What a tool / product do I need to buy to be able to transfer morphs (shape) of G3M to G3F for example?

When 3D Coat was on sale at the end of last year, someone mentioned here that there were some tutorials and workflow guides for using 3D Coat to morph DAZ figures and products but that they couldn't find them at the moment. Does anywhere know where they might be? The only ones I've been able to find on Youtube are extremely old and probably outdated, as 3D Coat has changed a lot since then.

Any advice or links to where I could learn more about importing meshes into 3D Coat, editing, and exporting morphs to use in DAZ Studio would be appreciated.

Easy way...pop old drive out of old laptop...drop into external housing.  Plug that newly created external drive into new laptop...transfer content.

Thanks Karen. I'll give that a shot.

@Richard, it means that if you have rotations in your pose, the transfer will ignore those rotations on the figure and do the transfer of weight maps as if the pose was at zero. This causes a misalignment of the weight maps. It'd be nice if I could model everything at zero rotation, but unfortunately shoes and other things just don't work well that way. Luckily, I did find out how to copy and paste weight maps. Pretty easy when you know where everything is.

I was trying to transfer to genesis. I do know it should be genx 2.

Okay, It works with GF2, so I guess my issue is trying to transfer morphs to genesis.

Which transfer did you try? I just did one from G2F to G2M without problem. I did not redownload anything since installing 4.9. If you want to try a redownload I would use either manual or DIM. All my current pulg-ins were installed manually.

TD

It keeps telling that it can't find the clone to help it transfer the morphs, I wonder if I need to redownload GenX add-ons through the cloud or with install manager? not sure which.

@mjc1016
 

thx.. so i can stop my test now.. ,,   is it actually possible to export the bend morphs?  or if i try to uplevel a gen3 base and get her fully working with bend morphs - would i have to do everything  from scratch ? just asking myself how much workload a high res model would be.

If you subd'd gen3 exported the object you could then use the transfer utility to get all the morphs, rigging back in. However the jcms wont keep their jcming, you'd have to re-set up their automatic dialing also the rigging following morphs.  Alternatively instead of resetting up all that stuff, you could just fit it to normal gen3 and all that stuff would go automatically.

 

I did a quick test of this and it worked, just needid a bit of weight map smoothing

What about UV mapping?

Wouldn't you want to subdivide it in something that will also do the mapping or doesn't it matter?

@mjc1016
 

thx.. so i can stop my test now.. ,,   is it actually possible to export the bend morphs?  or if i try to uplevel a gen3 base and get her fully working with bend morphs - would i have to do everything  from scratch ? just asking myself how much workload a high res model would be.

If you subd'd gen3 exported the object you could then use the transfer utility to get all the morphs, rigging back in. However the jcms wont keep their jcming, you'd have to re-set up their automatic dialing also the rigging following morphs.  Alternatively instead of resetting up all that stuff, you could just fit it to normal gen3 and all that stuff would go automatically.

I did a quick test of this and it worked, just needid a bit of weight map smoothing

Does anyone know if a morph pack exists to transform Aiko 3 LE into a little girl, anywhere from 1 to 13 years old? Thanks! ~* Phoenix DeFalco *~

ZarconDeeGrissom

 

I am on a simple Asus labtop, 8gb ram...  1gb entry nvidia ....
here a screenshot.. 38 frames upleveled to 4.35 mio mesh... rigged. the same mesh lags in DAZ.. so DAZ is clearly sower ....
But anyway...  my point is.. i miss a high resh DAZ character where the base has allready something between 200 - 500k polycount... that's enough to sculpt all needed wrinkels and expression morph/bends...

I'm so sorry, I thought you were referring to Iray Render performance, not the OpenGL view field interface. Because quite often a spot render is needed to see something (more like many things, not just setting up lights). I thought you were saying you were getting 10 to 15 Iray renders per second, lol.

:-)....     well i just render the 4.35mio mesh now in daz iray....   i dont note that it takes longer  then the base mesh... because both are very slow .... maybe someone else with faster card(s) should do such tests to confirm - but as far as i can say... the mesh count does NOT slow down iray a lot.... textures do this.

 

There is a technical hurdle that I just can't sort out, which unless I can figure out a workaround will probably mean that working with V3 or V4 isn't worth the trouble for me: DAZ's Morph Loader Pro won't recognize a V3 or V4 mesh import if I've reorganized the mesh's polygroups in zBrush. Rearranging the polygroups is pretty necessary for my workflow, mainly to seperate the polygons in the face from the polys in the eyelashes, teeth etc. It's just a mess to deal with otherwise. I've imported custom morphs for Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 figures up til now. With both of those generations I always rearrange the polygroups to suit me, and Morph Loader doesn't have a problem with it. For some reason it won't load a morph for V3 or V4 unless the polygroups stay original though. Unfortunately, in zBrush there is no way I know of to restore a polygroup layout after it has been changed. Maybe someone with experience importing morphs for V3 or V4 has some advice?

