Growing Plant Morphs?
Superdog
Posts: 765
I have a prickly pear cactus model that I want to add morphs to so that I can animate it to make it look like it's growing. The cactus model is all one mesh. I want to add morphs that shrink and grow each of the prickly pear "ears" (leaves?) and also add moving/twisting morphs to each part to give the effect of slight movement as it grows.
Can I add morphs to each of the prickly pear "ears" and shrink and grow them as necessary? Or do I need to open the cactus in Hexagon and split the plant into separate parts, then load each part into DAZ Studio and then add morphs to each part? I would much prefer to add morphs to areas of the whole plant in DAZ Studio if possible rather than have to split it up in Hexagon.
Any help/advice appreciated.
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Comments
As long as you can select each ear you should be able to morph it - bits of the mesh that are unchanged will be unchanged in the morph, but won't block other morphs from affecting them. If you are lucky the ears will be separate mesh and you can use select connected to grab each in turn and scale it. You could also try turning the plant into a figure so you could weight-map each ear as a separate bone for scaling.
Thanks for your reply. Is there a thread/tutorial about how to turn the plant into a figure for weight mapping? I've been looking at some of the morphing/deformer tutorials (Carnite and Medhue) on Youtube and creating deforms/morphs seems pretty straight forward. I also thought I should save the plant as a preset so that I don't change the original model. Is this necessary or can I delete morphs I make for the original model if I make a mistake?
How is it saved now? If it's an asset, just delete the file for unwanted morphs from the Data folder.
Rigging would be the same as any other figure - given that it's a fairly simple figure, use the Figure Editor to load the OBJ (right-click in the left hand panel), drag it into the hierarchy panel, add and arrange bones by right-click (or create groups before importing and when you drag the OBJ into the hierarchy that will create bones), create the figure, then use the Joint Editor to position the start and end points and the Geometry Editor and Node Weight Map Brush to do the rigging.
The cactus is a Poser file which I've loaded into DAZ Studio. When I apply a deformer to one of the leaves, the scale tool shrinks the leaf but also distorts it as well. I can never get it to completely shrink down. Even a little stump would be better than the results I'm getting atm. I've tried adjusting the deform field and moving the base but the shrunken results aren't small enough or very convincing as mini versions of the normal leaf. I think I need to somehow increase the red parts of the deform to cover the whole leaf without increasing the field. If I increase the field too much to make the leaf more red then other leaves are affected.
Another problem is that when I try to save a morph it isn't being saved. I select the cactus, open the deform tab, tick the three boxes below "spawn morph" and then click spawn morph, enter a name and click save but instead of saving the morph the enter name box keeps reappearing and the morph isn't saved. I don't have a clue why this keeps happening.
As for your other advice I'm finding it really difficult to understand. Do you mean load the cactus in the Figure Editor? I think I need a, 'How to turn props into figures', walk-through for dummies because this is all new to me.
Well, you may find you can get what you want by controlling the DForm with a weight map, instead of the field.
Move the field right away, otherwise its effects will be baked to the new weight map which probably won't be helpful.
Switch to the Node Weight map brush, and open the Tool Settings pane.
With the DForm selected, in the Tool Settings pane you wil see a button labelled Unused Maps currently showing Influence Weights - click the Add Map button next to that.
Switch to the Geometry Edit tool and select a polygon or two on the end of the leaf, then right-click and select Geometry Selection>Grow Selection to expand the selection to the whole leaf. There are other commands there that you can experiment - select Connected may be useful if the model is conveniently broken into parts, select Loop if it's a tidy mesh. Once you have a leaf fully selected switch back to the Node Weight Paint tool and right click, Weight Editing>Fill Selected and set the dialogue to 100%.
Try the effect of your DForm - if it's too sharp try right-clicking and going to Weight Editing>Soften, or paint directly to deal with oddities.
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On spawning a morph, make sure your name is valid and unique.
Thanks for sticking with this Richard as I'm sure it's not easy explaining these things to someone who has no idea how it all works. I'll go through the steps you've suggested and report back.
Ok, I followed the steps you suggested to the letter and it works! The leaf shrinks to nothing using the scale parameter just as I wanted. I selected the whole leaf by lassoing it because I couldn't get the pixel selection to grow over the whole leaf. I don't know why. I named the deform a unique name, saved it and deleted the deform when asked but when I went to find the morph there was no morph slider in the parameters pane. I just can't find it. Where would it have been saved to?
Ok, I just realised what I did wrong. I forgot to apply the deform before saving it. Once I did that then the new morph slider appeared. Thank you so much for your help!
I just wondered what the best way is to select parts of a prop such as leaves and flowers? I couldn't work out how to get the pixel selection to grow and the lasso tool isn't very accurate so is there a way to select or remove pixels - pixel by pixel without losing the selection completely? For example if I lasso a selection and then want to add to or remove from that selection how do I do that?
Another update - I've figured out how to use grow selection. After I lasso a leaf I then click grow selection and it selects any part of the leaf that I missed. So far this has worked every time and is creating perfect morphs. Long may this continue! So grateful for your help Richard. I could never have worked this out for myself otherwise.
One other question, how do I delete morphs once I've saved them? There are a couple of leave morphs that I did first that aren't as good as the latest ones so I'd like to do them again but can't work out how to delete the original morphs.
It's a lot of hard work but even so I don't know why someone hasn't released some suitable plants with these kind of morphs. This might not work for every plant but for those that do, when animated, I'm sure this will create some very realistic effects. I would buy this type of product in a minute!
Grow selection works only if the mesh is connected, if it wasn't working I would guess that the leaf is made of more than one distinct piece of mesh.
How are you saving the item? Different methods have different ways of deleting unwanted morphs.
Once I've got the deform as I like it I save it as a morph using the "spawn morph" in the DForm tab. This creates a morph slider in the props parameters tab which I then save by clicking on:
File/save as/support asset/morph asset.
This saves a morph file in the data folder of my Contents folder.
In that case, go to the Data folder for your item \Data\Artist\Product\Item) then in there to the folder with your morph (\Morphs\Author\Product\, where Author and product were set by you in the options dialogue when saving) and delete the DSF files for the unwanted morphs.