Richard Haseltine said:

crosswind said:

Richard Haseltine said:

crosswind said:

joshua.r.fletcher said:

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

No solution for MG within Alpha version so far... 

As far as we understand it only the Geometry Sculptor will be getting further development.

There's no separate Premier Alpha version but Alpha version per se supports Premier tier. You just log in with your account to verify Premier membership, then you can use Geometry Sculptor for Premier. 

If so, at the end of the day... we who ever bought MG plugins are not able to use them anymore in DS 2025 ? or in other words we have to always keep using DS 4.24 if we have no Premier membership ?

How can we claim the right ?

You can use DS 4 to make morphs, which will then work in 2025.

I knew that ~~ but it's always a pity that what we ever bought cannot work in the brand new DS 6.x 

crosswind said:

Richard Haseltine said:

crosswind said:

joshua.r.fletcher said:

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

No solution for MG within Alpha version so far... 

As far as we understand it only the Geometry Sculptor will be getting further development.

There's no separate Premier Alpha version but Alpha version per se supports Premier tier. You just log in with your account to verify Premier membership, then you can use Geometry Sculptor for Premier. 

If so, at the end of the day... we who ever bought MG plugins are not able to use them anymore in DS 2025 ? or in other words we have to always keep using DS 4.24 if we have no Premier membership ?

How can we claim the right ?

You can use DS 4 to make morphs, which will then work in 2025.

Connect installs won't transfer to a new system without reinstalling (if the files are in the correct place they should need only checking, not literal downloading, but it can still take a while) or copying the database over (which might be better avoided this time). If you logged in and had Update Metadata checked (it is off by default) you should see everything in the Install pane. Since DS is now logging in it may be worth t rying DIM again (if you use DIM then the only reason to have DS working online is for Premier exclusives - to use the plug-ins, and to get the exclusive shapes for the featured characters).

Richard Haseltine said:

crosswind said:

joshua.r.fletcher said:

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

No solution for MG within Alpha version so far... 

As far as we understand it only the Geometry Sculptor will be getting further development.

There's no separate Premier Alpha version but Alpha version per se supports Premier tier. You just log in with your account to verify Premier membership, then you can use Geometry Sculptor for Premier. 

If so, at the end of the day... we who ever bought MG plugins are not able to use them anymore in DS 2025 ? or in other words we have to always keep using DS 4.24 if we have no Premier membership ?

How can we claim the right ?

gcjellyfish said:

I can sympathise with the frustration. Speaking solely for myself ...

The folder naming convention exists to prevent namespace conflicts, as is a hard requirement that we PAs have to adhere to in order to sell products on the Daz store. And I agree that it is necessary to avoid accidental path/name duplication beteen products from different PAs with similarly named characters or whatever. This ensures that products sold on the Daz store will work, even if vendors on other storefronts name their characters the same as a different character sold in the Daz store. So, I completely support that requirement.

File names within product folders are now also required to have PA/Product initials/names at the beginning. Historically, this was not the case, and older products mostly don't do this. Unfortunately, this convention makes it harder to read the file names within the content pane since file names are truncated due to the limited width of the pane and the columnar layout of files within it. Essentially, all file names show the (IMO) useless part of the file name and, if you're lucky, only a few characters of the important part of the file name are visible. As a user, I find this unhelpful and frustrating. As a PA, I would prefer not to degrade (IMO) the experience for my customers, but I am obligated to follow the store rules. Some other PAs like and agree with the convention, and the folks at Daz obviously agree with them.

So, why does this rule exist? I have had it explained to me (by another PA) that the inclusion of PA names/initials is to help facilitate ordering product search results within Daz Studio for a given PA, not just the individual file name. It is necessary because search within DS content library seems to be based largely on a simple text string comparison within the file name itself. So, they have to jam in information about both the file and PA into one field to make this work. The net result being that the file names become harder to read and use within the application which is the universal cost of making search more useful for people who want to limit results to a particular PA/product, (but also less useful to people who don't want the results to be limited to a particular PA/Product).

As a database and web developer in my real job, I personally find this approach to search quite frustrating. It would be much better to avoid relying on a string naming convention to facilitate this functionality. It would make more sense to provide an explicit results filtering system that could be used to explictly filter results by one or more PA names, or one or more product name once the file text comparison is made. Rather like how you can filter search results on storefronts like Amazon to limit the overwhelming list of results by price range, or by manufacturer, or by some other criteria. Of course, this might not work well for products from other storefronts since DS would not have the product metadata (smart content etc) to draw from (that said, the PA-folder name could potentially work as a surrogate). However, the current system also does not work well for products from other storefronts who are not required to use the file naming convention. And since products from other storefronts do not require this convention, this ironically makes files from other stores easier to read within the Daz Studio content pane than products from the Daz store itself. This fact makes me gnash my teeth a bit, since I'm a PA who sells on the Daz store and I WANT the Daz store products to do well and be the best, most user friendly, products in the larger market. So, I feel that this file naming convention disadvantages my product in the marketplace.

