Sholaces imported strangely.

[Indulge Me]

I have a Genesis 8 figure and gave her some Hitop footwear. This footwear has a left and right shoelace, parented with something called “Rigid Follower” (which I don’t know much about in Daz). When I import this into Blender with Easy Import (+ merge rigs), the laces move OK with the foot until I Connect IK Chains. When I do that there’s an adjustment to the rig and the laces are in the wrong place. They also stop following the bone.

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I tried various things, such as changing the parent in Blender and merging the meshes. The latter I guess doesn’t move them when the rig moves because they’re not included in any weight map (at least that was my interpretation).

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So, is this a known issue or do I need to do something to make a rigid follower in Blender?

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Parenting to vertices is a little different in blender in that you select 3 vertices instead of a generic area, you can select the lace then vertex parent to the shoe. I don’t think this is supported by the importer, may be Thomas wants to look at it and provide some support, though it’s not hard to do by hand.

note for Thomas. A “quick” way would be to use the automatic object to object vertex parenting when a rigid follower is detected in the duf. That’s parent > vertex triangle. This will choose the nearest 3 vertices, not the same as the daz surface but it’s not possible anyway, and should produce a similar result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4x6DmDfc8

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/scene_layout/object/editing/parent.html

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[Alessandro Padovani]

update.

I see Thomas did something with vertex parenting in the last commit you may want to try it. I don’t have any asset with rigid followers that I know of, so can’t test myself.

[Thomas Larsson]

Yes, the plugin used to have very rudimentary support for vertex parenting. I don’t have this asset either and am not sure that vertex parenting is the culprit, but I have tested other clothes with rigid buttons, and they work much better after the last commit. What seems to work is to do the following steps:

1. Import the scene.
2. Eliminate empties.
3. Merge rigs.

Easy import does those things in the right order.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

question. @Thomas, is it mandatory to eliminate empties for rigid followers to work ? I mean, I just tested and vertex parenting can be used with empties too in blender. So if a object is parented to a empty that’s vertex parented to another object, it should work.

This would allow for example to use a empty to displace the vertex parenting from the object. Not that I think this is widely used in daz.

[Indulge Me]

Tried the latest (1.7.0.1448) and same problem. Laces “pop off” the front of the shoes after Connect IK Chains, as in the image below. However this time they follow at least, when I pose the leg. It’s fixable by simply moving them back to the correct position in object mode.

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[Thomas Larsson]

Alessandro, it shouldn’t be necessary to eliminate empties, but my test case worked better if I did. Otherwise the empties didn’t seem to be rotated property. Not sure why.

Indulge, if you do easy import, you may want to disable Apply Transforms.

What is the parent type of the shoelaces? After empties have been eliminated.

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[Indulge Me]

The parent type is Genesis 8 Female, Bone, LShin.

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[Thomas Larsson]

I see. Well, in that case the last commits do not help you, although they are useful for other assets. I will check something with bone parents then.

[Alessandro Padovani]

@Thomas, from what I understand but I may be wrong not having any asset to test.

In daz studio the rigid follower is child of left shin and the shoelace is child of the rigid follower. This is how things are commonly setup for rigid followers as explained in the tutorial I linked above.

In blender it doesn’t really matter what bone the rigid follower is child of, since it will be linked to the object geometry anyway. So in this case the plugin should import a empty (the rigid follower) which is vertex parented to the shoe object (not the shin bone), then the shoelace object should be parented to the empty.

If we eliminate empties then the shoelace object should be vertex parented to the shoe object, again not the shin bone.

As example below there’s suzanne vertex parented to G8F. It is parented to the mesh, not to the armature.

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[Thomas Larsson]

Indulge, Connect Bone Chains (new button name) should work correctly now.

[Alessandro Padovani]

There's no reply in 4 days so I guess it's resolved.

[Indulge Me]

Going to try it out now. Use current beta release I guess?