Creating things with faces?

Deke

I'm trying to create anthropomorphized things....like when you see a candlestick or a teapot with a face like in Beauty and the Beast. Is there a way to add a face to an object? Or a way to remove legs and body from a figure and just keep the face?

Richard Haseltine

Yes, though it might be a bit fiddly - the props would almost certainly need to be oversized to work, but you could scale each assembly as needed..

You could certainly hide all but the face mesh, mostly just switching the bones' visibility off (through the Parameters pane with multiple bones selected or one-by-one using the eye icon next to the bone in the Scene pane) then with the Geometry Editor selecting any polygons that were in the way and then right-click>Geoemtry Assignment>Assign To Face Group and selecting the group for one of the hidden bones. Parent the prop to the head bone and that might work with common materials applied to both. Just be aware that a single model can have only one grouping, so multiple items using the same figure with different grouping would be tricky.

Another option would be to take the figure into a modeller, create your prop around it (or bring another model in and delete the parts that would be hidden) on a new layer, and delete all parts of the figure that were partially or wholly hidden. Then you have to bridge from the raw edges of the remaining parts to the prop (as part of the prop mesh), so that the vertices around the edge of the hole in the prop exactly match the vertices around the edge of the figure's left-over face (most easily done by copy-and pasting the rim, then once the new mesh is created deleting the remains). Export the prop only, deleting or excluding the remains of the figure, then import it into DS (make sure you use the same preset in the options dialogue for both import and export), turn it into a figure with Edit>Figure>Transfer Utility, setting the figure as the Source and the prop as the Target. You want to use the Node Weightmap Brush tool to make the prop follow just the head bone, so select it's own Head bone, select the General Weights map in Tool settings, right-click>Geometry Selection>Select All, right-click>Weight Editing>Fill Selected, and enter a value of 1 (or 100%). Finally switch to the base figure, with the new prop-figure fitted to it, and with the Geometry Editor select all the parts you want hidden (using the group list in the Tool Settings pane will help), then right-click>Geometry Assignment>Set Auto Hide faces for Attachment, select the rim of polygons that joins to the prop, right-click>Geometry Assignment>Set graft Faces for Attachment and - when you switch to a posing tool - most of the figure should vanish and the face should be welded into the prop. This method does allow you to have different versions of the same figure loaded, each with a different set of areas hidden to fit onto the prop.  Again, apply a common material to both to make them look like a single part.

Deke

Thanks for the detailed response. I'll give these options a try. I had wondered if it was just a matter of hiding or erasing geometry and parenting objects together. One hesitation was the thought that all that hidden gemotry of the body and legs (which I don't need) would still have to be processed by my computer.  There is also this product that seems to erase some body parts.

https://www.daz3d.com/shapeless-morphs-for-genesis-8-female

barbult

Gescon might be helpful.