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Information on ERC Freeze feature

AllstereoAllstereo Posts: 8
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Hello all,

I am a newcomer to DAZ studio after being a Poser user for many years. Now, I was learning the basics, but I am particularly interested in the ERC freeze feature and how it is related to Poser dependent parameters. Over the years, I wrote a four parts tutorial about Poser dependent parameters (See the links below to the Free stuff section of the Renderosity site) and I believe that most of the content of my tutorial is directly applicable to the ERC freeze feature using the keyed type approach. In fact, DAZ can read Poser key format, but I have not evaluated all possibilities.

In order to help the Daz community, I am ready to write a short document how to adapt my tutorial content to DAZ freeze feature, but the keyed approach is not well described in the “official” documentation. Most of my knowledge about it is from reading threads on the DAZ forum. Thanks to Richard Haseltime, Kitakoredaz and Syrus_Dante for their relevant comments. Many options of the keyed type approach are always obscure to me and without a full understanding, it will difficult to link Poser dependent parameters to the keyed approach.   

Up to now, I am able to use the animation timeline to program the key pattern for control of transformation parameters (Translation, rotation or scaling) and morphs.  I understand part of the Property Hierarchy format and the key interpolation options.   

To be more efficient in my learning and to reduce time for extensive testing, I will appreciate to receive any information, web links and suggestions in regard to the keyed type approach.

The link to my tutorial:

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-on-poser-dependent-parameters-part-1-/71136

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-on-poser-dependent-parameters-part-2/75665

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-on-poser-dependent-parameters-part-3/75780

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-on-poser-dependent-parameters-part-4/76167

 

Denis Gravel (Aka Allstereo)

Comments

  • Syrus_DanteSyrus_Dante Posts: 983
    edited October 2018

    Hi and wellcome to the Daz3D forum.

    Your help and any tutorial or documentation to shead light on this mysterious subject is much appriciated. It would be nice to have a complete documentation of the ERC features of Daz Studio and how to setup the ERCs with the Property Hierarchy pane.

    I've quickly read over the first two PDFs and I think I can help you to adapt something like this more or less to the ERC features of Daz Studio. Maybe have a bit less scientific graphs and more screenshots with examples instead. I like the graphics with the block diagrams of the master-slave dependencies, I already thought about doing some graphic like this to explain ERCs but with screenshots of actual DazStudio dials with the prefixes like CTRL, FBM, JCM and so on.

    There are some significant concept changes in the way you set up the depedencies. There is no Depedencies Editor and there is no teach button. The biggest difference is that cross-talk between figures and other items with the ERC links is not possible anymore. Instead the cross-talk works only on Properties that are set to Auto-Follow on Conformed Items like clothes and other wearables.

    I think with the Keyed ERCs (Extract From Timeline Range) you have all options like you have them for animating the keyframes in the timeline. Keep the Play Range in the timline and the key frames limited to the minimum whats needed, otherwise the slider could start to stutter by dialing it. For to have a better control over the interpolation and the curves I would suggest using the graphMate plugin. With it you can setup the animation curves like in the Dependencies Editor but with great precistion.

    Here are some posts and threads about ERC and the Keyed option:

    Enhanced Remote Control (ERC) - Documentation Center - Daz 3D

    keyed sub-components

    Rigging Window Blinds?

    Linking a JCM with a rotation range

    ERC-Freeze / Property Hierarchy / merge property Sub-Components

    Here is the latest discussion on ERCs and JCMs:

    in FIX THE PELVIC DISTORTIONS - SOLVED - Comment by Syrus_Dante October 14

     

    This is my post on the fifth page of this thread about how I use ERC-Freeze or how I managed to work with it.

    in TUTORIAL - Creating a Genesis series Full Body Morph for DAZ Studio Pro 4.10 by RKane_1 Comment by Syrus_Dante October 2015

    [Quote]: TUTORIAL - Creating a Genesis series Full Body Morph for DAZ Studio Pro 4.10 by RKane_1

    TERMINOLOGY

    I didn't write this. This is stolen LIBERALLY from posts I cut and paste together in an effort to understand and parse the information together in an easily understandable set of info. The posts originally come from Syrus83227_202e840f4e, Richard Haseltine, Herald of Fire, Sickleyield, Ramwolff, and many others here too numerous to name.

