This problem has been bugging me for months. Finally, I just had a huge brainstorm on how to fix it! So here's a quick tutorial on what I did. I'll use my Link character as an example, with a newly created head attached to Mike 2's body. But this technique should work for any figure, and any body part! THE PROBLEM If you want to give a new head to an old body, you obviously need to attach the two together. The most obvious way to do this is to take the bottom points of the new head, and weld them to the top points of the old neck. Therein lies the problem. When you select, say, Point #7 (these numbers are just examples), and weld it to Point #20, you'd expect Point 7 to vanish and "become part of" Point 20. But that's not what really happens. Actually, a whole new point, Point 35, is created to replace BOTH original points. Thus, the point order (that is, the numbers assigned to the respective points) is screwed up. And so are the character's morph targets, since those depend on the points being in a specific order, which has now been changed. Not good. BUT! What if you didn't do anything to the points at all? What if you joined the two geometries (new head and old neck) without changing any points at all?? Here is a quick tutorial on how to do just that!

STEP 1 Create your prop head in whatever modeling program you use. Make sure there are the same number of points at the base of the neck, as there are at the base of Michael's neck.

STEP 2 Once the head has been created, close the modeling program, and reopen it with a blank slate. Open Michael's base geometry in your modeler. DON'T export Mike's body from Poser as an OBJ -- you need to make sure you use the ACTUAL geometry (found in the Poser directory Runtime:Geometries:Zygote People). Once Mike's geometry is loaded, select the head, left eye, and right eye, and delete them. Now, load your prop head into the same layer (so Mike's body and your prop head should both be in the same layer at the same time). If you designed your prop head correctly, you should see that there are just as many points around the base of your new head, as there are around the top of Michael's neck. Now you need to line them up. Select the points at the base of your new head, one by one, and snap (DON'T weld) each one to the corresponding point on Mike's neck. The picture above shows what I mean. I colored the head blue, and the body white, to show where one ends and the other begins.

STEP 3 Select the bottom row of polygons around the base of your new head. Make sure you include any polygons that touch the bottom, even if it's only at one point. Once they're selected, cut them out and paste them into a background layer.

STEP 4 Using the background layer as a guide, rebuild the deleted polygons just as they were, using the points on your new head AND the old neck. When this is done, select all the polygons in your prop head (including the new ones you just created), and assign them to group "head" and material "SkinHead". Now, delete the background polys, and export your new geometry as an OBJ file. Put it somewhere in Poser's Runtime:Geometries folder.

STEP 4 CORRECTION When I say "select all the polygons in your prop head (including the new ones you just created)", make sure you DON'T select the eyeballs.

STEP 4 CORRECTION #2 When you export your new geometry, make sure it's with a NEW NAME! Anyway, moving on... STEP 5 Open Michael 2.cr2 in CR2Editor, or in a good text editor (I use Microsoft Word). Near the top of the file, you should see a line that begins with "figureResFile", followed by a pointer to Michael's geometry (OBJ). Replace this pointer with the address of your new OBJ. Scroll down a few lines, and you'll see another "figureResFile" line. Do the same thing here. Now scroll to the very bottom of the file. From the bottom, scroll up until you see a line that says "figure". Under that will be a line that says "Name Figure 1". Replace "Figure 1" with whatever name you want (I call mine Link). DON'T do anything to the materials section; we WANT those materials to stay the same! Now, save the CR2 file under a NEW NAME. Put it somewhere in Runtime:Libraries:Characters. And you're done!! Open your new character in Poser and try it out! The head should be welded on seamlessly, and all of Mike's old morphs (except for the head, of course) should work fine!! --------------------------------------------------------- Well, I hope this tutorial proves helpful. Hopefully now you won't need to tear your hair out trying to attach that new head! :-D

That's about as solid an explanation and tutorial as I have seen anywhere. Thanks for sharing. Larry F

We could definitely use you in the Lightwave forum because we get a great many questions about poser and most people like myself don't know how to answer them.

Tephladon: Well, I'm not exactly an expert on Lightwave; I just thought I'd share a solution I figured out. Anyway, do you think I should post the tutorial in the Lightwave forum too? :-)

shiuld be LW 7.0 or 7.5, 6.0 or 6.5 doesn't work as the older version do not keep g info but mtl. back in lw 6.5 when i used it to model or modify poser geometries, it was a bit harsh as the old verson just ignored group info, so i had to figure out the workaround to trandfer the g info back to poser. thanks anyway.

Just for my curiosity, could you post a render of the finished head? :)

Poserpro: That's no problem at all. Lightwave 6 may not be able to do it, but there's an insanely useful program called UVMapper that can! Just load your model into UVMapper, assign the groups and materials you want, and export again. It's as simple as that! The program can be found at www.uvmapper.com :-) Lyrra: Certainly, here ya go :-)

Grrr. Sorry about this, guys. This is my first tutorial ever, and I keep finding problems. This is the 3rd mistake I've found in Step 4, so I think I'll just post the whole step over again, with all mistakes fixed. ------------------------------------------------------------ STEP 4 (REVISED) Using the background layer as a guide, rebuild the deleted polygons just as they were, using the points on your new head AND the old neck. When this is done, select ONLY the new polygons you just made, and assign them to material "SkinHead". Now, select all the polygons in your prop head (including the new ones you just created, but NOT including the eyeballs), and assign them to group "head". Now, delete the background polys, and export your new geometry as an OBJ file (with a NEW NAME). Put it somewhere in Poser's Runtime:Geometries folder. ----------------------------------------------------------- There we go, that should take care of all the mistakes. Sorry for the confusion of all these revisions. I'm considering posting this tutorial (cleaned up, of course) in the Character Creators forum, so you can look for it there too. :-)

Hi, MegaJar In fact, I was using LW 6.5 with UVMapper together to make clothes at that time, like I said LW 6.5 does not keep the original group info so I have to change the g as mtl before loading into Lw, then change back to g for UVmapper to remap. anyway, LW 7.5 has no such issue again.

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