My wishlist was building up again and I purchased them all this month clearing out the whole list due to the specials. Now I have to download everything and then transfer all to the Daz Studio 4 computer. So the problem now is, Firefox 52 on the Windows XP computer is no longer recognized by the daz3d website. I can't get the list of purchases for download to show up. I tried installing Chrome, Opera but not showing up in them either. Does anyone still use Windows XP and which browser is the one to use to download Daz purchases?

Catherine3678ab said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

only thing that works for me is to send to Hexagon use smooth brush send to Daz studio as morph

This is the method I tend to use as well. Quick and easy [usually].

 

Agreed - the morph route (Blender for me) seems to be the only option at the moment.

WendyLuvsCatz said:

only thing that works for me is to send to Hexagon use smooth brush send to Daz studio as morph

This is the method I tend to use as well. Quick and easy [usually].

Richard Haseltine said:

If you mean you want to create an HD morph, that isn't a facility available to us - only people making content for sale in the Daz store may have and use that feature.

Thank you for answer. What I meant was to apply a higher multi-resolution to the figure imported into Blender and then move the shape keys(jcm, pose morphs) into it. 

ggrancharov said:

I am working on a project where I need to somehow mix morphs between two characters, one being female and the other male. I searched the forums for a few days and read every thread there probably is on the topic, but unfortunatly most of them are looking at it from a 'transgender' perspective - and not a 'two adults having a child' perspective. 

So, at least theoretically speaking a "kid" between Michael and Victoria would inherit 30% of Michaels body and headshape and 70% of victoria's body and head shape if its female [they have a daughter] or vice versa if it's a boy. I would then use a tool like Genesis 8 UV Swap to apply either Victorias or Miachels texture on the 'kid' and then use the 'grow up' plugin to get the mature kid into a real kid-like body. 

Where I am stuck is the headshape/morphs. I need to find a way to be able to 'apply 50% of a G8M head' to a any G8F character and vice versa. 

Has anyone ever looked into this?

I'd be happy to fund development of such a mod/workaround if there still is none. 

George

Sounds like you need to use the Transfer Utility to transfer the Michael 8.1 head morph to Victoria 8.1, and/or vice versa. This can easily be done within DAZ with tools provided. This will not have any Transgender transfers with it just the head morph. If you aren't familiar with the Transfer Utility, there are several good videos out there on how to use it. I will update this post after putting a quick class together.  I do this all the time, you get quite good at it after a few times! Reply here if you want a quick tutorial, TD 

Masterstroke said:

Paintbox said:

Masterstroke said:

Worked on some shader improvements for the pupils and added some eye sockets morphs. Now she has red eyes by the flash of a camera. 
 

Really good! You are pushing the boundaries! I did the trick where I cover parts of the face with my hand and asked myself if it was realistic.

The good part -> the mouth/bottom part of the face. Really photorealistic. Forehead/hair is also good.
Almost there -> The nose, it seems a bit to hard edged, maybe a SSS thing perhaps?
What I miss -> The eyes seem a bit weird on the outer edges. Not sure what it needs, maybe moisture or better organic bends where skin folds meet eye?

Thank you both :-) 
I've been struggeling a lot with that eye ball lacrimal area. I
The lacrimals having a simple red shader, but a HD morph instead, which made them hard to cobtrol.
The more you deal with the details (e.g. the corners of the eyes, the lashes or the lacrimals), the more the details become a problem.Ye

Yeah, the devil is in the details as they say!

ForceX said:

Make sure you are only sending Zbrush the base model. You cannot send a model with subdivisions from daz to Zbrush as when you send the model back to Daz it is going to apply the morph to the base "unsubdivided" model. You can send a model with as many morphs, poses, deformations it does not matter. The only thing that matters is the base model vertex count/order.

 

to do this the only thing you need to do is make sure when you send a model to Zbrush the dialogue box has an option to "send current resolution" make sure this is not checked. You can however check the export current morphs. In Zbrush don't use any retopology brushes or brushes that change the vertex count. The move and clay buildup brush are fine they don't change the vertex order/count.

Do not use the ZModeler as this is going to change the vertex count & order. You can only move vertexs you cannot add or remove vertexes. You cannot change the flow of the topology. Even if the vertex count is the same adjusting the topology flow will screwup the vertex array assignments and you will end up with a highly distorted & mangled model.

