Understanding how to build custom morphs

rames44

I've watched Sickleyield's excellent YouTube tutorial on making clothing morphs. In summary (as I understand it):

1. Export the object to Blender (or equivalent editing package of your choice) as an OBJ (other formats might work -this is what she uses)
2. Fiddle with the position of the vertices
3. Re-import the modified OBJ using Morph Loader Pro (MLP), which creates the morph by comparing the original position of the vertices in the unmodified object to the modified positions. 

There are obviously subtleties depending on whether you're creating your own morph or wanting the item to react to an existing character morph, but I basically get it.

So here are the questions:

1. Is this technique only applicable to clothing? Or is this essentially how PA's create custom character shapes as well?
2. I've seen forum references to "ERC Freeze" (or something like that) related (I think) to morphs as well. What is that for, and how does it differ from what MLP does?
3. If the MLP technique works for characters, could I use it to convert a character shape created with dozens of different dials to an independent/standalone "single dial morph" by exporting the complexly-morphed character and then re-importing that shape (using MLP) against the base Genesis figure to which I'd done all the dialing? (Note: the question is technical, not legal. Not talking about using this as a technique for creating saleable items.)

(Inquiring minds want to know how stuff works "under the hood" ????)

Richard Haseltine

1. This is for any morph

2. ERC Freeze allows one property sldier to control mutliple properties. With respect to morphs it's mainly used if the rigging of the figure needs to be adjusted to fit the new shape, linking the offsets on the bones to the shape.

3. No - there are a couple of reasons not to: one is that you might lose track of which morphs were your own work and which were others', which matters for sharing; the other is that many extreme morphs also have corrective adjustments to tweak expressions and so on, baking the compound morph to a single morph would break the linkages. This is another potential use for ERC Freeze - set your shape, create a new property, then use ERC Freeze to make that property drive the shapes to their desired values.

rames44

Thanks, Richard.  I wasn't worried about the sharing on #3 - it was more a question of being able to animate between two shapes.  Pain to do when there are 27 different dials to be nudged.  But the ERC Freeze approach to that would solve the problem.

Syrus_Dante

Hi @ rames44

3. Yes no problem with that - export your character shape with dozens of different dials as OBJ-File.

Next use an external geometry editor to create your desired shaping, but while using Morph Loader Pro (MLP) to import the new shape back as a morph into DazStudio set the "Reverse Deformations" to Yes. This will work like a filter and the imported morph you create with that will only store the difference between the current shape of the figure in the DazStudio scene you had used to export and your new imported shape. So you can work on your character shape in the external editor but nothing of other vendors gets stored in your morph.

You can store this new morph as a morph asset and then use ERC-Freeze to combine all the current morph dial settings of the figure into one character dial and don't forget to save that as a morph asset too.