I'm Stumped - Nyarai and Ceridwen **sometimes** load distorted
barbult
Posts: 23,314
A couple days ago I purchased two Saiyaness characters, Nyarai and Ceridwen. But I have a mysterious problem with both of them that has me stumped. SOMETIMES when I load the character or even load G3F and dial the character shape, the skeleton (bones) don't line up with the character mesh. Then if I try to pose the character, terrible distortions occur. The really puzzling thing to me is that it is inconsistent. I can save a scene file and reopen it and SOMETIMES a scene that was good will reopen with the misaligned bones and distortions. SOMETIMES a scene that saved when the distortion was present will reopen and be fine. I haven't seen this problem with any other character that I own. It happens both in 4.9.3.166 and 4.9.4.115 Public Build (beta).
I've spent all day trying to figure out a pattern as to when the problem occurs and when it doesn't. I can't figure it out. Here is a scenario that causes the problem MOST of the time, but not always.
- Open DS 4.9.3.166 or 4.9.4.115
- Load Genesis 3 Female
- Select the Joint Editor tool
- Open the Tool Settings pane
- Set Visible Bones to Entire Figure
- Select Genesis 3 Female in Scene pane
- Open the Shaping pane
- Slide the Nyarai slider to 100%.
- Observe in the Viewport that the character skeleton (bones) get shorter as the dial is moved to 100%, but the mesh does not.
- Open the Parameters pane and dial Arms Up-Down Pose Control to -100%.
- Observe the bizarre curves of the shoulder area of the character.
- Dial Left Hand Grasp Pose Control to 120%
- Observe the long and bizarre fingers on the character.
I like both characters and don't want to return them, but I can't deal with them in this state. I will submit a bug report, but I'd like to understand, or even fix, what is wrong. Can you help?
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Comments
Do you get it even when you load the character directly from the character folder? I've never had this happen with Ceridwen (I do not own the other one).
Laurie
I have Ceridwen & I cannot reproduce this however I used to get that on other characters (Some I bought, some I created ) & found the cause was that using GenX I had transferred morphs from Beautiful Bends Product
https://www.daz3d.com/beautiful-bends-for-genesis-2-female-s
Some of these morphs are automatically activated & when that happens on G3 it caused similar distortions to the one you show
I noticed your screenshot shows you use gen X so thought it worth a mention just in case.
Yes, Laurie, I sometimes get it even when loading the character directly from the character folder in the Content Library.
@Tottallou, thanks for the clue. I will try to move all my GenX morphs out of my Content Library and see it that fixes it.
Ohhhh...that would explain things ;). I've never had that happen with any figure but then I don't have GenX either :)
Laurie
@Tottalou, I deleted all the GenX morphs from the G3F, G3M, G2F, and G2M morphs folders, even though I figured only the ones in the G3F folder should have any bearing on this issue. Generation X no longer appears in my list of morphs in the Shaping tab. I rebooted my computer, restarted Daz Studio 4.9.3.166 and loaded the Ceridwen "Actor" from the Content Library. She loaded with the same skeleton mismatch, and posing her caused the same distortion, so the GenX morphs don't seem to be the cause in this case.
Has it always been this way or could a recent purchase be causing the issue? Sometimes lately new content is causing distortion in old stuff or a conflict.
Oh, yes, I remember your Hercules disaster, now that you remind me. I just bought these two characters a couple days ago, so it has "always" been this way for me.
I think I've found a clue to the mystery. Somehow I noticed that when the problem occurs, the FBMHeight (Height) morph is dialed in by Nyarai and Ceridwen. (Gosh these names are going to kill me. I'm bound to misspell them pretty soon, if I haven't already.) If I dial Height back to 0, the bones and mesh match up again. Of course, that is not the way the artist intended the character to look. The problem seems to be that the Height morph is not adjusting the mesh along with the bones. I tried G3M and his Height morph DOES adjust his mesh along with his bones. Following this clue, I also discovered that I do have some other characters with the same problem - those characters that use the Height morph. I never noticed this problem on those characters before, so I'm beginning to think along the l lines that Serene Night suggested - some new content or update has caused the problem or conflict. I still don't have a clue about why the problem is intermittent, though. Perhaps there are two FBMHeight morphs conflicting with each other???? I still have the GenX morphs removed. The hunt continues... Please chime in with suggestions.
