Loading characters with only some morphs

ebslater26

I had been having very long load times for figures, where adding G8F to a scene would take upwards of 10 minutes. I realized it was probably the amount of characters and morphs I had installed, which are too many to count. I decided to try something and created 2 seperate libraries; one for just G8 and a handful of morphs that I always use and the other with all my other characters and morphs. Using the Content Directory Manager I made sure that only my G8 library was present and was able to load G8F in about 7 seconds! Much better! However, after re-adding my characters and morphs library I find that I can't selectively load a figure or morph. For example: When launching DAZ only my G8 library is present. I add G8F to my scene. I then load my Characters and Morphs library via the Content Directory Manager. I select a character and get prompted by the Character Loading Options window and select "apply character to currently selected figure". 10 minutes later it has applied the character and ALL other characters and morphs are loaded into the figures paramaters. 

My question: is there a way to selectively load just a handful of morphs or just those associated with a single character? I looked at Morph Loader but it only seems to accept OBJ files, not DUF files.

Richard Haseltine

No, splitting the content allows you to remove some and add it back easily but DS will always load all morphs etc. from currently connected content directories.

TBorNot

I have a character with oodles of morphs, complete with various hair items fitted to the figure, that takes a long time to load.  I removed all the hair and saved just the figure as a scene subset, did a File->new and then merged the figure and it showed up in seconds.  I brought the old figure back and then removed the character and just saved the hair items.  This also showed up in seconds.  I don't think it's the morphs at all, there's something broken when Fit has to be applied when merging a scene subset.

ebslater26

Ok, so the load times I can live with, though I will say that after rebuilding my libraries seperatley (and opting to not reinstall some morph packs that I simply never used) I'm finding my load times are much better than previously. What was taking 10 minutes is down to about 3. I can live with that. My biggest issue with this whole thing was that I'm starting to dip my toes into the animation tools in DAZ and was finding that with custom dialed characters (i.e. G8F with a ton of morphs dialed in to create a unique figure) the animation scrubber was laggy as hell and resetting the figure poses would take forever. I have found a solution though.

Once I have played with all the available morph dials and created a unique character I like, rather than save it as a Scene Subset (which has been my practice for quite a while) I am saving it as a custom morph.

My workflow is as follows: Create custom dialed character (or load a previously saved Scene Subset character). Change the figures resolution level to Base and remove all fitted items (i.e. eyelashes, clothes, hair, etc.). Export the figure as an obj. Clear the scene and load a clean G8F figure. then Edit -> Figure -> Morph Loader Pro. Load the previously saved obj. Dial the morph to 100%. then Edit -> Figure -> Rigging -> Adjust Rigging to Shape (if I don't do this then posing the figure is all sorts of wrong). Then I can save this new figure as a scene subset. 

Following that process the figure now only has one morph dialed in rather than all the others previously required to get that unique shape. Now if I play with animating the figure, playing the animation preview is nice and smooth.

Matt_Castle

ebslater26 said:

Following that process the figure now only has one morph dialed in rather than all the others previously required to get that unique shape.

Note that this approach has some significant drawbacks, which will become more apparent the more heavily morphed the figure is.

Most shapes come with corrective morphs (JCMs and MCMs, depending on whether they're Joint or Morph controlled) that will fix and improve the rigging so that it works better with that shape. If you export the shape and then create a new morph from it, all these corrective morphs will no longer be attached and the figure may distort in unrealistic ways (or their eyes may not close neatly, etc).

This may not be all that noticeable with less morphed figures, but can become very significant with others (particularly for larger, rather than smaller, morphs).