Moving morphs in hair from neck to top level
vwrangler
Posts: 4,888
This is probably going to be the sort of thing that's either stupidly simple or completely impossible, so ... I've got a hair that I would like to convert to be compatible with Genesis. I've tested it, and it works just fine, except that the hair morphs remain in the neck. It's not a big deal, but I would like to move them to the top level, so I don't have to navigate to the neck to use them, and I would like to keep their organization intact.
The organization is, more or less:
Hair top level
- (irrelevant body parts and bones)
- Neck
- - Morphs by category
- - - Character fits
- - - Shape morphs
- - - General movement morphs
- - - Highly specific movement morphs
- - - Morphs related to certain attachments that come with the hair
I can move them after transfer if I'm willing to let them lose their organization, but they're actually very well organized, and the simple alphabetic list is ... less so.
What I thought might work would be to move the morphs before transfer so that they were where I wanted them to be, but I can't seem to figure out how to just move the entire morphs hierarchy intact. If I'm at the top level of the hair, I can't see the neck, and if I'm in the neck, I can't see the top level.
I thought the Property Mover inside Property Editor might work, but everything is either a Group or whatever a V stands for, and none of them are what Property Mover recognizes as something it can move.
As I say, it's not a huge deal -- the morphs are still in the right place in the neck. Nonetheless, is there any way to make this work?
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Comments
Probably impossible, the morphs controlled by those neck dials are physically part of the neck body part. One thing you could do, if you know how (I don't) would be adding control morphs to the root body part, and have the original dials in the neck control the new ones.
I also do not know how to do that. I know just enough about Property Editor to be able to do relatively simple stuff without causing major damage. Usually. (And even with major damage, as long as I close out without saving, it's not a problem.)
I kind of suspected it might land on the "impossible" side instead of "stupidly simple", but I did hope....
Actually that's Backwards, you want New Morphs at Top Level LINKED to the Neck morphs so the Top Level set controls the Neck morphs. And I think it can be done but I do not know enough about Control linking to be sure. It sounds just like FBM linking for stuff like moving the Right arm also morphs the Shoulder, Chest and arm ERC's (I think it's ERC's).
I think that's actually what Transfer Utility is doing when it shifts hairs from Gen4 to Genesis. If you look at it in Property Editor, you have a group at the top level that's "Morphs > Imported > (body part)", but they're all hidden. Those can be unhidden and made into a top-level group, which is what I've been doing, but they're usually not as many or as highly organized as these.
DS4 was designed around Genesis and the Tri-Ax system, as a result Poser content isn't compatible, but to stop everyone abandoning DAZ and DS the devs modified the PZ3 importer, so that all Poser figures/conformers are converted into a basic version of the Genesis system, while at the same time leaving the average user unaware of the conversion.
The problem with this is that Tri-Ax content is "single skin" and technically doesn't have any body parts like you find in Poser, so there is no place on the bone for the morph deltas, so each targetGeom gets converted and moved to the BODY and an ERC pose control is left in it's place. Now this is fine if your just using your Poser content and saving as scene or scene subset, as your completely unaware of the garbage going on underneath. It's when you "convert" that same content to Tri-Ax that the problems start, because instead of having just one DSF morph asset file for the entire morph you can have dozens of them, some called "alias" while others are named after the body part they came from, and not all of those morphs will work.
So to your OP, it isn't impossible to do, but to do it properly means rebuilding each morph and then deleting the garbage you were left with after the conversion.
Actually DS4 was not built around Genesis. The Genesis Figure was not even introduced until DS4.2, after that the tools to USE content with Genesis started coming out and being built into the program. And I've not seen any mention of making the Hair item being discussed into a Tri-Ax type figure. That is not needed to just add a new level of morph control dials as is the issue at hand here. I'm not the one in the know but if you can RIG a legacy mesh in DS4.6 you should be able to ADD more Controls I believe.
A little tip, don't post unless you actually know what your talking about.
Genesis was in the very first build of DS4.0 standard that DAZ released, and I'm sure that the figure in the sneak peek Project X was also Genesis or at least an early incarnation of Genesis, so it's been around a long time, Oh and DS4.2 was never publicly released, if it ever existed then only beta testers would have used it.
The second you autofit or TU something to Genesis it becomes Tri-Ax, that is what the rigging system is called, but it's no surprise that you don't know that, as most of the community haven't a ****ing clue about it either.
Which is false. If you use a Poser item on a Poser-rigged figure in DS4 it stays Poser-rigged.
At this point, it appears that the considered opinion of everyone is that what I asked doesn't seem to be possible, certainly not without a lot of work I don't currently have the skills to do. Thanks to everyone who tried to help.
Which is false. If you use a Poser item on a Poser-rigged figure in DS4 it stays Poser-rigged.
Mike at no time have we ever used Posers Parametric rigging in DS, right from the start DS has used a WM engine, which left the devs needing a way to convert from Poser to DS, the PZ3 importer was their answer to that, it converts Parametric rigging into a crippled WM rigging. Why crippled, well we couldn't have the content bend better in the "new kid on the block" now could we, the brown stuff really would have hit the fan amongst the Poser community. In DS4 the importer still does the same thing it's always done, but now it has extra to do, as it now has to convert the mesh and morphs, the mesh gets welded to make it a "single skin" mesh, and the morphs get removed from the body part and hidden in the Body, which is a basic version of how Genesis works.
Most of the user base is none the wiser that any of this is happening, that is by design, it's not until you get deeply involved in the "converting" of something, so that it fully works with the Tri-Ax system, that you get to see just what is going on under the hood.