Dumbest question today: How do I install Vicky 4?
wetcircuit
Posts: 0
Yeah, this is the dumbest question ever, but once upon a time there was a complicated DAZ figure named Vicky4 and she came with a THING that installed on your desktop and you had to "activate" the thing (some sort of app that rewrites the resource files) anytime you add new morphs.... This was such an annoyance, and I trusted DAZ so very little with permissions to rewrite files on my hdd that I tossed this whole mess in the bin and stuck with V3 and other figures who were less problematic...
Ok, update to this century (and a month-long 80% off sale) and I'm giving her a second chance. Does this still happen? I have M4 and he seems to not need all this desktop app-morph loader thingy. Has V4 outgrown it too? Can I just build her runtime as I would with anything else?
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I gather it is something to do with the way it is installed nowadays, the .bat file that initialised the figure is now run automatically when you install, or something like that. It adds the channels needed for the morphs
Of course for someone like me who has highly customised runtimes which are not on the C drive I do have to still run the .bat file if I install a new set of morphs.
I'm on a Mac. I have no :C drive... And all my runtimes are external HDD.
So you are saying I *will* need to do something to V4 everytime I want to install new morphs?
Do you know why this hasn't seemed to be necessary with M4, or perhaps it has happened in the background somehow...?
I'm glad I asked... This is confusing...
Maybe it works differently if you are just installing.
My runtimes have been set up since I was using Poser 6, so not a new installation of the base figures. When I moved to a new computer I simply saved my old P6 runtime and linked to it in my newer Poser installation. This may be why I had to run the .bat file when I installed a previously uninstalled set of morphs.
Sorry I am not much help on this, :red: but I would assume that if M4 worked without needing initialisation, then V4 would as well
Actually, let me ask this another way....
In Carrara I load the "blank" M4, then add the ++Morphs, then add the Capsces morphs... This figure seems to work as I expect. I *think* I have all the morphs... (Do I?)
Then I save this figure as a Carrara file and use him as a "seed" figure. Rather than loading from the runtime I will load future uses of this figure from my Carrara Browser, or by simply opening my .car file.
Can't I simply treat V4 the same way? (and yes I apologize for all this handholding..., This issue really turned me off V4 for years.)
**edit, thank you for reply. I guess this is just going to be one of those "try it and see" situations that I am over-thinking...
I think that is how it works nowadays. I know there has been updates to the base figures, which I haven't bothered with, as my set up works well, and I am a firm believer in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
If you make sure that you have the latest V4 downloads, then it should work.
I have lot's of additional morph packs, A4, Steph 4, Creature morphs and there are others that I haven't bothered with like muscle morphs and Girl 4.
On M4 you can also have Hiro 4, Creature creator, Muscle, ethnic and maybe more that I haven't bothered with
I seem to recall the initializing thing being separate for V4 and then I think V4.2 added it to the install process. If I have a morph set that I want to use and it needs morphs++, I add those to the figure from the Content browser and then the character set and I haven't had any issues except for M4 and the Homo Erectus set.
I recently picked up the Reby Sky bundle and it needed to be initialized during the install process. Even though it is a V4 that needs morphs++ to work, it put a Reby Sky figure in with the other V4 figures such as The Girl, Aiko 4, Stephanie, etc. So I can just double click the icon and load the Reby Sky V4 directly in the scene without having to apply the morphs separately. I could load them onto a V4 that's already in the scene if I want to as well.
I still find the occasional 3rd-party morph that I need Poser to get around the weird syntax issue... but that is a different issue.
Is the idea that we are expected to load V4 from the runtime everytime with all our purchased morphs installed already? Wouldn't that lead to some severe bloat?
...or am I still overthinking it?
You actually have to "load" the morphs you want to use into V4 first (though there are some morph poses that do it for you when you load the character). You can save a copy of V4 with all the morphs you typically use so you don't have to load them each time you use V4. But you won't get figure bloat, except for what morphs you load for V4.
Ahh, ok. That is how I have always used these figures. I have a "seed" figure with the DAZ morphs and the Capsces morphs, and the shaders set up the way I like.... When I want to build a new character I start with that "seed" figure and swap out the maps. If I need additional morphs I load as needed.... I am embarrassed I allowed that cryptic Powerloader thing to keep me away.
