transfer shapekey to rest pose ?

[Alessandro Padovani]

There’s some request at the daz forum if it is possible to transfer a shapekey to the armature rest pose. So that, for example, one could shape the figure in blender then run the tool to transfer the shape to the armature. I don’t know if there’s an addon to do this, we usually fit a metarig by hand.

Then I have no idea if this is difficult or doable at all so just pointing to get an answer.

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/527501/

[Xin]

I don’t think that’s a good thing to automate (it’s not trivial either, maybe you could use averaged vertex coordinates based on vertex weights to get the new location?).

Rigging should be precise to get good results, which requires manual testing. It’s not hard to adjust the rig manually for a quick base rig, so any automation wouldn’t be very useful.

Depending on the mesh, sometimes the daz rig wouldn’t be enough no matter the distribution of bones. That’s why a lot of daz assets don’t deform well at all and require tons of shape keys for “corrections”. In general, if you are making your own mesh in Blender, you might as well rig it properly (this is a task Rigify accelerates quite well). No reason to stick to the “daz way” of trying to fit a rig in all meshes. Notice that daz shape keys also wouldn’t work well in that generated/deformed mesh either, so it’s not clear why you would ever want to stick to a daz rig in such case.

The way I see it, the whole point of the addon is to get rid of the constraints imposed by daz, and enjoy the full power of Blender.

[Thomas Larsson]

As Xin says, it is difficult to relate the joint location to the vertex locations, especially since most affected vertices are located on one side of the joint. So I don’t know how to do this in a general way.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Thank you Thomas and Xin for your answer and explanations. I’ll leave this open for a while just in case someone wants to add comments or ideas, then I’ll close.