Morph Cleaning Utility for .dsf/.duf figures

SickleYield

It takes forever for the full list of FBMs for Genesis or G2F to load in Properties, making it very hard to freeze ERCs and do other things involving advanced morphing and character creation.

What I'd like is a utility like some that existed for .cr2 figures, for cleaning all of the morphs from an instance of Genesis loaded into the scene. Then one could load a morph onto the newly "blank" Genesis or G2F, freeze ERCs or whatever very quickly and easily, and save just the morph to library without borking the install of Genesis. Content creators would be the main audience, but lots of people will make a morph that needs bone adjustment at some point, right?

Bejaymac

Gen/G2F/Dawn don't have morph channels, instead DS reads the data from any DSF files in the figures Morphs folder, and creates the dials that way, so the simplest way to get a "clean" figure to work with, is to simply move the contents of the Morphs folder some place outside of the Morphs folder. Load a new figure into an empty scene, do the morph work you have do, save it, delete the figure from the scene, put the DSF files back into the Morphs folder, and load a fresh copy of the figure back into the scene.

From my own work with DS it appears the problem with the Property Editor is pointless ERC code, the more "dummy dials" you have on "body parts" the worse it gets, until it gets to much and DS either goes (not responding) or crashes.

SickleYield

Bejaymac said:

Gen/G2F/Dawn don't have morph channels, instead DS reads the data from any DSF files in the figures Morphs folder, and creates the dials that way, so the simplest way to get a "clean" figure to work with, is to simply move the contents of the Morphs folder some place outside of the Morphs folder. Load a new figure into an empty scene, do the morph work you have do, save it, delete the figure from the scene, put the DSF files back into the Morphs folder, and load a fresh copy of the figure back into the scene.

From my own work with DS it appears the problem with the Property Editor is pointless ERC code, the more "dummy dials" you have on "body parts" the worse it gets, until it gets to much and DS either goes (not responding) or crashes.

I know there aren't "channels" per se. It's just that it takes too long to move those nearly gigabytes of material between folders every time. As a PA I have every DAZ figure release plus my own work plus the DieTrying conversion plus a bunch of unofficial character morphs by other PAs, etc.

What I actually ended up doing was:

Install Genesis Starter Essentials to another library folder called DAZ4Test. This Genesis comes with only the Basics. Then I deleted those from data files.

Renamed key files from "genesis" to "genesisC."

Use this version for my morph loading/ERC freezing projects. It loads Property Editor in a very reasonable amount of time.

Do not compress the morph files on saving. Afterward, do an edit/replace on all instances of "GenesisC" to "Genesis" in the morph in Notepad++.

Cut/paste the thus-edited morph over to my main Genesis install for testing and packaging. If necessary, re-save from there to create the presentation color I want or compress it,, etc.

Once the initial install is set up it's much faster than trying to cut/paste my entire Genesis/Base/Morphs folder twice on every project!

Richard Haseltine

You can avoid the editing - at least as long as you don't need to use the CMS - by copying the Genesis base files only to another location (the data folder and the character preset) and then using the Content Directory Manager to make a copy of your current content set up, start a new directory set, and add only the folder with the base Genesis to that, then switching between the content directories sets depending on what you are doing (just add your project directory to the bare bones version so that you can keep your files separate from DAZ' for easy management).

SickleYield

Richard Haseltine said:

You can avoid the editing - at least as long as you don't need to use the CMS - by copying the Genesis base files only to another location (the data folder and the character preset) and then using the Content Directory Manager to make a copy of your current content set up, start a new directory set, and add only the folder with the base Genesis to that, then switching between the content directories sets depending on what you are doing (just add your project directory to the bare bones version so that you can keep your files separate from DAZ' for easy management).

Sounds worth a try!

And no worries there, I've never used the CMS.

SickleYield

Just wanted to say, that worked great! Content directory swapping is my new workflow for figure morph creation. Thanks again, Mr. Kitty. :-)

Jaderail

LOL! I been doing this from day one and never even noticed the CMS only sees the Main install folder. Smart so not needed.

Richard Haseltine

I should point out that the new beta of DS (well, newish) has replaced Property Editor with an edit mode for the Parameters pane (accessed via the pane's option menu) and a Property Hierarchy pane - they are much faster than Property Editor, though using a restricted load of the figure still makes for fewer properties to juggle.