I recently started having one of my character's eyes bulge inappropriately through the skin but not every time. I'm still trying to figure out what causes it. My usual feeling is that extreme shapes tend to have the most problem and so I looked in my runtime for any monster purchases. Still can't solve it. It isn't every time. And I used this character all the time before without the eye popping occuring. So something changed recently.
Aha, it seems that there are two FBMHeight morphs for G3F installed. One is in SKU 22050 which is Genesis 3 Female Body Morphs. The other is in SKU 23140, which is Izabella 7. Since I have installed both products with Daz Connect, both are in separate folders on my hard drive under the "cloud" folder. I wonder if they are conflicting in some way? Maybe one gets used sometimes and the other gets used other times. Maybe that is why the issue is intermittent.
try the adjust rigging to figure space option under edit figure maybe, perhaps it was not ERC freezed?
I uninstalled Izabella 7 as a test. I restarted Daz Studio 4.9.3.166 and guess what - Nyarai and Ceridwen both loaded and posed correctly correctly. Of course, since the issue has been intermittent, I can't say for certain that Izabella 7 is the smoking gun.
Of course having to uninstall purchased content to get other purchased content to work is NOT a solution in my book. I wonder what would have happened if I had installed both with the DIM. Would one morph have overwritten the other, since they'd be in the same folder? What would have happened then? Would it depend on which product was installed second?
You shouldn't have that problem. Morphs for each Character should be in separate folders in the Data directory. And looking at your listing they are in two different directories. Character A is not going to look in the directory for Character B, C , or D, for it's morphs. if you look in a DUF file you will see Morphs are called out with it's location. As an example, this is from a Character I created, "/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis/Base/Morphs/ram1520/FBM-Lisa/Polly-Buff.dsf" Each morph is going to be called out not only by name but by location.
Using DAZ Connect it is impossible for one Product to over write another, due to each product being in a separate folder. I am sure that is one of the reasons, why DAZ 3D decided to use separate diretories for each product. This way one product can't corrupt another unrelated product, with installing, uninstalling, and installing again. If you had installed it with the DIM, there would be a posibility and DIM updates have been known to leave orphaned artifacts behind.
If you use Different Content Libraries for difference Content sources, and you create a Product inline, you will see that the Produce XML file will be in the Support directory for the Library the Product is in. Thus proving, DAZ Studio also respects Content Library separation.
Hope that helps.
I truly have no valid suggestions, but I wanted to chime in and say I have had the exact same problem. So you are not alone. I never found a solution to what is causing this. I've had it happen on DAZ characters (never the base iconics tho), and I've had it happen on characters i've bought elsewhere. And other people don't have the same problem. It's intermittent for me. I've uninstalled and reinstalled till my keyboard fingers bled. I've never been able to track down the problem. I've even completely uninstalled/deleted every single piece of content I own right back to uninstalling DS itself and starting from scratch. The only way I could fix it was adjust rigging to figure. And then other days I've loaded a problem character and it worked fine.
So I truly have no idea what the problem is, or why it happens. I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone. It's happened occasionally with Ceridwen (and another of that vendor's character that i can't recall the name) and then other days, Ceridwen works perfectly fine.
I have both, as well as Izabella 7, all installed by DIM, haven't had any problems yet.
I actually tried that while experimenting, but it didn't seem to make the character look right. Maybe I didn't know how to use it correctly.