Thanks, so it was the ZModeler brush.  Is there a way to organize brushes into groups "Changes Topology" and "Doesn't Change Toplogy"?  That seems like it would be handy to do.

Haircap is a thing in DAZ. I've never really seen that used much in other 3D areas. It's not mandatory let's say.

Your question is vague and doesn't tell use what's your level... what are your 3D skills. Those base hair meshes are not even advertised as being unwrapped. So what's sold here is really step 1 of polygonal hair creation workflow (hair cards)

To use such hair meshes in DAZ, one would need to know quiet a lot of tools, in at least one of the many all purpose 3D apps such as Blender, 3DS Max, Maya, C4D, etc.

You'd need to :

- Reshape the whole mesh to adapt it to the default G8 skull

- Unwrap all hair threads if necessary and orient hair card's UV islands in the same direction, scaling them to be sure that first and last polygons correspond to root and tip of your hears in the opacity map.

- Define a few Material IDs to get multiple surfaces in DAZ (useful to apply easily different colors and different Surface properties). At least 1 Material ID for the first polygons of each hair thread (close to the skull) if you plan to use the hair with dForce.

- Import the mesh once ready in DAZ and use the Transfer Utility to rig it.

- Import your textures in the Surfaces Tab for each Material ID (= DAZ Surface)

- Add a dForce Dynamic Surface to the hair mesh in order to define dForce parameters for each Surface.

- Add a dForce Modifier Weight Node to specify how much of each Surface parameters influences each polygon.

- etc, etc.

I mean, it is doable for someone who knows quiet a lot in 3D. But it'd take in my opinion about 5 hours or way more depending on the hair complexity. Even for someone with a well-honed technique, making those hair DAZ compatible would represent a lot of work. So much so that I'd say any 3D artist who knows that much... would probably do his own hair threads rather than trusting those already made ones ;)

G8 & G8.1 are the same model just different UV for the textures.
 

The following only works for standard morphs. HD morphs are not accessible to the standard end user only publishers. If you are attempting to transfer an HD morph you can "try" my idea at the bottom of this post. I have no idea if it will work. HD morphs are a pain if you are not a publisher.

METHOD 1:
If you have Zbrush,

1 .send your G8.1 model to Zbrush at base resolution.

2. delete your G8.1 model from the daz scene.

3. send your G8 model to Zbrush (this will add a a new sub tool) You need to do this because sending a morph from Zbrush to a model in daz that has not its self been imported to Zbrush first will cause wonky results.

4. Export your G8.1 model from Zbrush as a morph to your G8 back into daz. You will need to select the G8 as the target as we deleted the G8.1 earlier.

METHOD 2:

You should also be able to export your G8.1 as an obj from daz but you need to make sure to select the correct dialogue options. Then use the morph loader pro to import the morph into your G8 model.

METHOD 3 (HD Morph): (No idea if this will work)

If you are trying to transfer an HD morph, I do not know of any known method. You can try..... I have no idea if this will work. Find your morph file in the data folder. Move it out of the G8.1 folder and into the G8 folder. Doing this might make it accessible to the G8 figure. As G8.1 has access to the G8 resources folders but G8 does not have access to the G8.1 resources folder.

I don't know how much resources availablilty is dependent on folder structure or imbedded metadata in the file its self. It's possible this will do absolutely nothing.

Make sure you are only sending Zbrush the base model. You cannot send a model with subdivisions from daz to Zbrush as when you send the model back to Daz it is going to apply the morph to the base "unsubdivided" model. You can send a model with as many morphs, poses, deformations it does not matter. The only thing that matters is the base model vertex count/order.

 

to do this the only thing you need to do is make sure when you send a model to Zbrush the dialogue box has an option to "send current resolution" make sure this is not checked. You can however check the export current morphs. In Zbrush don't use any retopology brushes or brushes that change the vertex count. The move and clay buildup brush are fine they don't change the vertex order/count.

Do not use the ZModeler as this is going to change the vertex count & order. You can only move vertexs you cannot add or remove vertexes. You cannot change the flow of the topology. Even if the vertex count is the same adjusting the topology flow will screwup the vertex array assignments and you will end up with a highly distorted & mangled model.

