Moving an opject with many parts all together

littlefriend

I want to move say a house that I put together and all of the contents to another scene. Is there a way to kind of merge everything in/on/with the house, so it moves as one?

mnpazan

Yes. First save the house (and everything else you want to move) as a scene, then go up to the top bar under "file", and you'll find an option labeled "merge". You'll then be prompted to browse to and select the other saved scene you want to merge the currently open one with.

This will merge the entire scene(s), not just the resources you have unhidden, so be sure to delete anything you don't want carried over to the new scene before merging. You can do this after of course, but If you've got a lot of stuff to weed out, it may save you some RAM doing it before hand.

Once you've selected and merged the house scene with the other scene you want, save the combined scene as a new scene, then exit and reload from the new save. For some reason merged scenes take up more RAM than single saved/loaded scenes, even if the resources within the scene(s) are all the same. Saving and reloading after a merge will launder out whatever's taking up that extra memory.

littlefriend

Is there a way to save the house and contents of the house as one before I move it over to the other scene?

mnpazan

"Save as scene" and/or "Save" under "file" in the top bar. "Save as Scene" creates a new save file, and "Save" updates changes to an existing save file, unless you haven't made a save file for the scene you're working on yet, in which case "Save" acts the same as "Save as Scene" and creates one.

Same basic idea as in any other kind of program, be it Word or Photoshop or whatever. "Save as Scene" is just DS's version of the generic "Save as".

A "scene" is the whole , well, scene that you're working on: all props, figures, materials & material settings, poses, relative positions, etc. Whenever you save in DS, you're saving the entire scene, not merely a selected part of it.

mnpazan

Oh, another thing you can do is to export the stuff from one scene as an OBJ model, then import that into your other scene instead of merging the scenes directly. Do this by selecting "export" from the "file" menu. Make sure to review the options it gives you: you want to pick the "Daz Studio" scale preset, and make sure that "gather materials", "export UV maps", and "exclude hidden geometry" are checked.

Only do this if you've already finalized the poses/positions of everything you're exporting though, as this process will remove all figure rigging and will unify all objects into a single object. It will also bake all morphs or deformers into the OBJ geometry.

The reason you might sometimes want to do this instead of merge scenes is to save RAM. A dressed and posed figure that's been exported as an .OBJ and re-imported will be much, much lighter memory-wise than the original figure.

The "exclude hidden geometry" setting will cause any parts of a prop or figure that have been hidden in the scene tab to be cut from the exported OBJ model. So for example, you can hide all the parts of a posed & dressed V4/M4 figure that are underneath clothing, causing those parts to not be exported as part of the OBJ, further reducing your memory load for the final scene.

This is a really good trick for when you've got large, highly cluttered or highly populated scenes, since RAM use tends to go up enormously the more poseable and/or morphed models you have in scene. Also really good if you're using raytraced rendering, in order to keep geometry that's not in a position to effect the scene's lighting (anything that's outside the camera's frame, and won't create desirable shadows or bounced light withing the frame) from wasting computing power during rendering.

Jaderail

Create a NODE Name it House. Position the node in the center of your house or the place you wish to move the house from, center floor for example, now Parent the House and all the contents to the Node you named. Now save all that as a Scene file. You use Right Click and Merge to bring it back into any scene you wish to use it in. You will also need to open the Node and Select a part to move it because it is all parented to the node. Without opening the List under the node you will just move the full house, making it very hard to accidentally move just a part when you do not want to.

mnpazan

You can actually just parent everything to the house directly instead of creating a node. Only reason to use a node is if the house already has a bunch of sub-components and you want to keep the number of "branches" on your Scene tab trees low.

It may also be good to do the same thing with objects within the house. For example, if you have a table with a lamp and a book on it, parent the lamp and the book to the table so if you move the table, the lamp and book will move with it, then parent the table to the house.

Szark

Node being a NULL. ;)

Don't forget DS4.5 now has Grouping and with that one click of the eye and the whole group is hidden.

Probably not of value here but I thought I would mention it anyways. :)

Joe Cotter

Little Friend, hmm... I've seen that someplace before ;)

Jaderail

I only Suggested a NULL Node so they could move the full set from the position of their choice instead of the Items default node location. Some times having a Node on screen is better than selecting the object and the Node being off screen which forces the use of a different camera view. That happens to me with many SETs. The Default Node is off screen for my current camera view for sets that have the node at the base is one example.

mnpazan

Ah, that's an excellent point. I've run into that same problem with really large building sets myself.

Also sorry for my part in the node/null mix up.

littlefriend

Thank you all~your replies helped me out!