't have any use for it.  Never have in over 10 years of rendering and probably never will.

Already addressed this one, but moving on to your reply...

For the cross-gender clothing support you also need to keep in mind at least today, there really aren't that many unisex outfits in the real world.  Even in 2024, our children go to a school that requires uniforms and they are different for the sexes.  Even something basic like a polo shirt, they are cut significantly different and fit differently between the sexes.  Sure, you can morph it, but you generally morph the crap out of it and wind up compression/stretching issues I mentioned in that post.  Same for the US military ACU, while similar the differences are beyond morphs.

Aside from the fact that having *a* matching polo shirt but perhaps not with a perfectly feminine cut is obviously better than having *no* matching polo shirt, if we're talking about singling out points from a post without addressing the entire thing, I address several other points where native cross-compatibility is a boon - anthros don't need the vendor to make two different sets of body fur, aliens don't need two different sets of geografts and HD morphs, male and female members of a family can actually share morphs to get resemblance, etc.

I'll even go so far to say my lack of need for unisex or cross gender is probably the norm - granted, feeds get tailored for what we all click on now but at the art rags I look at there simply isn't much unisex or cross dressing going on out there. 

 Possibly...

... but I would say that the greatest strength and the entire ethos of the Genesis lines are their flexibilty and compatibility. Victoria, Olympia and Josie aren't all stand-alone figures - we can share the same hairs between them, we can share the same clothes, the same skins, the same poses.

If you say "well, we'll take away a function because not everyone's using it", then suddenly you have no functions. (Hell, on the basis of sales figures, we'd probably have no male bases at all).

But that as an example strongly illustrates a point. Options have exponential potential; even if you don't use rock monsters very often, the fact that you *can* use a rock monster when a scene calls for it massively increases what you can do. Taking away men might be much more obvious in its drawbacks, but the number of scenes I've had to put to one side because I don't have a specific and niche-seeming item to complete them is considerable. (On that note, I have to fanatically promote GCJellyfish's Dirty Dishes sets, because the number of scenes where I've thought "there's no way I can finish this, I won't possibly have a posable banana peel in my library... holy mackerel, I do." Actually, GCJellyfish's sets are like this in general, and I *still* underestimate their feature sets)

Even if few scenes may use cross-gender clothes, I'm willing to guess that many people have done (or had to abandon) scenes that required a seemingly niche function. Taking away functions because they're not useful to you eventually gets to the point where the DS feature set is below the kind of critical mass it needs to be useful.

~~~~~

Sure, things could be done better about G9, but I think the things that G9 has tried to do are good ideas in principle.

Anybody know who the character [used in the promos for P3D 100 Natural Expressions] is? Perhaps it is a P3D combo morph?

Hello,
I noticed that the FACS expressions are generating some distortions on the eyes, teeth and tongue for G9 (haven't tested previous versions TBH). This happens when "Transfer to Face Meshes" is enabled, which is necessary to get the morphs working with eyelashes and eyebrows. Distortions don't happen when this option is not enabled, but then the brows and lashes do not follow the morphs anymore. Seems like a dead end in both cases.
Any recommendation on how to get it work properly ? If not, I'll have to find the shapekeys and delete them manually. Although this may break other morhps.
Screenshot is G9, base model with no morph applied (for testing), Blender 4.2, Diff 4.2.1.
Thanks,

Matt_Castle said:

Gator said:

As for cross-gender clothing, I simply don't have any use for it.  Never have in over 10 years of rendering and probably never will.

I'm always disappointed when people conclude that just because a feature isn't one they will use that it's not something anyone else can or will use.

If you look at the five years of G8 and G8.1,I only know of one single school uniform set where the vendor produced matching male and female versions. That's a very reasonable thing to want or need in a uniform, but even of the other sets that aren't skimpy pin-up schoolgirls with unbuttoned blouses and barely-long-enough skirts, they would need you to carry out a conversion to get a matching jumper/blazer/sweater/whatever on both bases.

And I can't say I'm at all surprised that vendors didn't do it that often; it's tedious to have to redo almost exactly the same rigging work twice when you could have done it once - a development process that G9 achieves by its very nature.

~~~~~

I'm certainly no grand G9 fanatic  - I have most of my characters built on G8, moving them is a hassle, and G8 certainly isn't suddenly defunct, so I've mostly kept my cast on G8 - but I cannot fathom that some people don't find the concept of a unisex base to be meritorous.

I'm not talking about execution here. It is after all possible to have a good idea but realise it badly. I'm talking about the fact that there's a contingent of people who don't merely say "G9 has been done badly", but instead say things like "G9 is an answer to a question no-one was asking".

