[Released] ManFriday's Mesh Grabber [Commercial]

Artini

I have tried to fix the problem on thighs with Mesh Grabber with the different pose, but it was a real disaster.

See below...

nicstt

Scroll wheel changes the size of the area of influence, although I don't recall off-hand if alt, ctrl or something need to be held down whilst doing it.

You can also change it with the tool settings open, which I always have handy regardless of MeshGrabber being active or not.

Artini

nicstt said:

Scroll wheel changes the size of the area of influence, although I don't recall off-hand if alt, ctrl or something need to be held down whilst doing it.

You can also change it with the tool settings open, which I always have handy regardless of MeshGrabber being active or not.

Thanks a lot for the tips.

I have found the adjustment morph, so it is not so critical for me.

Will need to experiment more with Mesh Grabber - it is interesting tool.

 

Squirrel

I am having problems with Mesh Grabber on the Mac with a piece of clothing I created. It works fine on the base mesh, but if subdivision is active, it randomly selects faces as I drag across the clothing, and randomly displaces when dragging the gizmo. If I set subD resolution level back to base, it works again. It also works if set to High Res, as long as View SubD level is set to 0, and Render set to whatever you want.

Can you think of any reason this may be happening?

Another question I have, is there any way for Mesh Grabber to only affect connected faces/edges/vertices instead of affecting all faces/edges/vertices that are within falloff range? When working on clothing with interior/exterior geometry, it would be nice to be able to fix poke-throughs with mesh grabber.

RGcincy

Another question I have, is there any way for Mesh Grabber to only affect connected faces/edges/vertices instead of affecting all faces/edges/vertices that are within falloff range? When working on clothing with interior/exterior geometry, it would be nice to be able to fix poke-throughs with mesh grabber.

I don't have a Mac so can't answer your first question. For the second, set the falloff radius to zero and use vertex selection to pick one vertex. You can move that one alone. Hold down Ctrl while clicking on other vertices to extend the selection.

Squirrel

RGcincy said:

Another question I have, is there any way for Mesh Grabber to only affect connected faces/edges/vertices instead of affecting all faces/edges/vertices that are within falloff range? When working on clothing with interior/exterior geometry, it would be nice to be able to fix poke-throughs with mesh grabber.

I don't have a Mac so can't answer your first question. For the second, set the falloff radius to zero and use vertex selection to pick one vertex. You can move that one alone. Hold down Ctrl while clicking on other vertices to extend the selection.

Thanks for the zero falloff radius tip, I'll try  that.

As for the other issue, I don't know if it is Mac only... it couldverywell be PC as well, but I haven't purrchased MeshGrabber for my PC to test.

ebergerly

Y'know how when you have boned/fitted clothing, and you move a leg or whatever and the clothing mesh follows it but looks totally unnatural? For example, in the real world it would strech in a straight line, but with boned clothing you get this ugly curve?

Is there some way to use this to straighten a selection of faces/verts/lines? Kinda like the scaling in Blender  where you can form a curving line into straight by scaling to zero on that axis?

Thanks. 

darjaz

Can anyone advise where I can dind the most updates for mesh grabber dll file

It is not working. I paid for all 3, rotation , grabber and morph

darjaz

Can you  advise how can I get update for  mesh grabber so I can use it, I  need updated dll file

 

barbult

You can install the latest version of all Mesh Grabber plugins from Daz Install Manager (DIM).

rhye_7b205b2b74

been trying to use the rotation and the morph editor to this have unistalled and reinstalled 3 times and still no rotation wheels, it just ain't there ?

any chance the makers can add any ideas to why?

Imago

rhye_7b205b2b74 said:

been trying to use the rotation and the morph editor to this have unistalled and reinstalled 3 times and still no rotation wheels, it just ain't there ?

any chance the makers can add any ideas to why?

Perhaps the plugin isn't registered with its own serial?