Last year, over about a week period, I went through various iterations of my Content Library.

I started off with a 17+ minute load time of G8F.

I noted that the log time ("official time") included the time it took to click the Duplicate Formulas button. So when I walked away and let it go, it counted the minutes it was waiting for me to return and click.

When I babysat the load and clicked the error immediately, the load time dropped to 10 minutes.

Going through the error log and uninstalling all products that were creating Duplicate Formula errors dropped the load time to just under 3 minutes.

Having more than one video card increased the load time. (Discovered this because I have a seperate power supply to my secondary video card.)

Having only G8F installed with no morphs / characters had a load time of less than a second.

Speed improvements got to neglible differences once I hit the under 3 minute mark. The speed of the CPU and more RAM only improved things by ten or twenty seconds. Internal vs external HD had less than a few seconds impact. SSD vs HD had some impact, but like you already discovered, it depends on the hardware and cabling.

Internal M2 was faster by 30 seconds, as compared to an external 2.5 SSD. However the M2 external speed could be negligble based on the case / cables / computer port. The best speed I could get on the external M2 was by using a relatively expensive external case (ASUS STRIX), the cable that came with it, and using the USB Type C connector on my computer.

The worst times I got were with the "Amazon recommended" USB cables and the cut rate external cases that Amazon sells (the sub $15 type cases).

I'd link the blog posts I did on DA about the experiments, but its a lot of rambling and screenshots. It was seven days of various experiments...

The main thing I came away with as uninstall anything with Duplicate Formulas and Missing Target errors, unless you absolutely have to use them. Keep your G8 characters trimmed and uninstall ones that you don't think you're going to use. Or use the morph loader tools already mentioned in this thread to accomplish the same thing.

only thing that works for me is to send to Hexagon use smooth brush send to Daz studio as morph

Hair usually have a haircap. That haircap matches the head, so when you use it on a morphed character it will still fit.

In order to use a third party hairmesh, you might be able to scale it to match the character and then parent it to the head.

If you want to use it as a generic hair, you need to use transfer rigging, but then it must fit the character before you do that.

So, I just spent hours sculpting a character morph from the Genesis 8.1 Male in ZBrush.  Just trying to learn all of the tools and stuff.  However, when I went to GoZ to put it back in DAZ, it said that the topology had changed.
Steps I took:
Load Genesis 8.1 DEV Load character
Change Resolution to Base
Set Subdivision to 0
File>Send to ZBrush
In ZBrush I loaded the character from the tool
Went into Edit Mode

I proceeded to sculpt using the "Move Topological" and "Clay" brushes mostly.  I think I may have accidentally used the Z Modeler brush as well (This is what I am thinking affected the topology?)
So, to all of you creating custom morphs, are there brushes I should stay away from?  Am I wrong in which brush it was that messed things up?  Was it the clay brush? Or the Move Topological?
Any nuggets of information you'd be willing to share I'd be willing to listen as well...  I've used Blender and stuff for modelling before, but never quite got the hang of sculpting, and now I want to learn that.  I've watched a few tutorials, but there aren't many in-depth ones for DAZ Characters specifically that I could find.

supernoob said:

 

I disagree. I don't think the bare minimum additional textures approach to base character packages is acceptable because there is so much value in the morphs. If the package costs 4 times the price of a PA character, then the package should include 4x the value. It's not just that they don't include a ton of options, it's that they hardly include anything in the package. IMO the morph isn't worth anywhere near 4 times the price. However, I completely agree with you that the base characters stopped meaningfully extending the possibilities some time ago, with the odd exception. IMO that emphasies my view even further, that they're not worth the full asking price, unless someone needs that specific look to fill a niche.

Yes, I mentioned the discounts several times in my original post.
So basically the high price is exactly what the supermarkets / shops do (which I believe is now illegal in some European countries), where they hike the list price up to a ridiculous point, then slash the price with 'amazing discounts' to make it look like a bargain - in the hope that some poor sap doesn't realise how often the 'sales' are on and pays full price, and others simply fall for this predatory 'discount' marketing ploy and rush to buy it at the now 'bargain' price.

I think we're actually in agreement about the pricing of core characters.  I haven't bought one in a long time, as I can't justify the price when the redundancy factor is high.  I can't justify paying more than I would for a quality PA-made character model.  I was just explaining Daz's logic in my previous post.