    "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Bernard of Chartres. (English Version - Isaac Newton)

    I humbly ask all those who know a good bit to read over and correct any assumptions made by either me or the previous parties in an effort to further understanding of this great tool. Thanks! :)

    Auto-Follow: "Auto-follow On" tells DAZ Studio to create a morph in conformed figures when the morph in the base figure is dialed up (if there isn't one already). This allows conformed items like clothing to change to conform to the shape of the new figure. Leaving it Auto-follow off will prevent DAZ Studio from creating this automatic morph. Auto-follow should be on when it will make sense for a conformer to try to mimic the morph in the main figure, and off when it won't. You'd probably want to turn it off for something that shouldn't be mimicked by clothes or hair - eyelash morphs, for example. Hair problems have often occurred with eyelash or ear morphs. Eyelashes shouldn't be set to Auto Follow on as a general rule, ears are harder to judge. There are many reasons you might decide either way - for example, the clothing cleavage modifier on Genesis uses two actual morphs for each visible morph (a hidden one linked by ERC to the visible one); one morph, with Auto-Follow on, fills in the space between the breasts and the clothing follows, while the other, with Auto-Follow off, undoes the effect on the base figure while leaving it active in the clothing.

    Adjust Rigging to Shape: Adjust rigging to shape moves the end points of the bones so they line up with the same bits of mesh as they do in the base state.  When a morph reshapes the body to the point that the rigging doesn't work, the Adjust Rigging to Shape moves the points about which the joints turn so that they are once more inside the mesh at about the equivalent point - though in some cases that may need a bit of manual adjustment. An ERC Freeze is needed to link the moved joints to the morph, so that when it is off the joints are in the normal position and when it is at 100% they are moved to the modified position (and when it's at half strength they are moved half-way). You need an Adjustment Rigging to Shape and ERC Freeze only if the shape has changed sufficiently that the default rigging does not work, and the freeze should link only the change joint centers as controlled properties of the morph slider. If you have unwanted ERC links you can find and delete them in the Property Editor.

    ERC: ERC stands for Extended Remote Control. It's basically a way to make one dial control multiple dials, but it's also a little more advanced than that in DAZ Studio since you can also get it to deal with changes in the figure skeleton on top of premade dials.

    ERC Freeze 'Freezes' the current figure pose into an ERC channel. This allows you to set your dials the way you want them to be when your new ERC dial is at its maximum and then use the ERC Freeze to create a new dial property. When zeroed, those same dials will be at their defaults (usually also zero). When at maximum, those dials will be at the limits they were set to previously. The best part about this is that DAZ handles the 'in between' parts as well, so that you can have a 50% dial spin which puts those dials at the middle-ground between zero and their ERC setting. ERC Freeze, by default, links every changed property to the one you set as master. That's why it is important not to have anything set that you don't want linked, though you can (and should) run your eye down the list and deselect anything that is included in error.

    It's used for a variety of things. The Basic Child morph on Genesis, for example, uses it to scale the figure down to a child size. The actual child morph would otherwise be an adult-sized toddler! It also reworks the bone structure to match the new figure size dynamically.

    If your joint settings are not in their memorized base state then ERC Freeze will see the differences between base state and memorized state as part of the changes it should be linking to the morph, and when it restores the figure it will restore it to the memorized state not the actual state on load. You must memorize rigging before using these features.

    You can access the ERC-Freeze command in the "Parameters" tab if you change to "Edit Mode" in the right-click menu. Then if you right-click on any property in "Parameters" tab the menu shows many other useful commands and you can see the "ERC-Freeze" in there.

     ERC-Bake: ERC-Bake is the opposite of ERC-Freeze. If a Morph or Pose dial is "ERC-Freeze"ed and has "sub-components" that need to change, it can be reversed by using ERC-Bake. It will delete all the sub-components of that property and make them "currently used“ property values again in parameters pane (unfreeze) so they are easily editable there and can be "ERC-Freeze"ed later. If done with more than one control property all the sub-components these are now "currently used“ can be combined with ERC-Freeze to a new property.

    ERC-Bake can be found in the right-click menu of that new property in the Property Hierarchy tab - so the "sub-components" gets deleted from that new property and become "currently used" property values again.

    Precise Eye - Point At Null-Target / LookAt-PoseControl with EyeTarget

    At the same time I was trying something with the ERCs that turned out is not possible. It is about the issue with the cross-talk between the different scene items that was possible to setup with the ERC-Freeze dialogue in the previous Daz Studio version that showed all currently used property values of all items in the scene. But I had no idea how to save those ERC links because after a restart they where gone.

    I wanted to have some props parented to the figure that if I move them in their limited range they drive the pose control propertis on the figure. It was the idea of having some advanced armature handles to animate the pose control properties like head rotation in the figure while the eyes still point at the target prop more or less controlled by another controller. The setup was based on an arrow prop parented to the head center and another between the eyes. I let the arrows Point At the target prop that you grab and translate with the universal tool. Then I linked the rotation values of the arrow prop to the Pose Control properties of Head-Neck. That actualy worked pretty well. Then I created other Control Properties that overwrites (Multiply) various Pose Control properties for Head-Neck to turn down the effect of the prop translation rotating the head, or the Point At of the eyes, something that is not possible with the Point At in general that you only can turn on or off but not dial up to have it fade in.

