Any plan to support aliases?

[Miki3d]

Hi! Still Miki here!
I’m exporting a prop that uses aliases as morphs.
But in Blender these morphs do not get imported.
It can be easily fixed in Daz, I just wonder if aliases will be supported soon or later.
Thanks,

Miki

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[Xin]

Personally I don’t think that’s a good idea. New sliders mean a hit on performance. This might be ok in daz since daz is quite clunky in general due to a lot of other issues, but in Blender you want the viewport to remain responsive and play animations at the highest frame rate possible.

[bouich jules]

exactly even now it’s really hard to get a high frame rate you need do a lot of tweaking, so we can’t add more stuff that make it worst.

[Alessandro Padovani]

I’m interested please, how can it be easily fixed in daz ?

[Miki3d]

Xin and Bouich Jules yea I totally agree, but I guess the support to aliases would be just a little heavier if import/use them .
Alessandro to make aliases work in daz (and then blender) I made the morph connected to the alias visible, so it can be imported and visible in the blender morph list.
Anyway some aliases control more that one morph, that’s why it would be great the support.

[Thomas Larsson]

Aliases are supported to some extent, although I don’t remember exactly how it works. If you look in the terminal window when you load morphs, there are lines starting with “=” when an alias is defined, like this:

= eCTRLEyelidsLowerUpDown ECTRLEyelidsLowerUpDown
= ECTRLEyelidsLowerUpDown eCTRLEyelidsLowerUpDown

* EyelidsLowerUpDown

[Thomas Larsson]

There are a number of tricks to improve performance. I thought I had written a post about that, but I can’t find it so probably I didn’t.

• Use simplify to disable subsurf.
• Don’t load unnecessary morphs.
• Finishing > Finalize Meshes.
• Morphs > Disable Drivers.
• Exclude unused objects from the scene
• Do rough posing with mannequins.

The original idea with the lowpoly meshes was to improve performance too, but the vertex count doesn’t seem to matter so much.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Thank you Miki for the explanation, but I’m new to aliases and can’t understand it. May you please make an example with a real case, I mean how do you get if there’s an alias and how do you fix it. In daz studio I only see sliders and can’t tell what is what.

As for “hidden morphs” in daz, there’s an option in the global settings “make hidden sliders“.

[Miki3d]

Hi Alessandro!
Sure, here’s an example.
NewGen for V8 prop, the “Anus Open” morph is an Alias

and it drives the “PBMG8FAnusOpen” that is hidden in the figure

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When you import the morphs in blender, the “Anus Open” is not visible, so the only way is to unhide the “PBMG8FAnusOpen” on daz, import that morph into the blender figure and then transfer it to the newgen prop.
That way you’ll be able to drive the opening.

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Hope it helps!

And to make the hidden morphs visible I use the “Show Hidden Properties” setting, then I change the hidden flag inside the slider properties, you mean that?

Ciao,
Miki

[Alessandro Padovani]

Thank you Miki for the nice explanation. Couple of questions please.

I don’t get the M A P letters on the right of the morphs channels, I guess that’s how you see if there’s an alias. I’m using daz studio 4.15.0.30 and I don’t see any option here to show them, how do you get those letters ?

Also I don’t see the link to the PBM morph in the parameter settings, but I can “guess“ the driven morph by selecting “currently used“. Is this how you get the driven morph ?

As for the hidden morphs, as I explained above it is enough to enable “make hidden sliders“ in the global settings, this way the “anus open“ will show when you import the custom morphs and you don’t need to change anything in daz studio. At least it works fine here.

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[Miki3d]

Glad to help!
And I didn’t know about the “Make Hidden Sliders”, I’ll check it ASAP! Thanks!
You can see the PBM (partial body morph) reference in the Property Hierarchy, just right click on the alias in edit mode and you’ll see it!

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The Property Hierarchy contains all the references of every morph of the scene!

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Thank you, now I see it I never used edit mode before.

[Alessandro Padovani]

commit 4ca1aab

Renderotica - new-gens-for-victoria-8

I see something strange with anus open though. Don’t know if it’s a bug or me doing something wrong. That is, the morph doesn’t seem to work the same in daz and blender. I understand that ERCs may be involved here but in this case it doesn’t seem to me that ERCs change any bone for this particular morph.

I also tried enabling ERCs and importing all the custom morphs, but this doesn’t seem to work either.

steps:

1. import the test scene ngv8.duf, that’s G8F with new genitalia
2. merge rigs
3. select the geograft and import the custom morph “PBMAnusOpen.dsf“
4. apply the morph to some degree

Below the result of the morph applied in daz and blender. It may look like the morph “scale” is off for some reason.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

test scene for new genitalia

[Thomas Larsson]

Alessandro, in this case you need to mix two different shape keys, cf the Mix Shapekeys section of https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/morphs-section-version-16.html.

[Alessandro Padovani]

I’m using the latest version of NGV8 and in this case I can’t find the “PBMG8FAnusOpen“ separate morph. If I look at the currently used morphs it seems that only “PBMAnusOpen“ is driven by the alias.

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update. Ok I can see PBMG8FAnusOpen if I go to edit mode.

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update. But I can’t find PBMG8FAnusOpen in the custom morphs. Where do I find it ?

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update. Ok I found it in a separate folder, it seems that custom morphs for NGV8 are all spread around so they need a more extensive search to be found. That is, some are not where the custom morphs folder opens up when we add custom morphs. Hope this is useful to someone else having the same issue.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Nope, as for commit 4ca1aab, I can find the PBMG8FAnuOpen.dsf file but I can’t load it as custom morph. When I try I get a vertex count mismatch, this doesn’t happen with the other NGV8 custom morphs. For sure this is tricky to get done. Do I miss something ?

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update. Ok I got it, what I missed is “transfer the PBMG8FAnusOpen shapekey to the genitals ..“, So I have to load PBMG8FAnusOpen to the G8F mesh then transfer it to the geograft. Everything seems to work fine now but it has been a hell to make it work. Below the steps for anyone interested.

steps:

1. load PBMAnusOpen to the geograft
2. load PBMG8FAnusOpen to G8F
3. transfer PBMG8FAnusOpen to the geograft
4. merge the geograft
5. mix PBMAnusOpen and PBMG8FAnusOpen to a single morph

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[Thomas Larsson]

Yes, I agree that it is a nuisance. Personally I prefer Golden palace which doesn’t use such tricks.

[Miki3d]

Mmm to me it works without mixing, I also renamed the label of the PBMG8FAnusOpen morph to 0106 - AnusOpen so I see that name in the NewGen morph list inside Blender.
Here are my steps:

1) Edit the PBMG8FAnusOpen morph with a text editor, make it visible and change the label name to 0106 - AnusOpen

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2) In Blender, import the custom Morphs for NewGen

3) Import NGV8 custom morphs on G8F

4) Transfer Shapekeys from G8F to NewGen

5) Now 0106 - AnusOpen is visible in the morphs list and drives both the body and the Geograft

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Done

[Thomas Larsson]

Yes, I also noted that it works without mixing, at least if you load the morphs in the right order (don’t remember which that was). Mixing was necessary with the old morphing system, but in the new system the G8F morph drives the genitals morph and thus both shapekeys.