alienarea said:

xyer0 said:

alienarea said:

I  played a bit with Xiu Lin. Pretty face, but she needs to take care of her hands.

I like her. Did you morph her face some, because she looks less toonish than I remember? I guess we could turn down the normals on her hands.

Yes, I morphed in some Victoria 9, need to look it up. Used the Kiri skin.

She looks good. I passed on Kiri. 

xyer0 said:

alienarea said:

I  played a bit with Xiu Lin. Pretty face, but she needs to take care of her hands.

I like her. Did you morph her face some, because she looks less toonish than I remember? I guess we could turn down the normals on her hands.

Yes, I morphed in some Victoria 9, need to look it up. Used the Kiri skin.

In my experience, there's really no conversion needed. You load Horse 2 into the scene, copy the Coat surface and paste that to Coat on the centaur (and I think torso as well, I haven't done it for a while), then do the same for Hoof, then reapply the centaur opacity map to the torso. I typically use the IDG materials. It just occurred to me that I should have been saving these as material presets for the centaur, because I have a recurring centaur character.

edit: you also need to reset the UV to centaur.

re-edit: I would be very interested to hear about morph conversion, though.

alienarea said:

I  played a bit with Xiu Lin. Pretty face, but she needs to take care of her hands.

I like her. Did you morph her face some, because she looks less toonish than I remember? I guess we could turn down the normals on her hands.

Thanks for the quick replies.  I've done a few things based on what you two said that seems to help a lot.  The clue from Richard about 'product not installed' was very useful.

• Reran the "Reimport Metadata" and "Condense Database" from the Content DB Maintenance menu.  Wouldn't have thought that would help, but SofaCitizen mentioned it and I figured I wouldn't hurt.
• Reactivated all morph packages from Turbo Loader.  It's a great utility, but it's also bolted on.  An integrated tool that can trace dependencies would be a welcome sight for Daz 5.
• Reinstalled the starter packages and a few of the base expression packs that seemed to show up a lot in the log.
• Removed Auto Face Enhancer.  I've always had problems with that product either (1) slowing my loads to a crawl or distorting faces horrifically.  Maybe I just need to work with it more.
• Removed a few (not many) 3rd party items that were kicking up some errors.

Now I'm down to a couple dozen errors that take about 10 seconds to work through.  Now the challenge is to either (1) uninstall stuff I'm not likely to use or (2) carefully use Turbo Loader to reduce load times.

For reference, here's the kind of errors I was talking about:

2023-05-06 15:13:15.816 [WARNING] :: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(6969): Formula target property not found: Genesis8Female:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Stephanie%208/FHMStephanie8.dsf#FHMStephanie8?value - in file: /data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/Zev0/Expression%20Smoother/ES8%20Angry%20Smoother.dsf#ES8%20Afraid%20Smoother
2023-05-06 15:13:15.816 [WARNING] :: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(6969): Formula target property not found: Genesis8Female:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Monique%208/FBMMonique8.dsf#FBMMonique8_Cage?value - in file: /data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/Zev0/Bend%20Control/Smoother%20M8%20R.dsf#Smoother%20M8%20R

Thanks again for the help.

Oh!  And I'm still looking for something better than Notepad++ to view the log file.

So I've made two mixed shapes using Kiri 9 and a combination of other morph packs, including Toon Heroes and Young Anime Heroes. I showed them up in the Kiri 9 thread, and since there was interest, I decided to package them up.

Keep in mind that when I did these, especially the male equivalent (Kyo) I wasn't thinking of sharing the preset, so I used a TON of products which you'll need if you want to recreate it. For that reason, I'm also attaching the "recipes" (dials used) in case you'd like to try replacing dials from one product with another. You can see a list of the products used (that I remember) in this gallery entry.

You can find the presets here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MVOgh_6IQjGw58qFJ4XljiXVbJ18p7cY/view?usp=share_link

The renders I'm showing use our Toon Textures and Toon Alternate Textures (Blush and Alternate Eyelashes) and are rendered with some bloom to give them an even softer look.

Kyouko Gallery Entry [with the required products linked].

Kyo Gallery Entry [with the required products linked].

I have the same question. I'd think it's a very problematic product if it didn't have that additional morph for lowering the goggles.

Yeah, yeah... its late to complain, but "pitbull" is not a thing and this morph and texture should never have been called that. The product name of Bully is a little better, but not by much.

If you meant it to be an American Pitbull Terrier or an American Staffordshire Terrier (which... its not that last), you should have called it that. But "pitbull" is not a breed, it's a slur.

How do I unbend its ears so it can look more like an Am Staff? As a recognized breed of dogs, commonly slurred as "pitbull", the Am Staff's ears mostly stand straight up and while they may flop a little... they are one of the breed's most characteristic features and are quite often highly expressive.

If you think of calling me a 'nutter' in your reply... you might want to think again before you do.

Matt_Castle said:

Dodger said:

There's literally no reason you can't.