So,if it were up to me, I would like to see Daz developers overhaul the search within Daz Studio to include an explicit search results filtering system and to do away with the file naming convention that makes reading the meaningful part of file names difficult for our customers. But it is not up to me. And some other PAs seem horrified at the idea of changing it, as they seem personally wedded to the existing naming convention. So, I've largely given up trying to discuss the issue. I do my best to make my products as useful as I can in other ways and hope my customers understand that the file naming convention is not my choice as a PA.

Smart Content has long had a range of search otpions, those in the Content Library have been expanded

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/content_library/advanced_filtering/start
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/smart_content/advanced_filtering/start

A find in page for "Content Library" and/or "Advanced Filtering" in these pages will show how the chnages have been added

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/714286/daz-studio-4-24-0-x-highlights
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log_4_24_0_3

crosswind said:

joshua.r.fletcher said:

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

No solution for MG within Alpha version so far... 

As far as we understand it only the Geometry Sculptor will be getting further development.

There's no separate Premier Alpha version but Alpha version per se supports Premier tier. You just log in with your account to verify Premier membership, then you can use Geometry Sculptor for Premier. 

I can sympathise with the frustration. Speaking solely for myself ...

The folder naming convention exists to prevent namespace conflicts, as is a hard requirement that we PAs have to adhere to in order to sell products on the Daz store. And I agree that it is necessary to avoid accidental path/name duplication beteen products from different PAs with similarly named characters or whatever. This ensures that products sold on the Daz store will work, even if vendors on other storefronts name their characters the same as a different character sold in the Daz store. So, I completely support that requirement.

File names within product folders are now also required to have PA/Product initials/names at the beginning. Historically, this was not the case, and older products mostly don't do this. Unfortunately, this convention makes it harder to read the file names within the content pane since file names are truncated due to the limited width of the pane and the columnar layout of files within it. Essentially, all file names show the (IMO) useless part of the file name and, if you're lucky, only a few characters of the important part of the file name are visible. As a user, I find this unhelpful and frustrating. As a PA, I would prefer not to degrade (IMO) the experience for my customers, but I am obligated to follow the store rules. Some other PAs like and agree with the convention, and the folks at Daz obviously agree with them.

So, why does this rule exist? I have had it explained to me (by another PA) that the inclusion of PA names/initials is to help facilitate ordering product search results within Daz Studio for a given PA, not just the individual file name. It is necessary because search within DS content library seems to be based largely on a simple text string comparison within the file name itself. So, they have to jam in information about both the file and PA into one field to make this work. The net result being that the file names become harder to read and use within the application which is the universal cost of making search more useful for people who want to limit results to a particular PA/product, (but also less useful to people who don't want the results to be limited to a particular PA/Product).

As a database and web developer in my real job, I personally find this approach to search quite frustrating. It would be much better to avoid relying on a string naming convention to facilitate this functionality. It would make more sense to provide an explicit results filtering system that could be used to explictly filter results by one or more PA names, or one or more product name once the file text comparison is made. Rather like how you can filter search results on storefronts like Amazon to limit the overwhelming list of results by price range, or by manufacturer, or by some other criteria. Of course, this might not work well for products from other storefronts since DS would not have the product metadata (smart content etc) to draw from (that said, the PA-folder name could potentially work as a surrogate). However, the current system also does not work well for products from other storefronts who are not required to use the file naming convention. And since products from other storefronts do not require this convention, this ironically makes files from other stores easier to read within the Daz Studio content pane than products from the Daz store itself. This fact makes me gnash my teeth a bit, since I'm a PA who sells on the Daz store and I WANT the Daz store products to do well and be the best, most user friendly, products in the larger market. So, I feel that this file naming convention disadvantages my product in the marketplace.

So,if it were up to me, I would like to see Daz developers overhaul the search within Daz Studio to include an explicit search results filtering system and to do away with the file naming convention that makes reading the meaningful part of file names difficult for our customers. But it is not up to me. And some other PAs seem horrified at the idea of changing it, as they seem personally wedded to the existing naming convention. So, I've largely given up trying to discuss the issue. I do my best to make my products as useful as I can in other ways and hope my customers understand that the file naming convention is not my choice as a PA.

crosswind said:

joshua.r.fletcher said:

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

No solution for MG within Alpha version so far... 

There's no separate Premier Alpha version but Alpha version per se supports Premier tier. You just log in with your account to verify Premier membership, then you can use Geometry Sculptor for Premier. 

Ah got it.  Thank you!

joshua.r.fletcher said:

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

No solution for MG within Alpha version so far... 

There's no separate Premier Alpha version but Alpha version per se supports Premier tier. You just log in with your account to verify Premier membership, then you can use Geometry Sculptor for Premier. 

Has anyone found a reliable solution for this?  I can't get the export/import approach to work, and I don't think there's a premier alpha version yet?

Hi. When I import a Gen 9 character I get lots of Python errors when on the Mac. I don't get any morphs imported either (I am using the Gen 9 preset). When I try with Gen 8 everything works fine. When I try this on the PC everything works fine. I'm using latest 4.5 stable and latest blender 4.5.1 LTS.
I've tried removing scripts & addons and re-installing but cannot get it to work. All DAZ content is installed via DIM and root dirs set up properly.

