Putting One Figure's Head on Another's Body in D|S 1.8

Author: eallenmail

Tools Needed

* DAZ Studio 8

* 2 figures [1 donor and 1 recipient]

For this example, I will transplant an M3 character's head onto a V3 body. [I want to create a character that is the mother of the M3 character, and I want to keep the familial resemblance without trying to recreate the M3 morphs in V3 by hand.] Remember - throughout this project, save often!

Open D|S. Load donor figure, a.k.a. the figure whose head you want to take off and move to another figure. You can either create a new donor figure from scratch and save it all alone as a scene preset. Or you can load an existing figure. I loaded an existing figure, an M3 character, for the donor.

Zero the donor's pose. This brings the donor back to a default position, making it easier to work with.

Remove donor's clothes. You won't be seeing them in the completed figure, and loading them up will just eat more memory. So get the donor naked.

If your new figure is going to have a different skin mat than your donor, change the donor's skin mat to match the recipient's. I changed the M3 character's original mat to the V3 Makeup mat comes with the V3 high-res texture maps sold here at DAZ. [Incidentally, V3 mats experience some slight gapping at the seams when used on M3, but we're only showing the head of the M3 donor, so the gapping isn't really visible or problematic.]

If your new figure is going to have different hair, glasses, earrings, hats, etc. than the donor, remove items from donor's head as appropriate. Or just make them invisible. Either way, you'll be able to match up the donor's head with the recipient's body more easily with less in the way.

Make it so that only the donor's head is visible. You can do this quickly by going to the Scene tab and double-clicking on the little eyeball to the right of the donor's name. This makes the entire donor figure invisible. Then it's very simple to go down the hierarchy of body parts to head, right eye and left eye. For each of these body parts, click the eyeball which is to the right side of the body part's name. [The eyeball should be closed to represent invisibility.] The eyeball symbols should open back up. You now have the donor's head suspended in midair, waiting for a body.

Make the recipient's head invisible. In this case, we're removing the V3 recipient's head so that the M3 donor's head can fit on top of the neck. To do this, go to the Scene tab and find the V3 recipient's name. Go down the hierarchy of body parts to head, right eye and left eye. Click the eyeballs to the right of each body part's name so that the eyeballs are closed. The V3 recipient's eyes and head should disappear, leaving a neck stump.

Move the M3 donor's head down onto the V3 recipient's neck stump. There is no simple way to do this. Either use the Translate tool to drag the head in the view window, or use the Translation sliders under the Parameters tab. For characters with very similar construction, such as M3 and V3, you probably don't need to use X-Tran, just Y- and Z-Tran. Move between different camera views and zoom levels to check your work often. There is no body mat on the V3 recipient's body so that it has an obvious color difference from the M3 donor's head, which makes it easier to see how the head positioning is going.

Fine-tune as necessary. You will most likely see some gaps between the V3 recipient's neck stump and the M3 donor's head. The most obvious gaps on this example are under the jaw and at the sides of the neck behind the ears. You can see one of these gaps where the arrow is pointing in the illustration. There are a few ways to deal with the gaps. A) You can scale and/or reposition the M3 donor's head as needed, usually by reducing Z-scale and X-scale a tiny bit. B) You can scale and/or reposition the V3 recipient's neck as needed, usually by increasing X-, Y or Z-scale a tiny bit. C) You can ignore the gaps if they will be covered up by hair, or if they will not be seen in your render. I've chosen to ignore the gaps for this example.

Once you are satisfied with the position of the M3 donor's head, parent the M3 donor's head to the V3 recipient's neck stump. Go to the Scene tab and select the M3 donor's name. Drag the entire M3 donor figure down the V3 recipient's body part hierarchy to the V3 recipient's head. Drop the M3 donor figure here. The hierarchy in your Scene tab should now look something like this [see associated illustration].

Apply a mat to the V3 recipient's body that matches the M3 donor's head map.

Apply morphs; add hair, clothes, accessories, etc.

Save and use your new character in a scene.

This basic process isn't limited to gender swaps. You could transplant Aiko 3's head onto V3's body for a more realistic look. You could put the Mil Dragon's head on the Mil Horse using the same principles. Heck, you could even put the Mil Dragon's head on V3's body [with some scaling and tweaking, of course]. The only limit to head swaps is your imagination.

NOTE: When posing a hybrid character like the one in this example, you may need to pose the V3 recipient's body and the M3 donor's head separately. For example, let's say you have a sleeping pose, with lying body and closed eyes that you want to put your hybrid character in. If you select the V3 recipient's body and apply the lying pose, the hybrid character will lie down, but the eyes will remain open because the M3 donor's head is not affected by poses applied to the V3 recipient's body. In such a case, you'll need to pose the M3 donor's eyes separately.

Credits for tutorial illustrations: Donor figure is DAZ's Michael 3, with DAZ's Wedge 2.0 hair and DAZ's V3 Makeup map. Recipient figure is DAZ's Victoria 3.