Overlapping UVs (such as reusing the same part of a texture map to do both sleeves on a shirt), or UV co-ordinates outside the standard UV square (which are sometimes used to force tiling on a UV level, or alternatively for UDIM mapping). Not all models have these problems, but while a vertex ID is unique, a UV co-ordinate cannot be assumed to be.

~~~~~

However, yes, you can convert a weightmap to an image; I've done it in the past. I've got an add-on for Blender that I sometimes use so I can convert a weight map I've painted there into a mask I can use for things like a levels adjust layer in Photoshop (I don't have a 3D version of photoshop, and creating the mask in Blender means I can properly match it over seams).
The problem is... well, one program having a method for exporting weight maps to an image isn't any use unless other programs offer a way to convert that back. Doing so would just be a new poorly supported interchange format - if programs can't agree over things like FBX, then this isn't worth anyone putting their effort into developing a tool for.

(Another question is whether 8-bit really gives enough precision to transfer weights well, and I'm not certain it does).

Overlapping UVs only even matter if you're transferring. Otherwise, unless two vertices' UV coordinates are *literally the exact same* (or within the tolerance you give the system) they won't matter. And that can happen from bad UV mapping anyway but bad UV mapping causes so many other problems it's hardly unique to this one thing.
Besides, overcoming the problems with overlapping UVs is child's play. You just define the UDIM space for each material and then there are no overlapping UVs anymore.
If you are using this to transfer weight maps to another mesh, then just use multiple maps the same as is done for textures. Just like using UDIMs. Easy. Most only will be on one/in one UDIM space, but it doesnt even matter.

And importing is easier than exporting. You literally just sample the colour at the target UV coordinates. If there is more than one, you sample the colour there however many times and then average them. If you're not transferring to another mesh that takes the same maps, then they will only even ever be different if you frakked with them somewhere else manually. If you're transferring, they won't be that far oss unless you have a totally whacked out crunchy weight map that's all over the place, at which point, again, you have bigger cuddly clownfish to fry, because one thing important about transferring weight maps is that you need to start with a weight map that actually works.
As to whether 8-bit is enough, well, it really should but if not, surely 16 bit should be. I mean, the precision of a weight map isn't about it's exact six-digit weights, it's about the PLACEMENT of what weight. I mean, how often does it make a niticable difference if a specific vertex is bending at 5% or 5.1%? As long as what's happening doesn't get crunchy, it's no big deal. And it's easier to keep them smooth with less precise numbers.

But if you want higher precision, you have 3 colours to work with. Treat red as the 0..256 = 0..1 channel, then have G be 0..256 fractions of each 256th, and have B be the next subdivision down from that. That should be enough for anyone ever. That's a precision down to 0.00001 and change and is the same as a 32-bit image (it IS a 32-bit image, you're just storing it differently).
I really did not expect to have people defending not doing something that seems this simple. I was hoping for more "hey, let's try it and see!" It's way more positive.

Dodger said:

There's literally no reason you can't.

Overlapping UVs (such as reusing the same part of a texture map to do both sleeves on a shirt), or UV co-ordinates outside the standard UV square (which are sometimes used to force tiling on a UV level, or alternatively for UDIM mapping). Not all models have these problems, but while a vertex ID is unique, a UV co-ordinate cannot be assumed to be.

~~~~~

However, yes, you can convert a weightmap to an image; I've done it in the past. I've got an add-on for Blender that I sometimes use so I can convert a weight map I've painted there into a mask I can use for things like a levels adjust layer in Photoshop (I don't have a 3D version of photoshop, and creating the mask in Blender means I can properly match it over seams).
The problem is... well, one program having a method for exporting weight maps to an image isn't any use unless other programs offer a way to convert that back. Doing so would just be a new poorly supported interchange format - if programs can't agree over things like FBX, then this isn't worth anyone putting their effort into developing a tool for.

(Another question is whether 8-bit really gives enough precision to transfer weights well, and I'm not certain it does).

I have $0.57 store credit - can I transfer this to somebody else ? :o)

There's nothing I can buy for $0.57 and I don't spend real money here.

Dodger said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Weight maps are not images, they do not use the UVs. A weight map, like a morph, is a kind of vertex map - in this case mapping refers to matching up two lists, one of weights or of changed positions to the list of vertices making up a model.

You know, I just came in here looking for a way to do this and it looks like I'mma have to make one myself, apparently.
But this concept, this way of thinking about it, it is totally wrong.
A weight map is a 0-1 number assigned to a vertex.
A vertex also has a set of UV coordinates. Unless it's a really crappy mesh. And it should be a uique set (though it could be more than one if the vertex in UV space is on the border of a shell, that's no big deal though, you just average, and they should be the same so the average will be the same as both values, other than precision error possibilities)
So if I have a vertex and its weight is, say, 25% (or 0.25), then I see no reason I cannot just take its value, convert that to greyscale(64), and place a dot (with a little padding to accommodate any rounding errors and map scale differences) at that UV coordinate.
Then a weight map *would be a texture*.
It IS a map. It's a map of values associated with vertices. And a UV map is another map of two values (U and V, corresponding to X and Y across an image where the width of an image is always 1). So you can always store data and look it back up based on those coordinates. There's literally no reason you can't.
I don't see why this is treated like a foreign concept.
Sorry it's a year later I just didn't see a never thread on the subject.

