Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1320600

Inspired by Redfern's Davros character WIP over at: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=1320600 I thought I'd attempt to produce some wrinkles for Victoria 3's head. Initially I'm going to be doing fairly generic "forehead wrinkles" but the plan is to make these specifically useful for Bill's V3 character whilst showing the fairly simple steps invovled. This tutorial is NOT specific to victoria 3, although that is the mesh I'll be using. All you REALLY require is a character whose head mesh is sufficiently detailed to perform this task or (shock, horror) a charcter which someone has created a sneaky forehead prop for (Something like a Poser 3/4/5 "wig" but for the front of the skull and no hairs!). To follow this tutorial you'll need Poser 4 or better (though I rather suspect Poser 3 would work) and a little time. Cheers, Cliff Bowman

Right - let's the the road on the show nice and quickly. Load up Poser 4 and, based on your configuration, make Victoria 3 Sr1.1 (or later?) the only character or object in the scene, and select the Face Camera (as shown).

Select "Smooth Lined" aka "Smooth Shaded Lined" Document Style (display mode).

Select figure 1's "Head" object (I select it from teh list but with a scene as simple as this you should be able to just click on the head). Then click the much under-used "Grouping tool". The Display Window will change (as shown) and a new "Group Edit" windo (also shown) will appear.

Set Full Tracking (it is SO much easier to do Grouping Tool work with Full Tracking and Smooth Lined, I find) and use the camera controls to zoom in on the area we are interested in - in this cas evictoria 3's forehead.

Now then - in the "Group Edit" window click the "New Group" button. Since for this rough-and-ready example we're going to be creating a few forehead wrinkles we'll call our group "HeadWrinkles" in the dialog box (Set Wrinkles) that pops up. Click OK...

The Group Edit windows's controls have suddenly "lit up" now that there is a selected group (HeadWrinkles) even though that group is empty (has no facets at all). It might be worth while just studying this tool for a moment - there's a lot you can acheive with this surprisingly powerful yet simple tool. But I don't want to dilute this tutorial too much, so I'll press on...

I've ticked "Hide Other Objects" to speed up the display. While this has made the eyes vanish, the rest of the body wasn't even on-screen yet it has made Poser considerably more responsive. Looking at the mesh above the eyebrows we are going to "pain" where we want the wrinkles. Click on a face/facet to select it (and add it into the current group) or hold down the CTRL key while you click a facet to remove it from the current group. You can also "marquee-select" (draw a box with the mouse by holding down the left button as you drag the mouse) to add/remove many facets at once (it may not be obvious but the bright white rectangle on-screen is the result of me "Dragging" to add many facets at once). Any facet which is "touched" by the select rectangle will be added to the group. For efficient creation of the morph shape you want it is sometimes easier to add large numbers of factes and then tidy up be removing the odd facet than by painstakingly adding each and every facet one at a time.

Continue to add facets to the Group to produce the pattern we want. Note that I'm adding lines in a pattern of: 1 Line Selected 2 Lines Not selected 1 Line selected 2 Lines Not selected This pattern is important. We can have as many lines Selected/Not selected as we like, but it is important to remember that Poser dowsn't move facets - it moves *vertices*. If we tried a parter of 1 Line, 1 Line, 1 Line etc. then we'd seem to be painting the tightest possible pattern, but we'd be wrong - because Poser would be unable to seperate the vertices to move from the vertices to leave in place. I've added a 1/1/1/1 line "pattern" above the 1/2/1/2 wrinkle lines so that we can see how Poser treats too tight a pattern.

Every now and then, check the rest of the head (I tend to use a different camera to do this). In the "Smooth Lined" mode you can paint facets to add with comparative abandon because it does not select "reverse wound" facets - so when you paint on the front of the ehad you do not select facets on the back of the head. However, it will still add right-wound factes that you can't see. For the example image I painted part of the lines at an angle which had the left ear directly "beneath" where I was painting. Although *I* couldn't see the ear, Poser selected all the facets which were "pointed" towards the camera. I need to de-select these with CTRL-click (or CTRL-Drag) and then check the pattern at the front (and add in any factes I inadvertently removed while cleaing up the ear, then check the back again...). Once I have the design correct, with all the facets I want but only the facets I want in the group, I'll move on to the next step.

One last check in wireframe mode - where I can see all sides of the model at once - confirms that I've managed to remove all of the unwanted facets (although I have to be careful not to add any facets to the group in this mode, because the selection will "drill through" the model selecting facets regardless of which direction the facet is "facing".

