How to "ungroup" sets of things - like the Medusa's cannons?

Roman_K2

A number of DAZ models seemed to be linked together. For example if I load the cannon from Faveral's "Medusa" ship model into a scene with the Blenworth castle, ALL SIX cannons seem to come arranged on an invisible plane.

What is the secret, please, to just being able to work with ONE cannon, one tree, one leaf, one blade of grass etc.?

JimmyC_2009

Roman_K2 said:

A number of DAZ models seemed to be linked together. For example if I load the cannon from Faveral's "Medusa" ship model into a scene with the Blenworth castle, ALL SIX cannons seem to come arranged on an invisible plane.

What is the secret, please, to just being able to work with ONE cannon, one tree, one leaf, one blade of grass etc.?

Have you looked in the Scene tab? Can you see the seperate items listed, like Plane, Cannon1, Cannon2 etc etc?

Find the item that you want seperate from the group, select it in the Scene tab, and it should move on it's own.

If it has loaded as one singular item, then you would need to take it into a modelling program (like Hexagon), and ungroup it, and save the cannon one at a time, and reload them into DS. You could use the Hex to DS bridge for that.

mjc1016

And to make it easier, in the future...load the item into a new scene, select the one closest to the origin (center) and delete or make invisible, all the rest. Then save, in DS4 it's pretty easy, that one as new asset...name it something (well if it's the cannons, in this case) like 'single_cannon'. That way you'll now have just one to load and position where you want it.

Roman_K2

Hmmm... I hope this makes sense but the cannons aboard the Medusa ship seem to be grouped in a plane of six. I tried sending them to Hexagon but once there, "ungrouping" is a mystery -- I probably just don't know how to use the ungroup function.

Also the first time I went to Hexagon the cannons were black steel and wood. The second time they kind of came out like colorless .OBJ

Also... in another thread user chohole mentioned DAZ's EULA where it says "User may not reverse engineer, de-compile, disassemble, [emphasis added] or create derivative works from the 3-D Model(s)."

Technically, I am wanting to "disassemble" the group of cannons as sold by DAZ; I suppose I could always buy the other cannon they have, the more-detailed one.

Here's the rub: my dog ("The Stick") just bought the "Blenworth castle" prop and he thinks it's REAL. He wants to haul the cannons up to the tower so he can fire them for Reveille.

No biggie - like "The Stick" himself they are only 7-pounders, heh.

That's him in the corner (red arrow)... I put him in with a lot of post work. Whatta clown!

Also attached, the cannon plane as loaded into Hexagon.

JimmyC_2009

Send the Cannon on the Plane to Hexagon using the Bridge. That will keep the textures.

Are the parts listed seperately inside Hexagon? If not, you will have to select the cannons individually by using the polygon selection tools, and grow the selection untill you have ALL of one cannon selected.

Then use the Extract tool to make it a seperate object, select that new object, and send it back to DAZ Studio.

It might be a lot easier to just buy a single cannon. If you are only going to use this for yourself, then there is no problem with the EULA, you just can't sell it or give it away.

mjc1016

Roman_K2 said:

Also... in another thread user chohole mentioned DAZ's EULA where it says "User may not reverse engineer, de-compile, disassemble, [emphasis added] or create derivative works from the 3-D Model(s)."

Technically, I am wanting to "disassemble" the group of cannons as sold by DAZ; I suppose I could always buy the other cannon they have, the more-detailed one.

Disassemble, in this sense, is a specific term dealing with reverse engineering compiled code...it is taking 'machine level' code and running it through a disassembler and getting back 'human readable' (hopefully) or a 'higher level language' (like C++) from the machine code. Not cutting the parts apart to use them individually.

Now, that said, cutting them up and offering a single cannon for download is strictly forbidden. But doing so, to use them in a render...nope, it's fine. Otherwise, strictly speaking, we wouldn't be allowed to create morphs, change textures or any of the host of other things that we commonly do with this stuff.

Here's a few freebie single cannons...

http://www.sharecg.com/v/41361/View/11/Poser/BoyHouse-addons. (there's a cannon and a raft prop)

http://www.sharecg.com/v/29629/View/5/3D-Model/old-pirate-cannon-and-texture (this is a single from an old ship

Roman_K2

Thanks to all who replied--I know a lot more now. Those cannon choices are nice; before getting DAZ's "single" cannon I used layers and cutouts to just force a single Medusa cannon into position. :-)