Hylas

I´ve bought this quite a while ago when it was on sale but I only used it today for the first time, and I have to say, WOW... absolutely essential! Thank you for this amazing product!

ManFriday

Imago said:

rhye_7b205b2b74 said:

been trying to use the rotation and the morph editor to this have unistalled and reinstalled 3 times and still no rotation wheels, it just ain't there ?

any chance the makers can add any ideas to why?

Perhaps the plugin isn't registered with its own serial?

Sorry for the late reply.

First off, there are no serials for Mesh Grabber, so that can't be the problem.

If your problem hasn't been solved yet, step 1 to diagnose plugin problems is to look at "Help" -> "About installed plugins". You should be seeing three green plugs in the attached screenshot. If those are not there, then there is most likely an installation problem. There should be three DLLs called MF_mesh* something in your Daz Studio plugin directory at C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\DAZStudio4\plugins.

If you run multiple copies of Daz Studio (e.g. regular release and the public beta), make sure those DLLs are in each copy's plugins directory.

The only other explanation I have would be for the Mac only, where there has been a very strange problem that Mesh Grabber uses a tiny chunk of Mac shared memory, which Mac OS never releases. Rebooting the Mac entirely would fix that problem. But if you've never gotten Mesh Grabber to work at all, then that's probably not it.

ManFriday

Hylas said:

I´ve bought this quite a while ago when it was on sale but I only used it today for the first time, and I have to say, WOW... absolutely essential! Thank you for this amazing product!

Thank you! I'm glad you like it!

golem841

I'm learning to use this utmost fundamental plugin that fills a regrettable difference from Studio compared to Poser.

It should be included in the program itself !!

I encounter some difficulties :

- a tendency to "jump" from a garment from the main figure : is there a way to "lock" Gen 8 mesh ?

- some probably unavoidable mesh distortion which affects the mapping.

Last, some garments are delivered with morphs for the main figure to simulate real life indentation in the flesh (mostly undies and swimwear). Is there a simple way to do this with meshgrabber ?

Thanks for this wonderful thing.

ManFriday

golem841 said:

I'm learning to use this utmost fundamental plugin that fills a regrettable difference from Studio compared to Poser.

It should be included in the program itself !!

I encounter some difficulties :

- a tendency to "jump" from a garment from the main figure : is there a way to "lock" Gen 8 mesh ?

- some probably unavoidable mesh distortion which affects the mapping.

Last, some garments are delivered with morphs for the main figure to simulate real life indentation in the flesh (mostly undies and swimwear). Is there a simple way to do this with meshgrabber ?

Thanks for this wonderful thing.

Hi! Thank you for the kind words!

1. I'm not sure what you mean by "jump" -- I am suspecting that you mean the problem that it's currently far too easy to accidentally click a little bit outside the selected mesh, and then something else gets selected, which is annoying. I'm working on better selection tools, so hopefully that'll get easier, but there is no short term fix, I am afraid.
2. "Mesh distortion" and "mapping" I don't understand -- do you have some pictures that illustrate what you mean?

With the "flesh indentation", these garments are usually carefully crafted to match character morphs that have indentation in the right places. Also, those character morphs tend to be HD, and Mesh Grabber can't do that (it's a technical limitation). What you can try is this though:

1. select the character, use vertex selection in Mesh Grabber;
2. disable SubD in the character (switch to "base resolution") to get a better view on what vertices get moved, without the interpolation that SubD provides;
3. reduce Mesh Grabber's falloff radius to 0 so you affect only the selected vertices and not the surrounding ones;
4. try to move single vertices the way you like it;
5. turn SubD back on to see if the interpolated results are acceptable.

It will probably be more blocky than a professionally crafted HD morph, but it might get you some of the way.

 

 

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Two things relating to undoing MG changes:

1. Sometimes the changes I make with meshgrabber are not undoable using the DS undo button. But sometimes they are.  It seems that if I use the MG rotation, that cannot ever be undone. Is this to be expected, is it a bug, or am I doing something wrong? Would not at all be surprised if it is me.

