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So after years of eating it from Daz and their ludicrous business model of limiting the ability to be creative and the thinking that by not giving artists what they need it will increase sales, I have once again decided to look into workarounds and alternative solutions. Scary stuff. I will never understand the logic of how limiting customer satisfaction and going out of their way to make a product frustrating will make happy customers. Their model is akin to those old cut-out books to dress paper dolls, cookie cutter gingerbread men and those paint-by-the-numbers kits people would actually hang in their kitchens. Do they still make those?
It is to my shame and neglect that by not being at all proficient in Blender, when it's such a great (apparently) and mostly free app (less some plugins), I mostly have to relearn and start over again. So yeah, I'm lazy because I prefer working in Zbrush.
I was watching this video series on Youtube in hopes of finding an answer to my trauma and overcoming my neglect. Specifically, part3 referring to Xin's HD Morphs. Anyone have experience with this or any other workarounds more convenient than baking ALL my maps? Is there still no convenient way to get my simple HD morphs onto my characters? AAAHHH
Thanks y'all for any help at all, and I mean "AT ALL"https://gitlab.com/x190/daz-hd-morphs
Unfortunately I don't have any answers, but I would like to see some discussion on these topics. I've recently had the unpleasant and frustrating experience of trying to combine my custom characters into a single slider, instead of the 50+ morphs some of them have.
So after exporting the mesh at base resolution to an obj, (which is required for Daz not to throw a geometry mismatch error on import) and loading the obj back into Daz using Morph Loader Pro, there is so much detail lost without HD, that the character went from a 9 to a 6 😀
Adjusting the rigging to figure shape turns out to be a hit and miss too, with some retaining only the body portion rigging after ERC freezing the morph.
Also when applying the saved morph to the base, rigging differs between it and the custom character, it's like they get treated as different nodes? instead of both being from G8.1 base.I vaguely recall someone on here said there's a version of the HD Daz PA exclusive plugin floating around that works with an older version of Daz. Won't be any good for G8.1 though. Maybe I should become a PA to get in on that HD 🙂
The videos - why on earth would you spend so much time worrying about HD when the image he wants to render is full-body and you couldn't tell if HD morphs were there or not from that camera distance?
Some of the best Poser/DS images I've seen were produced 10-15 years ago when we were all working with old bones and rocks. It isn't an issue of technology it's about nous and clever craftmanship using what you have... it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.I tend to agree with @Frank22. I've switched almost entirely to rendering in Blender (in equal parts because I'm fed up with dealing with Iray's memory issues BS and because Cycles-X doesn't crap out and switch to CPU renderings with more than three figures on my battered old 1070). I use the Diffeo plugin, which can handle HD morphs but, and it's a big but, the increase in SubD levels eats memory like it's crack-laced candy. That sucks as a couple of my characters are supposed to be in the 40-50 age range, and I was relying on the Aging Morphs pack to add the detail. However, switching to using normal maps has given me almost the same results using low or no SubD levels and not stomping all over my GPU as the HD export did when it poured petrol all of my PC and tried to set it on fire. As I understand it, the whole point of normal maps is to do away with the very thing that Daz did with the HD morphs; having to use insane levels of SubD or polygon counts to get highly detailed character maps.
@cage
Converting your character to a single slider by importing as an OBJ destroys the weight maps and rigging, but if you want to go that way, I would just use Hexagon without going through Morph Loader. Just simply send the character to Hexagon and then back to DS without making changes. I convert my characters to a master slider using the following methodNormal maps are generally fine for the old folks, but they tend to be too static for my younger (under 40) characters and custom JCMs. I've spent a lot of money on video and system ram and like I said, I'm lazy and impatient. I typically render at 4 subdivisions in intimate scenes anyway. I agree that it's complete overkill in the vids example, but that wouldn't be my use. I want to create simple, elegant morphs to dial or that kick in automatically from movement and expression and forget about it. I don't have much experience in using maps in this way other than create and forget (more research... uhhh, this is fun), but I'm often dissatisfied with the result and just cleanup in PS and repaint the natural effect I want. I want too much I guess, but it would be simple if there was a way around Daz's restriction. Daz's offerings they sell as a solution are rudimentary at best, but they are a catch-all and can't be expected to work on the wide range of shapes I create. @frank22 @SkippyTheMeh Thank you so such for your input. If you have identified something I'm missing.. or a lot, well, it's all appreciated. 🙂 Here's to a Happy New Year
Thanks @jon kim 🙂 That's interesting, I think this script is exactly that method with a couple of bells and whistles.
https://www.daz3d.com/dial-control-for-genesis-to-genesis-8As it stands I've given up on combining the morphs to a single morph, due to not retaining HD shaping, and the rigging issues, I'm not even clued up with weight mapping 😀
My reason for combining the morphs into a single morph is to uninstall the morphs used to create the character, as well as the characters used. The above method still requires them. I'm trying to speed up Daz and make scenes lighter.
I went through the painstaking process of tracking each morph for each custom character and kept only them in the relative product morphs folder; and zipped up the rest. Good thing too, because I didn't catch them all, and just unzipping requested files needed on loading the character made that part a breeze. Looking back, it would have been easier to have just zip up the entire product morph folder and unzip the specific files Daz lists as missing on loading the character.
Yeah! Here's to a new year filled with lots of fun polygons 🙂
I’ve looked into “the painstaking process” but I can never get even one of my characters perfect enough to commit to it, even as semi-permanent. I want that control there because my perspective is constantly changing(anal perfectionist control freak). At least it gives me time to make a pot of coffee, go for a run and sometimes, even watch a movie and take a nap.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could use DS with our custom characters without having to resort to trying to be MacGruber
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