The idea comes across clearly and beautifully. If some trade association wanted to make public service ads against copyright violation, this would do the job!

Well "stated"!

Awesome morph, Jim. How much? ;-)

I think Anton was trying to reply without getting complicated and confusing, which is understandable. There are a large number of potential scenarios and he could be covering questions for days that have already been answered almost a year ago over at PP by other DAZ folks.

That being said, people should be aware of exceptions resulting from combinations. For example, morph carrier cr2 files can contain custom non-DAZ morphs and they can be sold as the second half of a character, with the other half being DAZ morph dial settings in a pose file. (I realize that's asking a lot of the end user, which explains why this isn't typically done). The result would be a character based on DAZ morphs and custom morphs, so a blanket statement saying characters cannot be created from DAZ morphs and custom morphs has exceptions.

As someone else already stated, a simple letter or call to DAZ explaining exactly what you want to do can be very helpful. I recently did just that and received not one, but two replies from two separate DAZ people, both with the same answer. The question was regarding the freely distributable Steph LE cr2. I was surprised to discover it contains some of the same morphs as the full version of Stephanie. Granted, it's missing a few meg of deltas, but there are still a bunch of morphs in there. I wanted to know if they wanted me to strip those morphs before distribution, or if the opposite was true -- that I would be violating something by stripping the original Steph LE morphs. Both DAZ reps told me neither case was true. They know about the Steph LE morphs, but aren't worried about their redistribution like they are about the few meg of extra morphs that come with the full version of Stephanie. In essence, this creates another scenario whereby both DAZ morphs and custom morphs could be used to create a character. For instance, create a custom head in Lightwave, then add a pose file that applies both that custom head and some stock dials for Steph LE. This could all be contained inside one cr2 file. However, a pose file would also be required to join the custom with the stock and it should be noted that I am talking about Steph LE, DAZ's freely distributable cr2 version.

Now, I've only provided two examples and I'm sure there are more. Still, what I wrote was long-winded and boring, which is what I believe Anton was trying to avoid. I will say this about Anton: Every time I've dealt with him, he has been so cool it is ridiculous. Truly, I'm not a rump smoocher, and maybe I've just been lucky, but all my dealings with DAZ have been handled in a professional and courteous manner. They are, by and large, nice folks. The few exchanges I've had with CL employees were no different.

Note: Exporting custom morphs combined with DAZ morphs, then importing the result as one dial, would be a no-no, as I understand it, and I believe that was Anton's point. The combination should be accomplished by other methods, such as; half DAZ dial settings in a Pose file, half custom morphs as v-only obj files (such as StefyZZ's Asia) or a Morph Manager-friendly morph carrier cr2.

I cant stress enough how easy it is to resolve any potential disputes before they happen by simply addressing an e-mail to DAZ and specifically telling them what you are thinking about doing. You are their customer and they will treat you as such. If you create a character that will help them get more customers and/or grow the community, they know that is good for them. They will advise you how to distribute your creation.

GV may indeed still be a virgin - what with technology, but she is no longer a maiden. Jim, I don't think that many are even aware that when GV came out, DAZ had not even provided morphs that COULD have produced a character like her. Lizzie had also done the pregnant morph in Saluda before DAZ did their's. I helped, but I would not do that morph from scratch for philosophical reasons. Anton was dumbing down the situation. But given how many have been fudging in DAZ morphs into spawned morphs and thinking it is no big deal, being emphatic and absolute may be the only way to get the point across. Greg is correct about the encoding, and for his legacy stuff, that may be the only way to salvage it. For new stuff, just never include DAZ morphs in a spawn, keep them as keys, then use a mixed key/deltas MI pose to provide the character. Decoding is a royal PITA and can be a bitch re: customer service - it is best avoided if possible. Something I still do not understand: granted that DAZ allows the V1/M1 CR2 to be used as a base for new characters, why would you want to use the whole thing? I don't remember which morphs are in V1, but I am pretty use Faery and Heroine and a few others are there. If you are providing a new character, why even have these? Why have FaceLong? Or any others like it? Is it that a vendor has no faith in the character being provided that alternate characters are also there? Smile/ Blink - the expression morphs make sense. But shape morphs do not. They make the files larger to no good purpose. It is illogical to me. Why give back morphs the user already has,and, are not being used? The only reason to use a CR2 to begin with, is to provide a character as a complete single morph/group. This would be a totally new 3rd party morph. If it involved dial settings, it should be a mixed MI pose and not a CR2 anyway. If a vendor cannot do this correctly, they should not be a vendor to begin with. And, and it is about time free stuff got screened first. Too many DAZ morphs/textures have had 100's if not 1000's of downloads before the post with the copyright infrigement was pulled.