It's got to do with the parametric rigging/each group being a separate mesh.   That is one of the major advances with the whole Genesis line.

You, at the very least, are probably messing up the vertex order by regrouping them...

There is definitely something in Studio that slows things down...dumping a scene to render in the standalone 3DL can gain as much as 6x speed increase (something that takes 30 mins to render in Studio, renders in 5 mins or less as a RIB...and it's been that way for a while even when the standalone 3DL was core locked to 2 cores and Studio wasn't...it was still faster on a 4 core machine).  I don't imagine that Iray is any different (other than there isn't an easy way to do side by side testing). 

I had some fun dusting off the V3 and V4 meshes and messing around with them in Zbrush. It is pretty amazing the detail you can carve into V3's face with so many polys available. I've really gotten spoiled by V7's bending though, it's so so so much more natural than V3 and V4.

There is a technical hurdle that I just can't sort out, which unless I can figure out a workaround will probably mean that working with V3 or V4 isn't worth the trouble for me: DAZ's Morph Loader Pro won't recognize a V3 or V4 mesh import if I've reorganized the mesh's polygroups in zBrush. Rearranging the polygroups is pretty necessary for my workflow, mainly to seperate the polygons in the face from the polys in the eyelashes, teeth etc. It's just a mess to deal with otherwise. I've imported custom morphs for Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 figures up til now. With both of those generations I always rearrange the polygroups to suit me, and Morph Loader doesn't have a problem with it. For some reason it won't load a morph for V3 or V4 unless the polygroups stay original though. Unfortunately, in zBrush there is no way I know of to restore a polygroup layout after it has been changed. Maybe someone with experience importing morphs for V3 or V4 has some advice?

And yeah, Sorel, I feel you on that one regarding wishing we users had the HD morph import tool. DAZ has always been unyielding on the subject when it was brought up on the forum in the past. I wonder if they might reevaluate their reasons for keeping the tool unavailable to us, now that HD morphs have been out for a couple years and they seem to not be capitalizing much on it anymore. It might make them more money to sell the tool as an add-on to DAZ Studio. I'd pay a relatively high price just so I'd never have to deal with displacement map seam issues anymore, among other current limitations.

yeah I know right?  I alway thought the point of the HD Tool was that you could RENDER high poly instead of having to manually up the subd in the viewport, was really shocked that you couldn't import higher poly meshses in general. 

ZarconDeeGrissom

 

I am on a simple Asus labtop, 8gb ram...  1gb entry nvidia ....
here a screenshot.. 38 frames upleveled to 4.35 mio mesh... rigged. the same mesh lags in DAZ.. so DAZ is clearly sower ....
But anyway...  my point is.. i miss a high resh DAZ character where the base has allready something between 200 - 500k polycount... that's enough to sculpt all needed wrinkels and expression morph/bends...

I'm so sorry, I thought you were referring to Iray Render performance, not the OpenGL view field interface. Because quite often a spot render is needed to see something (more like many things, not just setting up lights). I thought you were saying you were getting 10 to 15 Iray renders per second, lol.

I'd buy such a thing immediately. That said, the facial bones in the genesis 3 models have really improved the realism of expressions you can make inside studio over the previous generations.

I have a new experiment, in large part inspired by the conversation in this thread and the Emily project that has earlier been linked to. 

In working with getting G3F to make more realistic facial expressions, I felt that I needed more detailed geometry than the G3F low poly base mesh. Here are some facial expression morphs I made by working on a subdivided G3F mesh in zbrush, and then exporting the morphs back to DAZ along with corresponding displacement maps for each expression. After they're made, loading one of these emotions is a two step process: I dial in the emotion morph and then I apply the corresponding displacement map (the settings of which I have saved as a preset material in my content library). That's workable, but I'm trying to think if there is a way to apply a morph and its corresonding displacement map all in one click. Anyone know if there's a way to do that? Sort of like a character injection preset, but filtered so that it applies both the morph and the material needed for the emotion preset but doesn't change anything else about the character.

I'm thinking about maybe pushing these custom morphs further, so that each emotion has it's own specific bump map too (like project Emily) with appropriate microsurface info, to really get effects like the forehead wrinkles looking realistic :) It would definitely take a lot more time to make each one though... If only I didn't need to ever sleep, I'd get so much more done.

 

I had some fun dusting off the V3 and V4 meshes and messing around with them in Zbrush. It is pretty amazing the detail you can carve into V3's face with so many polys available. I've really gotten spoiled by V7's bending though, it's so so so much more natural than V3 and V4.