2. Also, is there any way to reset just part of the MG changes to a mesh.  For example, Lets  say I modify the mesh on a G8F figure to try to make her feet less Shrek-like. (Awful feet on the G8F Mesh. MG lets me fix them nicely.)  Then I modify the mesh on the face. I mess that up and want to return the face to normal but not the feet. Is there anyway to do that?

Thank you ManFriday for creating such an extraordinarily useful tool. I find it indispensable.

inquire

Can't you save the first morph on the feet, then begin again on the face? I think that way they would be separate morphs, and you just delete or ignore the face morph (turn it to 0), and begin on a new face morph.

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Thank you Inquire. I think that would probably work. But it does require me to save changes as morphs as I progress thorugh a mesh preparation. It would be great if I could, for example, hide the surface groups that I want to remain (using the geometry editor) and reset the surfaces that remain visible. That does not work either.

P_4075166

Hi there,

I've enjoying Mesh Grabber for while now but the pane disappeared while I was using it.

It still appears in my Tools(I can't load anything with Alt Shift so this is not an option)  and in the Installed Plugins but I was using it from the Pane menu and it has disappeared from there.

I've try to reinstall but still no luck.. any idea ?

 

 

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

I had to reinstall Daz Studio some months back, after some process on Windows forced me into reverting it to factory, junking all my installed programs.

I just now discovered that at least 2 of my saved scenes that I had made adjustments of stuff in the scene using Mesh Grabber -- i.e. to  shift part of a character's hair back and around his elf-ears -- now load with the adjusted object having reverted back to its non-grabbed form.  I was under the understanding that all the data about the adjustements were stored inside the saved scene file, but now they're not being applied to the scene.  Is there something I can check on in the innards of my system to get that stuff working again?  I've GOT an older copy of my Windoze hard drive, from before I imaged it onto a larger-capacity drive, but that may have been from before I saved these particular scenes out.  My Daz content is (largely) stored on another drive than C: drive, including all the scene saves, but if Mesh Grabber stashed some of its "this object got rearranged THIS way" data back over on C: somewhere... where would I look for it?  Or did something get disabled or broken about Mesh Grabber itself on my machine?  How would I check this?  0o

edit:  Went into DIM, right-clicked each of the three Mesh Grabber products I have, and selected Re-Install, then went back into Daz and loaded one of those problem scenes again (well, scene-subset, actually), and its back to working.  Gah, I guess I only thought I had reinstalled this pluggin.  I wonder what other pluggins I forgot to re-install.  0o

ManFriday

P said:

Hi there,

I've enjoying Mesh Grabber for while now but the pane disappeared while I was using it.

It still appears in my Tools(I can't load anything with Alt Shift so this is not an option)  and in the Installed Plugins but I was using it from the Pane menu and it has disappeared from there.

I've try to reinstall but still no luck.. any idea ?

Not sure I understand -- Mesh Grabber doesn't have its own pane. When Mesh Grabber is the active tool (i.e. selected in the "Tools" menu), its options appear in the standard "Tool Settings" pane, but only then.

Does this help?

zszabo2000_015a88f8bf

After extensive use, I've noticed a couple of "oddities" (I apologize if these were mentioned before in this, or a related thread; also, I apologize profusely if any of this is brought up in the documentation -- which I did read, although it's been a while).Before I get into that, I would like to preface this comment by stating: the more I use Mesh Grabber (MG), the more I feel like it's an essential feature that greatly expands what you can do within the DS environment -- i.e. without having to shuffle back and forth between applications (Hexagon/Blender/etc.). It comes in especially handy when trying to make minor corrections to clothing that's already fitted to a character (which, depending on the weight map and the figure it's fitted to, often leaves the base resolution mesh of the iitem being fitted in a fairly ragged state).

