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Hivewire Cat Family DS to ZBrush to DS issue

Dan30

Adventurous
I want to bring to your attention something unusual. While wanting to make some muscle and veins morphs for the big cat, I ran into a kind of problem, using the GoZ plugin from Daz Studio to ZBrush and back. The problem is that after making the mesh modifications, on the lowest subdiv level, of course, without affecting the topology,upon sending the mesh back to Daz Studio, I always get a prompt that topology of the model has changed and it can only be loaded as a new model, thus evidently loosing the UV's and the bone rig. Strangely enough, this only happens with the models from the cat family, big and small alike, regardless. It does not happen with the horse model or with the dog model. Or with various other meshes I have tested on. Initially I thought there may be something wrong with the plug-in and reinstalled it but, as I said, it does not happen with other meshes. With other meshes, I get the expected promt, that is, to update the current mesh and make a morph from the deformations sculpted in Zbrush.
Has anyone else been confronted with this behavior? Does anyone know why is this happening only with the cat meshes? If so, is there any workaround ?
Any answer is greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.
 

Dan30

Adventurous
I experimented some more trying to solve this peculiarity. And I loaded the cat mesh from the poser .CR2 file. And with this file, there is no issue updating the mesh with the sculpt done in ZBrush. Only with the Daz .duf file type. So definitely something in that file type is preventing the mesh to be updated and the morph to be created via GoZ.
 

Dan30

Adventurous
Experimenting further, I came up with a workaround for Daz users. And the workaround is loading the cat figure from the Poser .CR2 file. In Daz, convert the rigging of the model to triax. This step looks like it's necessary to preserve the rigging functionality once the model is converted as an asset or subset and saved as a .duf file. So, the third step is saving your model as a .duf file. Reimporting this last saved .duf file back into Daz will now allow to be edited in Zbrush and the edit to be saved as a morph as expected. These are my findings, and hopefully they may be of some help to someone.
 

Chris

HW3D President
Staff member
Co-Founder
Experimenting further, I came up with a workaround for Daz users. And the workaround is loading the cat figure from the Poser .CR2 file. In Daz, convert the rigging of the model to triax. This step looks like it's necessary to preserve the rigging functionality once the model is converted as an asset or subset and saved as a .duf file. So, the third step is saving your model as a .duf file. Reimporting this last saved .duf file back into Daz will now allow to be edited in Zbrush and the edit to be saved as a morph as expected. These are my findings, and hopefully they may be of some help to someone.

Oh man I'm glad you pushed thru the difficulty, thru uncharted waters, sailing to reach a new world of hope and optimizum. Wait... are you Columbus?

Seriously, happy that you know enough of what to do to find an answer. Good for you. I'd have to ask Paul to investigate.
 

Dan30

Adventurous
Oh man I'm glad you pushed thru the difficulty, thru uncharted waters, sailing to reach a new world of hope and optimizum. Wait... are you Columbus?

Seriously, happy that you know enough of what to do to find an answer. Good for you. I'd have to ask Paul to investigate.

Thanks Chris. You even made me laugh. Well, I am not Columbus, but I do like to explore and investigate and as a result, as anyone who does this, you end up stumbling into things like I did.
Anyway, I am also glad to help make things better in any way I can.
 

Alisa

RETIRED HW3D QAV Director (QAV Queen Bee)
Staff member
QAV-BEE
I've moved this over to the Questions-Feedback Forum so it can be explored in its own thread :)
 

Dan30

Adventurous
NEW FINDINGS!
First off, I want to make an amendment to my workaround step 2: convert the rigging of the model to general weight maps and NOT triax. I discovered that with triax, certain poses are causing the claws to explode all over the place. With general weight maps this thing does not happen. BUT, since the leopard CR2 file does not contain the cub, cougar, lion or lioness morphs, the usability of this workaround is limited.
I compared all cat models between Daz versions and Poser versions trying to discover what may cause the problem I mentioned yesterday. And I discovered other issues and inconsistencies between the two versions. And I want to mention I re-downloaded and re-installed all pertaining files of all the cat family available on the site and thus, is fair to say, all files are the latest versions. Also, I ran the comparison in Daz Studio, as I do not use Poser and I do not have it installed so the following description is how they appear in Daz Studio. Differences may apply in Poser.
My findings:

