Workflow for duplicating bones and transferring weights from other bones

Dankest Things

Hi All,

I would like to know how simple it is to do the following and if anyone had any tips on workflow how to do it (as i would like to do it a lot ).:

1. choose a bone and duplicate it with exactly the same parameters.

2. make the new bone a child of the original.

3. transfer all assigned weights to the new bone (in blender for example you would simply rename vertex groups or the bones).

The model will then leave daz studio so i am not concerned if this breaks anything in daz studio.

Thanks for any pointershelp.

Dankest Things

OK, maybe i got this...

1. select bone and using Joint Editor right click and create dulicate bones.

2. With Joint Editor reparent it by right click edit reparent bone.

3. in Node Weight Map Brush tool settings, copy 'general weights' from the original bone and paste to new bone, then remove from the original bone.

Does this sound correct, it seems to work.

Would be grateful for validation?

Richard Haseltine

It sounds like it will achieve your stated goals, though I'm not sue what that is meant to accomplish. I'd have thought you could also insert a new bone between the exisiting bone and its aprent, which might be fewer steps

Dankest Things

Thanks. I should have clarified, it is for use in Unity and whilst I could do, and have done, in blender, blender's fbx export has some issues, whereas daz to unity appears more robust. In Unity I cannot scale an animated bone in, for example, 2 of the three components of the vector, so if I move the mesh to an identical child I can scale the bone, eg. to customise arm width, whilst the animated parent bone behaves correctly. Extra bone are more performant than morphs for character customisation.

Dankest Things

@RichardHaseltine, on the face of it this worked fine, however, there were problems that seem Daz Studio related. I renamed the new bones in the hierarchy and this seemed to work and I painted new weights with the new bone names recognised. I exported as fbx for unity and saved the scene. In unity, everything was great, except the duplicated bones had their default, not new, names (eg. A bone duplicated from right thigh bend arrived as right thigh bend 2). However, all the weight mapping was as intended. Back to Daz Studio and I opened the scene to the error "Duplicate formulas found in files. Make sure the content is properly installed. See the log file for details" From this point all the weights that were modified were either messed up or lost. I figure this is Daz file issue, maybe if I create new bones rather than duplicate it will work, but this seems a bug! Any thoughts welcome, thx

Richard Haseltine

Nodes have a name and a label - the one that shows, and can be chnaged, in the Scene pane is the label, names are the functionally significant ones (which is why they are tucked out of the way). You can chnage names in the Edit>Figure (or Object)>Scene Identification

Dankest Things

Perfect. Thank you for your time.