Cross-Generation Animation Translation Using Bone Minion

I am looking for an aniBlock, but... oh... that's right. I have that for Genesis 3, but not 8.

Well, it was a good rendering day. I can take a break.

I load in Genesis 8 and apply a Genesis 3 Bone Minion to it and convert the entire collection in one sitting. It takes a while if they're long aniBlocks like these, but in the end the worth is Incredible. Like getting a whole new pack of aniBlocks for this figure.

It can be easy to mess up, so I'll go through the whole process here. We'll use Genesis 8 Female for this example, and we'll call her G8F and Genesis 3 Female we'll call G3F.

1. In either timeline, turn looping off, so Play will stop when the animation is finished
2. Load in G8F
3. Go to Scripts > Riversoft Art > Bone Minion and, with G8F selected, double-click the G3F Bone Minion*
4. Select the Bone Minion (might have to open G8F's hierarchy)
5. In Parameters, click the "Bone Minion" parameter heading and change the top value "Automatic Pose Transfer" from On (default) to Off so it does try to write as we preview and apply aniBlocks
6. With Bone Minion still selected, load the first aniBlock
7. Scrub the timeline (DS or aniMate - doesn't matter) back and fourth once to get Bone Minion off that last pose from the last frame - even though it's sitting on frame 0
8. Head to the Daz Studio Timeline - Make sure it is set to "Show All Frames" in its parameter settings dialog
9. With the scrubber set at frame 0 - the very beginning of the timeline, Turn Bone Minion's Automatic Pose Transfer On
10. Hit the forward one frame button (wait a second) and hit the back one frame button to get back to frame 0 (locks in the pose at frame 0)
11. Hit Play and don't pass your mouse over anything that will preview a pose or animation, or we'll have to start over
12. It'll take a little while for the transfer to complete - good time to get a cup of coffee
13. Upon completion, since we're in the DS Timeline, we'll be on the last frame of the animation
14. Hit the rewind button to go back to frame 0
15. Turn Off Bone Minion's Automatic Pose Transfer**
16. In the scene pane, select G8F
17. Go back into aniMate 2 and right-click an empty part of aniMate 2 > Create aniBlock from Daz Studio's Timeline
18. Play it through in aniMate 2 to verify the everything is right.
19. Right-click the new aniBlock > Save as New > give your aniBlock a name and navigate to or create the folder to keep them in. aniMate defaults to the aniBlocks folder in your library, so the new folder can be put right there if you like
20. Select the newly saved aniBlock and click the garbage can icon above it to delete it from the scene
21. Select the aniBlock applied to Bone Minion and delete that one as well - in the timeline you'll notice that there are still some residual key frames on Bone Minion
22. In the scene pane, select the Bone Minion
23. Right-click the Timeline tab that you would use to open the Timeline pane > Clear Animation > Clear Figure Pose
24. Repeat the process for the new aniBlock.

It all goes very smoothly. Easier to do than to type.

* Only available if you've purchased a Bone Minion.

Bone Minion folder - if you have more than one Bone Minion for Genesis 3 Poses, there will still only be the one Genesis 3 Female Bone Minion. If you own the correct one, it will just work on the figure you've applied it to.

When I work on these projects, I prefer to use (in this example) G8F Base Figure, rather than a character, just to make sure that the data is made ofr and taken from the main, base figure. It might not make a difference - so if I jst want to do one conversion while my character is open, I'll go ahead and make the conversion (it's just joint rotation data afterall) and also save the resulting aniBlock to potentially (definitely in my case) save time down the road.

 

** Automatic Pose Transfer On/Off is, unfortunately animatable. Meaning that, if it's already On and we turn it Off on the last frame, it's still On on the first frame.

When Automatic Pose Transfer is active (On), it will constantly send pose-change information to the target. You don't want that to happen any time except when actually transferring. Get into the habit of keeping this turned off except during the transfer, and Always at frame 0!

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I actually don't think the unisex mesh is the issue with the chest, it is simply a design flaw. The idea can work, but it needs execution.

Frankly execution for products has been off in general. Victoria 9 looked nice, and with a few exceptions, most of the core 9 line has been quite weak. It doesn't feel like things are headed in the right direction here. If Daz wants better sales, they need better products. I don't understand how anyone can recommend Wang at all. He has way more problems than just his chest. The very plain skin, the oddly small head, and freaky neck. What is going on with this dude's neck? Did he swallow a pyramid?