Thanks everybody! I'll catch up soon, lol. Now to download 4yrs worth of random V4 products DAZ has given me...
you go to My Library or content dep on set up \Runtime\Libraries\!DAZ click on DzCreateExPFiles-V4.bat as far as I know
:red: what does this do? I need to do this? How many times and when?
That is the .bat file I was talking about. The one you may no longer need if you have the latest downloads, etc.
It is designed to re-write V4's CR2...? To create the extra dial slots so you can assign more morphs?
Or does it make the "base" V4 load with all those morphs readily available?
It is designed to add the technology to be able to inject the morphs such as morphs++ and the others mentioned.
You still have to inject the morphs yourself.
Ahh - hence V4.2 may not need it anymore... Got it! :D
Ahh - hence V4.2 may not need it anymore... Got it! :D
https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/entries/124007-Why-is-the-update-from-Victoria-4-0-to-Victoria-4-X-What-is-ExP-technology-
Oh..., yes, this is the thing I thought was the issue... the ability to add more dials. I remember V3/M3 have "hard" limits.
How would I find out whether V4.2 has already been modified? This is a one-time thing or do I have to run it for each morph pak?
Hmmmm... I've installed and used several free third party character morphs- all using morphs++ without having to initialize the figure. The only one that I had to initialize was Reby Sky. Until I installed her morphs I had forgotten about the initialization process. Then I see Holly's thread here, and I think, wow! What a coincidence!
First image, Summer Glau morphs. Second image, Marilyn Monroe morphs. Both are full body morphs, not just the faces.
Well to be honest the only reason I found out that I needed to run the .bat file again when I installed another set of morphs was because although the morphs were where they should have been and appeared to have worked, the injection into V4 actually didn't work. But as I said I have a highly customised set up and my original installation of V4 and M4 was in poser 6 runtime, which I now use as an additional runtime in my newer version of Poser. It is not a fresh installation.
Basically the only way to test to see if the installation of V4.2 and Morphs++ has worked is to try it out. If the morphs++ does inject and you get the requisite dials in the figure parameters then you are fine.
But if your M4 works, then there is no reason why V4 shouldn't work, as far as I can see.
The way you can tell V4 from V4.2 is the title in the Content browser. Just make sure you load a V4.2 and customize it with your base character and then save it to you objects browser as you normally would for future use.
BTW, in the past I've saved a base V4 to the browser, loaded it into a scene and applied morphs to it from the Content browser and it works just fine.
As I recall, the CR2 defines a certain number of "channels" into which you can load a morph (a morph being the file that contains the adjustment of the vertices, like when we create a morph dial in Carrara....
In V3/M3 it was a certain number. You could load the DAZ morphs AND the Capsces morphs, but at that point you had used up almost all the channels, so you couldn't then load the Predatron morphs because there weren't enough channels to hold all of them. As I recall there was an altered CR2 freebie that was re-written with the extra channels for all these specific morph paks to load together.
One of the features with V4 was they wanted Aiko and The Girl etc to be morph paks, so DAZ knew customers would hit channel limits.... The limit wasn't "small", it was just a limit.... Like with V3, she could hold two very large morph paks at a time, but those particular three very large paks together was past the limit....
Sorry if I am using the wrong terminology.
I'm pretty sure if I am conscious of how many paks I have loaded in V4, I will not hit the limit.... Back then, pro users also talked about "baking" your character morphs into a single morph, to save time and simplify the figure. You could load a blank figure and just load your character in one dial. Then load in the expressions and viseme morphs you need for animation...
HI Holly :)
You should have INJ / REM Morphs for V4 (morph packs) in the runtime/Poses folders,. these can be used to Inject and Remove V4's morphs as you need them,. so,. No bloated figures,. unless you choose to load everything. :)
The "initialise V4" batch file should be a One time only, thing, that's run after installing V4, it sets up V4 to handle the morphs, then each morph pack you install after that "should " be added to the list of available morphs automatically.
DIM should set all of that up automatically.
With Genesis, and Genesis2 All of the morphs, for All of the main figures, (and characters) are available without needing to manually inject/Rem morphs,.
Hope it helps :)
Yeesh... Another reason to stay away from Genesis.
