Distortion in waist/groin area when creating a morph using MorphLoader pro

kgrosser

I thought I had it made with exporting all my characters as single morphs and porting them from G3 to G8 until I recently stumbled across an oddity seating a character made this way. So I went back and could track the issue to the part hwere I export a character via Morphloader pro and load it back as a single morph.

here is what i did:

- sculpting a character using (tons of) morphs

- loading that character itno a new scene and set the res to basic and zero out subdivision sliders

- export as .obj via MLP using default settings

- create a new scen load Genesis3F and load the created morph

- problem immediately present as per attachement: front shows the character the morph was exported from, back shows G3F with created morph dialed in, needless to add, this distortion then also is ported over when "Xtransferring" the character to G8F. Adjusting rigging to shape before exporting doesn't make a difference...

Any advise or hint would be greatly appreciated.

Richard Haseltine

Please put the viewport in Smooth Shaded mode if you need to show a nude figure, even without the Anatomical Elements.

This issue is an example of way baking morphs to a single morph is best avoided - you lose all the corrective morphs and joint adjustments that kick in when joints are bent and/or when other morphs are present - you can rebuild them but it's going to be a lot of work. Better to build your shape out of its components morphs, then right-click on the Parameters pane to put it in Edit mode; right-click in the property group you want your morph to appear in and and a new property, give it a name and limits; set the new proeprty to 100%; right-click on the new property>ERC Freeze, scan to make sure there's nothing there shouldn't be in the list of Sub Components, and click Accept; test, if all is good save the new property as a morph asset.

GutoCrafts

Try to apply the morph to the figure, select the figure in the scene tab and use the adjust rigging to shape. this fixes most problems to me when I do what you did.

You can also use a D-Former weight map in morph load pro to select what parts of the figure to affect and leave the unwanted distortion out when you import the obj. this can help if the imported figure is not very different from the original in the affected area. 

kgrosser

Richard Haseltine said:

Please put the viewport in Smooth Shaded mode if you need to show a nude figure, even without the Anatomical Elements.

Sorry, noted for future posts.

Richard Haseltine said:

scan to make sure there's nothing there shouldn't be in the list of Sub Components.

Can you elaborate this for me, please?

Richard Haseltine

kgrosser said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Please put the viewport in Smooth Shaded mode if you need to show a nude figure, even without the Anatomical Elements.

Sorry, noted for future posts.

Richard Haseltine said:

scan to make sure there's nothing there shouldn't be in the list of Sub Components.

Can you elaborate this for me, please?

Look through the list in that section of the dialogue and make sure that, as far as you can recall, it has only the morphs used in creating the character - not, for example, any joint bends and probably not any expression sliders.

kgrosser

Richard Haseltine said:

 

Look through the list in that section of the dialogue and make sure that, as far as you can recall, it has only the morphs used in creating the character - not, for example, any joint bends and probably not any expression sliders.

Will give that a try... however, the idea was to get rid of all the morphs by creating combined character morphs to reduce the load/save time and increase stability and responsiveness (maybe you remember the last conversation on this on another thread). As I understand this will basically create a master slider and requires the morphs to reside in that profiles library? If so, is there any direction you can point me to in regard of recreating the corrective morphs?

Richard Haseltine

You'd have to do the rigging adjustment, then go through looking at morphs and bends that you use regualrly and where there was an issue make a corrective morph, then either manually set it or use the Property Hierarchy pane to set up ERC to link it so that it was triggered only when shape and morph/bend were on. That's why I was suggesting using the master slider - it's potentially a lot of work to try to make up for the lost corrections, depending on how radically the composite morph reshapes the figure (and where). (There is the Attenuate feature in ERC Freeze, which should reduce the need to go to the Property Hierarchy pane.)

kgrosser

Sorry to bother again, but soemhow I'm not getting anywhere

Richard Haseltine said:

build your shape out of its components morphs, then right-click on the Parameters pane to put it in Edit mode;

 So instead I load G3F then apply a character previously saved, which loads all the morphs to build the shape, which i can perfectly trace in the "currently used" section, so I think that should be fine. Next step

right-click in the property group you want your morph to appear in and and a new property, give it a name and limits; set the new proeprty to 100%;

Done

right-click on the new property>ERC Freeze, scan to make sure there's nothing there shouldn't be in the list of Sub Components, and click Accept; test, if all is good save the new property as a morph asset.

Done so, going back to currently used I can see the new property control, howere moving forth back does not move the other controls. I freeze that master property control and save as ,orph asset (sam,e name and path as the created property), then I close and reopen DAZ, load G3F and move the new slider - nothing (well, close to nothing) happens... Guess I must be missing a vital step here, what I tried was to untick the restore figure/riging boxes on asaving the morph asset, but that didn't help.

Richard Haseltine

The new property was set to 100%, and it was the one you right-clicked on to do ERC Freeze?

kgrosser

yes...

[Edit] Seems i finally got the hang of it now. It doesn't work directly on a pre saved character alone or the actor applied to G3 (btw. am i the only one to think it's somewhat inconsistent  they are called "character" when saving, but "actors" in the library?) Instead I need to load the character and copy/paste the shape onto G3F. Following your instructions on from here will give me a master slider as intended. It doesn't let me slim down my G3 morph list, but let's see how the transfer to G8 works (as it should create a single morph with JCMs). Thanks for your help!

Richard Haseltine

A Character preset is labelled Actor because it can load a new figure, as well as modifying an existing figure.

kgrosser

Richard Haseltine said:

This issue is an example of way baking morphs to a single morph is best avoided - you lose all the corrective morphs - you can rebuild them but it's going to be a lot of work.

@Richard Haseltine, I'm trying to raise your attention here before crearting yet another thread. I played arounfd now enough to have a pretty good understanding as of why this is happening and it seems just very few JCMs lost down this way connected to a single character (Littlefox Star2)  create a noticeable problem for me. is there some how to I can possibly just copy, edit and realgn these 4 JCMs to my new character slider?

Richard Haseltine

kgrosser said:

Richard Haseltine said:

This issue is an example of way baking morphs to a single morph is best avoided - you lose all the corrective morphs - you can rebuild them but it's going to be a lot of work.

@Richard Haseltine, I'm trying to raise your attention here before crearting yet another thread. I played arounfd now enough to have a pretty good understanding as of why this is happening and it seems just very few JCMs lost down this way connected to a single character (Littlefox Star2)  create a noticeable problem for me. is there some how to I can possibly just copy, edit and realgn these 4 JCMs to my new character slider?

If you know that you used x% of the original morph, and that the original JCM was Y times the value of the original morph (as the inital added controller), then you could use the Property Hierarchy to make a second set of links to the JCM using X * Y / 100 (dividing by 100 as it is a percentage value)