Is it normal for it to be this frustrating?
SilverGirl
Posts: 171
I'm not sure if this is a vent or what... maybe looking to see if my expectations need to be adjusted...
I was all excited to get the body/face of my character looking right after a massive amount of dial sliding. I got a hair for her that was... okay. But the braid never sat right and really, it was a lot "fluffier" on the top than was right for her. Further in the game, I figured out that you CAN put G8 on a G9, so I bought some new hair. Well, that didn't go easy because the braid didn't want to attach to the back of the head the way it was supposed to, but I figured that out. Okay, great, got the hair sorted!
Clothes... oh ugh. Shopping is fun, but trying to get them to fit is not fun. She's a very casual kind of gal who would never wear something form-fitting, but everything vacuum-seals to her breasts like a super hero outfit, or seems to come with breasts built into the clothing because her cup size goes up by about a factor of three as soon as the outfit's on... or both. But by the grace of Fit Control and Clothing Converter and puttering and some great advice on the forums, I finally got one singular outfit looking right, too.
So I figure - great! I don't have lights or scene figured out yet, but as a reward, let's pose her and do a render. Everyone else's renders look great, and it looks so effortless in the turorial videos! How hard could it be? I've only bought roughly a thousand poses that looked fun to play with, plus a couple posing utilities. Choices galore!
...except none of the poses I pick look like they do in the pictures, her fingers all look broken, her braid has detatched from her head again, and we're back to poke-through for the clothing.
Is it this a normal part of the process? Is there really this much fixing that has to go into every single picture people make, or am I just vastly bad at this?
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Comments
Sounds like you need to adjust rigging to shape, which can be necessary after a lot of dial-spinning.
Ohhh brilliant. Thank you. Her braid keeps detaching, still, even though I have it set to "parent in place," but at least the poses look right.
Thank you. She's 83% scale of default, and I had no idea the structure didn't adjust with that.
....and on a lark I decided to try parenting her braid to her head instead of the base hairstyle it came with.
Problem solved.
You shouldn't need to adjust the rigging for store morphs - they should do all that themselves, and the effects just get stacked. If you can figure out which shapes are causing the problem, and if they come from Daz (or another store) I would report them (to Daz Tech Suport for anything bought here, usually to the artist for other stores).
Morph proction is pretty simple-minded - it just looks at how the adjacent area of the figure has moved and moes thata rea of the fitted figure accordingly. That does mean that enlarging or shrinking the breasts can look poor, especially if the artist had made some attempt to bridge the cleavage since the actual sternum area won't move and so the bridging section will be left behind as the areas over the breasts move. dForms and Push Modifiers can help, as can applying a Smoothing Modifier in Generic mode (the default, base Shape matching, tends to flatten out the effect of the morphs) but ideally you want clothing that has a custom morph to match the morphs you are applying to the figure.
To answer your broader question ... yeah, it kind of is normal. My experience is that if you go into your asset library (this is true of any asset library, for any software) just wanting to experiment with what looks nice together and see what happens, you can have a very chill time. If you go in with an idea already in your head, you're likely to run up against the limitations of your library quickly. You'll come up with ideas all the time that are outside the use cases the creators of your assets anticipated, or for which no asset exists. (And trying to instantiate a specific character who already looks a specific way in your head is one of the most challenging things to accomplish in D|S.) As you gain experience, you will probably also get more ambitious and discover new problems that are similarly frustrating but more niche.
I'm not saying this to discourage you! I hope you'll find it easier to NOT get discouraged if you know that other people are in the trenches with you, pulling their hair out just like you are. It does help to be the kind of person who likes puzzles, though.
Thank you for the detailed response. Prior to getting Daz in in November I'd wanted to try ditgital art for years but never had a box that could handle it, so I'm walking in clueless and it all kind of looks like magic to me. Can I ask - when you say "custom morph to match the morphs you are applying to the figure" - does this mean you're just using store-bought characters and sliding the percentages (like, 25/25/50% of three different pre-bought characters) works, but sliding the separate body-part adjuster dials invalidates that? (Sorry, I'm still trying to learn the lingo. I'll get there!)