LOL :)
It's seriously not as bad as it sounds. it's easier and lighter to work with, and there's no INJ/Rem poses to remember.
It seems to only actually "load" the morphs/shapes/morph-forms, etc.., when you adjust the slider for that option, so, it's not a massive load on system resources, where a Base genesis would have all the available morphs actually loaded, it's more like, all the sliders are available, and ready, whether you use them or not.
In a DS, scene file,. only a list of the models / shaders/ morphs used in the scene, is saved,. so, a saved DS Genesis scene can be under a hundred KB,.
The problem is that Carrara currently needs to physically save the "vertex object" which can result in a multi MB or GB file.
I think the changed needed to make Carrara work with Genesis were seriously underestimated.
I agree with Andy on all counts - especially the underestimation of getting Genesis to work within Carrara; something that I hope they continue to attempt to perfect.
Starting into working with Genesis in Carrara 8.5 can easily turn one away from it too soon if not enough patience and practice is given oneself. For example, the first Genesis figure loaded in seems to take forever to load, but subsequent Genesis figures then come in like lightning. So in scenes where more than one figure are needed, Genesis can certainly become a boon.
Another thing is that it is so different to work with than previous generations of figure. It required an entire new tab to be added - the Parameters Tab, for shaping and morph-forming poses. It required the addition of the Auto-Fit technology, which first converts items made for previous figures into something that would fit the base figure being made to fit, then the projected morphs are applied. A very cool process. I find it amazing how well it all works.
Genesis is a miraculously designed figure originating from what's called a SubD Cage. This 'cage' uses a fairly low count in polygons, but then helps to describe what happens to the resulting Subdivided outcome. This makes for not only higher resolution details in the rendered figure, but also higher levels of accuracy when using morphs that take the figure ever further from the original shape - like Behemoth, Troll, Gorilla, etc., so that we get better mapping with little to no texture stretch as we get from earlier generation's morph changes - especially when they're drastic. Yet the rigging is still the same, and the Auto-Fit technology has a specific footprint for converting conforming items to fit, which is hugely amazing.
DAZ 3D needs to be (and has been in outlying circles) commended for their achievements in understanding and creating such an advanced piece of interchangeability in a rigged figure.
Additionally adding free material, such as their Publishing Tips Pages (among other published articles), to assist in training anyone whom may want to create development for the figure(s), is a testament to how serious they are in allowing newcomers to become professional Add-On developers. Those pages also illustrate how well they've tooled up DAZ Studio to automate the application of the new technology for us (onto our own creations) in an accurate workflow - with further guidelines towards correcting inaccuracies that may develop, since the automation takes place from a single, default method.
The whole Genesis (both 1 and 2) system is an amazing step into a whole new direction to help anyone and everyone become more skilled at 3d CG creation with less time-consumption and effort - less tedium in the endeavor of simply 'getting the stuff to work properly for everyone'.
DAZ 3D,
I say: BRAVO!!!
Edit:
I don't want to get confusing, but that "single" default method has many possibilities - not just one. Some are drawn from a single, overall default, others from presets that may be selected from a list, and I believe (but not entirely positive) that we can establish our own, custom presets as well.tell me about it, took HALF AN HOUR to load Aiko 6 in this scene, A5 bit quicker A3 & 4 easy as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMnvBnTF1kg
tell me about it, took HALF AN HOUR to load Aiko 6 in this scene
:grrr: waaaaat? I'll pass.
V4 clothes all going on discount all over the Poserverse. I learned how to wait out DAZ a long time ago. I need a wide variety of everyday casual BASICS, not the bleeding edge in posing technology. The "thrill" of exploration is long gone. I just want to write my scripts and animate now.... Maybe around Carrara 11 I'll jump on the Genesis bandwagon.
:grrr: waaaaat? I'll pass.
V4 clothes all going on discount all over the Poserverse. I learned how to wait out DAZ a long time ago. I need a wide variety of everyday casual BASICS, not the bleeding edge in posing technology. The "thrill" of exploration is long gone. I just want to write my scripts and animate now.... Maybe around Carrara 11 I'll jump on the Genesis bandwagon.
I'm no techno-phobe, but I'm with Holly on this one. I see no compelling need to move to Genesis figures. M4 and V4 are plenty lifelike for my purposes.