Morph Putty Tool: Hooray! A bunch of people responded to my earlier Putty Post, & a couple of 'em testified or insinuated that they got the tool to do something. I hope we can pursue this a bit more because it would be a REAL boon to the community if we can get this thing to perform. Why? Because it is essentially 3D modeling right within Poser, isn't it? The Manual (p.170) says ..."sculpt your figures' morph targets by selecting & moving vertices. You can do this with any scene object that has morph targets." (Note that nowhere does it say you have to use the Face Room or heads.) I still can't do any "good" modeling in RayDreamStudio or anything else I've tried, so when I remembered & re-read about the Morph Putty tool I thought, hmmm, this may be an answer. Then of course I tried it out & couldn't get it to do a blasted thing. But there's gotta be a way. For a specific f'rinstance: I want to make a Tee shirt. I have a royalty-free mesh, from which I've lopped-off the legs, arms & head. I ran it through MorphManager, so it's loaded with morph targets. The neck, arms & hip area need fixing so it looks like a Tee shirt. I can make transparency maps, but it's a pain trying to get the seams to match up, plus, more CPU strain to render the trans maps. Or.. if I could just "move vertices"...

Tee shirt collar area. Top of "chest" shown, with polygons that obviously need to be smoothed/squished-down...have their vertices moved.

Morph Putty tool "engaged". It does list all the morph targets for the chest. I click on a vertice & it leaves a dot. I drag the dot and... nothing happens. I change the "Min/Max" settings all over the place and... nothing happens.

From what I gather, Morph Putty lets you free-form sculpt morphs... but only from pre-existing morphs. It won't let you drag around pixels to which morphs aren't associated. For example, use the P5 face room, click on the head and drag. Note that you can only control certain movements. If you look at the list of morphs, some will have been changed. These are the morph settings used to create the shape you just made by moving the dot around. Don't expect 3d modelling from P5, because it can't deliver that. However, for a quick and dirty character morph, the putty may be the way to go (I need to play around with it a bit myself and see what it can do.)

I see a button which says [lock all], and another which says [unlock all]. Is everything perhaps locked so that it can't be moved?

hauksdottir, I don't think so, since I've tried clicking everything that's clickable, and still, no action. Also, the manual says to check the checkbox next to the morph target to include or exclude that morph from being affected by the tool. I don't see any "checkboxes", just those little dots. If you click one of those dots it turns into a little padlock. STILL, whether clicked or not, nothing happens. Surely someone out there has actually USED the Morph Putty tool, haven't they???

The two images are the result of pulling about six vertices on each face. I'm thinking about doing a tutorial on Morph Putty, but I confess I'm not sure what to tell you if it "just doesn't work."

Some tips:

1. It appears that only certain "key vertices" link to the morph channels. You may have to try three or four different vertices before you can flare the nostrils or lower the eyebrow.

2. Changes require broad, gross strokes. I got it working while I was frustrated that it "wouldn't work." I grabbed the middle of Don's nose and stroked clear across the screen. It moved about an inch.

3. If you lock a morph channel, it will not respond to the putty tool. The green dot means the channel is unlocked. Click the green dot and it will change into a padlock meaning--well, yeah. One exception. If the channels are unlocked and the group name (Ear Morphs, for example) is locked, the channels are locked, in spite of the green dots. But if the channels are locked and the group name is unlocked, the channels are still locked. So locking the group name locks them all, but unlocking the group name doesn't unlock them if they are locked on the channel level.

4. Even if the channels you seem to be working on are locked, your strokes can have, literally, far-reaching effects. I grabbed the middle of Don's ear and tried to pull it up while the Ear Morphs were locked. Sure enough, the ears stayed where they were. But the cheek, mouth, and jaw all obligingly came up.

5. There is some sort of disconnect between the parameter dial display and the morph putty tool. If you open the Parameters/Properties palette, you should be able to see the dials change as you modify things. The only dials I can get to change are the ears.

6. There is no turning back, once you start dinking with morph putty. Pulling his ear up can change his mouth in ways you'll never manage to completely undo.

Hope that helps some.

I get the morph putty to work pretty well, but I think it works better if you use the isometric views rather than Main Aux or Face cameras. It also works much better on figures with lots of morphs because tt definitely is just a way to apply existing morphs, and it will not adjust geometry in any way that is not contained in a morph. The nice thing about it is that it will affect several morph channels at the same time even across body parts, saving a lot of tedious work.

Thanks Ron, will have to try your isometric view hint; makes sense. I've gotten a few useful shape changes from the putty tool, but haven't been able to grab a vertex below the mouth without opening or closing the jaw. It doesn't seem to work on a vertex unless there's an existing morph that moves that vertex to or from that direction. Be aware that it's my product, but P5JudyMagic has hundreds of additional head morphs, so there's a lot more to work with. Elisa/gryffnn