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A little frustrating... there is something seriously strange going on with the Minotaur, appears that it is operating on some 'fake' geografting (for lack of a better term) rather than real, which is causing the problem.
With the Genesis1 female genitals, when it is geografted on, it's really geografted on. It is part of the actual mesh and subtracts out the part of the mesh that it is replacing.
For the Minotaur, seems a completely different principle. The Genesis2male mesh is just turned invisible but is still there, and the minotaur legs are superimposed. When you save a Minotaur as a figure/prop asset, and then re open it in Studio, all the geografts are gone and you only have a Genesis2male, nothing more. The geografts in Carrara aren't even read as real assets, it acts like there's no file found when you try to load the minotaur geografts there, whereas with Genesis1 genitals it will load them fine, but the textures will of course be borked, but at least Carrara actually sees something there.
There are still I think a couple of ways to do this though, it would be easy if the legs had their own Minotaur morph that could be dialed in, but of course they don't, they rely on the Genesis2male dialing in the minotaur morph and then the legs grow to size along with the expansion of the rest of the figure. I'm wondering if we couldn't use this method though to simply turn the legs all by themselves (skinny as they are) into conforming clothing via the same method, then turn them into conforming 'boots' and make Genes2males legs invisible in Cararra, it would work just as well I think. Gave it a try and it does work, but even when applying the Minotaur body morph to my Genesis2male in Carrara, the legs still too skinny (though they do expand quite a bit and much better). Of course you can then pull the mesh into the right shape in Carrara (as long as you have Fenrics plugin that allows you to unclick 'protect topology') so that you can simply take a few mnutes with soft select in the modeling room to pull the mesh of the legs out to where it actually belongs and matches up with the larger minotaur leg orignal size as we see it in Studio... I'm spitballing a little here, I still think this is doable but not sure what's going on with that weird fake geografting, if only it wasn't doing that I think we'd have this thing figured out already. :)
it will be easier when Philemeno get's his no poke through plug in up and running
Hmm... I do know the horns aren't geografts at all, they're just made with a skeleton that keeps them hovering in place a the top of the head.
I don't know how to tell the difference between what happens with the minotaur and any other kind of geografting, because it's by exploring the minotaur that I learned how geografting works. You may not have the Asterion skin, but if you do, you could see there's one special hip texture to be used when the tail is attached. The texture is mapped so the center of its image is in the front of the minotaur's pelvic area, and the left and right extremes wrap over the creature's backside. There are big blank square chunks missing from these left and right extremes because the chunks map to an area of the body that will be completely hidden by the tail geograft. If you export to .FBX and go into another program to load the minotaur with Asterion skin and the tail attached, you'll see white bits poking through the tail bits on his bottom because the other program doesn't know to hide or remove the section under the graft.
If I export to COLLADA with textures, then load into Blender, I get the same thing, white bits poking through, but in Blender I know how to manually apply the geograft--how to get rid of the hidden faces and weld each vertex in place so I end up with a single mesh. (I assume the same can be done in Carrara, but I don't yet know how.) The legs and tail and G2M genitalia are definitely made to be welded on, but when exported, the vertices that would be welded are all just a short distance apart from each other in space. None of the grafts is perfectly fitted when you take the model outside of DS. I don't know if that provides a clue or not.
I just thought of a possible test, but I'm at work now, so I'll have to try tonight and report back. In DS, if you click the eye button to hide a fitted geograft, you see the hole where faces have been removed. So I could try fitting the tail and then hiding it. If the minotaur's ordinary backside texture appears, or if the wireframe view shows edges inside what should be a hole, we'll know DS isn't really grafting the tail.
Figured out more, and arrived at a solution too.
The reason I can't simply save out a morph of the hooves at full minotaur size and put that on the regular G2M-sized version of the hooves, is that by some crazy magic, when we dial in the minotaur body morph slider on the G2M, it doesn't just expand/move the existing polys to the the hooves figure, but instead actually *adds* a ton more polys too it. So they really aren't the same mesh at all, whereas with the Genesis1 genital I was working with, it's the same mesh just with different movements so the vertexes are in different positions (the definition of a standard morph, essentially). I'm guessing this somehow has to do with HD morphs or something? I dunno, but the bottom line is the original plan to simply make 'boots' out of the hooves geograft and then watch it morph out to the right dimensions when the Gen2Male that is wearing those hooves has a Minotaur body dialed in just isn't going to fly.
There's an additional problem with the hooves too, in that whoever the content creator was for this made a mesh where the edges of the hooves feet overlap with each other. When means when you export just the hooves as an obj, then bring it back into Studio and run Transfer Utility with the original geofraft hd hooves, while it puts the bones in the right place the overlap of the mesh means that when you rotate the shin or foot or whatever, there's a connected bunch of polys to the other foot, which results in the weird stretch strand appearing between the two like the minotaur just stepped in gum... on both feet. :)
So here's my solution, takes a little setup but not too terrible imo, and while it's a pain I saw you mention in another thread the principle (that I completely agree with) that doing a little effort in setup initially is worth the tradeoff to have a figure ready to go for the foreseeable future.