If they could be done equally well, it would obviously, unarguably and objectively be better to be able to have one base that can seamlessly share all assets (allowing uniform uniforms, cross-gender familial resemblance, alien/anthro creatures to inherently come with both genders, etc) than two bases with a conversion barrier between them.

Sure, there's an argument to be had about the compromises necessary to achieve that, but we should at least agree that it's a desirable feature.

Keep in mind that line is out of context, after I listed many cons to the single multi-gendered mesh.

For the cross-gender clothing support you also need to keep in mind at least today, there really aren't that many unisex outfits in the real world.  Even in 2024, our children go to a school that requires uniforms and they are different for the sexes.  Even something basic like a polo shirt, they are cut significantly different and fit differently between the sexes.  Sure, you can morph it, but you generally morph the crap out of it and wind up compression/stretching issues I mentioned in that post.  Same for the US military ACU, while similar the differences are beyond morphs.

I never said it was impossible for me to fathom a benefit for someone - that's not the point.  The point is that IMO the cross-gender compatibility is a net negative for me, what it offers doesn't outweigh the drawbacks.  I'll even go so far to say my lack of need for unisex or cross gender is probably the norm - granted, feeds get tailored for what we all click on now but at the art rags I look at there simply isn't much unisex or cross dressing going on out there.  

inquire said:

I don't believe that the Genius Bar or Apple Computer would do that transfer. I did check again with ChatGPT, and just said basically the same thing. It recommended Ace, data recovery, salvage, data, recovery, or secure data recovery, as companies that would perform these services. It said that Ace data recovery has extensive experience with McIntosh computers and transferring data from one kind of drive to another.

It also said that the Geek Squad at Best Buy would be able to perform the service provided that there is no damage to the drive. The other companies that are recommended above would apparently be able to perform more extensive services and would probably be able to help even if there was damage to the drive.
I do have some experience with the genius bar at Apple stores, of which there are a number in my area. They basically make recommendations and might refer a customer to companies who could perform certain services. If it's the Apple Computer itself, that is in need of repair, They can accept it and send it in to be repaired. I don't believe they will perform any repair function on an external hard drive, especially one that is third-party, even if it's a drive that Apple sells on its own website.
I'm just providing this for information and clarification. If anyone has more information on this or wishes to make modifications to this, I welcome that.

speech to text does include some funny punctuation errors. It's too difficult to correct some of this on my iPhone, but I got This message into shape that I think anyone can decipher.

I didn't suggest they do it, just that they tell you what you need to buy and prove that it works before you buy it. 

Elor said:

Apple is selling a bi-directionnal Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adapter and it's working fine on my Macbook Pro 14" to plug Apple's Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter in a Thunderbolt 4 port but I don't remember using it with anything else.

this is basically what ChatGPT Said and recommended. It said that this would be cheaper than taking a hard drive in and requesting that a company do the transfer. It only recommended seeking another company in the case that the hard drive itself had some damage to it, in which case the Geek Squad at Best Buy would not be able to handle it. So a company like Ace Data Recovery Would be able to handle that, at least that is what ChatGPT said.

I don't believe that the Genius Bar or Apple Computer would do that transfer. I did check again with ChatGPT, and just said basically the same thing. It recommended Ace, data recovery, salvage, data, recovery, or secure data recovery, as companies that would perform these services. It said that Ace data recovery has extensive experience with McIntosh computers and transferring data from one kind of drive to another.

It also said that the Geek Squad at Best Buy would be able to perform the service provided that there is no damage to the drive. The other companies that are recommended above would apparently be able to perform more extensive services and would probably be able to help even if there was damage to the drive.
I do have some experience with the genius bar at Apple stores, of which there are a number in my area. They basically make recommendations and might refer a customer to companies who could perform certain services. If it's the Apple Computer itself, that is in need of repair, They can accept it and send it in to be repaired. I don't believe they will perform any repair function on an external hard drive, especially one that is third-party, even if it's a drive that Apple sells on its own website.
I'm just providing this for information and clarification. If anyone has more information on this or wishes to make modifications to this, I welcome that.

speech to text does include some funny punctuation errors. It's too difficult to correct some of this on my iPhone, but I got This message into shape that I think anyone can decipher.

mmoch25 said:

felis said:

This is an example. It is The Tyto Ensemble for Genesis 3 Female(s). I realised the product is no longer in Daz.

I added dForce to the dress, loin and scarf. Also added weightmap to dress and loin, to keep the upper part out of simulation. Reduced collision distance on the Loin.

I have used the weight map method before, but sometimes it looks like it's about to explode, it looks really jagged, I then take it into blender to smooth out the morph, and that's when quite often the seams will tear apart.

Jaggedness may mean the offset values is larger than the typical edge (spring) length, so the simulation may distort as it tries to balance them (and may run away and cause the mesh to explode). You shoulkd get warnings about that during the preparation stage, before the actual simulation.