Is it necessary to ERC freeze eye/mouth/lashes morphs (G9)?

suffo85

Title..

I haven't made very many of these but it occurred to me today as I was saving out three new custom morphs which I had to make out of necessity, after manually converting some G3 to G9, that I've never ERC freezed any morph I've ever made outside of full body morphs which required adjusted rigging. 

Should I be ERC freezing morphs that don't require adjusted rigging?

Edit -> Another example I can think of are morphs I've made for props.  Sometimes I've rigged the props, sometimes I haven't, but in either event the morphs I created for props never required me to adjust the rigging for them to work correctly.  I noticed earlier today however, a morph I made to fix the G3 to G9 eye discrepancy does not load with a saved subset, making me manually toggle it, and I'm curious if that's because I didn't freeze it or not.

Richard Haseltine

Freezing is needed and useful only if the thing you are working in needs to trigger other properties (joint centres, corrective shapes) when it is turned on. If the property doesn't do that then there will be nothing to freeze. If you have a morph you created that needs to be triggered by another property then freezing is probably not the way to go as the controller may well already have sub-components*, rather you probably need to set the link up manually using the Property Hierarchy pane and make sure that the link is set to save with your property (and save it after creating the link).

* you can use the usual route, but you need to do ERC Bake first to turn the linked adjustments into raw values, then do the ERC Freeze - otherwise, with two freezes in succession you will end up with Duplicate Formula errors.

suffo85

Richard Haseltine said:

Freezing is needed and useful only if the thing you are working in needs to trigger other properties (joint centres, corrective shapes) when it is turned on. If the property doesn't do that then there will be nothing to freeze. If you have a morph you created that needs to be triggered by another property then freezing is probably not the way to go as the controller may well already have sub-components*, rather you probably need to set the link up manually using the Property Hierarchy pane and make sure that the link is set to save with your property (and save it after creating the link).

* you can use the usual route, but you need to do ERC Bake first to turn the linked adjustments into raw values, then do the ERC Freeze - otherwise, with two freezes in succession you will end up with Duplicate Formula errors.

Awesome thanks for clearing that up for me.  I've used the Property Hierarchy pane before when I was rigging vehicles to have single dials for individual tires and also a "master" dial that could spin them all at once, so I can navigate around in there okay. 

crosswind

Actually there're two typical cases of "ERC Freeze": 
1)  Freeze ERC Links Only, e.g. create a Control property for a character's head and body morphs; create a Pose Control property linked to the joint transforms (Rotate / Translate / Scale) that have values, or from an animated range. ( as this way is faster than using Property Hierarchy )...
2) Adjust Rigging + ERC Freeze, e.g. for full head / body morphs; for partial head / body morphs that'll be influenced by the rigging of related joints ...

So, I believe the option 2) applies for your case of making Eyes / Mouth... morphs (partial head morph, PHM). The general principle is: whether Adjust Rigging + ERC Freeze or not depends on if a Morph will be influenced by the rigging of joints that fall in the area of its vertex positions change.
You can study the similar official G9 PHMs (coming from Daz Originals). For instance, Mouth Height (head_bs_MouthHeight), Eye Whole Width (head_bs_EyeWholeWidth).  Let's take Mouth Height as an example

This morph will be influenced by the rigging of some joints under Upper and Lower Face Rig: Lips, Upper / Lower Teeth and Chin.... so Daz Adjusted Rigging by only selecting these joints then ERC Freezed the morph. If you check this morph in Property Hierarchy, you'll find the freezed result. Notice there's an R icon at the beginning of each line, that means Rigged + ERC Freezed. (screenshot 1)   By doing Adjust Rigging + ERC Freeze, the most precise shaping result can be assured when those joints rotate, i.e. with given poses.

But the above principle is not 100% absolute... or case by case, e.g if a morph is only related to the rigging of one joint or no joint, or at least there's no shape distortion with given poses, you don't have to do option 2). Besides, for the similar partial morphs, some vendors do it, some don't.  For instance, as for Mouth Width (Wider / Widen / Narrow), Daz, SF-Design, Vinme did it, P3Design didn't... yada yada ~

So at the end of day, as long as there's no issue with the partial morphs when you tested with related Poses, you don't have to do option 2), IMO ~