• MG seems to "remember" polygons selected with the weight brush or geometry tools, but not vertices or edges. In other words, if I highlight polygons using the other tools, these polygons remain selected if I then activate the mesh grabber tools. This is actually less trivial than it might seem, for two reasons:
  •  There is less of a chance of accidentally messing something up during the selection process (see also the point below for more on this) -- i.e. accidentally moving something, when I meant to expand the selection. As someone else in this thread mentioned, I've noticed there are times when the undo functionality doesn't seem to work with MG (I haven't specifically investigated this, in part because DS itself occasionally also becomes inconsistent in terms of certain changes -- e.g. changes to figure poses -- not being undoable), and there have been occasions where I made an unexpected change with MG and could not undo it.
  • The second reason is described in the next bullet.
• I've noticed one significant way in which MG differs from the other two tools (actually, the main reason I'm writing this comment -- I'm really hoping this could be changed to align with how the other tools behave): unlike the geometry editor and the weight map editor, MG appears to be unaware when polygons are hidden -- meaning, any polygons that were hidden using e.g. the weight map editor remain "visible" to the MG tool, even if they are hidden from view in hidden line/wireframe/etc. mode (note, by "hidden" I don't mean merely rendered invisible by setting opacity to zero in the surface settings). I have not yet tested how MG would behave if I actually removed the polygons, rather than merely hiding them. But in truth, being able to hide polygons is a great way of making changes to polys normally hidden underneath other polygons, which happens frequently with hair (see e.g. my comment, which was kindly pinned by the author of the following video, on how being able to hide polys can be very useful for e.g. applying weight maps at multiple levels:  ; I've never tried to use MG in this context, but it would definitely be useful for fixing collisions). I've attached two screenshots to illustrate this point. The first one shows the head of a G8 figure with hair applied and all polygons except for the scalp hidden. With MG in polygon selection mode, I selected a single polygon in the foreground, which does not match up with the polygons of the scalp. The second image shows a screen shot of all polygons from that hair shown and illustrates that what's actually being selected by the MG tool in both cases is one of the foreground polys, regardless of their hidden status.
  • I should note, there is a workaround for this, although it is sub-optimal: as I mentioned earlier, I am able to select polygons hidden underneath others using one of the other two tools and they remain selected when I switch over to the MG tool (this seems to only work in one direction -- i.e. poly selection using the MG tool is forgotten after switching to one of the other tools -- so I wonder if this was set up specifically for the very situation I'm currently describing).
• The optional rotate tool seems to be very aggressive when enabled (via check box), meaning it randomly activates if something is selected and the pointer is then moved around the viewport, regardless of its distance to the selection. I have not yet figured out what actually causes it to become active (meaning, a disc is shown and the next pointer click event begins a rotate operation, even when the control or alt key is held down), only that this seems to happen when the pointer is moved around randomly in the viewport. Because of the potential for making unwanted changes, I've gotten used to leaving the rotate function disabled and rarely use it as a consequence -- which is unfortunate, since it would come in handy in situations where I'm trying to fix poly collisions (e.g. to make existing clothes/hair dForce compliant).

 

JumboTronX

ManFriday said:

Wonderful ! Really a must have! Bought it! Thanks for that!

edit : one cool pluggin would be to have the same region/loop selection tools as we have in blender (C, ALT, SHIFT, B, ...).

Here's a little trick that's not in the PDF documentation: The Daz Studio geometry editor tool has loop and marquee selection. When you switch from the geometry editor tool to the Mesh Grabber, the Mesh Grabber copies the current selection. So you can do the selection in the geometry editor if it's complex and then switch to the Mesh Grabber. Works only for face (polygon) selection though.

This is such a great tool. It would be great if you could add the geometry selection to Mesh Grabber functionality mentioned above to include edges or a loop selection functionality built into Mesh Grabber. Thank you.

lelle

Julzjucie said:

Hey everyone,

Ever since updating to DAZ Studio 4.15, the UNDO function does not work with Mesh Grabber anymore. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Its a shame because when trying to do some precise work, UNDO is a must with MG.

