4.5 Pro smoothing modifiers on converted items not being saved in a scene?
Ok, first of all, I have been away from Daz for over a year and a half but I got bitten by the bug again so I grabbed studio 4.5 pro recently and started playing again. I had been reading about the autofit feature so I decided to give genesis a try with some of the gen 4 content I have. I loaded up the default genesis figure then autofit the Hardcore outfit for M4 over to him and everything fit very well, though I did have to use a little smoothing/collision on the shirt, even the boots belt and holster all came over just fine. Then I applied some morphs to genesis (just some dial settings on the standard ones) and sure enough the whole outfit automagically adjusted itself for a perfect fit to the morphed character. Being pretty pleased with the results I saved this as a scene and went off to do some other things.
Ok, when I loaded up the scene later I originally thought the morph following of autofit was no longer working, but I looked closer and it seems that the smoothing modifier is missing on the shirt. Does studio not save smoothing modifiers in the scene when working with autofit clothing? Smoothing and collision is my current favorite feature of studio and I just need to know the best way to use it.
Another question I have, when converting gen 4 items for genesis, can I saved the converted items as some sort of preset or asset or do I have to convert them each time I want to use them?
Comments
Smoothing settings are saved but the smoothing results tend to be recalculated every time you pose the character. So sometimes when you load the scene again you need to trick studio into re-applying the smoothing modifier. There are a few ways to do it, like changing the pose or just hiding the clothing item and unhiding. Or you can turn smoothing off for the item, wait a sec and turn back on.
Typically I keep smoothing off until I am ready to render, because it has to re-apply every time you change the pose, clothing or expression on the character. Recalculating the smoothing modifier while you work it slows things down, especially if a lot of items have smoothing on them.
There are two settings, smoothing iterations and turning smoothing on or off. So when you turn it off, the iterations setting is kept separately. You don’t have to worry about losing the iterations value. Unless there is a new bug anyway. Sometimes on older clothes lower is better, but I think in 4.5 by default the smoothing iterations have been turned down pretty low. In 4.0 it was 20, which actually works better for some items but at the cost of slowing things down even more.
Enjoy
edited for clarity
Well, in the case I am talking about, when I loaded the scene and clicked on the shirt which I had used smoothing on prior to saving the smoothing modifier was no longer listed in the properties tab on the item. I had to go back and re-apply a smoothing modifier which then worked as before.
As for the iterations settings for both collision and smoothing, in my admittedly very limited testing I have noticed that an extremely small number has been all that I have needed for it to work quite effectively. Generally in the range of 2-10 has been all that was necessary and at times going higher actually looked worse than the smaller iterations.
I have this problem too. It seems to be a problem of the new .DUF format not saving the morphs and other properties of autofitted clothing. Say, I load genesis, dial up the bodybuilder morphs, then autofit the shirt on him. I go to the shirt and dial down the "bodybuilder details" morph to get a smoother shirt. Then I save the scene. When I load it back later, the shirt is reset back to what the genesis figure has and I have to make the adjustment again.
Same thing with smoothing factor and all the transferred morphs from genesis. With the old .DAZ files, which I still have some of these laying around, they still work fine, as long as I don't save them as .DUF. Once I save them to the new .DUF format, all the clothes go out of position and lose the smoothing modifier also.
I am running the 4.5 Beta version 4.5.0.137. I have the same problem with changed morph settings not being restored when I reopen the DUF file. In my case I was trying to correct hidden morphs (I think they are called Auto Follow morphs???) that get added to hair and sunglasses when I put them on some Genesis characters. I have to change the hidden morphs to 0% to prevent drastic distortion of the hair or sunglasses. When I save the file and reopen it, those hidden morphs are no longer 0%, and the distortion returns. Then I have to figure out all over again what has to be changed to fix it.
I have attached pictures of the bad sunglasses when the morphs are non-zero, and the good sunglasses after I zero the hidden morphs.
Edit: DAZ attached the images in reverse order. The first one is the zeroed morph version. The second one is the way the file reopens after being saved as a DUF file.
If you have not already done so, its probably best to make a bug report on this.