Kururu Morph Saving and DAZ Conversion

I've been struggling with my Kururu model because I wanted to do some things the older types of models can't do. I've gotten some good advice from some awesome, knowledgeable people. There isn't much content out there for Kururu, see, and I'm determined to use her in the far future. (I've got to finish Heavenly Bride first.) I've spent hours, even days, playing with different things to figure out how I can increase her content and change her looks in the past few days. Because she's an older, poser type model I can't just morph her the way I would do Genesis. And creating an autofit made a huge mess.

Other people are taking Kururu's head and putting it on the Genesis 2 body. Good idea. I found the object (for free here at DA) of her head and gave it a whirl. Didn't work as I'd hoped. Oh well. I don't use Gen2 if I can help it. I prefer Gen1 because, well, Gen1 is a lot more universal. It can be either sex, and this means bigger wardrobe. For starters.

The reason why people are putting Kururu's head on a Gen2 body is so they can have a bigger warddrobe and morph her easier. From what I did all day yesterday for one scene, it can look pretty tight... although there's a seam around the neck where the two models are fitting together. You can get around that by using toon shaders of various types.

But it's been nagging me all along that there has to be a simpler way. I mean it's elementary, my dear Watson.

Kururu's problem, you see, is that she's not Triax mapped. She's the old style of mapping. I don't know much about the older style,I just know that's my issue.  So I've spent days and days thinking like a hacker, trying to get around this. Parenting Kururu to Gen2, trying to get the Kururu head to work, etc. My instincts have not been happy with me.

Instead of being a hacker, I should have been a simple solution maker. I kind of knew what would work but didn't trust myself. I'd tried it with Cookie in the past, see, and her eyes turned scarey. But. I just tried it again today. Here's how you get around this issue if you're primarily a DAZ user. In my case, it's all I have.

Step 1: Load your Kururu figure
Step 2: Convert to SubD
Step 3: Convert weight mapping to Triax. I always have to guess which way to do this each time I've done it, but eventually I get it.
Step 4: Open the bone rigging options (my version of DAZ doesn't seem to have the panel for it anymore so I have to hit alt+shift+J)
Step 5. Right click Kururu, tell it to adjust rigging to shape. You may want to open joint editor and set your base node to 0 0 0. Apparently there's a bug in DAZ where it doesn't do that for you.
Step 6. Save As Support Asset -> Figure/Prop
Step 7: When you're bored, open up your figure and work on the weight mapping as that's going to be fubarred. I want to learn weight mapping so I'll have me a perfect DAZ figure eventually.

I tested this by then deleting my figure, closing DAZ, reopening, finding my figure. Then I posed her various times. Woot.
Then I made a morph. And I saved it. I closed, opened, and voila. My Kururu, DAZ version, has the morph. All is saved. All is well.

From here I'm going to try to make an autofit clone for her. We'll see how horribly that goes. In the meantime I have Crossdresser, which works alright up to a point. In some cases it's worked better. I can see how making an autofit clone *and* having Crossdresser would be beneficial to someone like me. I have a lot of clothes I've collected since the end of Victoria 2 and the oncoming of Victoria 3. :-p

EDIT:The clone works but because of mesh problems things get a little wonky. It's a work in progress!

However, there's another way to keep your morphs without having to export INJ files and other fun things. Save your character with its morphs as a CR2. This saves the morphs in the morph loader just like with Genesis, which is really all I'm after.

I have to tell you, hunting down how to do it is super ridiculously hard. You need CR2 files for Poser, and a lot of DAZ users whose accounts haven't been hacked by assholes in Sri Lanka (no, really, I'm sitting here with no way to buy food right now) also have Poser and like to go between the two. I just have DAZ, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to package morphs into a character I'm planning for future comic work.

After two days of hunting, I came across a tutorial, and it worked. Currently my Kururu has a short leg morph. I'm not in a hurry to get her working perfectly because it may be two years before I get to the planned project. I just know if I don't get started now, when the time comes I'll be quite frustrated.  I'm going to link the tutorial for others to find it... and also so I can use it again when I need to.