Spent the last week tracking down why some of my saved characters looked weird with strange morphs applied to them.
And these morphs didn’t show up as “Currently Used” or “Hidden” either!
Turns out it was 3D Universe character morphs for both G8F and G8M.
So I’ve since deleted every 3DU character off my system. I used to trust 3DU as a vendor and they used to be good so not sure what was happening. But as soon as I deleted all the 3DU morphs all of my figures loaded normally.
If you’re having issues, check and see if it’s not 3DU characters somehow getting enabled.
Edit:
So some more drama. Turns out the JCMs and ERCs for the Maxx HD Mega Pack for The Brute 8 is activating even when the character isn’t dialed-in. Spent the past day and half tracking that one down!
Just to be on the safe side I’ve gone ahead and have uninstalled all the Swole characters and morphs, too since I rarely render those types of characters.
Had the 3DU characters received updates recently? I have several of 3DU’s characters, and I do not recall noticing any weirdness when I was working yesterday.
As far as 3DU characters getting updated I don’t recall. Not even sure how I could check? (I’m firing up DIM right now to see if there’s anything in the file info for the products.)
Strange, indeed! I had a similar problem last year; every character I loaded into a scene had a weirdly distorted face, even characters I had saved months earlier. It turned out that a new model I had bought was the problem. The creator had made an error in one line of code in the loading script, which caused the model’s morph to be applied universally to all characters. I fixed the problem by editing the line of code in the file, but the creator eventually updated the model with a correction.
I don’t know either. I have been toying with Turbo Loader.
I’ve had to. I’ve got way too many products installed and it took over three hours to load (not render) one scene with (3) G8/8.1F characters and a (1) G8M.
So I typically break out all my scenes into scene subsets. And I save a new version for every scene (new version of characters too).
Everything looked normal until I went to work on the next scene and load the figures in and they were completely messed up. Literally the only thing I did was reload a saved character.
But it was while working with TurboLoader that I learned something very scary about working with DAZ Studio…
Every time you touch a morph dial that dial then gets “activated” and will be saved as part of the character, even if the morph dial is set to ZERO.
So when I’m designing a new character I may touch several dozen body and head morphs (or expression morphs, etc.) to get what I want.
And every single one of those dials that I’ve touched, even if I’ve reset it back to zero, will now get saved with the character.
The TurboLoader Utilities addon has a “Scene Configuration” option that will save out a list of every morph dial that’s referenced in a character (or scene). That’s when I learned this.
Only way to clear it is to make sure those morphs aren’t available to Studio and re-load the character so those files are “not found” and then save out your character again.
And that’s when I noticed the 3DU characters, the Maxx character, and a bunch of others. Honestly at this point I probably need to uninstall over 50% of the crap that I do have installed.
The fact that every morph dial touched is “activated” on a character explains a mystery that I had encountered a few times. I create animations for a friend of mine, sometimes using premade characters that he sends to me. We check beforehand to make sure I have the models and morphs he used.
Occasionally when I open the scene file he sent, I will get a bunch missing content warnings from Daz for various morphs. When I go over the list of missing morphs with my friend, he always insists that he had not used them for the character, so I simply ignore them and carry on.
Based on what you discovered, I imagine my friend merely had touched the morph dials at some point and decided not to use them, setting them back to zero. Yet that caused Daz to save them permanently on the character.
That is exactly what’s happening, I guarantee you. It’s also bloating the characters and slowing down the loading. Just take a look at the DAZ Studio Log File when you load a complex scene. Notepad++ has an option where you can “tail” the loaded file so it auto-refreshes immediately as new lines are added to the bottom.
That’s another way to quickly see just how inefficient Studio is as well.