     

    Here is something I've found in the changelog it could be that I was using an earlier version than v4.6.2.71 while trying the above ERC links with the props.

    [Qoute]: Documentation Center » Daz Studio » v4.x » Change Log » 4.6.2.120 Change Log

    • Tweaks to make Property Hierarchy pane more efficient about when it rebuilds its list; improves experience when selecting nodes within the same hierarchy

    • Fixed ERC Freeze to create links in the correct/consistent order

    • Added a Mode option to the Attenuation group of ERC Freeze; allows Sub-Components to be targeted by the attenuation property

    • Added DzNodeSelectionComboBox to the scripting API

    • Fixed some issues with script documentation extraction

    • Added documentation to several script widget classes

    DAZ Studio : Incremented build number to 4.6.2.71

    • Fixed an issue with the interactive lesson layout command not being cleaned up completely

    • Fixed #DS-254: Crash while running unit tests; fixed cases where geometry can be subdivided while building; fixed crash in skin binding when geometry count handed in is incorrect; fixed case where loading deltas would cause scene to rebuild

    • Added Render Settings presets to the default load types

    • Added support for props to ERC Freeze

    • Updated ERC Freeze to use a single node selection drop down

    • Added a Keyed (Extract from Play Range) option to ERC Freeze

    DAZ Studio : Incremented build number to 4.6.2.72

    Public Beta 5 (RC)

    • Optimized application of ERC Freeze

    • Fixed an issue with the control value and the Keyed option in ERC Freeze

    • Added interactive lesson submasks for floating panes

    • Made StopInteractiveLessonButton style-able

    • Keyed ERC Freeze now prefers the most used interpolation type instead of the first used

    • The escape key can now be used to quit an interactive lesson

    DAZ Studio : Incremented build number to 4.6.2.73

    Post edited by Syrus_Dante on
  • AllstereoAllstereo Posts: 8

    Hello Syrus_Dante,

    First, thank you for the information. Part 3 and 4 of my tutorial have many examples of ERC control. For more information about ERC, see the message that I send to you.

    As a first step to understand the ERC Freeze feature, I will try to import the 3d models of my tutorial within DAZ Studio  to see how it deals with the Poser dependent parameter.

    Allstereo  

  • AllstereoAllstereo Posts: 8

    Hello all,

    You can find my tutorial on DAZ Studio ERC feature on the Renderosity site at:https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-daz-studio-erc-feadture/81207

    Here is a description of the content:

    This tutorial is about ERC (Extended Remote Control) feature of DAZ Studio (Version 4.10). After a short history about ERC and some preliminary considerations, concepts relate to the ERC relationship between Controller and Sub-component are described using the DeltaAdd and Keyed operators. By the same token, the DAZ tools and graphical interface associated with ERC feature are introduced. In the last part of the tutorial, the ERC Freeze and Bake options are explained as well as the use of Timeline method to build ERC keyed relationship. Details about the Attenuate option are given with application in the design of a Multiple Joint Controlled Morph (MJCM).


    Daz scene files are included to support the tutorial.


    Work with DAZ Studio (Version 4.10)

    Allstereo

  • andya_b341b7c5f5andya_b341b7c5f5 Posts: 694
    Allstereo said:

    Hello all,

    You can find my tutorial on DAZ Studio ERC feature on the Renderosity site at:https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-daz-studio-erc-feadture/81207

    Interesting.  Thanks for taking the time to put this together and sharing it for free.

  • Learning3DLearning3D Posts: 90
    Allstereo said:

    Hello all,

    You can find my tutorial on DAZ Studio ERC feature on the Renderosity site at:https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/tutorial-daz-studio-erc-feadture/81207

    Here is a description of the content:

    This tutorial is about ERC (Extended Remote Control) feature of DAZ Studio (Version 4.10). After a short history about ERC and some preliminary considerations, concepts relate to the ERC relationship between Controller and Sub-component are described using the DeltaAdd and Keyed operators. By the same token, the DAZ tools and graphical interface associated with ERC feature are introduced. In the last part of the tutorial, the ERC Freeze and Bake options are explained as well as the use of Timeline method to build ERC keyed relationship. Details about the Attenuate option are given with application in the design of a Multiple Joint Controlled Morph (MJCM).


    Daz scene files are included to support the tutorial.


    Work with DAZ Studio (Version 4.10)

    Allstereo

    Wow, thanks a lot for that extensive tutorial. It is currently way above my skill level, but I will keep it for reference and sure read later :)

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