Im hopping Im not the only one with this bug and that we can hopefully shed some light to it.

Same here, no UNDO in DAZ 4.20.   

lelle

@ManFriday Using Morph Editor: I favorited a morph, loaded it, made my changes, saved it. Everything was working fine.(Done with 2 morphs). After closing DAZ (4.20) yesterday and re-open it today the Mesh Grabber Deltas are gone on these Morphs. Any idea how I can recover my Mesh Grabber work? And I'm afraid this happens again.

Edit: It happened again. What exactly do I need to do (best with screenshots) to save a Mesh Grabber Morph for further use with other figures ? (The LOAD - SAVE way, doesn't even seem to work for the same figure) The explanation in the windows are really hard to understand for a standard DAZ user. The docu buttons don't work. I found a PDF for Mesh Grabber 2.0 (after long search), no explanation in there about Morph Editor. Sorry writing a little rude, but hour for hour of my work runs down the sewerage and never seen again. 

barbult

lelle said:

Julzjucie said:

Hey everyone,

Ever since updating to DAZ Studio 4.15, the UNDO function does not work with Mesh Grabber anymore. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Its a shame because when trying to do some precise work, UNDO is a must with MG.

Im hopping Im not the only one with this bug and that we can hopefully shed some light to it.

Same here, no UNDO in DAZ 4.20.   

Mesh Grabber undo has always been a little unreliable for me in all versions of DS, but it is working in 4.20.1.34 for me right now. Can you describe a repeatable scenario where it always fails? I created a primitive cube with 40 divisions and then selected polygons and translated and rotated them. Undo worked fine. Then I tried a gingerbread man prop and did the same thing. Undo worked fine.

barbult

lelle said:

@ManFriday Using Morph Editor: I favorited a morph, loaded it, made my changes, saved it. Everything was working fine.(Done with 2 morphs). After closing DAZ (4.20) yesterday and re-open it today the Mesh Grabber Deltas are gone on these Morphs. Any idea how I can recover my Mesh Grabber work? And I'm afraid this happens again.

Edit: It happened again. What exactly do I need to do (best with screenshots) to save a Mesh Grabber Morph for further use with other figures ? (The LOAD - SAVE way, doesn't even seem to work for the same figure) The explanation in the windows are really hard to understand for a standard DAZ user. The docu buttons don't work. I found a PDF for Mesh Grabber 2.0 (after long search), no explanation in there about Morph Editor. Sorry writing a little rude, but hour for hour of my work runs down the sewerage and never seen again. 

The Save button on the Morph Grabber Tool Settings pane will convert the Mesh Grabber mods to a morph that will appear in your Parameters pane. If you want to save that morph permanently for later use, you have to save it as a morph asset. Dial the morph down to 0% and then use menu item File>Save as>Support Asset>Morph Asset(s). This is the same process as if you had created a morph with Morph Loader Pro.

Edit: By the way, this is described in the Mesh Grabber Manual on page 9. If you don't know how to find the manuals for plugin products, use the Help Browser built into Daz Studio (shortcut F1).

lelle

barbult said:

lelle said:

Julzjucie said:

Hey everyone,

Ever since updating to DAZ Studio 4.15, the UNDO function does not work with Mesh Grabber anymore. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Its a shame because when trying to do some precise work, UNDO is a must with MG.

Im hopping Im not the only one with this bug and that we can hopefully shed some light to it.

Same here, no UNDO in DAZ 4.20.   

Mesh Grabber undo has always been a little unreliable for me in all versions of DS, but it is working in 4.20.1.34 for me right now. Can you describe a repeatable scenario where it always fails? I created a primitive cube with 40 divisions and then selected polygons and translated and rotated them. Undo worked fine. Then I tried a gingerbread man prop and did the same thing. Undo worked fine.

Nothing to reproduce, lets say, I pull a face to the right, then click on "undo" or CTRL-Z, which both work fine usually, nothing happens.