Could there be some cached/hidden files left over that I'm not removing before a re-install? I'm at a loss to know what to try. The errors are python tracebacks and I can work around the morph issue by importing them afterwards but I'm not sure what else my be broken broken. I don't want to work on the PC as it's old and has a limited content install, so I'd like to get it working on the mac.

UPDATE: Well, I went through all my DAZ and Blender folders in my ~Library and deleted everything to do with Diffeomorphic. Then downloaded the latest dev build and installed that, as well as the scripts and Whoop-de-Doop! It's working perfectly.. There was some old stuff from 2022 in there so I guess that was the issue.
Cheers

xueyt9518 said:

crosswind said:

Certainly they're strand-based hair (SBH). The base geometry of an SBH is polyline. ZB is not able to import polyline. 

Well, you can manipulate polylines with Blender. Firstly, activate Geometry Editor tool in DS, export SBH to OBJ file. Import OBJ into Blender and deform polylines as you wish (in Edit mode).

Then export to OBJ, import OBJ in DS with Morph Loader Pro to create morphs on SBH ~~

Oh thank you so much! I think I need to learn some blender now XD

No problem ~  

crosswind said:

Certainly they're strand-based hair (SBH). The base geometry of an SBH is polyline. ZB is not able to import polyline. 

Well, you can manipulate polylines with Blender. Firstly, activate Geometry Editor tool in DS, export SBH to OBJ file. Import OBJ into Blender and deform polylines as you wish (in Edit mode).

Then export to OBJ, import OBJ in DS with Morph Loader Pro to create morphs on SBH ~~

Oh thank you so much! I think I need to learn some blender now XD

Certainly they're strand-based hair (SBH). The base geometry of an SBH is polyline. ZB is not able to import polyline. 

Well, you can manipulate polylines with Blender. Firstly, activate Geometry Editor tool in DS, export SBH to OBJ file. Import OBJ into Blender and deform polylines as you wish (in Edit mode).

Then export to OBJ, import OBJ in DS with Morph Loader Pro to create morphs on SBH ~~

For some older hair models, I could import them into ZBrush and then use GoZ to import them into DAZ for hair shape adjustments to accommodate specific poses. However, with newer hair models, I get an "error encountered while importing a file" message when importing into ZBrush, and they appear as a cube, making adjustments impossible. I’d like to ask about these new hair models (likely not strand-based hair). They are the kind with PS Hair and PR Hair (sorry if my terminology isn’t precise, as I’m not very familiar with this). How can I adjust the shape of such hair models? Thank you so much!

update. The decal bugs have been fixed in the last commit. Then I proposed a limited implementation for uvw decals, once it's done should be fine to import the Dega wounds and eventually other similar uvw decals.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/downloads/

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/2554/

inquire said:

OK, thank you. I got it solved, actually before I read this message. I worked on it yesterday. I just wanted to double check it this morning to see that it works out. Briefly, I uninstalled and then reinstalled DS. I uninstalled and then reinstalled one of your bone minion products. I think that brought the correct folder back into DS. I rebuilt the database, and re-imported the backed-up metadata. Everything seems to be working fine now.

I am not by any means of techie, so this was difficult for me. But I'm glad I got it worked out. I do think that bone minon products are wonderful. I hope you'll continue producing more of them. Thanks for spending time with me on what was for me a very difficult issue.

You're very welcome! I am so glad you got it solved.

Well diffeomorphic is a daz importer, so of course it also tries its best to import the daz hairs. However in general most daz hairs don't really fit to blender, as they are extremely heavy both in geometry and texture size. If possible it is much better to import a daz figure without hair then use some blender native hair, which will look better and also render much faster.

https://joseconseco.github.io/HairTool_3_Documentation/hair_library/

The general concept here is that not all the daz content fits to blender. Extensive corrective morph sets are another example, which imports in blender hundreds of morphs thus making the figure extremely heavy. As blender users we should rather take from daz what works and discard the rest, especially when blender has better native options.

PostgreSQL is used for anything that relies on metadata - presets tabs in settings pane, Smart content, the products and categories containers in the Content Library pane, and the various type and group tags that appear on thumbnails.

Exactly what is DIM showing as installed? What security software ar you using? Is this a clean ionstall or did you copy across a database from the old system?

OK, thank you. I got it solved, actually before I read this message. I worked on it yesterday. I just wanted to double check it this morning to see that it works out. Briefly, I uninstalled and then reinstalled DS. I uninstalled and then reinstalled one of your bone minion products. I think that brought the correct folder back into DS. I rebuilt the database, and re-imported the backed-up metadata. Everything seems to be working fine now.

I am not by any means of techie, so this was difficult for me. But I'm glad I got it worked out. I do think that bone minon products are wonderful. I hope you'll continue producing more of them. Thanks for spending time with me on what was for me a very difficult issue.