First, put a Gen2male in the scene, then add the geograft hooves to him. Dial him up to the full minotaur body morph (you can add head too if you want but I don't think it makes any difference). Now the hooves are the right shape to go with the Minotaur, but the feet are slightly overlapping. I took the time to rotate one of the bones on on either hoof just slightly (I think it was the foot bone on each, but I'm kind of blanking, might have bin the shin). Didn't have to do much, like 1.5 on the slider bar for both, just enough so they aren't overlapping anymore.
Exported just the hooves, not the whole Gen2male figure but at the hooves top level only, as obj. Re-imported and ran transfer utility for the hooves obj I just made as the target and the source was the original hd hooves (not the full G2M). Now we've got a studio figure that has the bones in the right place for the hooves.
Save as a Figure/Prop asset, then come over to Carrara.
Load up a G2M and go ahead and dial him up to Minotaur body morph. No this next bit is no fun, but I can't immediately see a way around it. If you were to fit the hooves to your G2M, because the G2M is dialed up in shape the legs won't lose their uv's or anything, but they will expand by the same amount as the dialed up G2M figure, which means they won't match up to the thighs. We want the hooves to stay exactly the same dimensions they are right now, which means we don't want o conform them to the G2M at all. At the size they are at right now, they are perfect fit for the dialed-up G2M thighs, so instead of having one pair of minotaur 'boots' that conform to the figure, we're going to have to split this into 2 different 'boots' that are simply parented to the left and right thighs. Drag the hooves from the top level and drop them on the right or left thigh bone of the G2Male. Now you've got 2 legs of the minotaur that are attached and will move with one leg of the G2M. We could simply make the other leg invisible, but my preference is to delete the unused bones to prevent confusion and go into the modeling room and delete the other half of the mesh of the other boot, so I'm left with one 'boot' on one leg of the G2M that has bones in the right place and ready to go. Then repeat this process with the other leg, importing in another copy of the boots figure and parenting it to the other G2M thigh, deleting the unused bones and mesh.
At that point it's simply a matter of making the G2M legs invisible at the point where the minotaur leg meets up with it at the thigh and it should (theoretically as I haven't had the time to go through that and made sure yet) and you should now have a minotaur figure with the correct legs that will take textures correctly and that you can save to your Carrara objects browser for future use. You may be tempted to delete the bones and mesh on the G2M that you're turning invisible just to keep the scene a little less cluttered, but that might not be wise, as you can still apply pre-made duf poses to the G2M (though not the hooves) and I'm not sure if you'd lose that ability if you deleted some of the G2M bones.
@Jonstark, that sounds really good. I think I see where my "separate parts" experiment went wrong: I thought I needed to unfit the items before exporting them, but you left them fitted so they'd hold their shapes.
In parallel, I've been working in Blender to stitch the entire body together as one mesh, thinking I'd bring that into Carrara and attach the skeleton to it, but naturally I'll try your method first. I brought Blender up because as I worked on the mesh there, in the back of my mind I've been wondering what to do about the extra bones. I was thinking maybe it would be a good idea to leave the G2M shin and foot bones in the figure so poses would work normally, but do something somehow make the minotaur hoof shin and foot move to follow the human ones. But I bet it would mess up IK to have bones attached in a full circle: hip to femur 1 to shin 1 to foot 1 to foot 2 to shin 2 to femur 2 to hip. Here's where I really show I'm a noob: Do you think there might be a different way to make the minotaur hoof foot stick to or follow the human foot?
I repent of my earlier theory that it would make sense to delete the unused bones on the other hoof; I found out when I did that that all the bones lost attachment to the hoofs mesh. So it's fine to delete the other leg mesh, but leave the bones in place or you'll lose the bones attachment on the visible leg too :) Lol this is a little tricky.
I completely see what you're doing in blender to make it all one mesh object (so much easier with Gen1 where the geografts all became part of one mesh object when attached, don't know why they didn't do that here too but oh well...) and you could certainly do the same in Carrara, whichever modeling tool is easier to work with for you wins that battle, but either way, if you make new Carrara bones and attach them remember you'll also need to fine tune all the weight painting and that method loses the rigging native to G2M from Studio. Probably doesn't matter much for the hooves, but might make a difference for the bends on the upper body that the genesis technology is so praised for. I have little doubt the same good bends could be done by refining weight painting, but it might be a chore.
It might make sense to learn how to weld in Carrara, to make sure it handles the UVs right and I can still texture when the model is complete.
