Genesis 9 Mouth Figure refusing to auto-follow

EvieSEvieS Posts: 66
edited November 2023 in Daz Studio Discussion

Recently I've tried to create a master morph parameter to control a morph on Genesis 9 simultaneously with a morph for her mouth figure. This will work when I initially create it and of course I use the ERC option to memorize the morph changes. All is well. However when I save out both figure (mouth and G9) and then save out the newly created morphs --- upon starting up with a new G9 figure and mouth, my morphs are there and they still work - but the master dial will only show ERC information for the G9 figure...having lost the data for the mouth figure entirely. I've done this successfully with the eyes...a master dial on the G9 figure that controls both her face and morphs as well as her eye figures. So why won't this work on the mouth? I've also noticed a lot of morphs for the G9 mouth (even with auto-follow turned on) won't seemingly affect the mouth at all. It will work on the eyes, the lashes, the tears...so on...but not the mouth. What's up with that? Anybody have a clue?

Another issue I'm running across is why can't we save POSE or SHAPE data for G9 and her body parts/figures in the same file? They are conformed, so shouldn't we have an option to save morphs on say the mouth...along with the morph settings for the body? I'm having to save a preset shape for both mouth and body to get them to do a singular task. This seems like something that should be already available as an option.

Any help on the mouth thing greatly appreciated.

Post edited by EvieS on

Comments

  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838
    edited November 2023

    Haven't found such an issue on my side. How did you ERC Freeze, manually or with Property Hierarchy ? Better always use the latter for setting up ERC links...

    For 2nd point, there're Properties Preset, Hierarchical Pose preset but no hierarchical shaping preset... A workaround could be: save Wearable Presets with attachments and G9's shaping options. Next time before loading preset, delete the attachments on the target G9 first...

    Post edited by crosswind on
  • EvieSEvieS Posts: 66

    I set up ERC freeze manually with Edit mode on and then clicking the master control's options. I will poke around on the hierarchy thing. Is that something in different location? I learned to do manual and that's all I thought there was. Any pointers greatly appreciated!

  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838

    EvieS said:

    I set up ERC freeze manually with Edit mode on and then clicking the master control's options. I will poke around on the hierarchy thing. Is that something in different location? I learned to do manual and that's all I thought there was. Any pointers greatly appreciated!

    Strongly recommend using Property Hierarchy as below. You can Freeze, change Parameter Settings, build links in b/t Controllers and Sub-Components as well as setting ERC types and formulas...so on and so forth.

    SNAG-2023-11-11-0041.png
    502 x 1302 - 87K
    SNAG-2023-11-11-0043.png
    1751 x 1398 - 300K
  • lilweeplilweep Posts: 2,476

    um ... how do you expect to control mouth (let alone eyes) with property heirarchy on Gen 9?

    The mouth and eyes will inherit auto-generated follow morph from the main figure they are attached to (because they are fitted figures). you have to give your new morph for the eyes and mouth the same name as the auto-generated follow morph so your morph is loaded in place of the autofollow one.  It has nothing to do with property heirarchy and ERC freezing.

    Or am i being stupid? 

  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838

    lilweep said:

    um ... how do you expect to control mouth (let alone eyes) with property heirarchy on Gen 9?

    The mouth and eyes will inherit auto-generated follow morph from the main figure they are attached to (because they are fitted figures). you have to give your new morph for the eyes and mouth the same name as the auto-generated follow morph so your morph is loaded in place of the autofollow one.  It has nothing to do with property heirarchy and ERC freezing.

    Or am i being stupid? 

    Of course I know how to set auto-follow and how it works, and I said there was no problem on my side, and I just show a way of setting all these properties via hierarchy including all functions.

    You 're not stupid...

  • EvieSEvieS Posts: 66

    Well maybe I'm stupid...because my Genesis 9 mouth only partially responds to auto-fit morphs. In this case in particular I created a very wide open mouth - cartoonishly wide - and the mouth/teeth simply do nothing despite the auto-follow being set. Now the eyes, the brows and the lashes will all move quite nicely to adjust but not the mouth. I've never figured out exactly why "open" type morphs won't transfer to the mouth/teeth. I have DS on a laptop and I have the same issue there. I messed around with the hierarchy editor today and while I didn't have a lot of luck with it - at some point I must have did something right because I managed to get the master parameter on the figure to finally control the mouth/teeth morphs. I haven't been able to replicate what I did though, so I'm not sure what happened. I'm still, tonight - trying to figure it out. If I do, I'll post the process here. 

