Distorted fingers

rbel_295e7c1d4c

I started out producing a partial morph in DS 4.5 and Hexagon to reposition the arms and hands of a Genesis character but found that when applied, the morph interfered with the actions of the 'built-in' hand morphs such as 'right fingers straighten' and 'right fingers in-out' - the fingers no longer moved through the same range of positions or they twisted into an unnatural position.

Given this I tried a simple arms up-down morph using a base Genesis model. I lowered the arms on the otherwise zeroed Genesis base model, sent it to Hexagon, saved it as an obj and imported it back into Daz using Morph Loader Pro using 'reverse deformations' set to 'yes' and leaving 'overwrite existing as 'make unique'.

After applying this morph and adjusting the rigging (having selected 'adjust orientation') the arms moved to the required position but the problem with the fingers remained.

Richard Haseltine

Are the bones in the right place? You can see them with the Joint editor tool active. Did you use ERC Freeze to link the adjusted rigging to the morph?

rbel_295e7c1d4c

The bones all appear to be in the right place but I did not use ERC Freeze - I thought that was for use when saving the morph as a dsf file?

Richard Haseltine

ERC freeze links the changes to the morph - otherwise you've changed the base bone positions, and the rigging will break if you turn the morph down or off. However, as long as the morph is on the rigging should work without freezing - otherwise it would be impossible to test the changes made by the adjustment function, and tweak them if need be. Could you post some screenshots of the issue please, the morph (with boens showing) and then the morph plus the pose.

rbel_295e7c1d4c

The left image is with my simple morph applied and the rigging adjusted; the centre image is with the built-in 'right fingers in-out' morph applied and the right hand image is with the built-in 'right fingers straighten' morph applied. I think that the bones are all correctly aligned.

Richard Haseltine

It's a little hard to figure out - are those at 1? Anyway, I suspect the issue is that the adjustment has changed the relative bend of the different fingers, and those "morphs" are actually master sliders controlling several rotations - if the relative base position of the fingers has changed as a result of the morphing then the slaved rotations will produce a different end result, and the limits on the rotations may well no longer be appropriate. If that is the root of the problem then the fix may be to try to adjust your morph so that the fingers maintained their relative angles.

rbel_295e7c1d4c

This should help clarify the problem - I have added a row of images showing how the fingers should look. They do not have my lower arms morph applied but have just the built-in master sliders for right fingers in-out and right fingers straighten applied (all to the maximum setting of 1 as were the original examples).

Richard Haseltine

So what has been done to the mesh in the examples where it's going wrong compared to those where it isn't?

rbel_295e7c1d4c

The following images do not seem to show any obvious changes in the mesh unless I am missing something. The images on the right are those with my 'lower arms' morph applied.

Richard Haseltine

Ah, I misunderstood your previous post - I thought you meant that none of the images had your morph applied. When you say you are lowering the arms, do you mean bending them down (in which case I think my speculation about the rotations needed being different is likely to be at least partly right) or are you lowering in the sense of y-translating?

rbel_295e7c1d4c

Apologies for the confusion - I was using 'lowering arms' as in a person lowering their arms, not as in moving any part of a Genesis model via y translate.

My 'lower arms' morph which I have been applying via Hexagon uses the built-in 'arms up-down' control function which bends the arms, down in this case. Just looking at the parameter settings the name is CTRLArmsUpDwn which in turn controls Genesis:Arms Up-Down Right and Genesis:Arms Up-Down Left.

Richard Haseltine

Well, the built in pose control is like the finger controls - it isn't a morph, it's just a master control that affects several rotations at once. As I said, it's possible that by adjusting the rigging to match an actual morph, with (unavoidable) changes in alignment of the bones, that the problem is simply that the relationship between rotations that gave good results in the default position no longer does so; while there are some adjustments you could make to the multiplier and offset for the ERC I'm not sure this will be fixable - but you can still pose the fingers individually of course.

rbel_295e7c1d4c

Many thanks for your patient help. I will endeavor to work out which bones need tweaking and if that does not work will go down the lengthy route of adjusting each finger.