Issue with importing NGV8 Morphs to main body

[mller]

I recently started using the 1.6.1 version and encountered a problem when importing the NGV8 morphs that are meant for the main body, not the genital graft. If you simply import all morphs with drivers, the morphs will not show up as custom morphs in the menu and the JCM drivers will also be broken.

Responsible for the broken JCM drivers are the morphs, that i marked red. If they are excluded when importing, the JCMs work, however the morphs will still not show up in the menu. Those morphs have in common, that they add drivers to the thigh bones.

I read in a different thread that version 1.6.1 automatically determines the driver on custom morphs now, so I went back to an older version of Blender with 1.5.1 installed, to test importing the morphs with “Driver Type” set to “Either” and it worked a lot better.
I don’t know if the new morph system allows it, but getting back the ability to choose which drivers to import would be extremely useful, since I usually only want the JCM drivers anyways.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

NGV8 requires to mix shapekeys. Also you need to use the 1.6.2 development version to report bugs since old versions may not be fixed.

https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/morphs-section-version-16.html

[mller]

So I just tested it with 1.6.2 and it seems to have gotten even worse. Now the JCM drivers don’t work at all, even if I exclude the morphs mentioned earlier.

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[Thomas Larsson]

The bug with the missing jcm drivers has been fixed in the latest commit. As for the rest, it seems to happen because all drivers are hidden. More investigations are necessary to figure out why. In the meantime you can enable the global setting Make Hidden Sliders.

[Thomas Larsson]

OK, I think I have understood what is going on. Consider the AnusOpen morphs for definiteness. Both PBMAnusOpen and PBMG8FAnusOpen are hidden properties. The visible property is 0106 - AnusOpen, which is defined in an alias file. Alias files have hitherto been ignored, but in the last commit they are considered for custom imports. There was an old kludgy solution which is still used for the standard morphs. To import the AnusOpen morphs, we have to import three files with two different active meshes.

To NGV8 import

• alias_new_gens_V8_1840_0104 - AnusOpen.dsf
• PBMAnusOpen.dsf

To G8F import

• PBMG8FAnusOpen.dsf

Then there will be one visible morph called 0106 - AnusOpen, which drives the two others. After we merge geografts the situation is like this:

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[Thomas Larsson]

The same thing in DS:

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[Thomas Larsson]

As for the jcms, they work as long as we don’t import the file CTRLGensC-NGV8.dsf. This file contains a property the indicates that the character is G8F rather than G3F. Unfortunately, loading the file sets this property to zero, which means that all jcms are also zero. That’s why it must not be imported.

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Now, if you have imported it, you can nevertheless get the jcms by setting the armature property CTRLGensC-NGV8(fin) = 1 manually.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

I feel using “make hidden sliders“ and “mix shapekeys“ is easier for the user than trying to understand what he has to import and what not. I mean in general it may happen that some morphs are missing as in #964, and the workaround is to “make hidden sliders“.

The plugin tries to simplify the importing and not all cases are considered, this is by design to avoid long loading times as explained in #683.

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note. Related to this but not quite the same there’s also the proposal by Wilfre #1011 to try to import the custom morphs for a figure automatically, without the user having to search for them. But this has not evolved, probably because it would be too complex in the daz exporter.

note. As I understand it, the “solution” in the official daz bridge is the user has to select the morphs he wants to export on the daz side. Then in blender they are all visible and sliders driving other sliders are ignored and not imported. Not that selecting the morphs in daz is much easier than finding them in the custom morphs folder. I mean it is always a mess anyway.

[mller]

Ok thank you, I appreciate the explanation. Using 1.6.2.1036 I wasn’t able to make “0106 - AnusOpen” appear as a visible property when importing “alias_new_gens_V8_1840_0104 - AnusOpen.dsf”. I’m not sure wether the commit to make alias files importable is missing or wether I’m doing something wrong.
However I agree with Alessandro that it’s probably easier to just make hidden sliders and merge the corresponding shapekeys into one, unless there can be a system to automatically rebuild the entire slider driver structure from daz.
I think the option to make hidden sliders should also be displayed in the import window, so that it’s easier to find for users, and maybe even be active by default. Otherwise all those shapekeys will be locked with unusable drivers after importing.
Aside from that it’s probably most important to fix “CTRLGensC-NGV8.dsf” breaking the JCM drivers, since that will trip up every user who doesn’t know about this issue.

[Alessandro Padovani]

It must be said that, if the user isn’t aware, then he would import only the JCM and PBM files so the CTRL files would not harm.

[Thomas Larsson]

, the fix was introduced in 546f491, 1.6.2.1037.