    As for the renaming of morphs - I'm wondering if that would work. So no, that isn't crazy either. I'm going to keep playing with this now that I got it to work once. If anyone thinks of anything else that might be relevant to this issue, don't hesitate to speak up. Thanks to both of you for the input.

  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838

    EvieS said:

    Well maybe I'm stupid...because my Genesis 9 mouth only partially responds to auto-fit morphs. In this case in particular I created a very wide open mouth - cartoonishly wide - and the mouth/teeth simply do nothing despite the auto-follow being set. Now the eyes, the brows and the lashes will all move quite nicely to adjust but not the mouth. I've never figured out exactly why "open" type morphs won't transfer to the mouth/teeth. I have DS on a laptop and I have the same issue there. I messed around with the hierarchy editor today and while I didn't have a lot of luck with it - at some point I must have did something right because I managed to get the master parameter on the figure to finally control the mouth/teeth morphs. I haven't been able to replicate what I did though, so I'm not sure what happened. I'm still, tonight - trying to figure it out. If I do, I'll post the process here. 

    As for the renaming of morphs - I'm wondering if that would work. So no, that isn't crazy either. I'm going to keep playing with this now that I got it to work once. If anyone thinks of anything else that might be relevant to this issue, don't hesitate to speak up. Thanks to both of you for the input.

    No...OP, but I'm afraid you probably still didn't do it correctly... "Open morph(s)" on G9 mostly related to "rigging", so I have to clarify that there're different ways to make such a "cartoonish wide open" property as per your request:

    - opt1: make a Pose Control property (Modifier/Pose) by mixing FACS or Expression dials (non Auto Follow)

    - opt2: make a morph property (Modifier/Shape) with Auto Follow

    I'll show you these 2 ways by a recording a video later on.

  • EvieSEvieS Posts: 66

    Thanks for the offer but I found how I did it. LILWEEP was absolutely correct. But on a side-note, your OPTION 2 does not work at all. Auto-follow just doesn't work for the mouth if you're adjusting something like mouth opening that moves the jaw around. Neither of my computers have any success with that. Works on eyes, brows, lashes and clothing and hair - but mouth says no-go. I think you're right about it being a rigging issue since the mouth/teeth have a rigged jaw hinge. Maybe it's locked on purpose to prevent distortion or something. I don't know - but my G9 mouth has always been next to immovable. It will change location and position to adjust for head morphs and body resizing (FBM) but if I try to use an open mouth morph from my figure with auto-follow...it don't work. 

    Option 1 may work if you're doing it for the mouth - but you can't combine mouth and figure into one Pose or preset. The whole idea is to have one morph on the figure that controls morphs on the mouth figure.

    Back on point - LILWEEP was right. I reproduced my magic master parameter by simple name collusion. This is what I did:

    • I made a master control parameter on the mouth and added the morphs for the mouth that I wanted to turn on to that master via ERC Freeze.
    • Then I went to my figure and created an IDENTICALLY NAMED master parameter on the figure and added the one from the mouth to it via ERC Freeze.
    • I saved out the figure asset and installed my new morphs to my Genesis 9 base (data .duf) and restarted DS. 

    Upon loading G9 now, the singular master parameter on the figure controls the mouth morphs. I'm guessing it's a linking thing - making DS think the two morphs are the same thus it relinks them? I don't know. I was always able to set this up in DS and get it to work, but then I'd save out the figure asset and get my new master morphs and install them and the figure one would have zilch for subs and would do nothing. It's like during the figure asset save, it would lose the ERC frozen data for the mouth...so that the newly exported .duf wouldn't do a darn thing when installed. When I do this now with the identical names - the newly installed parameter seems to retain that ERC information and works. Don't ask me...but it worked. Twice now. Could this be an actual bug in DS? Losing ERC information for non-figure (G9) conforming parts? Should I report it? Clearly the program is capable of making this work - I've done it twice now - but the name thing shouldn't really be needed to fool it into working. If you ERC Freeze a morph to a new parameter and save it out - that parameter should be retaining any data you ERC'd to it, right?

  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838
    edited November 2023

    EvieS said:

    Thanks for the offer but I found how I did it. LILWEEP was absolutely correct. But on a side-note, your OPTION 2 does not work at all. Auto-follow just doesn't work for the mouth if you're adjusting something like mouth opening that moves the jaw around. Neither of my computers have any success with that. Works on eyes, brows, lashes and clothing and hair - but mouth says no-go. I think you're right about it being a rigging issue since the mouth/teeth have a rigged jaw hinge. Maybe it's locked on purpose to prevent distortion or something. I don't know - but my G9 mouth has always been next to immovable. It will change location and position to adjust for head morphs and body resizing (FBM) but if I try to use an open mouth morph from my figure with auto-follow...it don't work. 

