Creating/finding a script for saving poses

Jio Derako

Hello there!

I've got what I hope is a simple question here, but one I can't seem to dig up the answer for myself.

Right in to it; I save poses for my figures fairly often, and working with a number of custom characters, it's important that I save each pose with morphs and scale transformations unchecked. This isn't terribly hard to do in the regular pose-saving dialog, but it becomes quite tedious and time-consuming if I ever need to save more than one pose at a time; go in, unselect all channels, select all transforms, open properties on everything to uncheck scale, open morphforms to check things like eyes_side-side and shoulders_shrug...

I'd imagine it shouldn't be a huge challenge to create a script that automates all of this, and for that matter, I'm hoping scripts of this sort are already out there (lots of vendors sell pose kits with hundreds of poses, none of which will mess up character morphs; I find it hard to believe they'd suffer through all this checking-unchecking for every pose).
In terms of script creation, though, it seems my Google-fu is weak. All the information I've found is either much too vague, or tutorials geared towards users who already know how to script.
Is there some resource for scripting that's geared towards a novice such as myself? (I'm familiar enough with coding in general that I can understand some more advanced stuff, but I still need a lot of the code to be explained to me before I know how it works.) Or even better, is there some pose-saving script already out there that I could dig into and modify to fit my needs?

I'm using DAZ Studio 3.1 advanced, though if I'm not mistaken, most of the scripting stuff should be the same between 3 and 4 (correct me if I'm wrong on that).
Thanks in advance for anything you can come up with. I'm usually pretty good at digging up this sort of info, but this particular subject has gotten me quite stumped!

cridgit

Redacted

Jio Derako

cridgit said:

In earlier version there is no way to fully automate the save pose preset, as Studio always pops up the dialog box. In DS4.5 you can do it fully automated, but you need some complex script to build the save options (to list all bones + specificy which transforms you want to include).

Would this mean that there is no way to set it up at all in DS3, or it can be done without being fully-automated? If there's simply some way to have it pop up the dialog and check boxes for you (almost like a macro functionality), or essentially anything that requires a few less clicks than how I currently need to do it... that's also just fine.

I'll take a read through the links; thanks for the point in the right direction on that, looks like you've already delved pretty extensively into the subject. I anticipated that the script itself might be a lot of work to set up, but I'm a big fan of doing a lot of work now, to make something a lot simpler later. (or, doing a lot of unnecessary work now, to make something only slightly better later.)

For those artists who create large amounts of pose presets with specific settings (top/bottom only poses, etc), would you say they most likely use Poser for saving instead? I'm not a big fan of Poser's interface (the cameras in particular seem incredibly awkward to use), but I do have access to it if there's an easier option for saving poses in there (I can always save poses with default settings in DS, then convert them later using Poser, if that's a lot easier).
I suspect this is the case, but without going and asking one of these content creators how they do it, I've no clue (if you don't know yourself on this one, I'll probably try to ask someone what method they use, and post it back here for future reference).
On that note, your own PoseMaster script looks very interesting, though I'm not 100% sure on what it actually does. It's for transferring poses from one figure to another (V4 to Genesis, etc), I can see, but the "mix and match poses" line is what I'm most curious about; is this something for loading a pose as a partial pose (only applying to the arms, for example) or something entirely different? And would it have any use for me in my situation, perhaps?

cridgit

Redacted

Jio Derako

cridgit said:

Jioruji Derako said:

Would this mean that there is no way to set it up at all in DS3, or it can be done without being fully-automated? If there's simply some way to have it pop up the dialog and check boxes for you (almost like a macro functionality), or essentially anything that requires a few less clicks than how I currently need to do it... that's also just fine.

I'll take a read through the links; thanks for the point in the right direction on that, looks like you've already delved pretty extensively into the subject. I anticipated that the script itself might be a lot of work to set up, but I'm a big fan of doing a lot of work now, to make something a lot simpler later. (or, doing a lot of unnecessary work now, to make something only slightly better later.)

For those artists who create large amounts of pose presets with specific settings (top/bottom only poses, etc), would you say they most likely use Poser for saving instead? I'm not a big fan of Poser's interface (the cameras in particular seem incredibly awkward to use), but I do have access to it if there's an easier option for saving poses in there (I can always save poses with default settings in DS, then convert them later using Poser, if that's a lot easier).
I suspect this is the case, but without going and asking one of these content creators how they do it, I've no clue (if you don't know yourself on this one, I'll probably try to ask someone what method they use, and post it back here for future reference).
On that note, your own PoseMaster script looks very interesting, though I'm not 100% sure on what it actually does. It's for transferring poses from one figure to another (V4 to Genesis, etc), I can see, but the "mix and match poses" line is what I'm most curious about; is this something for loading a pose as a partial pose (only applying to the arms, for example) or something entirely different? And would it have any use for me in my situation, perhaps?

In DS4- you can automate the save as pose preset but it will ALWAYS show the popup dialog and there is no way to automate the dialog options in script. You need to manually set the options every time.

In DS4.5+ you can do it fully automated (set the dialog options with script and skip the dialog) but then you can only save in DUF/DSF format and Poser users won't be able to use the poses. Are you planning on distributing the poses?

Sorry can't help with Poser - I'm a DS-only user - so you'd best check with a Poser artist.

PoseMaster was originally created for mixing and matching poses, as you described, and pose transfer functionality was added later. Admittedly that's probably what most people use it for nowadays. But its a very useful tool for posing - you don't need partial poses anymore. Apply a full body pose #1 to your figure (say you want the head and arms from this pose), then apply another full body pose #2, copy pose #2 with PoseMaster, undo pose #2, select the legs and paste the copied pose #2 to the legs. Voila! A combined pose #1 for upper body and pose #2 for lower body.
Really appreciate the info; I take it this means my original idea simply won't work in DS3, but I haven't lost hope entirely; I'm sure there's some way to speed the process up, perhaps by another means. We'll see if anything comes up.

And one more reason to eventually move to DS4.5, though as-of-yet I'm still not a big fan of its interface. No plans to distribute the poses, so file format isn't an issue there; I just hoped to speed up some of my own workflow, so DUF/DSF would be perfectly fine. =D

cridgit

Redacted

Jio Derako

cridgit said:

If its purely accelerating your own workflow you're after then I recommend you give PoseMaster a spin (for mixing and matching poses). I doubt you'd be able to beat it for efficiency, once you figure out how it works.

I'll see if I can give it a try, for sure! Just need a bit more in the funds department before I can justify spending the money right now. =D

cridgit

Whoops, all gone.