There is a technical hurdle that I just can't sort out, which unless I can figure out a workaround will probably mean that working with V3 or V4 isn't worth the trouble for me: DAZ's Morph Loader Pro won't recognize a V3 or V4 mesh import if I've reorganized the mesh's polygroups in zBrush. Rearranging the polygroups is pretty necessary for my workflow, mainly to seperate the polygons in the face from the polys in the eyelashes, teeth etc. It's just a mess to deal with otherwise. I've imported custom morphs for Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 figures up til now. With both of those generations I always rearrange the polygroups to suit me, and Morph Loader doesn't have a problem with it. For some reason it won't load a morph for V3 or V4 unless the polygroups stay original though. Unfortunately, in zBrush there is no way I know of to restore a polygroup layout after it has been changed. Maybe someone with experience importing morphs for V3 or V4 has some advice?

And yeah, Sorel, I feel you on that one regarding wishing we users had the HD morph import tool. DAZ has always been unyielding on the subject when it was brought up on the forum in the past. I wonder if they might reevaluate their reasons for keeping the tool unavailable to us, now that HD morphs have been out for a couple years and they seem to not be capitalizing much on it anymore. It might make them more money to sell the tool as an add-on to DAZ Studio. I'd pay a relatively high price just so I'd never have to deal with displacement map seam issues anymore, among other current limitations.

ZarconDeeGrissom

I am on a simple Asus labtop, 8gb ram...  1gb entry nvidia ....
here a screenshot.. 38 frames upleveled to 4.35 mio mesh... rigged. the same mesh lags in DAZ.. so DAZ is clearly sower ....
But anyway...  my point is.. i miss a high resh DAZ character where the base has allready something between 200 - 500k polycount... that's enough to sculpt all needed wrinkels and expression morph/bends...

Second example is smart phones. No smart phone out there exists without DRM. It may not "benefit" the customer, but it is pretty much completely transparent and ties into a delivery mechanism where you can find, install, and use the app without having to have any technical background as to what the device is doing or where it is installing things. The DRM, especially in the case of the Apple store, could be said to be a benefit since it encourages developers to develop for it since they know their work is a little more protected and they get paid closer to what they deserve if it is successful than without it, which provides users with a wider selection of apps they might not otherwise have.

Of course, there is also a negative experience i personally had, and also the reason i do not put my faith into a "poison pill": Before the MP3-players ruled the music-world, there was a thing called a minidisc. It was from SONY (probably the most notorious DRM-advocate of all time). The minidisc could store and play music downloaded from a computer. You had to use a special program to transfer music with it and use all features it offered. Technically the minidisc was better than MP3 in all aspects. However SONY build a DRM mechanism into it that restricted copying of music in various ways. You could not copy a song more than twice, for instance. But apart from that it worked really well. That is: it worked really well until until a new Windows version was released (i cannot remember if it was XP or 7). The SONY software i had did not work on that new Windows anymore. So i had to get an update. But at the time that happened, SONY had decided that the market for minidisc in the western world was too small and so there was only a japanese update  available for the Windows application. So i had to use a japanese application for the minidisc. Did i mention that the japenese application, of course, refused to install on an english Windows? Well, i had to use a japenese Windows just to get the minidisc working. Really annoying. There were some attempts to break the encryption and to work around the DRM, but they failed. Even technically fine and quality-wise better than MP3, i discarded the minidisc, because it was just too hard to use.

Lessons learned:

• The DRM as such is not bad. It becomes bad if it is coupled with other requirements you do not like (like switching to a forein language, for instance)
• Even if there was a "poison pill", it would not have been activated. SONY did not get bankrupt or tried to create a subscription service. It just lost interest in it (i.e. not enough money to make from it).
• Being able to copy stuff around without limitations is no guarantee, but at least an indicator that that stuff will last longer.

Here's an example of a hack that helps DAZ...

Can G2F skins work on G3F. No. Wait!!

A 3rd party vendor has made a hack... a work around the LIMITATIONS deliberately put forth ( in a product sold by another store ) ... so now customers can use G2F skins ( and ALSO V4 skins then ) on G3F.

This was a workaround. This was a hack. Hacking can help and hinder us.

Encryption WILL NOT stop hacking. Once you introduce a thing and its limitations are found... someone will begin finding a hack around its limitations. This is what humans do best of all.

My understanding is that the product doesn't need to do anything to the existing, possibly encrypted (though not for G3F) files - it applies the materials preset file to a remapped G3F and to a set of GeoGrafts, neither of which would be stopped if the presets were encrypted or installed via Connect.