Whoa... Jaager. Hehe... Cool. Err... Anyway, I humbly concur. :-) One hypothetical question, knowing you're about as likely an individual as I'll ever find with the answer: Let's say the creation wasn't a character, but sort of a multi-character pack with dozens of separate morphs for each body group, plus FBMs, PBMs and ERC. If the original figure's cr2 does not contain enough dial slots for all that data, can it still be done with MI?

Sure, you just put the slots for your targetGeoms in the CR2 and have your MI pose point at those. All the CR2 needs; targetGeom UNIQUENAME { hidden 1 } one for each morph - name can be the same over all the groups - I meam - head/chest/... can each have a targetGeom with the same name. hidden 1 is to make it invisible when empty. (When you save the cr2 - the hidden part goes to hell -Poser fills in the morph channel structure and you have to use Dial Cleaner, or a special pose the rehide.) For a series of characters - what I do - You can only use one character at a time -right? So they can all use the same slot - right? Foe Vic - I have one slot in head = targetGeom Faces I have 200-300 separate MI poses (*.fc2) each with the same channel name = Faces (targetGeom Faces) For all the groups - I have a slot = targetGeom Body even the head has this one - for the neck part that comes from some shape morphs. I have a Body2 on the chest/collars for anyy additional ... augmentation? there - bigger works most of the time - smaller usually does not. I have been thinking that the slot names - Faces / Body may be too dangerous. They should be figure specific = Body_V / Faces_V - Body_M / Faces_M something the make the slots figure specific so that Mike morphs do not get injected into Vic by mistake. Anyway, you can make and copy in as many slots as you wish. MM4 will copy them in with no more than I have above. You just match your MI pose channel names to your slots.

Okay. I was confused. I didn't know it was possible to inject entirely new dials into the cr2. I thought they had to be previously in the cr2, either as replacements for stock morphs or hidden unused slots, like V3 has -- meaning, you'd be distributing a pre-configured cr2, anyway, even if it was empty of delta info. I can see I'm going to have to go back and read more about this, because I was mistaken. Thanks for the help!

You may not inject new morphs unless - the slot - the channel name - is there. If you open V3, you will see that DAZ has provided 50 slots for community morphs and a whole bunch for their own future use. If you try a pose file on a cr2 that does not have the channel name, you get the "this file may not apply" message. I am just saying that getting your own slots in is easy, and if you use a slot of the above size, 300 of them would take up less room than one complex head morph - for V2 - for V3 maybe 1000. These slots would be small and hidden and no problem, but the CR2 and a pose file must have matching channel names.

Ahh... Okay, that's what I thought. But, that's also why I have a problem with the entire injection concept. Don't get me wrong, from DAZ's perspective, I understand MI's advent. V3 has an enormous number of morphs and they were worried about users with less horsepower. Or, at least, I think that's part of it. I also strongly believe MI and V3 went hand in hand because DAZ had a problem with V2 and M2 morphs showing up in places they didn't want them. Individuals spawning Tailor-enhanced clothing packs to compete with their own clothing packs would be less likely, because a V3 morph pack is a totally separate purchase and thus more easily defended as a value of its own, apart from the figure itself. I grok the above, it makes sense for DAZ (or Jim Burton, or anybody doing the horizontal marketing thing). But, from the end user's perspective, in my opinion, MI creates more hassle than it is worth. If I market a custom character pack with hundreds of morphs and I want my users to be able to "roll their own" -- make their own characters by playing with the dials I've provided -- I'm going to have to distribute a pre-configured cr2 that accepts my injection deltas, anyway. It's the same download size. I haven't avoided cr2 distribution. Worse, I'm asking the user to put the morphs into the cr2 file after the fact, and only temporarily. They will get to watch an hourglass every time they do this. In the end, to avoid that pain, they will save the file to... ta-da, an exact replica of the cr2 I should have simply given them in the first place. This is what many of us have done with V3. Please understand, I think of you as a Poser tech gawd and the last thing I want to do is seem unappreciative of your greater knowledge. I'm just not completely sold on injection as the end-all solution to morph distribution. Like Poser 5, it's new, it's certainly more complex, but in my opinion, that doesn't mean it's necessarily better in all cases. Sure, a single character morph, good. Although, a V1, M1 or Steph LE-based cr2 with the shape changing dials stripped would eat less memory than injecting the character into a full-blown V2, M2 or Steph and it would be easier to use. I think of V3 a little differently because her cr2 is built for MI and she's huge, no matter how you slice it. Still, if your intention is to give the end user a couple-hundred dials to play with every time they load your paper doll, the only difference I see between MI and a straight cr2 is complexity, time consumption and the potential legal tool provided by making the morphs a separate purchase. Anybody can figure out how to steal MI deltas just as easily as deltas in a cr2. The memory is going to get eaten by every user who wants all the available options, anyway. And what's the point of buying a morph pack like that if you aren't going to play with all the possible dial combinations? Like I said, I dont mean to be a PITA, especially to you, because I've learned so much reading your posts over at PP, but I've got funky opinions on the injection concept. Maybe I'm mental. I dunno. Nice to see you here, BTW. I only lurk at PP.

