Spawn FBM or merging dials in DAZ Studio?

Tigerschnecke

I have asked a number of people to create faces on G2F using a few hundred morph dials and saved these as presets. Now, I would like to merge the individual dial-settings into a single new morph for each of these faces. I.e., what I ultimately want to do is to create an average face from the 20 complex presets that I have collected.

Is there a way to spawn a combined morph out of all of the adjustments for a face? Or would I have to export each one as an .obj, and then reload it via Morph-Loader? It's all inside DS, so I was wondering if there would not be a better way. E.g., I tired batch-importing the presets via GenX2 but that does not seem to work, perhaps because it is from G2F to G2F?

Richard Haseltine

You could create new morphs, but there are a couple of reasons not to. First, if you started from third-party or DAZ morphs then you couldn't distribute the results, while you can distribute presets; second, some shapes need correction morphs to work correctly with expressions (for example, things like eye closing) and if you spawn a new morph you break the automatic linkage between morph, expression and correction.

If you want to have a way of dialling up each custom combination to an arbitrary level one option would be to create a master slider to control them all - because this is working the original morphs it will be distributable (it's just the linkage, not the original morph data) and it will trigger any correction morphs needed for expressions etc. Right-click on the parameters pane and put it into Edit mode. Right click and Create New Property - give it a name, set its limits if desired (you may want a 0 to 1 range instead of the default -1 to 1, for example) and accept. Now zero the figure shape (from the Edit menu), set the new property to 1, and apply the compound morph preset you want to use. Right-click on the new property and select ERC Freeze. Double check your new property is set as the controller and that the desired morphs are the only things listed as being controlled - assuming all is well click Accept. Make sure it works, then use File>Save as>Support Assets>Morph Asset to save it (the Author and product names determine the folder names in the \Data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 2\Female\Morphs folder for your property). Repeat for the other shapes. You should now have a set of defined properties you can use to mix the shapes.

Tigerschnecke

Thank you for the quick and detailed response! I am not looking to distributing any of the results, I just want to create renders that are based on a clean average of the settings that participants have adjusted. Their task was to create a particular type of face with a given set of dials, and I want to see what they came up with on average. I also excluded expressions (e.g., the eye opening) from this, and basically just kept morphs relating to the facial shapes. The problem is just that there are still so many morphs that it will be very time consuming to compute an average of all of the individual dials first (ca. 400 dials x 2 conditions x 20 participants per condition).

Richard Haseltine

The technique I suggested should be manageable (possibly more so that the route you'd have to follow to generate a new basic morph). It might be scriptable, but I'm not sure about that.

Tigerschnecke

OK, yes, I will try it. I initially thought that the controllers would just wipe each other out completely - but actually, it should work, I think.

Richard Haseltine

The main potential issue is that a lot of morphs have limits, so if you have the various compound parameters set high enough the potential exists to drive a morph to a value outside its permitted range. However if you are keeping the total of the combined parameters to around one that shouldn't happen.

Tigerschnecke

Thank you again - it works quite well that way! Just one related question: Whenever I save the morph assets at the end, DS creates a new subfolder that has another copy of all the dependent morphs, i.e., I end up getting a lot of copies of what appears to be the same except for the one new shape that I froze. I have tried to merge everything into just one folder at the end, discarding everything except the controller shape-files and a single copy. It seems to work that way, I am just not sure if I might be overlooking something and these might be needed after all?

Richard Haseltine

I'm not sure why it would do that - where are you saving (the directory is listed at the top of the option dialogue when saving), do you have multiple content directories?

Tigerschnecke

The asset directory is always the same - but I think giving it a different product name for each shape might be doing this. Should I stick with the same product name for everything (sorry if that is a rather stupid question)?

Richard Haseltine

Product Name determines the folder (within the author folder) used for the morphs you are saving - it shouldn't affect the morphs that were already saved, or cause them to be duplicated.