Any vampire that tries to bite Wang could potentially lose an eye! That Adam's Apple is dangerous!

I can get buying something and customizing. I pretty much do that with everything. But we are seeing wholesale changes here, using another character's skin, trying to fix the body morph, and so on. At that point...why? I don't understand.

When sending to Zbrush, it is important to have "Export with deformations" checked and "Export at current resolution" unchecked.
This way, it should work, but do not change anything in DAZ Studio, while using GoZ, except dialing the newly created Zbrush morh dial to a 100 percent.
Everything you add, that has not been dialed in, during the sending to zbrush process, will be baked into your morph target.

Didn't know FT could do 8.1, interesting. There are times when Face Transfer is fine and does a bit better than Facegen. It adds a bit of eyebrow on outside corners, which Facegen tends to miss. But I rather dislike how Face Transfer blends the face into the texture much of the time. As I said before, it Face Transfer has a habit of making clown faces. Of course, Face Transfer is much cheaper, so there's that.

It is good that Daz is fixing an issue with Face Transfer, that gives some hope that maybe they will update it someday to improve it. But I honestly don't have faith in that. It is irritating, because when Face Transfer first released, I was excited for it. I had hoped that by being a first party plugin that it would get more updates and possibly get some cool features. However that never materialized. As versatile as Facegen is, the app is extremely old and its core is basically the same as it always has been, even though it has progressed some. So I had great hope that Daz would take their Face Transfer and put a new spin on the technology. I'd love to see an AI component in it. This is a perfect use case for AI, as it could generate the rest of the texture that the photo does not show, and create a better morph. I would also be willing to pay more for Face Transfer if it really did work well. I mean, people are paying $100+ for Facegen. It may be kind of a niche market, but the people in this market are often willing to pay up for it. If it worked really well, I am sure it would sell like hot cakes.

At any rate, Facegen is not dead, as some have noted, it is just not available from the Daz store anymore. You can still buy Facegen directly from its site. As far as I can tell, the app is still getting updates. It is up to 4.5 now, and since this thread got me curious, I tested it out and it is improving. The changelog posts: 

4.5

• Fix Genesis maps color adjustment for faces with beards
• Modify → Texture add Detail Modulation Strength slider
• Create → Photo improve results a bit

"improve results a bit" is actually true. I just tested a photo I used before, and the results surprised me. It blended the texture color of the forehead better than it already did. The chin could be better, but the forehead and temple blend perfectly into the texture, and the entire body color is in line with the color of the face. No clowns! I tried two different textures and and this got me excited, because somehow Facegen managed to make these very different source textures nearly the same color as the face in the photo. I have no idea how it is doing this. But this is a really amazing power. Just think of what can be done with this is enticing, and I am not talking about just making people's faces. You could get creative here and use Facegen as a way to color correct some textures. The morph may be slightly better, the upper eyelid is not pushed down as much as it was previously.

A bit off topic, I couldn't help but notice that Iray 2023 is on the beta track. I sure hope no canaries die in Daz's cave so this can see the light of day ASAP.

Vinme Morphs do a decent job of reshaping the masculine chest -- although they do call those specific morphs "breasts masculine". Mind, that's a hefty price to pay for the six morphs that affect the male chest, so you would want to get the whole package to use for other things. (And they've finally corrected how it crashed into Shape Shift and caused duplicate formulas.)

Write Idea said:

G8M does have a morph called Pectoral Undercurve (or something along those lines) that either enhances or decreases its size to give a flat chested look.  That might help with G9 (if it has one).  Though, all those faces might cause some distortions.

Genesis 9 has morphs called  "Chest Volume Fix" for both left and right pecs. It reduces the outer curve and maybe a bit on the undercurve. Not sure if that's in the Starter Essentials or the Essentials Expansion add-on.

It's possible that Soto's Breast Utilities might help with this, but the promo images for the male are ... discouraging on that front, let's say. However, I don't have that set so I can't say for sure. And again, not cheap.

Sickleyield's free morphs package also has one morph (SY Free Pecs Shape 02) that squares off the bottom of the pec a bit to attenuate the moobtacular shape. That combined with the Chest Volume Fix might get you where you want to go.

MelissaGT said:

It's not so much the size of the pectoral that is an issue...it's the shape/angle itself. I bought some chest morphs specifically for male figures on the 'other' site and I'm hoping that will help.  

@MelissaGT - was that the package by SF-Design? Did it do what you wanted?