    1st, nobody said lilweep was wrong.  2nd, you have not seen my workflow, how could you say opt2 does not work at all ? It did not work on you side 'cause you missed an "important step" ....

    Option 1 may work if you're doing it for the mouth - but you can't combine mouth and figure into one Pose or preset. The whole idea is to have one morph on the figure that controls morphs on the mouth figure.

    Why can't I ? If it cannot make it, what does ERC exist for ? Furthermore, there's a MultiDimensional Controlling method that you even can make them much complex...

    Back on point - LILWEEP was right. I reproduced my magic master parameter by simple name collusion. This is what I did:

    • I made a master control parameter on the mouth and added the morphs for the mouth that I wanted to turn on to that master via ERC Freeze.
    • Then I went to my figure and created an IDENTICALLY NAMED master parameter on the figure and added the one from the mouth to it via ERC Freeze.
    • I saved out the figure asset and installed my new morphs to my Genesis 9 base (data .duf) and restarted DS. 

    It was nice that you make it work in this way but it couldn't have to be that cumbersome... There's a very standard Auto Follow way of making these, even if on a "peculiar G9"... Auto Follow means you don't need to create any property on the target sub-node (mouth). If you manually create one with diff. name, that'll be 1st of all a non-Auto Follow way but a staged controlling way instead, and there's also a very SOP on such a way.

    Upon loading G9 now, the singular master parameter on the figure controls the mouth morphs. I'm guessing it's a linking thing - making DS think the two morphs are the same thus it relinks them? I don't know. I was always able to set this up in DS and get it to work, but then I'd save out the figure asset and get my new master morphs and install them and the figure one would have zilch for subs and would do nothing. It's like during the figure asset save, it would lose the ERC frozen data for the mouth...so that the newly exported .duf wouldn't do a darn thing when installed. When I do this now with the identical names - the newly installed parameter seems to retain that ERC information and works. Don't ask me...but it worked. Twice now. Could this be an actual bug in DS? Losing ERC information for non-figure (G9) conforming parts? Should I report it? Clearly the program is capable of making this work - I've done it twice now - but the name thing shouldn't really be needed to fool it into working. If you ERC Freeze a morph to a new parameter and save it out - that parameter should be retaining any data you ERC'd to it, right?

    Yes, especially with the latest DS version, an unique urI will be randomly created by DS to avoid any similar conflict, ERC failure or duplicate formulas issues...

     

     

    Post edited by crosswind on
  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838

    If you still have interest, the steps are in here - : https://mega.nz/file/DeI3RBpZ#ZckXxLx_VGrm1FnfZkI-rxCTuV82FNsJekCMUTWDdHk

    Good luck ~~

  • EvieSEvieS Posts: 66

    Crosswind - not sure what ticked you off. I didn't mean any disrespect or argument with you. I know OPT 2 won't work because I'm not a newbie. I know how to make a modifier with auto-follow turned on. I don't need a tutorial on that particular topic - I've already tried that and as said - my G9 mouth doesn't seem to like morphs that make it open. Please re-read over my last two posts. As for OPT 1 - I'll definitely look over your workflow. Thank you for linking it. I think what you've misunderstood is that my auto-follow feature for G9 will move the mouth around a bit (XYZ) to make it stay in line with an auto-follow morph - but when I try to achieve a morph on my figure that opens the mouth - the mouth/teeth will not do anything and I suspect this is because of the jaw bones being locked. If you ever messed with G8 you know any head morphs would warp her teeth and inner mouth - sometimes beyond redemption and it was the same with her eyes - so I suspect this is one reason DAZ made G9 have separate eyes and mouth like this - to hinder that warping issue - and it does so kudos to them for that - but the auto-follow features is limited for the mouth and the eyes too somewhat...and I find that some morphs I make just won't have much effect on them. But I'm quite versed on auto-follow morphs enough to know how to make those. Sorry if I didn't clarify all of that previously.

    I didn't say LILWEEP was wrong...didn't say you were wrong either. Sorry if I said something that was misconstrued. Thank you for your help and pointers. The work-around trick of idential naming is quick and effective, so it's what I'm running with till I can get something else to work. I posted my work-flow on it in case someone else is having similar issues. 

    Thanks again for posting the video...I'll watch it tonight when I get a moment. Much appreciated.

  • crosswindcrosswind Posts: 6,838
    edited November 2023

    EvieS said:

    ...

    Thanks again for posting the video...I'll watch it tonight when I get a moment. Much appreciated.

    Sure thing and no problem...I'm very sorry for any misunderstanding from me! cool

    Post edited by crosswind on
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