Posing Parts or Posing with an object?

StevieD

I'm totally new to DAZ studio. In fact this is my first post. There will probably be more.

I understand many of the theories but I have no clue where anything is in DS. Which by the way, I think looks totally fabulous. I haven't done any animation in 15-20 years. I started out with a big project to do and I am trying to learn as I go. I know, it's stupid but I have to do it this way.

My current problem that I thought I figured out but doesn't seem to work is this. I'm trying to save a set of different hand poses. I used the "Save Pose Preset" and clicked off things that I didn't think that I needed. I clicked off most everything except the hands.

I saved them in a folder which already contains hand poses. "Handy For Genesis" (which by the way has separate Right and Left Hand Poses (how do they do that?)) - They do show up with an icon but when I try to load the pose I saved, nothing happens. I can still load the "Handy" poses, though. In a tutorial I saw somewhere, they said to turn off the translate switches. So they don't make the poses translate to where they were made.. Is this true? Is this enough info to tell what I'm doing wrong?

Even though, I would like to get this to work as I expected and if I could get this to work, great for future, BUT ACTUALLY for the situation I am right now working on,,, I would rather do this... The pose presets I am working on are different ways of holding and playing a drum stick for a drummer character I am working on...

Can I save the hand pose with the drumstick in the hand together and call it up like a pose with the drumstick in the hand (maybe even make it change position with the pose)??? Make it a child to the hand but would this work as a "POSE"? I 'm thinking this might not be exactly possible but I thought I'd ask.

Also as an aside, can I/How can I change the rotation point of the drum stick?

Thank You
If you can help me.

Richard Haseltine

How are you posing the hands, and exactly what are you selecting? If you use the Pose Controls on the hand itself then you'd need to save "morphs" for the hand, if you are adjusting the individual fingers you'd need the hand and all its child bones (the fingers) selected and to save transforms. If you could put one of your presets up for download someone may have some other suggestions.

There isn't a built-in way to save a preset that will affect both a figure and a prop, nor to make the positioning of the prop conditional. It would in principle be possible to hack the deprecated script-based presets to do that, but that would require some knowledge of scripting, and it may be possible to hand-edit a dsf/duf file to at least apply poses to both figure and prop (I don't think they could be made conditional, though - unless you made an ERC link between morphs and position, which is again getting fancy).

You should be able to use the Jont Editor to alter the centre point of a prop, and there is also a free script to alter the centre point which I think is working in DS4 - however, the link will be on the old forum (forumarchive.daz3d.com) - see my free script list in the DAZ Studio Freepozitory there.

StevieD

Sorry for the delay in responding. I'm away. I'll try all this out later tonight.

I read in one of the tutorials to have morphs off for some reason, I think. I'll re check.. I;ll try that. I am using the finger pose controls.

I'm trying to pose the fingers and I moved the arm to where they would be if I would use the hand when it is changed but I am going to use a separate pose for the arm, wrist, shoulders so that I can get more flexibility when animating the movement. Other than that the Figure is in the straight "T" stance.

The arm will be posed and animated separate because while the same basic motion would be need if the figure is playing the HiHat and the Cymbal, the position of the arm and the body would be different. The basic position of the Hand grip would be basically the same, though. Of course I would throw in some hand, finger variation as a real drummer would naturally do. I'd, also, want the position of the arms shoulders and torso to be based on the position of the body, where ever it is moved not 0,0,0.

As far as you thought about including the object with script, that's way to far for me at this time. I'll have to wait until I actually gain a feel for the basics of the program. When I get back to try everything you suggested, I report back. Thank you for your advise.

Richard Haseltine

You do want to exclude morphs generally, otherwise applying a pose will reset the shape (or apply the shape that was in use when the pose was saved). However, if you are saving only the hand I think you can turn them on as all the shaping morphs in Genesis are on the root, not the hands.

StevieD

Holly Molie!!!!! I almost forgot how insane it is to learn a new software package. It's funny how you can read and read and read then look at hundreds of video tuts, half of which are severally out of date, where you have to try to interpolate to the version you are currently trying to figure out. I sure do wish this was easier.
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OK. I finally found a forum post that showed me my mistakes. In two different places, talking about two different aspects of it, I was able to put them together to figure out what was going on. I'm still not sure I've grasped it but I did get it to work as I needed. Here is the link of the forum post that helped me out for those who have my same problem. http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3304/#42364
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I won't go all through it all but in essence, One of my biggest problems was that I didn't open up every single little position on the selection tree and there are plenty of them. When you see everything in there, all spread out, you do get a better feel for what you have to click and not to click. That's important. I think there are still a few boxes I need to click to get exactly what I want but I spent about a week already trying to get just this, So,,, you know,,,, Before I found this post, I was getting poor or no results. Now, my results do not work exactly like "Handy for Genesis" does but at least I can do what i want to do when I apply them with the Command Dble Click.
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If you (MAC) Comand Dble Click (Control Dble Click (on the PC)) on the preset, a box comes up where you can deselect Morph and other things to apply the pose in what ever position the Hand is. Well so far I only tried it in one or two positions. "T" stand but it seems like it works in the other as well.
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Another problem I had was I posed the hand without limits to get it in the correct position. The Dble click box helped that as well. When I first started I was either getting No pose at all or I was getting a pose that effected everything, even morphs in the figure. I'll continue to work on this and report if I get a lightning strike.

Thank You