Thank you, Walt! Really. I really appreciate those words!

Yeah, animating in Daz Studio! All I had to do to get there was to stop wishing for what wasn't there, and think about what "I" could do to make things easier on myself. It truly presented itself when I was getting frustrated with how impossible those on-screen manipulators are compared to, well... any software I've ever used. "Poser", I thought to myself. Which meant that, instead of on-screen manipulators, I would be better off using dials.

Dials? Hey... a few years ago I learned how to make those dials - and it's a really fast and simple process! 

Daz Studio is really magical in that regard. Being made so well as a software that can transform any mesh into a figure with such a plethora of pretty much automated tools... it's really powerful for that. I watched and read a lot of advice and tutorials from SickleYield for the transfer utility and learned a lot of inner workings processes from the amazing Josh Darling. 

Dials! I had been thinking to myself for years - we have Arms Up/Down and Front/Back, but no Twist. If I had an Arms Twist dial I could remedy nearly all of my animation woes using Mocap that causes the arms or hands to clip into the figure. So that was my first dial. But since I made that dial, I could quickly see how more would also be very useful. Hmmm... what am I always fixing with the graph editor in Carrara? Oh... the individual bends for chest and abdomen. Bam. Made those. And I mean... get into a flow with a clear vision and this sort of work goes very quickly. I have a fun little demonstration on that in the Course as well - I explain: "This is only taking a minute because I want you to see what I'm doing. We'll speed it up as we go", and I do. And it is actually even faster than that when you're not explaining stuff!

I got really into it, but only for... maybe an hour. See... I didn't yet have that clearly though out plan, I was just testing the waters with an epiphany I was having.

When I tested out my new dials I was really amazed. Night and day difference. I didn't realize that I was actually creating what could very easily be used to completely obliterate the need for a graph editor, but I was.

Eventually I started making more and more useful dials. 

Having the workflow smooth out so quickly with such a simple concept, everything else about animating just started to become easier and more fun. Faster and more fun. More efficient and more fun. Everything it became more of also added to the fun factor.

After getting good and used to working that way - which is fairly instantaneous once the actual workflow is realized - even 'knowing' immediately where to start looking for the right aniBlock became easier. Knowing what we can 'fix' with the dials... everything was just easier... and more fun!

The whole timeline becomes a LOT easier to manage, because we're not having to mess with the actual key frames made through baking the aniBlock, we're working with keys we make ourselves using our correction/control dials. It's not only easier to work with the keys, but we can clearly see where we placed them in the timeline, making it really easy to work out what happens next, and where.

MelissaGT said:

AllenArt said:

MelissaGT said:

I know I started a separate thread bout it for G9 males in general...but Wang 9's chest is particularly wonk. 

I'm working on it. LOL 

Edit: This is likely as good as I'm going to get it with the morphs I have.

 

What morph packs do you have? I'm looking to help de-boobify a male figure I've been working on and so far nothing I've tried has been able to get the lower pec to not look like a boob, especially the nipple placement. I like what you've done here.  

It's a combo of base morphs, Vinme morphs and SF Design Easy Pecs. There is also a morph under Tools in Parameters that is a Chest Volume fix that helps to de-moobify the pecs some ;)

AllenArt said:

MelissaGT said:

I know I started a separate thread bout it for G9 males in general...but Wang 9's chest is particularly wonk. 

I'm working on it. LOL 

Edit: This is likely as good as I'm going to get it with the morphs I have.

What morph packs do you have? I'm looking to help de-boobify a male figure I've been working on and so far nothing I've tried has been able to get the lower pec to not look like a boob, especially the nipple placement. I like what you've done here.  

WendyLuvsCatz said:

you might need to resort to DAZ studio

if you convert to weightpainting you can use the transfer utility and save a support asset

the general weights best, just convert to blended weights afterwards

it should fit the legacy figure

works for V4 etc so should for Lorenzo

I discovered that sort of workflow early on after the release of Daz Studio Pro 4.0 when they made it with all of those wonderful tools free.

Magic!

I think that's one of the reasons HeadWax calls it the Carrara plugin.

It's really cool how we can load in any figure, model something for it - anything, export to OBJ, bring it into DS, turn it into conforming clothing for the target figure, save to library, and it just freaking Works!!! I never really used DS for much more than that and to deal with and build aniBlocks.

I bought Decimator to make low poly figures for use in Carrara, but decided against taking that route the more I got used to the magic of Carrara. Didn't need low poly figures.