Return to Smooth Lined mode andclose the "Group Edit" window by clicking on the "Close" button (or as some of my charming friends say, due to the "x" symbol, "kiss it off").

Select Smooth Shaded and reposition the camera to give you a better view of the whole face. Make sure you have the head selected and then choose "Create Magnet" from the "Object" menu.

Like the Group Edit feature, Magnets are often overlooked or deemed to be too diffucult to work with, and 3rd party 3D editors are assumed to be the only solution to a problem. In fact, as with most things, "once you know magnets they are easy". Especially when used in combination with the Group Edit feature, as we are here. Select the magents "zone" as shown in the image :) This "zone" surrounds/contains all the vertices which will be affected by the magnet, and eventually our morph...

...however, we can see that currently the zone surrounds the entire head - but we want to make forehead wrinkles so we need to make the zone affect only select facets within the zone... Select "Properties" from the "Object" menu.

From here a variety of really useful effects can be applied. A few comments on the controls might be well worth the slight diversion from teh tutorial: Visible: Having the whit eline drawn around the zone is extremely useful when you hav eone magnet, but can be distracting if you ahve (say) 10 magnets at onc e(and in my earlier days I really DID have that many - and more! - magnets for the creation of a single character). Turn off the visibility of a zone before working on another zone if you find yourself getting distracted. Edit Falloff Garph: By default the "falloff graph" is set to make a magnet affect vertices at the center of the magnet zone with 100% strength, but affect vertices right at the edge of the zone by a tiny amount, of at all. This is designed to result in a nice "organic" feel and allows for smooth transition between the original shape and your new design comparatively easily. You can change the graph in very sophisitcated ways to produce different effects, by most common alternative being to affect all vertices within the zone by the same amount. Set Parent: Hopefully you'll already be familiar with the concept of parenting - put simply this allows you to "attach" the magnet zone to the component it is meant to deform, makign life easier for posing with magnets attached as opposed to creating morphs. Group: Ah! The reason we're here. We can limit the affect of a magnet by setting it's zone to only affect the group or groups that we wish to affect, instead of affcting ALL of the mesh within the sone...

Click the "Group" tick-box to add a tick and force the zone to use only the selected group/s. Click the "down arrow" to show what groups are available, and which ones are selected. In our case there is only one group (HeadWrinkles) and it is currently selected. TIP:- Like some other drop-down lists, this list toggles the items when you click on them... so if you click on "HeadWrinkles" the list will not only close but de-select the HeadWrinkles group. Frustrating. Click in an empty part of the underlying "SphereZoneProperties" window instead, or click "HeadWrinkles" to close the list but de-select the group, then open the list again and click HeadWrnkles to select and close (fussy behaviour!). Click "OK" to accept the change and close the window. The magnet will now only affect the HeadWrinkles group that we created in the earlier steps... including the odd 1/1/1/1 line pattern that I created to show why we can't/shouldn't paint patterns that tight.

Select the prop "Mag 1". This is another one of the 3 props that make up any "magnet" (magnets compose of the zone, the base, and the magnet itself). I don't want to get TOO heavily into magnet generics, but the base is useful as a "zero point" or "base" for the magnet to operate on. Anything your magnet does is relative to the position of that magnets base (remember this if you do any scaling or rotation in particular).

Usign the magnets parameter dials, set Scale to "95%" and zScale to 95%. While "Scale2 is the better of the two scaling parameters for this particular morph, it does draw the texture in slightly - so I felt that minimising the scale and accentuating the forward/backward depth of the morph with zScale would be an improvement. Also ideally overdo your morphs - if you can create a morph which is perhaps up to 50% stronger than you think will ever be needed - and have it work well - then your morph will be much more flexible and higher quality IMHO than if you create a morph "just good enough to get there". Also...you see where I put the 1/1/1/1 line pattern? the whole thing has sunken - even the facets that I didn't select in the group! Tha tis because the "shouldn't be sunken" lines have no vertices specific to them - every facet shares its vertices with "sunken" lines, so the factes are pulled in with the "correctly" sunken lines. Also note we needn't have scaled the lines IN - in my first veriosn (which had a line pattern of 2/2/2/2 BTW) I scaled the magnet up to around 110%.

The depressions are a bit sharp at the edges mind - let's mix that up a bit. There are two ways we could do this - we COULD go and edit the mag zone's falloff chart, but it's easier to select the mag zoen and scale it along the x axis... by trial-and-error I've chosen to set the Mag Zone's xScale parameter to 60%.

