Yesterday I have spent the whole day figuring out how to rig a figure from scratch in DAZ Studio 4 Pro. I have paid $200 for the CCT (Content Creator Toolkit) tools back in DS3, and now they are being offered entirely free in DS4, so I wanted to finally put them to use. To get this tested, I wanted to rig a simple 30 segments tail.

The entire process is made of basically 6 steps:

1. Import the OBJ you want to rig, supposedly created in your 3D modeling application of choice.
2. Using the Polygon Group Editor tool, select faces and assign them to individual groups. This "grouping" process is optional with TriAx figures, but it still makes things easier in the end.
3. Using the Figure Setup tool, create the grouping hierarchy, name your groups, and set joint rotations orders for each bone.
4. Using the Joint Editor tool, adjust bone joints, align bones to the respective body parts, mirror the setup to the other side, and then finally "memorize the figure rigging". This last step is well hidden deep into the DS4 interface sub-menus, and will give you NO warning if you forget to do it, in which case ALL the changes you did in this step are lost.
5. Using the Weight Map tool, create basic weight maps for each rotation axis for every bone in the body.
6. Finally you can use the Weight Map Brush tool to paint your maps. This is where most of the work will be done, and will probably take the longest.

The part that interested me most was painting the weight maps, but I was surprised that we don't have to manually create bones like I always did when rigging in Poser. Bones are automatically created by the CCT tool, though they don't come at the right places and adjustment is still needed to set them into the proper place and orientation. Sounds all great, but there is a catch - all commands are hidden in sub-menus, and this becomes quite a pain when we have to repeat the same operations so many times.

In step 4, once we add the bones into the tool, we now have to drag each of them into its respective parent, give it an external name, and set up their joint rotation axes. It's 4 mouse clicks per bone, so we have 4 x 30 = 120 mouse clicks just to have this done. This could be greatly simplified if we could assign joint rotations to all bones in a single operation, since all bones in a tail have the same axis orientation.

The part that actually shocked me was the weight map painting. This is made of a series of steps that need to be repeated for each joint rotation axis for every bone, which means the number of bones multiplied by three. But here's the thing - each of these steps is deep inside sub-menus, and there are no keyboard shortcuts that can save you from having to dig into the menus over and over again for every operation in this pipeline.

To rig our simple tail with 30 segments, you will have to find the commands in deep menu, three times for every bone. In some cases we can abbreviate the triple work by copying and pasting weight maps, so it comes down to 6 more steps:

1. In the Scene Tab, select the body part you want to create weight maps for.
2. Using the menus, select Polygon Selection -> Select -> Face Groups -> "body part".
3. Select the X axis from the current bone.
4. Using the menus, select Fill Selected Menus.
5. Using the menus, copy and paste the current weight map to the Y and Z rotations axes.
6. Using the menus, select Polygon Selections -> Clear Selection.

This is not doing the weight painting just yet, is only preparing the joints for it. So far we have 16 mouse clicks just to create the initial weight map for a single bone. Now repeat this for every bone, as we now have 16 x 30 = 480 mouse clicks while hunting for commands in the DS4 menus, making a partial total of 120 + 480 = 600 mouse clicks so far - and we haven't even started to paint weights yet! O___O

  One funny thing I was surprised about was the fact that although we have created the body groups to make this process easier and faster, the CCT tools don't recognize them unless you dig into the menus to select the one you want to work on. In other words, selecting the body part in the Scene Tab does not select the respective polygon group in your scene - that has to be done using the damn menus, which sounds quite redundant to me.

Ok, now we finally got the part where we paint the weight maps, and there are multiple tools to help with the process. Except that the tools are rather quirky. For example, we have the bone-aligned gradient brush that sounded great when I first saw it, I was really excited to give it a try. First problem was placing the starting and ending points - the default "align to bone" doesn't place them correctly, and moving them around manually is a pain.

In addition, I've found out by accident that although the tool works by aligning itself to individual bones, it actually affects ALL other geometry in range, which make it quite useless for rigging figures with left and right sides. But since this 30 segments tail doesn't have sides, I gave it a try. So here's the catch with this tool: every time you click to grab a controller, it jumps out of place. But there is more - the gradient is also too harsh, which defeats its own purpose.

And then we have the dual-spherical gradient tool, which is exactly how Poser figures are traditionally rigged. The spheres can be resized, but not rotated like in Poser, so they can only be used if your geometry is either vertical or horizontal - what a waste! Add to all this that the CCT tools have been undocumented since it was first released for DS4, as well as DS4 itself, which still doesn't have proper documentation.

All in all the process was way harder than doing the same in Poser. DS4 splits the tools all over the interface, while Poser has them all in one single place - inside the Setup Room. Good part of the work was wandering around trying to remember WHERE DS4 put the tool I needed now. Some of the tools are in the same menu, while others are somewhere in another menu, and some are only available at a separate part of the interface, like the rather hidden "memorize rigging" command. And mind you, forget to call this command and ALL your last changes to the rigging are lost - without warning.

But it is not all bad. I liked the main weight map paint and smooth brushes; they work as they should. I also like how CCT automatically creates the bones based on your 3D model, but you still have to create their hierarchy as a separate process, which is rather odd. In Poser, like in most other 3D programs, you create the bones as you setup their hierarchy by adding bones as a child of another one.

When we look at how DAZ3D has marketed the CCT tools, they first made it very expensive as an add-on for DS3, and then later came up with a new version for DS4, but apparently gave up on it after release. Documentation was never written, and then the whole thing was given away for free. DAZ3D has been warning us for several months that the CCT tools will only be free for a limited time, but it makes no sense to offer something that used to be so expensive for free, and then charge for it after this long.

This probably happened because the general DS4 user is not exactly willing to spend that much money on a developer tool, when most of the DS4 users might have chosen it over Poser just because it was free. Once people get used to getting something for free, they will refuse to pay for it later. That's a rather universal market law as far as I know, so it might be that DAZ3D has abandoned the CCT tools development (I hope not!).

After all, what's the point on releasing a complex tool that comes with no documentation? CCT is not a single tool, but a collection of multiple tools that make sense when put to use in a certain order in a pipeline. When I have searched for tutorials on DAZ, the newest document was still referring to the previous version for DS3 (now a dead link), which is now marked as "incompatible with DS4" in red letters at the DAZ store.

This week I found a brand new 65 pages CCT tutorial released by Blondie9999 at the DAZ3D store, and it has confirmed the information I have gathered so far. Blondie9999 is known for her great work on Poser rigging, and in her tutorial we still have the same 6-steps pipeline I have mention above, which confirms the 600 mouse clicks just to prepare a simple 30-segments tail to have weight maps painted.

In spite of the time I have spent painting weights, the tail presents inconsistent deformations along its length when bent, and that's because of the way CCT deals with weight maps globally instead of locally. In other words, each bone in a TriAx figure can influence the entire body, so it's relatively easy for things to get out of control when we look at the whole.

Rigging Poser figures with weight maps is something rather new to me, so I am not claiming to be an expert on the subject. But even if DAZ3D is now offering their glamorized CCT tools for free along with DS4 Pro, I still think the weight map rigging process could be way easier than this. I actually tried to use CCT only to get the basic bones into the OBJ (traditional, not TriAx), and then went to do the rest in Poser, just to find out that the bones were all messed up when loaded into Poser.

I now know how to create a basic TriAx figure from scratch in DS4 Pro, but the number of steps and quirky tools are still daunting. This is something I wanted to try anyway, so I don't think it was a waste of time. I just think the good times for weight map figure creations in DS4 are yet to come.