The only shape I used was the Caucasian woman who comes with Daz Studio, all alterations done with the Daz G9 expansion pack (can't remember the name) with all the sliders that was mentioned in the tutorials that came in my welcome email. (Except the ears were mesh grabber, but I don't see why that ought to impact anything else.) She's not *drastically* different in build -- more athletic, scaled to 5' tall, and smaller-breasted (I'd say maybe a B-cup?), with a few other minor tweaks. That 'adjust rigging' trick fixed the hands problem entirely; her arms still don't go the right spots for a few of the poses I've tried (they tend to be tucked unnaturally through her body) but I can compensate for that, even if I'd rather not have to. The hands part was what did me in the most, I think, especially since nothing I did seemed to really fix it (understandably, since her joints were apparently in the wrong places).
Actually, this helps a lot, thank you. I knew there would be some fiddling necessary to get a custom look, and I'm totally willing to put in the work because I've wanted this for YEARS and finally seeing my characters looking back at me is an incredible joy. (And of course I would start on "one of the most challenging things" mode... seems to be how I get into every art form I've tried.) But I'm also a "Photoshop still intimidates the hell out of me" level of rookie, and my art time comes in snatches between being a full-time caregiver to my son who is autistic. So the limits of the software, my knowledge, and my patience seem to be one of those "if a train leaves Cleveland..." math problems. It's nice to know other people are also fighting through their own difficulties and not that I'm just terminally inept. Folks on the forums have been so kind, helpful, and patient, and wow I can't thank everyone enouh. I look forward to the day when I can read posts like the ones I'm making now and be like "hey, I remember cussing at my computer over that!" and pay it forward. :)
A custom morph means that the clothing has been taken into a modeling or sculpting application (or adjusted with dForms and Push modifiers in Daz Studio, but that is trickier to bring off) to give a more considered match for the shape on the figure than the automatic match, then that is loaded as a morph with the same name (not label - you need to click the gear icon on the morph's slider and select Parameter Settings to see the name) so that when the figure is put in X% of Such-and-such morph the custom morph in the clothing will automatically take the same value. Without a custom morph of the same name Daz Studio just "projects" the shape, so that the clothing or other fitted item keeps the same offset relative to the new shape as it has relative to the base shape; that is why breasts frequently look vacuum wrapped, or every striation in a muscular morph is showing in the character's shirt. Unfortunately even restricting yourself to the base Body Morph set there are still so many shapes that clothing makers can't provide a custom shape for each.
It sounds as if the height adjustment is causing the issue - when you adjust the shape in a way that moves the modelled joints (the elbow, wrist etc.) the joints of the figure (the points about which it bends) need to move to match, otherwise you get really weird stretching. Adjust rigging to Shape looks at where the bending points are relative to the base shape and moves them so that they are in the same relative position in the morphed shape. How are you doing the height adjustment - using the Proportion controls?
For height adjustment it's showing as used:
I don't remember how much of that came with the original and how much I dialed in. I did adjust "proportion hand size" down about 10% as well, which might've also impacted the fingers.
I have another character off the same base, and the limited poses I've tried on her have needed some adjusting, but more in the "expected" than "wtf how do I even deal with this??" range. She is scale 92.4% (the first one is 82.7%), proportion hands and height at neutral, and same proportion smaller body only and legs length as the above. (But the common ones might not be baked into the original as I made the 5'4 lady first, and then copied her and made more adjustments to get the shorter one.)
If the properties work on some figues and not others I would suspect they are not the root of the issue. If you take a new figue and use those properties at the same values (roughly) as on the fiver-footer do you get the same pose issues?
I found a good way to try to find ideas for things is to do exactly what was mentioned above, chill out and go through your inventory. Only instead of looking for specific things to do something very specific with, I approach it with a blank canvas in mind to see what I can combine together to make something hopefully unique. I noticed you said you're still leery of photoshop, if you haven't bought into a subscription to Adobe yet I would suggest having a look at Gimp first, it's open source and free. :) The learning curve for it is probably slightly harder though. Being able to retexture things really makes a difference when coming up with ideas for stuff to render, as I'll just retexture environments, items, or clothes to suit my needs.