MelissaGT said:

It seems the base figure should have been made without boobs because they're easier to add than remove. 

Easier doesn't automatically mean easy.

Sure, adding boobs is fairly trivial if the figure is nude, but when you consider clothes, I had to take many hours and create new tools to make projection morphs to stop one of my bustier (G8F) characters loading shirts like this:

... and instead load them like this:

And I've had to make different versions of this projection morph to address clothing of different tightnesses. (Fortunately I've now got my process fairly refined so I can adapt it to new character shapes reasonably quickly, but alas I don't have the scripting skills to automate it entirely).

Sure, dForce can somewhat handle this problem if you do a timeline simulation to bring the shape in, but that's tedious and requires dForce compatible shirts (which are comparatively uncommon). Fit Control is a port in a storm, but it's also imperfect, trying to work out what combination of shapes can best cancel out the deformation.

Getting a good fit on clothes the further you move away from the base shape is a challenge - and I say that as someone who is really good at making clothes fit things far from their original base shape:

So making G9's base shape completely flat chested definitely does not magically make all the challenges go away.

We can argue then that perhaps there is a need for separate base figures... but the concept of a unisex base is meritorous. The number of times I've needed matching outfits for men and women, or needed to share morphs to make characters look like brother and sister, or turned down buying a monster because the PA only made it available on one of the bases... it's not a small number. And while sorting those kinds of things is within my skill set, I know my skill set is uncommon.

At least with G3 and G8 (and G2, but I've never used G2) there were separate base figures for males.

 Actually, if we've brought up G2 - the G2 figures share exactly the same topology, as do (I believe) all the Victoria era figures. You can export Girl 6 to a mesh file and then reimport that shape on G2M just fine. (There's minor differences in the actual rigging, but ultimately G2 is a unimesh base, and splitting it into two mostly has the advantage of needing less clothing morphing).

Entirely separate geometries for the male and female bases is actually an exception rather than the rule amongst Daz figures.

We're perhaps in a position where the vendors haven't needed to work with the constraints of a unimesh base in a while, particularly with the changes to how rigging and correctives are done since those eras, but nothing fundamentally means that the same geometry for the male and female base is a problem. If anything, the way it was done with G3 and G8 could be seen as a bodge that replaced one set of problems with another.

LeatherGryphon said:

kyoto kid said:

...I tend to shop "European style" (purchasing for a few days instead of a couple weeks)  as I don't have a lot of storage space in my apartment or a chest freezer to "stock up" and make the delivery charge worth it. I also like picking out certain items myself like produce, fruit, and meats/seafood.  Yeah it's a bother at my age to go to the market (particularly the one that is further away for certain items the Safeway down the street doesn't handle or they overprice) but I deal with it.

I'm the opposite.  I've arranged my situation so that I rarely have to encounter those self-checkout/irritation machines.  Only when I'm forced to end up at WalMart do I even consider it if the lines are long, but soon talk myself out of it.  The CVS drugstore is another place that keeps hinting that I should "take advantage" of the irritation machines, but I always wait for the store clerk or the pharmacist.  And as for mass groceries, I order most of my canned goods on the Internet in bulk.  Usually 8 or 12 items in a "flat" or 24 items in a "case".(gotta remember to tip the postman well this Christmas)  I keep about six months of canned and dried food(life sustaining, if not filling or exotic) at all times.  When the sun flares and the power & communication around the world goes out, I'll have a few months before panic sets in (perhaps enough time to plant a garden, or strangle a deer.)

But at least I'm in an area where the water comes out of the ground freely, the ground is fertile and not covered with concrete or asphalt, and I could plant a big garden, and strangle a deer trying to beat me to the produce.

...don't get me wrong, I loathe the things as well.  The only reason I end up using them at times is the Safeway down the street often only has one, occasionally two regular checkout lanes open (out of 7), neither of which are express lanes for those with only a few items.    So that is the reason I often see long queues of people with full trolleys that often snake back into the aisles.

The Safeway in my area also has an odd configuration in that they sectioned off an area which has OTC medications/healthcare stuff, wine, laundry detergent, and paper goods with two checkout stands at the entrance. If you have to get any of those items, you have to go through one of the two checkout lanes there in that section of the store (usually the only ones that are open as well)  Even if you just need a pack of TP or a bottle of dishwashing soap, you are forced to stand in line often behind several people with overloaded trolleys and deal with, I swear, the slowest cashiers I've ever seen.

