Working with V3 today. I've modifed some scaling information and have some shaping morphs turned on. In posing her and putting her through the motions, I'm finding distortions all over the place that do not exist in default pose. I think JCM's look and sound good on paper, but in practice they are not practical. They are making clothing items difficult to produce and use, and some or most of them, to my eyes, aren't looking very realistic anyway. I think more work is needed on this development before they are considered for inclusion on any future model. What do you think? -WTB

I tend to like them - there's a neatness factor there. But I agree with what you've said. If the user had direct control of them - making them "Morph Controlled Morphs" instead might be better.

I am certainly an advocate, but JCM are mostly intended for bare skin. If the area is covered by clothing, the morphs should be turned off. DAZ did not include INJ/REM poses for the JCM on V3, but they are easy to do. I have not done the individuals, but I have poses that remove and inject the lot of them. An alternate method is to hack a pose file that sets the rate to zero - and have another to reset the rate to default. It is just 5 lines of code, it can be altered to make the morphs FBM or PBM - two minutes work.

They surely are a pain to match in clothing! V3 does pose so nicely, though, I'm unsure if I'd want to give up the JCM. However, some of the effects could have been done with JCJ, using ghost joints that work on the mesh joints. The big advantage of this would be painless inclusion in the clothing of the same JCJ. JCJ = Joint Controled Joint, as I'm sure most of you know.

In an ideal world, custon shaped figures should have thier own unique JCMs. Just make your own custom set. There is good and bad with every technique. lol You fight the battles you can win after all. Or at least try. It is Poser after all. :)

"You fight the battles you can win after all." Great advice. Wish I'd take it more often!

I thought Jim was smoking a Joint Controlled Joint when I saw he was giving GV away.

Pretty funny, big guy. :-)

For me, because I'm far from expert, they're a pain to work with :(

Jim, if I understand you right that wouldn't work real reliably because the areas are on seams of multiple groups. I wanted them on the ears though. :( I lost the vote.

Well I fond them too cool to use ! And anyway there won't be so much fun models without them ! What is so funny with ERC in global, is that it is really simple to set, only a few lines and it goes ! But what is less clear is to translate what we wish to do in our mind and to write it down... So many possibilities ! =)

Anton- yeah, your right, possably the number of groups could be cut down though, or there could be two ghost joints working at the same place on two joining groups. Would be a pain to set up, of course, but once it was done it would be easy to add to the clothing. One of my characters (HFV? I'm loosing track!) had both ghost "ear" parts and "breast" parts, they worked pretty well on Vickie 1's mesh, I didn't put them in Glamorous Vickie because the way her chest is cut-up pretty much killed ghost breasts, and nobody ever said they enjoyed the ears, and V3 has a ton of ear morphs anyway, so they weren't done either. ;-)

Once we get into final Daz Studio and weight mapping, all this hadlebar, matSphere garbage will be behind us. To anyone who is not familiar, weight mapping is like trans and bump maping but the maps tell the mesh where to bend and how much. basically you kinda paint the joint parameters.

Really ? Interesting ! =)