Now to get rid of that odd depression above the wrinkles - select the ehad and you'll see there's a new temporary morph named after the magnet. Set this to zero for a while to make using the group editor easier, then use the above instructions to open the group editor and obliterate the 1/1/1/1 pattern - perhaps you'd even add addition wrinkle lines following the 1/2/1/2 style pattern.

I choose to add extra lines...

Having added some lines quite high on the head, I've decided that I do not like the zScaling portion of the magnet properties, so have changed the scaling as shown here.

Once we have finished our design - as here - we can then produce a morph for it. As I have no knowledge of how to produce the special INJection morphs that are commonly used for Victoria3 (and little interest in them because of the speed penalties in using them - especially under Poser 5) I'd only be able to document the "standard" ways of producing morphs. These basically fit into "keep it to yourself" and "able to share with others" categories. I'll try and get back to saving this as a morph if/when I manage to calm my son down...

Right - well, make sure the Head is selected. The quick-and-dirty way to turn the current head shape (INCLUDING any DAZ-copyrighted morphs that are in effect - best to zero those first if you have some applied!) is to select "Spawn Morph Target" from teh "object" menu (with Head selected, rather obviosuly for a head morph). You'll be asked to provide a morph name, after which the new morph appers in the lsit and you can delete the magnets used to create the morph. Note that the initial morph value is 0 - and quite right too! So once you've deleted your magment/s you'll need to set the morph value to have it show up. Your character can now be stored in a library "as usual".

The second - and my favourite (especially for sharing) way of creating morphs is a little ahrder, but IMHO worth the effort. There are now tools to make this easier I belive, but since I consider it so easy to do with nothing but Poser and Notepad, I'll illustrate the supposedly "hard way" of doing it. First, select File...Export...Wavefront OBJ...

Click "OK" in the window that pops up to seelct a single frame export. In the "Heirarchy Selection" windo that come snext, untick "Universe" (this de-selects everything) then tick "Head" to seelct the object we're creating a morph for, and click on "OK".

Provide a location and filename, then press "Save".

Set the options as shown here, then press "OK". Your morph is now saved... and we could use it very quickly and easily, but if we want to be able to share it there are some extra steps to perform.

Open up the .OBJ file in a text editor. There are too many ways to do this for me to feel it's worthwile including as part of the tutorial, but it shouldn't be terribly taxing. If you now look at the file you'll find that it's a fairly plain text file which describes the model in terms of Vertices (lines starting with "v") Texture (uv) co-ordinates (lines beginning with vt), Vertex Normals (line startign with vn) and Faces (strangely enough, lines starting with f). Almost any of these can be ommitted - for example, Poser apaprently makes no use of Vertex Normals in an OBJ file, so these are something of a waste FOR POSER. However, all we need for a morph file is the vertex positions - so delete all lines which start with vt,vn, of f. No - seriosuly, although Poser was told to produce a "morph" export and it included those, we don't need them and DAZ (or any other model vendor whose models you might produce morphs for) is likely to be upset if you give anyone a file containing the f lines (and/or the vt lines). So just delete the lot, but don't damage the v lines or the morph won't work anymore. you may include or delete any lines starting with # - these are "comment" lines, and are pretty meaningless except to human beings. The process of removing all this extra (copyrighted) baggage is known as "squishing" the morph.

Save the squished morph as a plain text file - and make sure it's a plain text file, none of this cleverly-formatted word-processor stuff with hi-tech facilities like "bold" or 2word-wrap" here thank-yew-very-much!

A quick file comparison might be in order. While the original exported morph was a massive 5.79 MB (!! Yes, Victoria3 gives big head morphs) the "squished" version is comparativelt small at "just" 1.20 MB. For further space savings it should be ZIPped or RARed up with a readme file for sharing with others (I just used WinRAR on the squished morph and got it down to around 305 KB - much better!). But now then - how to apply the morph...

Back in Poser now... select and delete Mag1. You'' find the other 2 components of the magnet also vanish. Select the head. Now open the "Properties" window. this is slightly easier in Poser 5, but in Poser 4 you can either: Double-click the head. Select "Properties" from the "Object" menu. Hold down the CTRL key while you tap the "i" key.

Click the "Add Morph Target" button. This will bring up the "Add Target Dialog" window. Clock on locate and specify the squished morph file. In "Label" put the name of the Morph e.g. HeadWrinkles. then clik "OK" twice (once for each dialog window) to return back to the main Poser itnerface. You should now have your morph avaialble on the head object, and it should work "as advertised".

