ERC Freeze: Adjusting skeletons for custom characters in DAZ Studio

[Music] hello everyone in this episode i'd like to show you how you can adjust skeletons for custom character morphs in that studio that's an important step if you've made your custom character outside of that studio be that in zbrush or blender or if you've combined morphs from existing sliders in that studio and if you've exported that as an obj brought it back in and your character is now a single slider on the existing genesis figure what can happen and what will happen is that when you dial in a pause the character looks seriously weird and here's a solution to that so this was brought up to my attention by the way from one of my earlier videos about how to combine things with morph loader and with hexagon by one of my viewers e christopher clark thank you so much for bringing that to my attention christopher is an author and he makes book covers for his own books with that studios a very creative use of that studio i'll leave a link to his amazon author page in the description if you want to check it out so thank you so much for bringing that to my attention and i thought i'd make a video about it because you know this is important for all of us i'll show you the whole process of how to what the what the problem is and also the solution so i'll bring in my in my case it's a custom morph for the genesis three figure here she is that's the basic genesis three figure and i will add my custom moth with morph loader so i've described that in a previous video we just go up to edit object morph loader pro and where i will go and find my morph which is this one here and it's a stylized kind of cartoon morph it looks very different than the regular genesis figure so with the figure selected under parameters i can find my morph and i can go and dial it in so it looks decidedly different now if i dial this morph up and i go and apply a pause to the character maybe just one from the from the regular genesis starter essentials here you'll notice that this doesn't look so good i mean she looks like an alien now with the really weird arms and all that and it really depends on your character this really doesn't look good does it so it really depends on your character and how far away the rigging is in your character from the target character or from the base genesis character so this might be more extreme than uh yeah this might be very extreme on some poses and less extreme on others but you get the picture this is not what i want my character to look like so i'll go back to the t pose and show you the solution of how to fix this thing so with my character selected and my morph dialed up to a hundred percent make sure it's set to 100 percent we go and switch over to this other scary tool here which is called the joint editor it's either this little icon here that you can switch over to or you can head over to tools and then pick it from here joint editor just in case you don't have that icon in the toolbar it's easy to reach with the with the menu and with this selected you can now see the bones that make up the rigging of my character what we can already tell is that the skeleton here that is not in the place where my character is so really all these bones they should be with her arms and i can tell that the hip bones here they're kind of too high or like her hip is kind of here rather than here and this all that das duty doesn't really know about that yet and that is why my morphs come out so crazy so to change that we need to do two things number one is we need to add match the skeleton to where the actual figure is and then we need to marry that setting up to my morph slider that says hey that skeleton needs to be adjusted at this point for this position of that slider and everything else that happens in between is much like what happens between two keyframes of an animation it'll be interpolated and that studio usually gets it right so with my character selected and with the joint editor tool selected i need to go and right click on my character that brings up this menu here one of which is under edit there's a thing called adjust rigging to shape and that's what you need to do and that will take care of putting the skeleton in the right place so let's do that edit so right click edit then adjust rigging to shape then you go and click on this and there's a fairly scary dialogue that comes up but we couldn't ignore what it says we can just accept the default it allows you to be really granular about what parts of the skeleton you'd like to adjust we're just going to hit accept das duty is going to think about it for a moment and watch what happens to the skeleton as it's done thinking about it it pops it right into the correct place so her hips are now correct and her arms are now correct and there's still two things that are kind of sticking out on the head here but i think we can probably ignore that that's okay don't worry about that so that is that is number one the skeleton is now in the right place but now we need to tell the morph slider that it needs to use this skeletal position when it's being dialed up and that is also happening with my figure selected here on the actual morph slider so right click on that slider to put it into edit mode that's important right click on it again and notice that there's various other options that have now come up here one of them is called erc freeze so click that and that will come up with another scary window that you know tells you basically the differences between the regular skeletal position and the adjusted position the deltas as they call it and this huge table for literally every joint here every bone we can just say okay whatever and say accept and that is all you have to do the final thing is take the slider out of edit mode because currently i can't move it i can move the whole slider so if you ever wanted to move the slider into a different slot here you can use that but we're gonna just go and disable edit mode here and now we can use that slider again and you can see that my figure reacts as expected with the skeleton shifting positions as interpolated values here when i interpolate between my base character and my custom character the skeleton doesn't just stay in one position it now moves with my character and that's perfect and of course the other even more important thing is that if i now go and dial in a pause on this character it's not going to look like an alien anymore i will go switch off my joint editor tool just so that i don't see the bones anymore and in my smart content i'll just go and dial up some of these poses and now she looks more or less okay so it's not quite i still need to make adjustments because the character looks different than what the pose was designed for but you know no more long alien arms everything looks kind of perfect except for the hand and the chin there and stuff but yes you get the drift my friends that is how you do that so yes very important thing to do erc freeze on adjusted skeletons for custom characters i hope this was helpful if you have any questions then please leave them down below in the comments and thank you so much for for all your support on patreon kofi i really really appreciate that i it really encourages me keeps me going and it's just you know i love putting out little quick tips like this for you and also share the knowledge that viewers like christopher bring to me and you know it's lovely to just share this back with you and just just keep going around and run i really appreciate that my friends have a wonderful time i will see you in the next video take care bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 11,475

Keywords: DAZ, DAZ Studio, ERC Freeze

Id: JBtl2b8B7TM

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021