Victoria 3's hands frustrate me. Actually, V1's and V2's hands frustrate me too, but V3 I find triply frustrating because this is the third version and the problem is still there, whereas even Judy, she of the face that could sink a thousand ships, is doing better in the hand department. I speak, of course, of the knuckle joints, and of the fact that that's just not how the human hand bends there.

So I was fiddling around with the V3 character I'm working on (I'm pretty happy with most other parts of her), and I happened to look at her hands, and something in my head just snapped. I frothed at the mouth, I spoke in tongues, I broke out the joint editor.

After a few hours of nudging those green and red spheres back and forth by tiny fractions of a unit, I have new respect for people who do this professionally, and a headache. I think this is workable, but that I have a long way to go, and I'd like to bounce my efforts thus far off some people who actually know what they're doing, and verify that I'm not just duplicating someone else's effort (though I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anyone try this before, perhaps because no one is masochistic enough).

Incidentally, is there some way to embed joint parameter settings in a pose file? If this works out I'd be happy to distribute the results, and that seems like the simplest way of going about it.

Anyway, below are some shots of my handiwork, with the finger bend settings at 22 (except for the pinky, which is at 19), -30, -60 and -60 again, respectively. All other dials are zeroed. The altered joint parameters are on the left, the default ones are on the right, with otherwise identical settings. As you can see, there's a lot of breaking and polygons running off in random directions between the fingers, especially as viewed from the palm. (Unless, like me, you've got bad eyes and a big monitor, in which case the hands are all invisibly tiny. Sorry.) I'm having to fight the geometry a bit, since Victoria has stronger knuckle bumps with her fingers straight than people usually do, but at least I got rid of that bizarre 'double knuckle' thing she has at sharp bends (as in, for example, the third image).

And I just realized that maybe I should have posted this over in Poser Technical. Man, I'm terrible at this forum thing. At least I gave the post the right title this time.

I can't help you because I don't do "joint editor" other than using to to zero out. However, what you've done looks promising.

Maybe you could put this on a MAT for an alterante joint for those that get interested... Ascii

Quite a difference!

Attached Link: http://www.shininghalf.com/desprit/downloads/V2clothesToV3.zip

Ah V3. I think JAAGER, at his site, has a fix for the V2 hands...

The problem with V1/2 hands - bad values for some of the trans dials got into the figure cr2 and this gets propagatted by using contaminated pose files. The cure is to lock the trans channels for all but a few groups = hip, toes, maybe feet. The eyes in the base need to be able to move, but once you have a character, they should be locked also. This should be done in the base figure - probably all of the figures - it is not limited to Mil figures. Until V3 is locked, this figure is open to contamination - if an infected V1/2 pose is used on the figure. One of the JNT poses I have up locks the hands' trans channels at zero, I am not sure if I put the one up that locks most the the other groups too. Lock means min = max = 0.0 (Poser will not let you use its window to make min identical to max - but if you text edit it, it will accept a file that does have them.) POS pose files have settings for the 3 trans dials as well as the three rotations - for every group - even though - the trans dials are hidden for most groups. Alternate JP can be kept and shared in a pose file. It is a matter of copying the proper JP lines, instead of rotation or morph keys into the actor blocks. MAT = material, changing materials is another alternate function for a pose file. Almost anything that you can change at all in a CR2 can be changed using a pose file. The name at the bottom left corner cannot be - at least I could not - the master in the ERC script cannot - or it is ignored if it does - the channel names cannot be changed - but doing that is like tearing up the rails.