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Dawn Clone in DS

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
From my understanding "projection templates" are made to make rigging easier.
Eg, you've worked hard on rigging a skirt for Dawn, you plan on making more skits for Dawn so you use the first one as a projection template so it acts kind of like a shortcut to rig your other skirts. I hope that makes sense?

And Auto-fit uses a "clone", I kind of think of it as a "shape" eg: make a V4 clone to use with Dawn by making V4 look exactly like Dawn (size, shape, everything), the clone fools the clothing so it thinks that its going on V4 but "stretches" it to fit Dawn) this is not quite right but hopefully gives you the picture of what's happening.
 

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
I found this from the old HW forum from Paul:

Projection Template = nothing more than a clothing item being used as a template for auto-fit or transfer utility. Found in a specific DAZ folder dir. You can use any DS rigged clothing as a template to project from. So if you make a skirt, you can use this as a Projection Template for all your other skirts and it doesn't have to be moved to the Projection Template folder to work.

Auto-Fit = USER based function to fit clothing to a figure in DS. It uses the default algorithm of the Transfer Utility, so it should NEVER be used by content creators. The Transfer Utility allows you to control all the options of the projection, where Auto-Fit does not.

Transfer Utility = Tool to transfer rigging, morphs, groups, surfaces, etc from figures to clothing or other figures. This is your friend if you want to get Poser content into DS. It has the ability to merge hierarchies which will combine bones and weights from 2 figures/clothing items, as long as the bones have unique names. So say you have a skirt and a shirt, you can combine their rigging into a dress.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Thank you for all the info and links, Rae! Very helpful! I have been using the Transfer Utility for years, but I didn't know it could merge weights from 2 outfits into a single one. It's certainly one of the most powerful things in DS. ^___^
 

Leana

Enthusiast
Autofit works in 2 steps:
1. It adapts the mesh to fit your target figure: that’s where it needs a clone morph, so it knows what adjustments to make
2. It rigs the modified mesh for your target figure automatically

A projection template is a tool you use to rig your item: basically it’s a default set of weights that you use as a base to rig your item. The default option will be just using the weights for the target figure, but you could have other templates aimed at specific type of items, the typical example being having one for dresses which would rig the skirt with specific bones rather than just following the legs (which is rarely a good option for big skirts).
If you look for example at SY Ultra Templates for Genesis figures at Daz, they’ll give you templates for loincloths, long dresses or tunics, and so on.

Using a specific projection template is more or less like using a similar type of item as the source for the rigging instead of using the target figure directly, eg copy the rigging of another Dawn dress to rig your dress instead of starting from Dawn rigging and then adjusting the skirt. The template is a kind of merchant resource donor rig intended for that.

Both autofit and the transfer utility can use those templates.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Sounds like projection templates are like what we used to do by copying the rigging from an existing "donor" outfit instead of the figure. This used to be the standard for Poser legacy rigging before DS existed. I have started using less of this once we started using modern rigging, mostly because the weights are now vertex-dependent, so projections from one outfit to another can yield varied results that nearly always need adjustments in Poser anyway. DS does some form of smoothing when projecting morphs, while Poser doesn't. As a result, I tend to get much cleaner weights in DS than I do in Poser. Conversely, morph adjustments are a breeze in Poser with the Morphing Tool, while DS has nothing in-house to do it. This is a reason DS has become part of my toolset, even if I only use it for content creation. It handles the weight map projection part better than Poser, where the Transfer Utility is heaven-sent.
 
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