1. The housecat Poser version does not contain the kitten morph. I do not know if in Poser is located someplace else. The Daz version does and is in the Actor/Body subsection.
Similar to all Daz versions cat meshes, the housecat universal manipulator tool is located at the center of the world when meshes are loaded. NOT SO for the other cats, where the manipulator is located somewhere around the hip, above the grid, and for the lion and lioness, even above the mesh itself.
2. All the Daz version big cats contain morphs for all the cat variants: cub, cougar, lion, lioness . NOT SO for the Poser models. The cougar does not appear as a morph in any of the big cats meshes nor as a separate breed in the breed animals subfolder.
Also,the leopard .CR2 does not contain ANY morph for the big cat varieties.
3. The lion and the lioness which come as .PZ3 files and not as .CR2 like the leopard, do contain morphs in the Actor/Body subset but only for lion and lioness. No cougar, no cub morphs. ALSO, in spite of the fact that they load with their respective morphs ON, there is no size change. They remain the same size as the leopard. What changes though with the morph on are the hair meshes only, which move out of position and break in a big way, especially the lion's mane.

So, given the multitude of hurdles and odd behavior, at least in Daz Studio, I gave up on my muscle and veins morph project I had, at least until these issues are resolved and I have a usable editable mesh that contains all functional actual morphs.
I do hope that my findings are going to help in resolving the issues soon and make all models consistent in behavior , appearance and functionality.

Here are 2 screenshots showing what I explained above:

Differeces in size example: on the left, the Daz versions with appropriate sizes, on the right, Poser version with all meshes the same size as the leopard.

upload_2018-7-6_20-40-57.png


Example with the Poser version meshes with morphs applied and exploding hair:

upload_2018-7-6_20-43-18.png
 

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Hey Dan

The way Poser works, one INJ's the breed, cub and kitten morphs into the base Big Cat or base House Cat. (The INJ files are part of the Poser versions of the products and show up under the Pose Tab in PSR.) And once that is done, one can mix and match them if desired just like in DS. Yeah Poser works really differently:)

So in essence if you come up with a morph for them, it needs to made into an INJ pose for Poser. How that is done I don't know:) Paul and Sparky are the ones to ask about that.
 

Dan30

Adventurous
@CWRW
Then why do I see the lion and lioness morphs and not the others in Daz? And only in the lion and lioness files and not others. And the scale issue? I downloaded all the Poser files as well and I did not see any INJ files. Where are these INJ files located?
 

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
and in DS- this is the House Cat (working on something there right now:) (the morphs go into the data folders for DS and then show up in the parameters window under Actor->Full Body)

Screen Shot 2018-07-06 at 12.12.29 PM.png
 

Dan30

Adventurous
Laurie, if you read all I reported in the beginning of my post , I did mention where these are located in Daz, to be able to make the comparisons. I am pointing out the inconsistencies of the various cat meshes in terms of appearance and functionality, in the context of the workaround I mentioned earlier. I see the INJ folder installed in Poser, but I did not see where they are located within the folder structure of the downloaded Poser files.
 

CWRW

Extraordinary
HW3D Exclusive Artist
Hey Dan

Sorry- I am such a neophyte on that end of things! I'm not really much help on this. This really is Paul and Sparky's "playground":) I can say the Poser INJ files are located in the unzipped Poser product folder in Runtime/Libraries/Pose/HiveWire 3D Animals/HiveWireBigCat/INJ/Breeds and so forth.
 

Dan30

Adventurous
No worries Laurie. I thank you for chiming in and for your patience.
Just out of curiosity, I re-downloaded all Poser files to double check. They are there alright. Still, that does not explain why some of them appear as mophs the same way as they appear in the Daz files. And others do not. Maybe this is part of the issue.
The reason I delved into this is because I wanted to use a Poser file, convert it to .duf Daz file so that I may be able to edit the mesh in Zbrush and then make a morph, which is not posible with the actual original Daz files at least not via the Goz plugin. And since the Poser file does not contain all the original morphs and has size issues in Daz, for now, I do not see or know how I can make a universal morph using this workflow. I may still have to investigate further and maybe use another workflow, and import the morph via morph loader pro in Daz. I remember watching such a tutorial.
Thank you again for your time.
 
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