Merging Geografts with custom morphs

[Former user]

Hello,
I’ve been trying to merge geografts with HD meshes following the guide provided by Thomas. All went well except when I tried to merge while the geograft mesh has custom morphs.

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Here is what happened when I tried:

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As you can see, vertices are not merged. It still works if I merge them by hand but I don’t know what causes the issue here.
When I try with the non-HD mesh, everything works as intended. Also, this is Victoria 8 with Golden Palace, nothing else.
It seems that with the HD mesh, the vertices cannot be merged for some reason.

EDIT: I noticed that fixing the mesh by hand messed up the rig. It could be posed but I was unable to make the mesh follow the whole rig in Object mode.

[Thomas Larsson]

Does this problem only happen with HD meshes?

Are both body and geograft HD? Do they have multires modifiers?

[Former user]

Only the body has a multires modifier, the geograft has a subdiv modifier. It does happen only with HD meshes.

To give more context, I followed this guide: https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2020/09/hd-meshes-and-geografts.html

I noticed that some meshes, when exported in HD, had only the multires mesh in the HD Collection. Then I tried to merge the golden palace geograft on the HD mesh which worked, but had to manually assign the rig to the mesh and It could only be posed, not moved around.
Finally, when I added custom morphs to the geograft before merging it with the HD mesh, this issue appeared. The vertices are visibly not merging correctly.

It seems that the workflow to use geografts with HD meshes is a bit difficult to get right, especially with multiple geografts on HD meshes.

[Thomas Larsson]

I cannot reproduce these problems, but I followed the updated guide, https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2020/09/hd-meshes-and-geografts-revisited.html. That workflow is simplified considerably.

The geograft is only added to the HD collection if Blender succeeds in rebuilding subdivisions. Oddly enough, Blender failed to rebuild subdivisions for golden palace on G8F, but succeeded for GP on Victoria 8.

[Alessandro Padovani]

I can confirm the issue, daz studio 4.15, blender 2.92, commit ed78d6a.

steps:

1. in daz studio export Victoria 8 with GP at HD resolution, this includes entering the geometry editor
2. import in blender and merge rigs
3. import some custom morphs for GP, I used vagina open 1 2 3 as example
4. merge geografts

This will break the mesh.

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The solution is to transfer shapekeys before merging the geograft. This way the merging works fine.

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Even so, as a side effect after merging I lose the custom morphs sliders. But I can use the blender sliders instead so this is not a big issue. Then when I apply the custom morphs with the blender sliders they work fine for GP, but the whole figure is also deformed in a strange way. I’m not sure if I have to select specific options to transfer shapekeys in this case.

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[Thomas Larsson]

You should merge rigs before loading morphs. In that way the shapekeys are driven by the right armature.

[Alessandro Padovani]

I did merge the rigs before loading the custom morphs for GP. Sorry that I wasn’t clear, adding the step now in the description.

[Thomas Larsson]

Hm. I still don’t see the gap, but I agree that the Custom Morphs panel does not appear when the rig is selected. It used to. The Mesh Shape Keys panel is for undriven shapekeys, which are probably stored in the mesh object and hence lost when merging geografts.

[Alessandro Padovani]

POSSIBLE SOLUTION

Ok I found a solution. Not sure if this is the intended workflow so Thomas please let me know if you can improve on this.

steps:

1. in daz studio export Victoria 8 with GP at HD resolution, this includes entering the geometry editor
2. import in blender and merge rigs
3. duplicate GP
4. merge geografts, this will merge GP without custom morphs and leave you the GP duplicate on the scene
5. import some custom morphs in the GP duplicate, I used vagina open 1 2 3 as example
6. transfer shapekeys from GP duplicate to Victoria 8 using the “geograft” method

This way everything works fine.

edit. May be the plugin could automate the duplicate in the merge geografts tool. That is, the user loads the morphs on the geograft, then the merge geografts tool first creates a duplicate without morphs to merge, then transfers the morphs, then deletes the duplicate. That’s what I did by hand.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

update. Not sure if this is relevant, in my tests it is not because I get the gap anyway. But I imported the custom morphs without drivers, otherwise I get driven morphs with pink sliders that I can’t use myself. These particular morphs don’t seem driven by bones anyway.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

update. Thomas I see you say that with Victoria 8 you get a HD GP. While I don’t. That is, I get a HD V8 and a subdivided GP, same as Willfre. May be this is why you don’t get the gap. So you may try with G8F instead to get the gap.

[Thomas Larsson]

Not sure why I didn’t see the problem before, but now I do. Fixed in last commit.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Thomas you got it commit 4a24e4e works great here. Apart that the plugin sliders for the custom morphs are lost after merging. But we can use the blender sliders instead so this isn’t a big issue. Personally I find it more elegant to use the blender sliders.

As for me we can mark as resolved if @Willfre has nothing to add.

steps:

1. in daz studio export Victoria 8 with GP at HD resolution, this includes entering the geometry editor
2. import in blender and merge rigs
3. import some custom morphs for GP, I used vagina open 1 2 3 as example
4. merge geografts, this will lose the custom morphs sliders but we can use the blender sliders instead

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[Joe Morris @ FAST Animation Studio Toolz]

Thank you so much for this solution I really appreciate this library of knowledge