The Daz discount game is neither illegal nor deceptive in American law.  I think it's impossible to deny that the appeal of this sort of discounting from a notional list/full price is strongest for consumers that tend toward impatience and irrationality.  None of us are completely immune from those tendencies, but for some, it's their usual practice.  "More money than sense" is a common idiom for a reason.

 

Richard Haseltine said:

If the parts you want to hide belong to a figure a GeoGraft might work - you probably don't need more than a single polygon if there are going to be no holes needing capping, just load/create the mesh and run the Transerfer utility to turn it into a fitted figure, then with the Geoemtry Editor select the parts you want to hide, right-click in the Viewport>Geometry Assignment>Set AutoHide Faces for Attachments, and select the new fitted item you just made (menu names from memory). Loading the new figure will then hide the parts you specified (and, unlike a morph or transparency, will not send them to the render engine).

In this case, I was hiding one out of five shower heads in a wall of showers and, in one case, moving two of the other shower heads outwards.  Then, I did the same thing for five of the ten floor drains.  Then, I did the same thing for the groups of glass dividers.

The approach I ended up with is probably a bit inelegant, but it is working.  I exported the object in Blender, modified it, pulled it back in with Morph Loader Pro, and applied the resulting morph.  I then confirmed (by moving the modified .obj files aside and loading the scene from scratch) that the morph is getting stored as part of the scene rather than being applied from the modified object in any way, so that meets my requirement of not having to distribute a modified copy of somebody else's model.

Anyway, to make a long story short, my school (based on FG School) now has locker rooms where the classrooms were (adjacent to the gym as locker rooms should be) and emergency lights in the gym (though I still need to design or find safety cages).  I've also built a beautiful two-story band room with glass rails around a partial balcony (and an attached office), made mostly out of Tesla3dcorp High with a bunch of wall and floor and ceiling pieces from Room Creator 2, folders full of music on the desk with custom skins on the folders from "Interiors the classroom", etc.

Now, I just need to add a kitchen to the cafeteria by morphing the back wall out of existence and merging parts of the kitchen from Moonshine Diner, put the FG School classrooms (which I cloned before turning them into locker rooms) somewhere, build a proper shower room for the pool, merge various other parts of Tesla3dcorp high as additional classrooms, build out the second floor, add the elevator interior from Elevator Hallway, put together some other classroom interior sets....  Eventually, this is going to be an amazing set.

dgatwood said:

If anybody runs into this problem, Blender has a really annoying open bug:

https://developer.blender.org/T68058

where by default, it destroys the vertex order both during import AND export.  So you have to explicitly open a "Geometry" disclosure triangle and tell it to keep the vertex order during import, then check a checkbox to preserve it on export.  Otherwise, your morphs will be garbage.

Now that I've figured that out, I have a working approach.  Basically, I morph the undesirable bits into a tiny ball about a millimeter across and hide it inside one of the parts that I want to keep.

 

That's not an open bug. It is over a year old, is on an old version of Blender, is closed and archived, and isn't even a bug at all. It is just how Blender works. It uses the options YOU select for import and export. If you select Keep Vertex Order, it does. If you don't, it doesn't.

Hey, 

I followed this tutorial to make a gen 8.1 daz character from a 3d scan, and it worked perfectly,
but since the 3d scan I used was a smiling model, my daz model is now smiling too.
I want to somehow change this into a default (not smiling) face. 

I thought of setting the "Smile Open Full Face" morph parameter to a minus value, but it's not working.
The face doesn't move at all.

I don't quite get this, because some of the morphs work this way but this doesn't.
(ex When I set the "jaw open" to a minus value, it makes this figure close it's mouth.)

Can anyone think of a smart way to do achieve what I want to do?

Torkuda said:

Would you like a blender file with say-

A model from diffeo and a model from Sagan demonstrating the fix? I can do that rather quickly.

In the following file I purposfully imported a Sagan alembic to a file where I knew it probably wouldn't recognize the diffeomorphic. It decided NOT to mess up this time but the file will work fine for our purposes anyway.

