Converting Gnobbit to DS a wip

[Pendraia]

So I weakened and bought Gnobbit. As someone who mainly uses DS I thought I would document the process of converting Gnobbit to DS so anyone else who wishes to do so can have a go too!

I loaded him into DS and initially he did look a bit bent out of shape but I selected him in the scene tab and then using the triangle and line menu, selected edit/rigging/Convert figure to weight mapping. This fixed any bendiness that shouldn't have been there. Left the default settings(triax) and this is what I have so far. Hair is parented because it was following the ears and I have to play with that and see if I can get it work nicely as a conformer. Clothing when loaded triggers autofit and I just hit accept. The Textures folder load okay but eyes and tongue needed to be loaded via the surface menu. I haven't played with any surface settings yet. So far poses have only needed minor adjustments. I may need to do more fine tuning as I experiment but so far it's good.

Last one as I'm about to go out...eyes closed, satisfied and I've tweaked the lighting from plastic to matt and skin

Matt is the pants...skin is gnobbit itself.

 

[Pendraia]

Next job was to go into the parameters and use the cog to stop the morphs from being hidden and test the morphs. Leave them hidden it appears that the morphs in the imported list are actual morph control morphs of some sort and are linked to the morphs in the head dial. You may wish to change the path to Morphs/Hidden instead of Morphs/Imported.

 

[Pendraia]

Okay...the head dials all work. I wondering if the ones that don't work might by JCM's so I'm off to have a look.

Checked and yes they do. The eye blink ones that weren't working by themselves come on when I use blink left. So now I know that I need to set them as hidden files and as mcm's.

See green writing above...this was correct that these morphs are linked to the head dials.

 

[Ghostman]

This will be interesting to follow.

 

[Lorraine]

Thank you for trailblazing, Pen. I'll be following behind you Wednesday

 

[Pendraia]

Thanks...I've got him saved as a character and I've been playing with weightmapping to see if I can improve on the automatic conversion. I'm still learning to weightmap so it's a slow process. I'm working on smoothing some of the bends. He's quite usable without doing this at this point I'm being a bit anal. People doing this for their own use could even just add a smoothing modifier just to help smooth out some of the bends. At this point he doesn't make full use of the DS triax mapping but I think it might worth trying to do some bulge maps for when using twist, bend and side to side together.

 

[Lorraine]

And that last bit just whisked right over my head. Every time I think I'm making progress I read something like that and my brain goes "Nope, just...nope". Sigh. I'll be one of the afore mentioned 'people doing it for their own use'. But, hey, I'll have him and be able to use him so what the heck

 

[Pendraia]

Don't stress Lorraine...the weightmaps aren't too bad even without adjustment for personal use. If it was going into a store as a product the standard is higher.

You've added smoothing modifiers to clothing this is just the same you can add smoothing modifiers if it starts giving you ugly creases at the joints and it will smooth it out some. I'm playing with the weight maps because
a. I want to see if I can improve it.
b. when it converts from Poser it doesn't actually use the bulge maps that you can have with triax. So I want to see what I can do with them.
I posted this in the other thread but I may as well post here as well...I got distracted
It's Gnobbits fault...he kept complaining he was lonely.

 

[Lorraine]

I can see why the Wizard got sick of him

I wasn't so much stressing as "woosh, there goes another one". There is so much under DS's bonnet I know nothing about. But thank you for the reassurance

 

[Pendraia]

No problem...

 

[shadownet]

Oh, I am so happy to see this happening. I told Ghostman I would convert his little Guy to Daz Studio but I am still trying to find my way around inside DS as its still fairly new to me and even though I understand rigging I am having a hard time getting the tools to work because I usually am doing something wrong. I did get Gnobbit converted much as you have done, except there were a few places where the wm needed to be touched up and I was having some problems there. I think all the morphs are working right, though might need to check the jcm on mine as he does not seem to pose the same way in DS as in Poser. Something off there.

 

[Karth]

Nice work Pendraia

 

[shadownet]

I wanted to clarify what I wrote. I told Ghostman he needed to have a DS version of his Gnobbit and that I would try to convert it as I am learning how to use the rigging tools in DS. However, please do not let me attempts stop anyone more knowledgeable from working with Kenneth (GM) on making this guy DS compatible. He is just too cute not to be getting more render time.

