Short characters result in negative Y Translate when grounded

MadHammer

Created a toonish character with separate head and body morphs that I want to be able to apply to G8/G8.1 characters individually and followed xenic101's video explaining the process, rather indepth. Problem is he addresses the issue of short characters at the end of the video and then either intenional or unintentional the video cuts off after he says 'here is how to fix this issue'. I would add a comment to the YT video but that account is basically inactive and another user asked the same question almost a year ago and one other commented on it, but no response from xenix101. 

So now that the background is out of the way, here are a few questions:

1. If you have split morphs for head and body, is his way of aligning with the neck the correct way to create your character morphs and make it G8Base usable?
2. If the result is a negative Y Translate when grounded (CTRL-D on character) how do you get the negative translate to think that it is Y Translate = 0? In other words I want for example for Y of -10 to be turned into Y of 0 without actually moving the character up 10 or adding unneccessary objects/planes/groups/etc.
3. How do actual character creators create characters that are much shorter than G8Base and still have the head and body morphs separate and usable on the Base models?

Maybe this is commonly known but either my Google mojo has a serious case of alzheimers or the information is some sort of secret and I do not know the secret handshake.

Here is the video I spoke of, youtu.be/RR9SY5_7qcw

Kainjy

I don't suggest to use the procedure shown because you'll have a height problem: activating the body morph only, your body will go up but your head no, while if you active head only morph you'll have a giraffe neck. You can use it only if your morphed figure changed only body shape (no arm/leg/torso lenghts and no height changes).

I suggest to recreate a new morph for every part: export your head only morph, open the file (obj) align the character to the ground in blender and fix head bug. Later reimport it as a new morph.
Remake the operation for the body morph fixing the head position.

The correct procedure is:
- create a body morph where you change body and head height (so don't limit at the body only)
- create a second head morph where you change only the face shape (not height)

Another way could be making like the Brute 8: If you have it, you can look that the body morph make the character bigger. Looking in the parameters you'll see that a scale value is linked (by ERC) to body morph, reseting the scale at 100% you'll have a G8 male with muscle morph but with size equal to a standard G8. You can make something similar linking scale parameters to your morph.   

For the Y the problem is that you didn't adjust rigging to shape, look online "ADJUST RIGGING TO SHAPE". Usually I make morph with character always grounded.. you can adjust your morph file before import it.

 

MadHammer

To clarify a couple of things, If I follow the procedure you have outlined, I will have two morphs one for the head only and another for a properly scaled character that includes both head and body. Is that correct?

Not exactly what I am looking to accomplish, I want to create a body morph that drags the head (or any head morph) down to whatever scale it is modeled at similar to some Character Presets. I always use "Adjust Rigging To Shape...", and I have tried it both with "Adjust Orientation" checked and unchecked, but still get the girafe neck when using the body only morph.

Just a side rant, why is this so hard to do this in DAZ, it should be a single checkbox to drag the entire neck/head down with the top of the torso. I can see why almost all DAZ assets are the same size as the Genesis Base they are modeled from. End of side rant.

I also thought I could do this by only adjusting the scale on the body morph and using 'Head Propagating Scale' to get the head back to the unscaled size I wanted in the first place, but alas, that did not work either.

Kainjy

Yes correct !
It's a vertex coordinates problem
The morph make vertex change position.. so your chest/navel/sholders etc.. can go up and down (or in/out).
If the morph doesn't affect the head, it remains in the starting position (nobody tells the head do adapt) and you have the neck problem. You must create a body morph that changes body shape and makes the head vertices go down (not changing the shape but only Y position if you don't need to rescale it). The head shape is changed by the second morph (you can inflate the face, make eyes smaller, etc..) modelled on a Genesis base figure. 
So:

• your body morph will be correct and the head will be resized proportional to arms and leg (if you make a 10 m character height, you must scale the face to don't have the too small head effect)
• your morph face can be applyed at every character and you don't have problems if the body morph is inactive (like you have now).

 

Kainjy

For the Y coordinate problem you can:

• create a morph with feet on the ground
• manually edit (by Joint Editor) the first joint position.. it's the figure coordinate

MadHammer

Thanks @Kainly will try this out soon. I upgraded to 4.20 yesterday without reading the changelog or threads here so I have to deal with those issues first.