Here's where I am trying your technique, but clearly I've done something wrong. I have two fleshboots parented to the G2M thighs. For each one, I went into the VM room and deleted the other boot, then came back into the Assemble room and got rid of the hoof bones that didn't have a hoof anymore. I left the human bones alone, so each leg has two thigh bones, two shin bones, and two foot bones. Heck I should just take a screenshot of my instance tree.
The entire hoof will move around with the human thigh bone, but the hooves don't respond to posing by any other bones. Also, when I parented, them, they didn't line up perfectly, so I think I'm going to start over in DAZ Studio. I think I must've done something to move the G2M a scooch, which makes all the wearables load just a bit off in Carrara.
Yeah that's what I mentioned above that I repented of my earlier theory that it was ok to delete the unused hoof bones :) I was wrong about that, you want to leave the unused bones alone, otherwise it detachs the other bones on the visible hoof from the mesh too. I admit I'm not an expert on how to work with bones in Carrara (actually my skill level would be best described as 'rank amateur' lol) and I thought it would be ok to delete them before testing it, but reality contradicted me pretty quick. :) It's ok to delete the mesh, but leave the bones alone.
welding the verts sounds interesting.
curious if it would fix the vert count and uvs
I finally got time to sit down and try the @Jonstark Technique, and so far it seems it will work. It is very important that, to place the character in DAZ Studio, you double-click on the base character in your library so it will load into the default position, then whatever you do, don't move or pose it before creating the wearable .OBJs. If I'm careful not to move anything in DS, the parts load up perfectly aligned in Carrara.
Can I ask for some more help from you guys? The resulting creature can be posed, but the joints don't deform correctly because all the bones are slightly offset from where they should be.
This is a problem created in DS: There the minotaur has a fitted geograft tail, and when I reimport the .OBJ wearable tail, it appears perfectly positioned. The two tails occupy the same space. Then I use the Transfer Utitlity to copy rigging from the geograft tail to the wearable tail. Then I use the Joint Editor to look at the results, and I find the transferred skeleton's bones are all slightly offset from the originals. I can click back and forth between the geograft tail and wearable tail to see the skeleton's aren't properly aligned.
I haven't attached a pic of my Transfer Utility settings because I haven't found a combination of its settings that makes any difference. What other ways are there to fix this? In Carrara, I detached the skeleton so I could move the bones, but I can't move the tail bones without messing up the rest of the skeleton. I don't know how to make a single bone and its attached children move freely, and if the skeleton chapter in the manual contains information on how to free up a bone to move by itself, I sure don't understand it. What I'd like to do is grab all the bones in the tail and move just those ones down a bit without affecting anything else.
Have not tried the geograft fixes myself so these are only untried suggestions. Both involve using Daz Sudio to adjust rigging and then use ERC freeze.
Maybe (1) in Daz Studio use the joint editor to move the bones manually and then resave?
or (2) follow the Sickleyield tutorial for adjusting the skeleton when the mesh proportions have been changed. Skeleton adjustment starts around the 3 minute 40 second mark or so.
@Diomede, thank you! The SY video put me on the right track. Here are the steps to get a good skeleton in a wearable item you can load into Carrara:
OK, on to the next part of the challenge... If I load a G2M in Carrara and parent the wearable body parts, everything seems to fit nicely and can be posed--though the joints are looking strange, so I may have to learn how to manually configure JCMs--but if I delete the unwanted portion of the G2M's original human legs, apparently I blow up the UV map, because when I go to fix the textures, the new textures get projected onto the body rather than mapped. Images end up in the wrong places.
Looks like I'll have to assign faces in the unwanted part of the legs to a different shading domain and make them invisible. Hopefully that won't blow up the UVs. I will report back when I have results.
I said I would report back, so here's my update: It appears to me that you must start @Jonstark's process with a Minotaur HD 6 in DAZ Studio; you cannot begin with a G2M.
After going through everything to make the body parts into wearables, loading a G2M in Carrara, and parenting the parts, the creature looks good until I try to texture him. Then it turns out that I can't replace the G2M's torso and hand textures with ones designed for the minotaur, as if the minotaur character were using different UVs than the base G2M. It doesn't make sense, I know, but in support of my theory, I have found I can apply Darius 6, Lee 6, and base textures to the torso with no problem, they show up perfectly, but the minotaur ones get mapped wrong.
Last night I started the entire process from scratch, now that I know how to create the wearable body parts with working skeletons, but this time I started by using the Minotaur itself instead of G2M. In the end, I could apply all the textures, and so far I don't see any problems anywhere with the results. (I'll reload the project tonight and see if the good results survive a reboot.)
The problems that remain at this point are weird knee-bends on the wearables and seams between body parts that show up in the render.