Character creation/saving... help ?

Rogue7

I've dialed up a custom character for female Genesis 8, saved the morph assets (wish there was an option to just select which dials are in use) made an icon & card image, and the next day i openup Daz, she's missing from the Actor/People/Fantasy Shaping options.... what step am I missing?

 

Syrus_Dante

It sounds like you have done something wrong with saving morph assets it is not meant to do it this way.

The easiest way of saving custom dialed characters is to save a Shape or a Character Preset to the library. The Shape Preset will include all dial values of the morphs the figure has. In addition to that the Character Preset can also include material settings meaning the skin texture and shader settings.

With File>Save As>Support Asset>Morph Asset you can save morphs you just have added to the figure/prop/object in the scene with DForm - Spawn Morph, MorphLoaderPro or ZBrush GoZ for example.

If you realy want a seperate dial for your character like the ones from commercial products you first need to create a New Property with the right-click menu on the Parameters pane 1.Edit-Mode 2.Create New Property. This new property can then be used to store the other morph values. To do that you have to right-click the New Property and choose ERC-Freeze. A dialog will pop up with a list of currently used morphs (careful it can also include unnecessary settings - scroll the list and uncheck anything that dosn't look like a shaping morph). By confiming the ERC-Freeze dialog the New Property will act as a Controller to drive all other morphs that your character is made of. Next you can customize the New Property appearance as you want with an icon/card, color and property group in case the New Property didn't appear in the Actor/People/Fantasy Shaping group.

Once you are done you can save the New Property with File>Save As>Support Asset>Morph Asset to the content library by just selecting this one under Actor/People/Fantasy Shaping. The next time you load the Genesis 8 Female to any scene it should also load the Morph Asset from the library.

Rogue7

So you're saying I need to save the Morph Asset twice? once for the character settings & once again for the character morph

Syrus_Dante

Sorry if the descripton was missleading. I just wanted to say there is an easy way of saving custom characters by Presets into your Content Library.

Then I talked about situations in when you should save morph assets and finaly how you can create a custom Character Controller Property.

No need to save the new property twice just save the morph asset once but only select the one New Property you have added. This new character control property is actualy not a morph by itself it is only a controller storing the morph values. I mean if lateron you make changes you can always save over the original morph asset. But be careful with doing so to select the same Asset Directory, Product Name and so on, so Daz Studio will actualy overwrite the existing file on disk otherwise you will have to deal with duplicated morph files.

Read this if you run into this situation:

Update Custom morphs?

or this thread if you want to delete some:

How to get rid of properties for good

Rogue7

Just to clarify (see attached pic) , just saving this in Morph Assets(s) should save it into any Genesis 8 character I load next session?

Syrus_Dante

Yes this looks right.

However this sentence in your first post confused me.

saved the morph assets (wish there was an option to just select which dials are in use)

I thought you have somehow remebered which morphs where used for creating your character and you had checked all of them in the Morph Asset Save dialog. If so you may have already messed up the Genesis 8 Female morph assets within you Content Library.

Don't worry this is not irreversible becasue Daz Studio does not delete any morph assets you may just have them saved twice (you can check if you get a "duplicate assets found" messages by loading the genesis 8 Female figure). To fix this issue just open your file browser, navigate to the Content Library path you have saved the morph assets in and delete all the DSF files within your Vendor/Product name folder except the one storing Senka 8. Then restart Daz Studio and see if the error messages are gone by loading up Genesis 8 Female.

But if there was an option to select only dials in use you must have been in some other dialog maybe for saving a Character Preset. Most of those preset save dialogs have this option button on the top right to select only currently used morphs but not the Morph Assets Save dialog. The "only select currently used morphs" option is useful if you want to create "non destructive" Shape/Character presets that do not reset all other not in use morphs of the figure to zero if applied.

 

After reading my first post again I realized what may have confused you and why you asked if you have to save the Morph Asset twice.

After you have saved the Morph Asset, dial up your new Character Control Property (Senka 8) and then you can save out a Character Preset in the Content Library pane on the plus button at the bottom of the pane (the current material settings can be saved along with a character preset). But this time the Character Preset will include the information to dial up your new Character Controller and not all individual morphs this character is made of.

Rogue7

Syrus_Dante said:

Yes this looks right.

However this sentence in your first post confused me.

saved the morph assets (wish there was an option to just select which dials are in use)

I thought you have somehow remebered which morphs where used for creating your character and you had checked all of them in the Morph Asset SAve dialog. If so you may have already messed up the morph assets.

It took 5 screenshots to make the list, but yes i went through and ticked the 'right' boxes...

Saved the character preset, and still nothing for my character when i load a new Genesis 8 character in. How peeps get this to work when they're making new characters for sale puzzles me

Syrus_Dante

You should read the Update Custom morphs? thread there I've tried to write down every issue I had with creating custom characters dials. Yes I went to all of the descriped issues but I've learned alot by those mistakes. Took me maybe three weeks to figuring everything out. I hope you find useful information so it dosn't take you that long. Lately I've skipped creating those custom character dials becasue its alot of work and to modify them is also complicated. The default Character Presets are meant to be used by the end user even custom created morphs can be saved embedded with the character presets so why bother with creating characters dials like the vendors/PAs.