OBJ morph issue / importing rigged objects?

EternalWinds

Hello

I've imported heads made externally into Daz in the .obj format. My initial question is to do with the morphs I apply to "pose" ears, eyelids etc.; is there a way to change how they behave in terms of deformation?

The issue I find is that if I import a head as an .obj, then create a morph such as a rabbit ear bending forward, then apply the morph with Morph Loader Pro, the morph "kinda" works... moving the slider to 100% gives the correct ending position and shape, but the transition from 0-100% just moves each vertex to the final point and really deforms the model. Are morphs the wrong thing to try and use for "posing" things like facial expressions, ear movements etc.?

Ideally i'd rig the model in Daz but I don't find Daz's rigging very easy to use. I know how to rig in Blender and could skip the "morph" phase entirely if I could find a way to import rigged things into Daz, but I can't seem to find a working format; I know an .obj has zero rigging instead i'm importing the original head as an .obj, then posing it in blender and exporting the posed heads as .objs to use with Morph Loader Pro.

 

So basically, is there some option to make morphs "smoother", or follow a more "correct" movement between 0-100%? Or a format I can use to import a Blender-rigged mesh into Daz?

Richard Haseltine

A morph is linear - it moves the vertices along a line between the zero position and the morph position - so no, morphs can't handle rotations. The only way to avoid rigging the item might be to use multiple morphs, set them up in a sequence on the timeline and once satisfied use keyed ERC to turn that into a moprh sequence controlled by a single slider - but I can't help feeling that would be a lot of work for limited gain. For something like rabbit ears, if you want them posable, I think your best bet would be a GeoGraft with bones.

EternalWinds

I thought that was the case... no problem!

I've read a few tutorials on geo-grafting, it seems great for things like custom ears, custom leg / arm shapes (outside the boundaries of mesh sculpting) et., though it doesn't really work for me in this case since the entire head is it's own "thing"... as in, I can't shape the Gens2F head into it, so it pretty much has the be the external mesh.

Which leads me onto the same question; how easy is it to import a rigged mesh? That would make it so much easier as it's already rigged, i'm just spending some time playing around with a static .obj and "posed" morphs rather than trying to re-rig in Daz whichisn't the easiest to get to grips with compared to what i'm used to... :)

larsmidnatt

We have a few threads a week about people having challenges with FBX import/Export and how rigging is handled. Not sure about from blender in particular, but I would imagine it may not be so perfect, if it works at all. The importing part is very easy, few clicks. Whether it is usable is a different story.