Oh and mastering the use of simple primitives can make a scene otherwise impossible to complete able to be completed. A quick example could be something like needing a wall, or needing an something to bridge a gap between two items, etc. Primitives are great.
I think I started using Daz around the same time as you, November(ish), and I had a really horrible time starting out too. Very frustrating. While I didn't have any experience with art or rendering, or any applications associated with it, I wasn't a stranger to mesh and putting meshes on actors/models. So I at least came in knowing there would be issues with clipping, that parenting or linking objects/meshes together would be required at times, etc etc. But still I've gotten fairly frustrated with it all also, so I can relate to that. It gets easier as long as you stick with it. :) Given my background in IT I think sometime by around week two or three with Daz I was already disecting Postgres and Daz's metadata files to fix broken things.
What's been really helpful is the community, just asking questions here when I hit a dead end on a problem somewhere. If the community didn't know, after some time I usually figured out the answer on my own through excessive searching lol. If you're having trouble searching the forums, search on Google (or your favorite search engine), instead and it'll find the posts on these forums.
Try to spend some time with Daz everyday. :)
Okay, so I ran an experiment with some interesting results (sorry for delay; couldn't get to DS yesterday).
I started with the Kat for G9 figure, same as my 5' lady. I copied the parameters listed above but oddly, she turned out shorter than my character. So clearly there's something I missed? No idea what it is, but I left New Girl (we'll call her) be as-is.
They were standing next to each other, and I applied the same pose to both (a g9 pose off the Ancient Warriors Feminine pack). New Girl posed flawlessly. Original Girl was kinda close, but her arms were in the wrong places (body intersect), and her hands were... well, not broken-looking, but it was obvious the positioning was different and not right.
So for the sake of science, I did Edit>Copy>Copy Figure on the Original Girl and Edit>Paste>Paste Figure Shape to New Girl, and it ended up with the WTF broken fingers look (which had been fixed in Origial Girl when I adjusted the rigging).
And then, for comparison's sake, I loaded up Other Girl (the 5'4 who hasn't given me nearly as many problems, not that I've done much with her yet) and tossed the same pose at her. She looked almost entirely like New Girl, except her right hand was broken-looking. Put her back to 0 pose, Threw Adjust Rigging to Shape at her (I thought I already had, but maybe not?) and tried again; her hand was no longer broken, but her right hand/arm were not quite the same as New Girl (although still pretty close).
So I'm not sure what to make of this other than something clearly got messed up somewhere along the line, and I'm not sure what. I'm going to try copying down all Original Girl's values and replicating on New Girl (oh god...) and do some occasional poses in between with the test pose I picked to make sure things are still smooth. If it works, I'll do the same with Other Girl.
Super not looking forward to this process, but it'll be less frustration in the long run if I invest the time now.
It does sound as if something used on original Girl is not working correctly - though there is the property with Genesis 9 that controls corrective morphs, and which should be zeroed, but that wouldn't affect joint adjustments as far as I can see.
Yeah, the weird thing is I haven't applied anything to her except doing mesh grabber to fine tune the look of her ears. Same with Other Girl, who has it to a lesser extent and was the figure I copied to refine to make Original Girl. So whatever it was, it started there and got worse.
Whenever I start to feel this way I always remind myself: At least Daz isn't Blender. At least Daz isn't Blender.
In a really odd twist of "I don't even know how that happened" -- it is, in fact, the ears morph I made with Mesh Grabber. Which I also had dialed in somewhat on Other Girl, but not as strongly. Which would explain why the distortion wasn't as bad for her.
Ah, perhaps you had accidentally incorporated some of the chnages from the other morphs - which would have had the shape, but not the linked joint adjustments nor any corrective morphs for better bending.
Probably. No idea how, but hey, that should shock no one at this point LOL.
The good news is that if I took it off Other Girl and she poses fine now, so I don't need to recreate her.
Unfortunately I do have to redo the ears (this time I'm doing it on a base G9) and that wasn't fun the first time, plus the frustration of having to re-do so much prep work when I'd finally gotten to the point of having her ready to render. But at least I know what the issue is now! And all future morphs are getting made on a base figure!