 

On the diffeo version of the figure I alphabatized the materials on the shirt, pants and hair just to show it can be done. However, if you select the sagan version of the character model, then shift select the diffeo version, you should only have to hit ctrl L and select "link materials" to have Blender over-ride the materials on the Sagan model with the materials from the diffeo model. You'll notice that if you do that with the character models, the materials will look all jumbled, as the order of the materials doesn't match. However if you do it with the shirts, select Sagan, then diffeo, link materials- the transfer will work just fine.

 

(Alphabatizing the materials isn't hard to correct, there are arrow buttons by the materials that can do that manually, it's just a bother and I'm sure it was a bother to do it on your end. I'm really just suggesting you bypass exporting texture altogether and just don't alphabetize the material list, letting the end user link materials. It's not a bug I'm complaining about, it's a fix I'm suggesting- and an easier workload.)

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_kVp-dp3ylrmUCXStYYmCzXoVIIx_ZiI/view?usp=sharing

As always in engineering, I'm sure there's a tradeoff to be made so that the material slots can be referenced by index instead of name in Sagan.

 

rcourtri_789f4b1c6b said:

Let's separate, for clarity's sake, the terminology, the features that come with the character model, and the pricing issues.

A "Daz Original" is anything maketed as a "Daz Original".  I think what the OP is referring to is what Daz has been calling "core characters",  which provide the user with  special morphs which aren't available with the "base character".  Arcadia 8.1 should have morphs that wouldn't be available from dialing body and head shapes with Genesis 8.1 Female.  It's these morphs that provide the bulk of the value, and some particular characters will have hard (absolutely necessary) or soft (if you want your figure to have the exact shape you're seeing in promo renders) dependencies on those core character morphs.  Core characters don't usually have an unusual number of surface/texture options (makeup, eye colors, etc.), As mentioned, the value is mostly in the shapes/morphs.  A core character with too many surface options would make the individual PA-developed character models a little less appealing and more redundant by increasing the "I could already do that with the character models I already have" factor.  Those PA-developed character models main selling points tend to be things like minor differences in body or facial geometry, texture options, or inherent HD features.

(To my way of thinking, the new core characters for Genesis 8 ceased to meaningfully extend the types of characters you could make about three years ago.  Since then, they're relying on (1) impulse purchases from people who base their decisions on promo renders rather than thinking about whether that core character really extends what kind of human figure they could make from assets they already have, and (2) obsessive collecting with little planning for use.  There may be as few as ten female body shapes that have significant commercial appeal.  Beyond this, we're really into serious redundancy or small niche appeal.)   

As to pricing, I'm always baffled by people who concern themselves with list price.  With the Daz store, we're in a situation where most items are discounted most of the time, or sold in a bundle at a discount.  With Daz, you really only need to concern yourself with actual dollars (or whatever currency) spent, not percentage discounts off of a not-very-meaningful list price.  The higher pricing of core characters is both a residue of the time when those characters were hard dependencies for other character models (I don't believe there are any other characters dependent on Arcadia 8.1--The pricing method is obsolete, but hey, somebody is buying), and a result of the core characters being frequently sold as part of a bundle--the bundle looks like more of a bargain when the core character's price is high.

Yes, from my examples and everything I wrote, obviously I meant 'base characters'.

I appreciate that some of the characters have a very unique shape/morph which may not be easy to replicate with morph packages. This could justify a slight increase of price over the majority of 'other vendor' character models.

I disagree. I don't think the bare minimum additional textures approach to base character packages is acceptable because there is so much value in the morphs. If the package costs 4 times the price of a PA character, then the package should include 4x the value. It's not just that they don't include a ton of options, it's that they hardly include anything in the package. IMO the morph isn't worth anywhere near 4 times the price. However, I completely agree with you that the base characters stopped meaningfully extending the possibilities some time ago, with the odd exception. IMO that emphasies my view even further, that they're not worth the full asking price, unless someone needs that specific look to fill a niche.

Yes, I mentioned the discounts several times in my original post.
So basically the high price is exactly what the supermarkets / shops do (which I believe is now illegal in some European countries), where they hike the list price up to a ridiculous point, then slash the price with 'amazing discounts' to make it look like a bargain - in the hope that some poor sap doesn't realise how often the 'sales' are on and pays full price, and others simply fall for this predatory 'discount' marketing ploy and rush to buy it at the now 'bargain' price.