Can someone explain the V3/V4 workflow to me?
mike.smith2005
Posts: 85
As someone who came to Daz studio after G8 was already extablished, I'm having a very difficult time wrapping my head around the old systems that still exist here. G1-G3 all seem to more or less work like G8+, just with a few less bell and whistles and older render techniques, but this V3/V4 workflow I just can't wrap my head around. Sometimes people are in poses and sometimes figures (why?), hair and clothes don't always fit (why?) and have to be manually put in place (and sometime can't be reposed very well), and some things like Cookie and Pickles and other 'toony' figures have heads and tails that work nothing like the body parts other figures have.
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The "why" of that is that Genesis introduced features that made working with figures in DS so much easier for successive generations. For example, anything that's compatible with V8 will work on G8, because they are fundamentally the same figure, which is not the case for generation 4 and earlier. Victoria 4, Aiko 4 and the Girl are actually distinct figures, so if something is compatible with one, you can't assume that it will be compatible with the others. Whereas Genesis and beyond have all morphs available as soon as you load them, but you might have to inject the morphs you want into V4 post-load.
Actually the why of the content locations is the Poser library structure - it had a limited number of locations, of which the relevant ones would be Figures (anything with bones), Faces (expression poses), hair (props that loaded as hair piece parented to the head, replacing any other hair), Hands (hand psoes - which did have the useful option of applying to the left or right hands at the user's choice), Poses (just that), and Props (any model without bones, other than hair as such). Poser 5 added Materials (Poser material settings, analogous to either shader presets or materials presets) but Daz didn't initially support those (mainly for backward compatibility, I think). Until the addition of the Materials library Poser didn't really support a preset for setting materials, nor did it have a preset for shaping, so once people figued out how to edit files to create that kind of preset they had to be plonked into one of the existing libraries - Poses was the simplest (some people did use Cameras or Lights, but they were treated in a special way which could complicate matters). Multi-part hairs couldn't be put in the Hair library, since loading once part would replace the other, and hair with bones (such as posable tails) was meant to go in the Figure library (in fact it was possible to cheat the system by changing the extension used to identify the type, and more rcent versions of Poser have stopped enforcing the file type link to the library location anyway, but that is a newer feature than the older figures).
How can I tell, if it's not in the name, that it's compatible with V4 or A4 or Stephanie (S4?)?
What does that mean? How do I do this? I know when I load V4, I get a loader that asks me what all I want to load with it. I can load muscular bodies or a better skin, but afterwards?
Richard Haseltine said:
Aaaaahhh! This makes sense. I don't like it (LOL) but it makes sense!
Most of the time what you find in the "Figures" library is the base figure, V3/M3 and V4/M4 etc.
Characters in the "Pose" library come in a couple of flavours, you have the MOR-pose PZ2 which is similar to a shaping preset in DS4, it just holds the morph names and the values for the dials.
Then there's INJ/REM, these come in different flavours to, but they all do the same thing, INJect/REMove morph deltas from specific channels in the figure and then change the dial setting.
Hair and clothing not always fitting is usually because they weren't edited after being saved. In Poser when you save back to the Figure library it's almost like saving a scene, if it's in the scene then it's just been added to that CR2. Having one rigged item in the scene means it's saved as a "Figure" rather than as a "Conformer", so the creator is meant to edit the file and change "conforming 0" to "conforming 1", some do many don't, as a result it doesn't auto-conform in Poser or DS. In DS just right click the item in the viewport and select Fit "item name" To.. from the menu.
While V3, A3 or SP3 are indeed different figures with different rigging and don't share much (they can share textures, but by default that's all), A4, G4 and S4 are actually morphs for V4.
However contrary to Genesis figures, content for V4 does not automatically follow morphs applied to the figure.
Some V4 clothes or hairs include morphs to fit G4, S4 or A4, or to match the basic head and body morphs, but not all. It is possible to make those items follow morphs you have used though, there's a command called "transfer active morphs" you can use for that. But you have to explicitely tell DS to do it.
Regarding using morphs:
Basically when you load a figure DS/Poser loads a list of dials corresponding to the morphs. In order to use those morphs, DS/poser needs to load the "morph deltas" in memory so it knows how the morph works and can apply it.
For Genesis figures, DS automatically loads the morph deltas when you use the corresponding dial for the first time, but for V3 or V4 you need to explicitely tell DS/poser to do it, by "injecting" the morph delta into the figure. The dialog which asks you which morphs you plan to use when you load V4 will then "inject" the select morphs so that you can use them directly. If you want to use other morphs afterwards, you can use the corresponding "INJ" pose to activate them. Conversely, you can use a "REM" pose to remove/unload the deltas for a morph you don't want to use.
Sadly "transfer active morphs" doesn't always work, we learned with DS3's version that there is a lot of content out there that actually has the morphs, it's that they just don't work in DS due to bad ERC.
As a result we learned that "transfer active morphs" wont overwrite existing morphs, which means a fair bit of editing to fix the ERC yourself.