Question about exporting morphs of a custom beard in DAZ 4.11

login@staay.io

Hello there

I'm currently working on a VR movie using DAZ characters with the iClone animation pipeline. Great stuff!
I got stuck with the following problem, hoping for someone to point me the way.

I imported and transferred a low-poly custom beard (bought from a 3d marketplace) to the facial rig inside DAZ.
I saved the beard as FigurePropSupportAsset, and can i apply it to any Genesis8 character and instantly use all available morphs.
If i move any shape slider on my character Genesis8 character, the beard nicely matches every facial deformation.

https://ibb.co/GnRvkRW

When i export the character including beard from DAZ as fbx and import it to Character Creator using Transformer, the morphs on the beard get lost.

https://ibb.co/yWX2zrY

 

When i import the fbx to Modo, there are morphs on the character as expected, but not a single morph shape on the beard.

So obviously, the problem is that DAZ doesn't export any morphs on my beard.

What am I not seeing here?

I'm using DAZ Studio 4.11 Pro with Genesis8.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks

Andy

 

 

EDIT: Image links did not work

 

 

 

Leana

DS includes an “auto-follow” feature which automatically adjusts a conformed item to follow the morphs if the figure tagged as “auto-follow”. The beard doesn’t actually have those morphs, they’re created by DS on the fly, that’s the reason they’re not exported.

If you want the beard to have morphs when exported you’ll need to create actual morphs in the beard to match those of the figure.

login@staay.io

Thank you Leana for the info!

I know the process of creating morph shapes inside traditional modeling software like Maya. It is quite time consuming, especially when it has to fit to an underlying sets of morphs from the face.

Is it possible to create the morphs in DAZ in a somewhat generic way? (eg. pull up slider smile-left, save morph, pull up slider smile-right, save morph, and so on..)

Do you know of any plugin that might help me in that regard?

Leana

I don’t know of any plugin which would do that, no.

I’m not sure if simply trying to re-save the automatically generated morph as a morph asset with the right name would work as I never tried.

If it doesn’t, the way to do it would be this:

1. Export the various morphs as obj:
   1. Apply one morph to the figure wearing the beard
   2. Export the morphed version of the beard as obj
   3. Remove the morph you used
   4. Repeat for each morph you want in your beard
2. Load only the beard in DS, then for each morph:
   1. Set all morphs to 0 on beard
   2. use Morph Loader to create a morph from one of the obj 
   3. save it as a morph asset with the same name as the corresponding figure morph so it replaces the automatic one

But yes, that would take a lot of time  

login@staay.io

Many thanks for your detailed elaboration! Unfortunately that is too time consuming for our budget.

For now we are testing how the beard looks without actual morphs on it - given that the camera distance is a few meters away from the head - we think it might work.