 

[Pendraia]

Thanks Shadownet and Karth...if I can get this to a state I'm happy with I would be more than happy to let Ghostman have it to use how he wants. At the moment it's really only good for personal use. Some of the bends are a bit rough and like I said earlier for personal use it's okay to add a bit of smoothing and that will fix a lot of things but if it was to be released to others the weightmapping would need a lot of work. This is just a personal project for me at the moment as I really wanted to play with Gnobbit. I did keep getting distracted from the weight mapping though. Which I'm still very much learning.
Here's what distracted me and I also did another one that I don't have a render for yet. Still need to try and do a proper troll hair. This has been done in Zbrush and it's quite heavy in terms of Poly size...

 

[Pendraia]

I think all the morphs are working right, though might need to check the jcm on mine as he does not seem to pose the same way in DS as in Poser. Something off there.

I noticed that some of the poses need minor adjusting which I was surprised by as normal poser poses work fine for the same figure.

 

[shadownet]

Yes, there appears to be a slight difference in the way DS and Poser read key values. Some of the poses use the Up-Down ARMs master dial and this combined with the arm pose seems to be the reason for the difference. I am also making progress on the rigging that may work for commercial application if yours does not. Like you, I am wanting to get this setup so that the same poses (even if they are pz2 and duf) work the same way on the figure. This way its just a matter of converting the pose to Poser or DS based on which program was used to make them. Kenneth is very much wanting to have a DS version available so hopefully we can make this happen. I will be happy to share my rigging with you and have you take a look at it once I am confident I have the bugs out.

P.S. That is a very nice render. And that Troll hair looks great on him. I have not tried doing renders with him in DS. I still mostly render in Poser so do not know my way around the materials and IRay/ 3Delight render engines that well.

 

[Pendraia]

Thanks...I'm happy to have a look at it for you and test your rigging in DS. From what I've seen most poses only need minor adjust and then saving as DS format files. I have a 3 day weekend coming up so hopefully will get chance to do some serious work on the rigging.

 

[Bejaymac]

The thing to always remember is that Studio has never used Poser rigging, the PZ3Importer plugin has always converted it into a general WM with hidden "helpers" to make it appear to bend the same in both DS and Poser. In DS4 that "convert to WM" basically just deletes the hidden "helpers", some figures still work to an extent without them, while others can be a right mess when you try to bend them, that's why I always tell people not to use it unless they plan on redoing the WM.

The other problem with using this feature is the mesh and morphs, in DS a figure is a single mesh (doesn't even need mesh groups) with a separate skeleton and it's the WM that holds the two together, in Poser you have a skeleton and attached to each bone is a prop with only the bone welds holding the props together. Now in Poser say you have a figure with 50 bones, an FBM that works on the entire mesh will have 50 sets of deltas (one for each prop) and one master dial in the BODY, loading that same figure into DS basically gives you a "poor mans" version of Genesis, the morph deltas are all moved into the mesh and dummy dials with ERC are left on the skeleton. Now for DS native figures all of the morphs are FBM's as we are dealing with a single mesh, but when you "Convert to WM" that Poser figure and use "Figure/Prop Assets" instead of one morph asset DSF you end up with 101 for that one FBM, 50 dummy dials with alias in the file name that have ERC six ways from Sunday, 50 assets with part of the deltas also with ERC and one asset file for the Master dial.

Back when we first got DS4 Pro I converted Aiko 3 using this feature, I was left with 12 thousand asset files for her morphs, most of which were alias or the empty PBMDC & PBMCC dials, V4 has even more and a number of her morphs don't work right after converting them so you can't use them as is, attached pic is Girl4 but Aiko4 does the same.

 

[shadownet]

Hi Pendraia. Sounds great on having you take a look at my conversion. I talked with Kenneth and he thought this might be a good time to do a few minor updates on the Poser version as well as offer the DS option to his customers. I have been looking over his Poser version with him and helping to make some tweaks. Also looking at how he converts to DS, and doing any tweaks needed there.

@Bejaymac - Thanks for the info. Just wanted to remind you that prior to the genesis line of figure Daz Studio and Poser both used a similar (parametric joint parameter) rigging with V4 and previous figures being Daz Studio creations. The rigging at that time was compatible with both Poser and DS. Once weight mapping came on the scene, Poser figures and DS figures began to diverge as to rigging. So, yes, trying to convert a parametric joint rigged figure or a Poser weight mapped figure to DS can often lead to unwanted results. Luckily, the Gnobbit, while a Poser weight mapped figure, does not have a complicated skeleton set up, so converting it to TriAx wm works fine. I am only finding a few places where the wm needs to be touched up. Otherwise, the morphs and dials and rigging works pretty much the same in both Poser and DS. The only difficulty I have encountered at present is in not being as familiar with the rigging and wm tools in DS since I am new to using these. However, I am catching on quite well and making progress.

 

[LisaB]

Great stuff happening here! Thanks for sharing this, Pen!