Creating Morphs
kaotkbliss
Posts: 2,914
I thought I was doing this correctly, but apparently not :(
I took a worm object and sent to Hexagon, I used Hex's bend tools to make a curve for the worm then exported as an object. (I did this for many different types of bends)
I then went into Daz, selected the worm and loaded all the objects into the morph loader pro
They all show up in the worm morphs, but all any of them do is scale the size of the worm :( No bending
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Comments
They probably do bend, but the scaling is off so it doesn't look like they are doing anything else.
You need to match the import scale to the scale you exported at....so if you used the Daz Studio scale to export you need to make sure that Morph Loader is using the same scale to import them.
So restart Studio, as long as you didn't save the morphs, and reimport one...making sure you have the correct scale. If that works, go ahead with the rest of them.
I have made a lot of morphs in Hexagon and done this sort of thing. But I have noticed that if the bounding box size increases when you are making the morph you seem to get unexpected behaviors in some of the morphs. All sorts of distortions. I had the idea of putting an invisible object in the original base file that would force the bounding box to be bigger so that I could bend things like hoses and have them stay inside the bounding box of the original base object. I am still trying to sort out how to reliably make bending morphs. I have had lots of linear morphs (expand, extend etc.) work just fine but bending hoses often results in strange distortions which seem to happen if the bending goes outside the original objects bounding box. Also there are a lot of checkboxs in the Hexagon export to obj screen and apparently you want nearly all of them unchecked except I think flip textures and maybe export UVs. I tend to use morph loader advanced but I am not sure it matters which of the two I have available I use. Bending hoses has been something I have also been unable to seem to get to work just right. To get things to fit in Hexagon I tend to import them at 0.1 scale and then export them at 10x scale to restore them to what DAZ exported them as. And I do not use the function to send to Hexagon. I export the OBJ and then open Hexagon and import it and save it as a Hexagon file for good measure. If someone can figure out how to bend hoses without making them multiple segments and then creating an "actor" and adding bones and using pose I would love to hear why this gives me such fits also. Bends seem to be a special case somehow.
Basically, that's the best way for a hose.
That may be what's happening with me. The original bounding box just barely fits the worm so when I bend the front or back half into a curve, the bounding box gets bigger. Also, I guess I should mention that it was not changing shape at all, just scaling.
I will try those 2 things mentioned (making sure scaling matches in both Daz and Hex and using a bigger bounding box, perhaps an invisible cube) as soon as I get a chance.
Thank you both for your suggestions.
*edit*
Maybe I was wrong and didn't see it before, but it does bend when it finally hits 100% for the morph, but by then it's so tiny LOL
I did manage to get the morphs loaded and working properly. Hex was renaming the object when I used the bend utility on it and I forgot you can change the name. Once I changed the name in Hex to match the name of the object in DS, then I could send back over the bridge to DS and it would ask to create a morph.
I never did get the object using morph loader to work properly though.
I have a model of an electric air pump I made from a blank screen in Hexagon based on a real world one. I wanted to add a hose and an inflation adapter to it, short but able to bend up. Never could get that to work. Morphs would load fine but then when you tried to bend just the hose the pump would distort and rotate and flatten and go crazy.
I tried exporting from DAZ to Hexagon. Usually I just save to an OBJ, work on it in Hexagon 2.5 and then save the morph file and back in DAZ import the base, select the base, and then edit object and use morph loader advanced to add the morphed file to it. Works fantastic for all sorts of changes but goes bonkers with bends.
Scales and extends all work fine. I finally found out what Base Camp was for and had a use for it but did not like the dome so I exported one of the stock bases to Hexagon and made from scratch a new glass dome that could be made taller and shorter and also the rounded top could be flattened or even dished down or made into a tall bullet shape etc. Zero problem. Works great. I have even made versions with labels on them like "Caution Creature Bites".
But bending this pump hose never has worked. Indeed even with letting DAZ send it to Hexagon and being very careful I get total acid trip garbage with only 10% bend attempt. Even the pump body is horribly twisted and distorted.
So I went back to my original Hexagon 2.5 file of the pump fitted with the desired short hose segment and adapter. Then made a box to go around it rather tightly but allow for upward bend without violating the bounding box. Then I made sure it was all one item and all the material surfaces still existed and now there was a new surface with a texture for "Box" that could be invisible but which forced the bounding box. Now I bent the hose again.
It worked up to a point. I think the method I used to bend the hose was not quite suitable. But at 100 percent bend it is just right. Inbetween there are some distortions but like I said that is because I did not hold my mouth right when bending. But the bounding box trick apparently works. The pump body says put and sized and just the hose segment bends inside the volume of the new forced bounding box. I think if I figure out the problem with settings other than 0 or 100% I can get what I want but for now I can live with just being able to have the hose segment straight or bent at a useful angle.
And no I did not flip the file, I just rotated view in Hexagon because that is easier for me to select segments and bend each one. I probably should have used another method or made absolutely sure I only bent in one axis and then moved only in the Y direction. I touched it up a bit by moving a bit here and there in the X axis and I think that is what makes the things like 50% bend a little bit distorted.
Morphs move the vertices in a linear fashion so the are not very good for things that have to move in an arc.
Thanks jestmart! That bit of insight snaps all sorts of things into focus. Morphs move the verticies in a linear fashion. That also explains why such things like curves and bends tend to work at 0 percent and 100 percent and are often wierd inbetween or outside that range. I have also learned to listen carfully to mjc1016 and now why one runs into situations where the best way to get things to work as you want is to segment them and add bones and make them an actor you can pose instead of morph.