My FixDuplicate IDs script would be blocked if the files were encrypted, as would a script I wrote (but have not released) that lists the morphs from a particular set (or sets) by their grouping in the Paramaters pane, so I do understand the worry about workflow. For what it's worth, I am told that there is a new/modiifed script object that would let my morph-listing script work on a loaded figure instead of parsing a file hierarchy, which would be an imporvement in usability, but I don't yet have the details to do the work.

A Brief Off Topic Aside...

Okey dokey, I'm working on it...   :)  Done - looks fine to me now.

Notes to self follow: how to get a monospace (monotype?) font on this forum that displays what I enter and doesn't break the rules:

• I originally used 'Formatted' (from the right-hand "Paragraph Format" dropdown) - that caused the offending behaviour since the long lines didn't wrap.
• I've just removed that and tried 'Computer code' (from the left-hand "Block Styles" drop down) - that totally cacks it up! (which was why I used 'Formatted' in the first place)
• 'Typewriter' from "Block Styles"seems to do the trick  :

The following is information for a bug report I'm putting in about the forum. Here's the text using the default settings:

# Dataline Syntax:
# <propName>,<vertexCount>,<poserGeometryName>,<poserInternalName>,<poserExternalName>,<dsGeometryName>,<ds4Name>,<yR>,<xR>,<zR>,<xT>,<yT>,<zT>
# Details:
# To create a full dataline you need both Poser and DAZ Studio.
 

Here's the same text using 'Computer code' (from the left-hand "Block Styles" drop down)

:HANDPROXYDATA<br /> # Dataline Syntax:<br /> # &lt;propName&gt;,&lt;vertexCount&gt;,&lt;poserGeometryName&gt;,&lt;poserInternalName&gt;,&lt;poserExternalName&gt;,&lt;dsGeometryName&gt;,&lt;ds4Name&gt;,&lt;yR&gt;,&lt;xR&gt;,&lt;zR&gt;,&lt;xT&gt;,&lt;yT&gt;,&lt;zT&gt;<br /> # Details:

Did 'computer code'display that correctly ?

No

(I'm using FF 44.0)

I applied the style by pasting the text from Notepad (Microsoft's one), then selecting it, then applying the style.

 

Here's the text of the bug report:

Request #211143
Website/Forum Bug: 'Computer Code' Doesn't work (at least for me)

I'm writing/editing forum posts using Windows 7 and Firefox 44.0, and when I apply the 'Computer Code' style to a block of text in my post it totally screws up the text.

I'd guess it's something to do with the <and > characters, and maybe the forum software thinking it's HTML.

A workaround was to use the 'Typewriter' style, but that doesn't negate the fact that there's a problem.

See this post http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1000906/#Comment_1000906

(The following is not in the bug report - it's additional information)

P.S. it definitely seems to be the < and > incorrectly triggering the forum software to consider it as HTML. 'Computer Code' seemed to work okay in erostew's post and in my post (where I'd manually edited the text to replace < and > with { and })

P.S.2 Another example - a section of DAZ Script. Here's the text:

    var wDlg = new DzBasicDialog;       
    var wWbLbl = new DzLabel( wDlg );
    wWbLbl.text = "Blah, blah, blah, blah, ...ad infinitum..."

And here it is as 'Computer Code'

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; var wDlg = new DzBasicDialog;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; var wWbLbl = new DzLabel( wDlg );<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; wWbLbl.text = &quot;Blah, blah, blah, blah, ...ad infinitum...&quot;

Or not. But nothing to confuse the forun software into thinking it's HTML this time. Maybe it just detects that I'm posting and goes into 'garble' mode ?  ;o)

If you're pasting actual computer code (and not just wanting it to be in a monospaced font) then use the "Insert Code Snippet" button. (Top row, just after the image button).

Also, it seems like you're copy-pasting code from the website, which includes things like non-breaking spaces (&nbsp;) and BR tags (<br/>). If you use the "Paste as plain text" button, it will strip out all the HTML and prevent it from looking "garbled".
Here is an exampe of code posted using the "Insert code snippet" button:

<?php

        $url = 'example.com';

        // create curl resource 
        $ch = curl_init(); 

        // set url 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url); 

        //return the transfer as a string 
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 

        // $output contains the output string 
        $output = curl_exec($ch); 

        // close curl resource to free up system resources 
        curl_close($ch);   

The reason your "code" looks garbled is because it is outputting it exactly as it's input (as the <code> tag should), but because it was copied from a website, it didn't look the way that it was entered because the browser converts things like html tags (<br />) and entities (&lt;) to their visual counterparts. The code is actually what's posted. If you either use the "Paste as plain text" or paste the copied code into a text editor and then re-copy it and paste it here, it should look more like what you're expecting.