Tips and questions.

First, tips, that I learned the hard way, for anyone else attempting this.

1.    1.    DO NOT inject every morph package you have and then use the “copy all morphs” option. If you have morph packages injected (which you will, because you need the morphs to make the heads fit together), you will have to pick through the list manually, because it will make extra copies of the entire set of base expression morphs for every character in every morph package. This means, for example, if you have ethnic morphs loaded, you will get the full set for Norwegian, the full set for Ethiopian, etc., and none of these copies work as well as the original base copies (the ones that don’t have a bunch of letters before them) so to make it more manageable, you will have to spend an hour deleting them all.

2.   2.    Screen material areas, and use “exclusive” mode.  Screen out things like eyelashes, teeth, etc. In this character, the base of the horns is part of the head, and I wish I had screened them, because morphs that affect the top of the head cause the horns to warp. I had to clean it up in the copied morphs with the grouping tool and an Ockham script.

3.    3.   When copying morphs, make sure the figure and body part that you are copying to is selected as the current actor, even though the script lets you select anything in the scene, which might lead you to believe that what you’re copying to and from only have to be in the scene. If the wrong thing is selected, things start to get very weird. Figures start mixing up their parameter windows, forever, in that  scene, and you have to revert. Be careful. Save frequently.

Questions for anyone who actually knows how to use this: There are settings, but I don’t know what they do. “Distance cutoff,” “number of influences,”  “test normals,” “test using base geom,” “ray-casting.” I left them all on the default, because I was afraid to interfere with them.  

Is there anyone out there who uses this tool frequently, who is good at it?

There is a Restore Detail script that comes with it, but I couldn’t get that to work. It is supposed to clean up the messy morphs, but for me it either makes dials that don’t do anything, or it makes spikes shoot out of their faces. What am I doing wrong?