Carrara Conversion with Geografts
Inkubo
Posts: 745
In this thread I hope to share what I know and also get assistance with converting a character with geografts. Hopefully by the end there will be great information for anyone wanting to convert any character with grafts.
I'm using the Minotaur HD 6 with Asterion skin because it's one of my favorites--and it has many geografts. I'm going to include genitalia so issues with gens can be worked through as well. If anyone else wants to go through this process, you could do so with any character, with or without gens, and include the wisdom or questions you encounter along the way.
UPDATE:
For the benefit of anyone who came here to search for this information, the discussion somehow got moved to another thread, https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/185751/geograft-does-anyone-recognize-these-artifacts, where several kind people contributed to a solution that is not perfect, but comes darn close.
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# Request for Assistance #
To use the minotaur's hooves, I need to hide geometry in two places:
As you can see in the attached photo, the legs and hooves are initially both visible when I import the character. What I thought of doing was to go into the Model room, select the polygons I want to hide, assign them to a new shading group, and make the shader on that group transparent. Is that what I should do, or is there a better way?
(Sorry about the darkness of the attached photo. I do have a Sun lamp in my scene, but so far I haven't figured out how to make it actually illuminate anything.)
Making a body part Visible /Invisible can be done by selecting the part,.(in the figure heirarchy / Scene instance list) and clicking the little Visible check box in the panels above...
Normally there are Preset "poses" to Hide body parts which other geoemetry replaces,. EG: Mermaid tail etc...
have a look in your "poses" for that figure.
geografts mess up the uv maps in carrara. this includes the pro anatomical elements
in daz studio geografts replace polys in the mesh,
in carrara they punch holes in the mesh.
been that way since genesis came out.
there are workarounds
the popular workaround, i dont understand really. parenting a 2nd copy?
I want to try the solution of parenting a second copy, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get Carrara to duplicate an object...
load a 2nd from your library
well, i asked a ds guru how to save a geograft in ds to conforming
on our own again sigh
When I left the minotaur project a few days ago, the render was as you see in my July 22 post: both the human legs and hooves were visible at once, and both had proper textures. My problem then was that I needed a way to hide part of the human leg, including the lower half of the thigh, and part of the hooved leg at the top where it flares out away from the thigh.
Last night I reloaded the project and found my problem is different. Now Carrara hides the unwanted parts of the human legs, but the texture on the hooves has gone crazy, similar to what we've encountered before with geografted gens and shoes.
I tried the giving the minotaur some invisible pants and parenting the hooves to those pants instead of to the minotaur's body. When I do that, the leg parts of the hooves shrink down to little twigs because the minotaur's body morphs are no longer projected onto them. Is there a way to project the morphs onto an object that is not fitted to the body?
If not, is there a way to copy an armature from one object to another? It occurs to me I could save properly fitted and morphed hooves to an OBJ file and import them that way, if I had a way to restore the armature. The legs should then be shaped better, and because they would no longer be geografts, Cararra wouldn't lose its mind by trying to texture after punching holes in mesh.
manually dialing the morph on the legs didn't work?
mebbe socks or boots as geograft buffer?
hazarding a theory, not tested yet, the 'buffer' would need the morphs in it to like daisy chain morph follow. wish i could test it now, but at the dayjob >.<
it's so much easier to edit the .dsf file. if you have dson editor, don't even need to see curly braces.
I really like your terminology, geograft buffer, to describe the invisible thing inserted between the model's body and the visible geograft!
I'm a dense noob, so I didn't actually have a clue about finding and manually dialing in the morph. For all I know that could work.
But your "daisy chain" theory excites me. Tonight I should try dragging in a second copy of the hooves so as to use actual hooves, properly morphed, as the geograft buffer.
I made a pelvic helper for Johnathon you can fit his meat and tatters too and conform it to Johnathon.
it is just an invisible vertex band I used the transfer utilty to fit to G3M as pants in DAZ studio and morphloader to add a couple in out resize morphs, it sort of follows his shape so could be a low band belt too but not UV mapped or anything as its set to invisible anyway.
Is in .car format for ease of use.
Thanks, I'll give it a try!
The minotaur is a Genesis 2 character, and using geograft buffers hasn't worked for me so far... I haven't found a substitute to use as the buffer for the hooves, and if you use an invisible set of hooves as the buffer, psychadelic texture spots begin to appear on the torso. I went so far as to make a completely invisible minotaur and fit everything to its parts, but grievous things happen if you try to fit one character's main body to another...
not sure I can make something advanced enough for that sorry,
this is only simple as basiaclly only uses pelvis and thigh bones, a pair of pants might work for minotaur
thigh bands mebbe?
i had started a thighband for minotaur to strap a crossbow to,
but then i was side tracked making a poseable crossbow.
then i started playing witcher 3. >.<
Geralt carries his crossbow on his back.
too bad Wookies aren't public domain lol
Hm! The Vrakaros armor set came with thigh bands. I don't expect much, but I could try 'em.
I still haven't learned to use DAZ Studio, so could someone please tell me what a geograft is? I prefer working in Carrara Pro.
DAZ sells or gives away character bases like Genesis 2 Male. Sometimes other characters in the store are made by adding new anatomy that doesn't exist in the original model. A basic example would be the genitalia that come in Pro bundles. The Lekkulions' headtails and the minotaur's horns, hooves, and tail are other examples of anatomy created from separate objects rather than being extruded (morphed) out of vertices in the original mesh.
So to put these things together into one seamless-looking character, DAZ Studio and Carrara hide parts of the original body mesh and stick on the new parts. The process is called geografting.
DAZ Studio does it well, but Carrara has a bug that can make textures go crazy when a graft hides parts of the original body. In this thread we're trying to figure out how to solve that problem in an easy and repeatable fashion.