Morphing Skeletons

murph101

DAG NABBIT!

I just purchased Michael 4 Skeleton to use just the skull and wanted to morph it to an alien-like skull.

I find two show-stopping problems:

1) I cannot make the rest of the skeleton disappear. I am usually able to turn visibility on and off of purchased items in Carrara. It appears to have no effect on the skeleton.

2) I cannot morph the skull at all, other than to shrink and grow it's overall size.

I saw there was a morphing tool for M3 skeletons. Will that be forward compatible? I'd hate to waste even more money.

evilproducer

DAZ does have a 30 day return policy, so if you can't get the skeleton to work the way you want, you could return it.

As to making the rest of the skeleton invisible, what is your preferred method, so that if somebody else has it, they can test it?

DUDU

The skeleton has certainly several shaders domains, it is necessary to put some alpha channel at zero…

Dartanbeck

If you're talking about This Skeleton, Try these things:

First of all, the hiding of everything but the skull:
Try this first:
Double-click the top line of the figure. Probably called "M4 Skeleton"(?)
This will get you into the model room with the whole skeleton. Either by selecting or deselecting through the menu, select just the skull and all of its parts, then go to Selection > Select Invert With M4, this takes a while (a lot of polygons to select!) after you make the command, so just wait a second or three.
Now go View > Hide selected.
This should make the rest of the skeleton entirely invisible in your scene.

Note that this methos doesn't always work on some of the latest, new figures - and possibly some older ones too. So I'll also cover the option to use, should this not work:

If the above doesn't work, do this, which will:

Select "Model" and enter the Texture Room (paint brush icon, upper right)

You'll see a list on the right of all of the shading domains of the figure. The only ones you want to keep are the ones for the Face, Head, and any other parts you might need, like teeth for example. So go to the first allocation that belongs to something that you don't want to be visible and click the little arrows on the far right - for changing the shader. Scroll to the bottom of the list of available shaders and select "New Master Shader".
That shader now looks gray, and has a generic name. You might want to change the name eventually, but not just yet.

Double-click that new shader you've just put in place to bring it into the main working window. Change "Alpha" to "Value 1-100" and leave it set at it's default value of zero. Change all of the rest of the channels, including color, to "None".

Now simply drag this new shader into all of the domains that you don't want to see. You can do this right in the list on the right, but you have to do them each, one at a time... so don't even try looking for a faster way! LOL

Actually, if you really know all of the names of the domains, I think Fenric has a plugin that will allow you to simply make that above set of changes to all of those domains at once. But anyways, just place that new shader and then you might as well name that shader (back in the assembly room, in the Shaders tab to the bottom right) to "Invisible".

Now you can go ahead and Edit > Remove Unused Masters > Remove unused objects, Consolidate Duplicate Shaders, Remove unused Shaders
to clean up your file a bit.

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Now, I'm almost certain that you may INJect any M4 morphs to this Skeleton as well - to apply those morphs, so that the Skeleton matches the shape of M4, but I might be wrong on that. Try it because I think you can:

Select the top line again: "M4 Skeleton"

Go to your Content folder and double-click any shape morph INJ files that you might have for M4. For example, if you have the M4 Morphs ++ pack, just go to Poses > Daz's Michael 4 > Morph Injections and double-click Morphs ++ M4

If it works at all, this one will tell you. It would actually be better to narrow this down to only the morphs for the head to keep unnecessary build-up of data that you just don't need or want - I'm just trying to set up an easy way to tell if the INJ works on the Skeleton - I'm really pretty sure that it does though.

Let me know how this turns out.

murph101

I took your advice and went into the vertex modeler, selected the skull and teeth, then inverted the selection and hid selection. It worked perfectly.

Then I used the magnet tool to morph the head, which worked really well. I tried the M4 injections, but the morphs were so minute that I could not tell. The magnet was able to reshape the skull.

I appreciate your wisdom, intelligence, and dazzling looks!

Thanks!

murph101

Voila

Dartanbeck

Oh cool, Murph!
Super glad that it helped you get it working. To return such an excellent product that sold for such an excellent price would be a real shame.
I try to just start talking about ways that I think will fix the situation - and even if it doesn't nail it down, I'm always at least hoping that it can get us closer in communication towards resolving an issue - and it usually helps - at least in some small way, anyways! :)

You know, I've been really pushing myself in Carrara for a few years now, and I've still never used a magnet! Silly, eh? Instead, I always go into the modeling room and add my own morphs. I really have to try out magnets in Carrara - I've seen some excellent results, yours included! ;)

DUDU

Thank you Dart for your quite detailed explanation!
As I wrote it another place on this forum, one learns every day something on Carrara.
Thank you!
Nice scene Murph !

WendyLuvsCatz

if you ever want to see a really weird morphing skeleton, autofit one to Genesis, make Genesis invisible and dial up creature morphs!
MS lycan, sabbatic goat, RAWart manwolf, the genesis gorilla and mouse to name a few!!!