Option to import figures with morphs

[Rincewind]

I think it would be pretty handy if we would get import options, which allows us to

1. Import the figure as basemesh and all morphs on that figure as a “merged” shapekey

2. Import the figure as basemesh and import all active morphs (morphs which value is not 0) on that figure as seperate shapekeys with their values from the duf file.

Background:

Some reusable assets in Blender (like self made hair or cloth) could be created only once for the basemesh of a figure and than applied to any other importet figure, via adding SurfaceDeform modifier to the asset.

Obstacles

the merge all morphs to one shapekey could be diffcult to implement, after the rigadjustments of the merged morphs must be also merged to keep “Morph Armature” working.

[Thomas Larsson]

You can already import files with Mesh Fitting set to Morphed (Characters). However, this option is of limited use, because it loads shapekeys to meshes but the armature is not morphable. You must also manually transfer the shapekeys to clothes. But it might be useful for some cases, although I have never used it myself.

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[Rincewind]

I also tried out the Morphed option before I wrote this.

1. Morphed is not working as expected. In my test file I’m using a height morph and a muscle morph.
   The height morphs seems to be applied to the mesh (or at least to the armature, not sure here), but are is availibe as seperate morph or shapekey:

   

   The muscle morph seems to completly ignored (also others morph like a fat body morph):

   

2. Even if the Morphed Mesh Fitting option would work like expected it would miss the following features:
   - Option to merge all active morphs into one morph/shapekey (including Armature for the “Morph Armature” feature
   - Respect the active morphs current value (at the moment it seems like you have overwrite those values with a single value manually, at least this is how I would interprate Morph Strenght - can’t test through lack of functionallty ;) )

   

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Issue #1011 was marked as a duplicate of this issue.

[Alessandro Padovani]

My personal opinion.

As I understand it you would like to turn blender into a clone of daz studio. That’s not what diffeomorphic is for, and it isn’t possible anyway because of limitations in blender. The original idea behind diffeomorphic is to use daz studio as an asset generator, then import in blender the “baked” asset, so that the asset is simplified and better manageable in blender.

[Rincewind]

@Alexander Palacios Alexander Palacios

Yes, on a larger scale I try to enable Blender to do some stuff what only DAZ can do right now. But not via Diffeomorphic.
I’m the guy who did the presentation mentioned here: https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/issues/936/blender-support-for-morphed-armatures

However, the feature request I did in this ticket is no attempt to do make Blender into a DAZ clone.
It’s an attempt to simplify my workflow.
With some workarounds I can do everything I mentioned in the initial post, but with lot of manual steps.

1. With Shape Splitter I can combine in DAZ the morphs to one morph, save the morph and than load that morph as custom morph into DAZ
2. If I need seperated morphs for a figure, I can import all the morphs also via custom morphs manually by hand (which may be a lot of work)

After this is both a lot of manual steps, I try just to automate these progress to make my life more simple ;)

And like descriped in the inital post. The usecase is to reuse non DAZ props (hair, cloth) on an importet figure more easily, after we don’t have in Blender auto-fit.

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Rincewind

Thank you Mark for the nice proposal, I’m sure we all hope that you and the blender team can do it. If we could keyframe the rest pose for armatures then ERC morphs will work better. If I understand correctly the actual workaround by Thomas is to enter edit mode for every frame to change the rest pose, thus this requires rendering one frame at a time.

As for importing/merging the daz morphs, please consider that we have anyway to import the custom jcms for most figures, that are not necessarily in the active morphs. Plus there are figures made mixing other figures. So we really need to bake to get something usable in blender, especially for animation. Importing hundreds of driven morphs on a figure may make little sense in blender. But this is my own opinion I know there are others who don’t agree.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Duplicate of #1469.

Resolved with daz favorites.