I don't require agreement, so I have no problem if you do not agree. I used to hang here a lot, but things here changed. There is a lot of needle stuck in a groove stuff here and there are plenty who can do what I used to do. you can only answer the Vicky eyebrow question so many times before it gets boring. Things have gotten strange all over since CL ate its young - or rather EGISYS did.

As I suggested to Anton in another thread - a new CR2 is not needed, just a carrier with the slots. Copy them into the CR2 that you use and call the morphs you want from MI poses.

I think you have the cart before the horse as regards the reason that MI pose morphs come with V3. The figure is huge when all the morphs are in place - not practical at all. The idea of using V2 as a factory to spawn morphs and copy those to a base cr2 - with expressions and function morphs has been difficult to get across - V2 tends to tax most systems, so that obviously would not fly with V3. The MI poses are not a gimmic, they are a necessary evil.

I couldn't see the utility for shape morphs as MI poses with V1, but you you don't have to scroll down but a couple of V3 head morphs in EditPad before you see the advantage of having them out of there. The CPU may do it faster than I do, but still it has to slow it down a bit too.

If your system has the horse power to handle the full boat figure, you are fortunate, but I doubt that is the case for most users. The body is not all that much larger V3:V1, morphs that is. But the head is something else again. It really needs to be used in sections, with the zero morphs removed, before moving to the next section. It is not so convient, I grant you that. But persisting in using the figure with every possible morph in place will freeze a lot of systems, or have Poser do its weird stuff from not enough memory.

Following your present path, I suggest you keep potential problems in mind, so that if you find it causes problems, you have an idea of an alternate method to get the job done.

If you have P5, the morphs can be grouped and collapsed, so that the list is not so impossibly long. I think I have a pose file that inserts the grouping into a CR2, but it would be my grouping. Ask me at PP if you want it.

If you use P4, you are back to carpel tunnel just sliding down the list in head.

In the mother post it was asked how can they detect if a morph is used? The answer is simple, a morph position and its original vertex position are two points in 3D, draw a line from one to the other and extend it in both ends. All morph values generated by that morph would end up on that line. They have clear evidence that you have stolen their morph if you morph uses all the deltas used in their morph and many or all of your morph deltas end up on that morphs lines. The morph uses 3 values like 0.000242429 so the chance that you can make a morph delta that ends up on the same line as a DAZ morph delta is non existent So you would have to make sure all deltas in your morph are moved by more than an original DAZ morph to get away with it. Staale

I really, really, like the injection morphs. Jaager and some of the other guys have been talking about them for a long, long time, but I've never added the blank channels to any of my figures, out of pure lazyness, I guess. But now that V3 has them I can see how well they work in the real world, and I love 'em! I especially like the idea of having custom versions of V3, with just the approate morphs, you could have (for example) a ugly V3 with all the old, ugly, fat (sort of describes me) dials only, she would look so good standinfg next to Glamorous Vickie (who fills the bill in going the other way!). She would not have any unneeded dials to wade through when setting her up, nor unneed overhead. Some have complained what the "load-all-morph" injector takes a while to run, let me just say you need a faster computer and you shouldn't load them all, anyway! Staale- I think the important concept is- you shouldn't include non-distributable morphs, but if your heart is pure, and you make ones that are 100% your own, this doesn't apply.

Staale - I'd mentioned something similar at PoserPros... but it would be a long and laborious process, even if it were coded in. Also, as you mentioned, the whole thing would largely be thrown off the minute you blended in a legit home-made morph and combined it. Another method would be to count vertices used in a given morph, and combine that with the mix/max values... it would be well nigh impossible for a legit magnet to exactly mimic the same vertices and their min/max values at the same time, even as a percentage of the whole. This second method could serve as a double-check. It would be tricky, but possible. The best bet would be for DAZ (or any other major mesh-monger, to sample and test things from time to time this way, then when they have sufficient evidence, make a very public example of the violator, enough to put everyone else on notice, but w/o scaring the legit morph-monger types :) /P

I'd like to see the cr2 format extended to include common programming constructs. Maybe Studio will go that way eventually. The files could be much smaller. Thanks for all the info, Jaager. I'm going to look at it again after I decide which morphs I'm leaving in the pack. There are like 20 meg of dials in the collars now. Probably overkill. Hours of fun for me during development, though.

One of the advantages of the MIpose injection system is that you need not leave anything out, it sits in a distant folder until you want it in. You don't have to make the choice, the user does. All it costs is the few lines the slot adds. I am betting that a sloth for every V1 morph every made would take less space in a CR2 than one V3 head morph that moves every point. So limiting the number of slots is false economy.