This store is not out on the fringe  of town, it's just a little ways from downtown in what is a fairly upscale neighbourhood.  Apparently the layout change was made to prevent shoplifting even though they have a couple of security guards at each door and I'm sure, in store surveillance. I do find it odd they don't have those sensor thingies at the doors (like other markets have) which beep if someone tries to smuggle something out under their jacket without paying.

If the other market wasn't so far away, about a mile walk  (not an enjoyable experience in bad weather) or a somewhat circuitous transit trip (with a transfer and wait for a connection), I'd shop there more often.

you might need to resort to DAZ studio

if you convert to weightpainting you can use the transfer utility and save a support asset

the general weights best, just convert to blended weights afterwards

it should fit the legacy figure

works for V4 etc so should for Lorenzo

I'm trying to use Zbrsh to make  corrective morphs for some extreme pose. Everything works great but the problem is by using Goz, the corrective morph I've created  also includes other morphs. Like if I'm making a corrective morphs for pose A, what I got through Goz is the corrective morphs plus pose A. What I really want is only the  corrective morphs. In traditional work flow(export the obj and edit, then import it back ), these problem can be easily avoid by setting Reverse Deformations  to YES, when import obj as morph. However, this could be messing when using Goz. Goz is definitely time saver for sculping figures and I wonder if there is any way to make the morph creating by Goz  reverse deformations ?

Problem solved, it's nor Goz or Zbrush work flow has problem, just my stupid work, never put your hands on any figure dialed on multiple imported morph.

As a counter voice, I will note that Face Transfer (1.5.0.5) does do G8.1. It pops a gratuitous warning if you're doing a G8.1 male, but you can click through and it works fine. There are a few essential steps to making the figure that is initially created workable, including using the separate Face Transfer Shapes product. I then use ManFriday's Figure Converter for Genesis 9 to get the resulting FT shape to G9. Current FaceGen creates G9 characters directly but I simply do not like the squirrel face that FaceGen creates, and I gave up on using it after a few months when I could not make reasonable figures for some of my characters with it. Someone else's tastes and preferences may differ, so I'm just stating my opinion.

However ... Outrider42 makes the valid point in other threads on this subject that FaceGen offers an important feature that FT does not - you can select alternate base textures,so long as they are appropriate for the Genesis version. FaceGen also seems much more forgiving of relics like shadows and highlighting in the original source image than Face Transfer is. I have spent a lot of time experimenting with FaceGen-sourced textures in recent times and am currently using a workflow that uses Face Transfer-originated shape and FaceGen-originated textures on G9. For the moment, I find that both products are essential to my custom character creation process.

This is one I did yesterday as part of testing some new products. He's G9 with Face Transfer shape (including about 20% Dain 9) and FaceGen base textures. 

unless it's a morph of a Genesis figure

Lycan looks a bit closer to what you're looking for. You might not want to dial it in all the way, because it's a very overpowering morph.

Since this topic comes up in google top results, I am adding my own solution that works for me adter trying many noy-so-great-working tutorials...

Studio 4.15

Blender 3.2

1. save g8 pose as preset
2. load blender obj
3. transfer utility: src g8, target obj
4. joint editor, select g8, then ctrl-select obj: r.click > transfer rigging (figure space)
5. delete g8, reload g8, apply g8 pose preset from step 1 <- not intuitive but necessary
6. fit obj to g8 <- will look weird
7. load obj as morph, apply to obj <- fixes the deformation from step 6

Dartanbeck said:

...and there's this (never tried Facegen, so I don't really know what it does or doesn't do)

Face Transfer has never been updated since its launch in 2019. It can only do Genesis 8. It can't even do Genesis 8.1. Facegen has updated numeous times since, including support for Genesis 8.1 and 9, and already had support for Genesis 1, 2, 3 and of course 8.

Face Transfer is also useless without buying the Face Transfer Morph Pack, as that pack's main goal is to fix the flawed morph that Transfer produces (it creates a face that is comically flat)

Ok there is a big difference between a preset (.duf) and a native morph (.dsf). I suggest you learn how daz's structure works. Morphs will automatically be saved in data folder. Presets will be saved where ever you placed it on G9. You cannot save a preset in a data folder.

It doesn't matter. What you are choosing exists already, be it a morph, a character preset or anything, meaning path has already been defined. You cannot custom resave to another location via the script if it has been saved before. Only way to do that is manually through studio, then delete the source files afterwards.