I think in general that is true. But look at how Daz delivered Izabella 7. In addition to the morphs in the Izabella-specific folder, there is another folder at the same level named "body". "body" folder contains the FBMHeight morph. That puts the FBMHeight morph in the Izabella 7 product at exactly the same logical content library location as the one in the SKU 22050 Genesis 3 Female Body Morphs package. Both morphs resolve to data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 3/Female/Morphs/DAZ 3D/Body/FBMHeight.dsf. And in fact, that is the path referenced by character-specific body mophs like fbmizabella7body.dsf. Most characters that use moprphs from Genesis 3 Female Body Morphs list that product as a required prerequisite, but Izabella 7 includes a copy of that morph instead. I don't know how Daz Studio is intended to resolve two morphs with identical logical content library paths in physically different folders of the Daz Connect cloud folder structure. When a character dsf like Nyarai or Ceridwen references that path (data/DAZ 3D/Genesis 3/Female/Morphs/DAZ 3D/Body) which version does it get? Maybe that is the source of the intermittent behavior. Maybe sometimes it gets one and other times it gets the other. It LOOKS like sometimes there is some kind of error/collision and it gets totally messed up.
Jakiblue and Digital Lite Design, at least I am not going crazy! Thanks for confirming that I am not alone with this issue.
Taoz, with DIM installation, I believe the Izabella 7 version of FBMHeight and the Genesis 3 Female Body Morphs version would be installed into the same folder, with one overwriting the other. I don't think you would end up with two physical files with the same logical content library path like I got with Daz Connect. It is good to know that that setup is working for you! I had previously tried uninstalling Nyarai and Ceridwen and installing them with DIM instead. They still had the intermittent problems for me. That was BEFORE I decided that they were not the source of the problem, but Izabella 7 was. She was still installed with Daz Connect, as was the Genesis 3 Female Body Morphs, so I still had the two possibly conflicting morphs.
Now I have uninstalled Izabella 7 from Daz Connect and reinstalled her with Daz Connect again, in case there was something incorrect or corrupt about her version of the FBMHeight morph. Since doing that, I have not seen the intermittent problem at all. So, I don't know if there was something wrong with my Izabella 7 files or if I have just been lucky so far and the problem will reappear. I wish I would have tried to compare the Izabella version and the body morphs version before uninstalling and reinstalling, but I didn't. When I compare them now, the are identical, except one has:
"author" : "Daz 3D",
and the other has
"author" : "DAZ 3D",
The only difference is the capitalization of Daz vs. DAZ. I have no idea whether that is significant or not.
So, in summary, I still have the two versions of FBMHeight morph installed in Daz Connect, but the mismatched skeleton and mesh problem is not happening and the resulting posing distortion is not happening. If the problems come back. I'll update this thread.
it's definitley an odd problem and I don't think I've had a completely satisfactory answer.
One other thing I've learnt - when uninstalling via Smart content, I always go into data -> cloud and also delete the products folder from there to ensure it really IS completely deleted. And because of a product that I have had months of back and forth with Support, I also delete cache and temporary files.
Looks like an artifact someone forgot to delete before packing things up. I downloaded this through the DIM and look at it, Body is in there also, which is odd.
So I used the DIM to download several other Core Actors and none of them have Body and all of the Morphs for the Core Actor's are inside their own folder.
My guess is someone didn't clean up the folder very well, while packing the product up. The problem doesn't happen with the DIM install because it over writes the file already in the Body folder. I am betting that you could rename that folder and everything would work fine, though DAZ Connect might try to 'Heal' what is sees as an error, or it might not. Testing that now, on my baseload machine. Izabella 7 loads just fine without the Body folder. You should submit a bug report on it, because the Body folder is there in error. This is the one time separate Product folders can hurt you.
It also shows, why I suggest doing content creation in a clean Library, for each Project/Product; so artifacts like this, that don't belong to the Project/Product, don't get packaged up with that product. Also testing is easier, you can just move the content folder to your base load test machine.
I once found a whole product installed within a totally separate product, how it got there, I haven't a clue, but it was there.
I have submitted a bug report about the original intermittent distortion problem, but I'm going to update it about the specific issue of the duplicated body folder and FBMHeight in the Izabella 7 package. Thanks for examining the DIM installation, Haslor.