First off, if it's such an obvious, simple solution, can you name a program that does it this way? Comparing a weight map to a UV map doesn't support your core argument, because neither is a "map" in the same way that a texture map is. If you're aware of a way to UV map an object by applying an image, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in hearing that. You're also failing to consider that a weight map would not be A map, but likely dozens if not hundreds. Weights travel across UV islands and blend with other bone weights, so whether each UV island has multiple maps for the different bone weights, or each bone has multiple maps for the different island, you're dealing with a whole lot of different maps (again, for something that might not even have a UV map to make these associations). A more sensible approach would be something like a spreadsheet of weight values for each vertex. 

Richard Haseltine said:

Weight maps are not images, they do not use the UVs. A weight map, like a morph, is a kind of vertex map - in this case mapping refers to matching up two lists, one of weights or of changed positions to the list of vertices making up a model.

You know, I just came in here looking for a way to do this and it looks like I'mma have to make one myself, apparently.
But this concept, this way of thinking about it, it is totally wrong.
A weight map is a 0-1 number assigned to a vertex.
A vertex also has a set of UV coordinates. Unless it's a really crappy mesh. And it should be a uique set (though it could be more than one if the vertex in UV space is on the border of a shell, that's no big deal though, you just average, and they should be the same so the average will be the same as both values, other than precision error possibilities)
So if I have a vertex and its weight is, say, 25% (or 0.25), then I see no reason I cannot just take its value, convert that to greyscale(64), and place a dot (with a little padding to accommodate any rounding errors and map scale differences) at that UV coordinate.
Then a weight map *would be a texture*.
It IS a map. It's a map of values associated with vertices. And a UV map is another map of two values (U and V, corresponding to X and Y across an image where the width of an image is always 1). So you can always store data and look it back up based on those coordinates. There's literally no reason you can't.
I don't see why this is treated like a foreign concept.
Sorry it's a year later I just didn't see a never thread on the subject.

No, doesn't look like it.  I tried to send it to Hexagon and there move the strands inside the head (they are separate from the rest of the mesh), creating a morph in DS, but despite the strands are separate from the rest of the mesh, the morph distorts parts of it anyway. 

Saxa -- SD said:  Sounds likey you were aiming to add verts without re-uv'ing. Did you get that to work?

The heart of the issue! Yes, ... in the end.

I started with 1 model with 3 different UV maps (to match existing source textures) and I was tweaking that into 4 models, one with the same vertex count as the original, so no big deal. In the end I did get the other two to work without having to re-UV (the nightmare scenario). The modeling tool I use is AC3D - far less ornery than Hex, but the vertex orders got changed hence the massive  whirlwind I went through. A different workflow might have got me to the end sooner - who knows. Transfer Utility was a savior as I had circa 100 morphs on the model and TU managed close to 95% of shiflting that across (in terms of vertex deltas).

I did have one UV funny where parts of one UV map got garbled on loading, and I never understood what the issue was. It was only about 12-ish vertices affected in 2000, so I edited the UVs in Hex, ported back as a prop, exported from DAZ and reloaded from that.

As you said .... "Alls well that ..." :)

lourijr said:

any updates on the next steps, I purchased the product but did not find bull?

This thread is four years old, and it's just a few people requesting things; there was never a promise of a bull morph, now was one released. Also, Horse 3 is out now, so we're far more likely to get a bull morph for that (although that's not promised either).

Serene Night said:

vwrangler said:

Would that be a good texture for Boyd, if you decide to bring him to G9?

Boyd is very tan, but it might work for Owen. I think it also looks like the skin could be made tan quite easily. But yes. Great texture. Great eye colors. 

Sorry, I meant Owen.

Serene Night said:

I have tried to bring Owen and Boyd over to g9 but they look pretty bad. The Morphs transfer using the transfer process but they look kinda alien. I may have to try again.

I know Sickleyield and Riversoft Art have their Character Converter coming for G8-G9, but no idea when.

I have tried to bring Owen and Boyd over to g9 but they look pretty bad. The Morphs transfer using the transfer process but they look kinda alien. I may have to try again.

Look! The fish are rising!!!

GND2 with G8F looking over the river in an UltraScenery Britain scene.

GND2's pose origin is actually a bit complicated. It was a Musketeer V3 pose dating 2003?, which I moved to GV3 in 2005. Then I created it anew on G8F in 2020, and finally completed the circle by script pose transfer from G8F to the V3 morph that is GND2... Seems crazy, really.

Regards,

Richard

Indeed~ Rigging is the right way other than using a morph on it. The thread above is a good guideline though it was 6 years ago~ Only it used TriAx, now using General Weight will be all fine...