Here's a render. I've set the HeadWrinkles morph to 0.25 (I generally find smaller values of morphs used in combiantion give a betetr effect than huge values to one morph), loaded DAZ's original hi-res texture and used some DAZ light that came with the Multiplane Cyclorama. All we need now is a swimsuit and a bathing pool :)

Very interesting tutorial. I see how this can be used in many ways. Thank you very much who3d.

Very nice job. Keep it up.

Great tutorial who3d ! Why don't you upload it in Renderosity's tutorial area ? it will be a better place for it !

Thanks in advance.

:) Eric

You have the morph in as efficient a size as possible at step #25. If you save the CR2, you have the morph.

You can copy it from the CR2 you just saved back into your main CR2 using MM4. Going to OBJ, unless you are going into a modeler - and using magnets to do this, this is not likely - is unnecessary. It is an obsolete way of sharing morphs.

To share, the morph can be copied into this file:

---

{
version
{
number 4.01
}
actor head:1
{
channels
{
}
}
}

---

copy/paste the text between the **** into a new file and name it: V3HeadMorph.pz2

Copy the new morph into it with MM4 and share this file.
The name is set. The limits can be set to something more realistic than +/- 10,000.

With V3 now:
If you name the morph at the Spawn step = PBMCC_01 (the 01 can be any number up to 50).
Then go the parameters window for the morph and name it "head wrinkles" or whatever.

Then save the CR2, copy the morph using MM4 into the head morph carrier above. Then save it as V3HeadWrinkles.fc2.

Now, if this file is put in Face library - it will inject this morph into V3 figure CR2. Share this file, and the users do not need to copy anything and anyone can keep the morph out the the figure until wanted.

"You have the morph in as efficient a size as possible at step #25. If you save the CR2, you have the morph." That's the "quick and dirty" way of doing it (and also actually the official documented way!) but not terribly shareable in all cases - often DAZ morph info could be in that CR2. I FAR prefer my second method, which also works with characters other than Victoria3 (which was an important factor in my consideration)... but also there may be a follow-up tutorial which will use a 3D modeller, and also possibly a Michael2 version of the final "Davros Wrinkles" morph I'm aiming towards having been inspired by Bill's work (linked earlier in this thread). I also felt it was important - to me if no-one else - to show how little beyond just Poser (and indeed the stock models, tho the DAZ models are generally better) one needs in order to come up with some surprisingly good modifications. I've seen too many people display talent that use just the dials, and I boggle at how much higher they might soar if only they knew how easy it was to build your own custom morphs. Naturally once you've built a few, you can combine them... and on and on. Imagination's the only real limit. Cheers for the input - and Jaagar, if I DO start putting tuts up "to keep" in the tutorial section, can I include your (credited) post as "the third way"? :) Cheers everybody - it's nice to have feedback - and feedback that's a combination of warm & informative is doubly precious! Cliff

Attached Link: http://www.morphworld30.com/files.html

You should use Traveler's TargoMag for your magnetting. It gives your magnet zone a set of cross hair directly in the middle thus making the magnet zone extremely easy to use. Being someone who uses magnets on an extremely regular basis, I'd not live without it!

Xena, how do you use the TargoMag? There's no explination in Trav's ReadMe. Maybe a quick Tut within the Tut?

I broke my arm yesterday so typing much is out of the question but, you simply install as per Trav's instructions then use your magnets like usual :)

Cliff, Yes, you may include my addenum.

The 12 line file I have above IS a CR2, if you name it with a .cr2 extension.
You use it to share the morph. That is all the parts of a CR2 that you need to have in a file that MM4 can copy from - into the CR2 you do use. It is easier to use if you give it a *.pz2 extension.
You can add an - actor BODY:1 section and have the FBM dials (valueParm) there to copy in if you have any.
Using the figure.cr2 - which is what DAZ advocates - uses a file with way more baggage than you need. A simple carrier is better.

OBJ are less functional - as far as V1:Mil Kids or M1:Steph.
As deltas, the morphs can be copied directly in. As OBJ, the location has to be compensated for. That does not mean the morphs DO anything useful in the alternate versions of the figures, but as deltas - they only address the changes they make.

Otherwise, figure compatibilty is irrelevant. A morph - as deltas or as OBJ is only for the figure it is made from.

The OBJ version is certainly the form that must be used in forging morphs in other modeling programs.

I know it is my bias, but I don't see the point in using Poser magnets to generate morphs if you can and do use a real modeling program. I took this tutorial as being directed at those who only have the magnets as a resource.
But for morphing the base figure - it is difficult to use magnets to massage the individual points.

I can see their utility with clothing. DAZ would have done something more universally useful if the body shapes they pack clothing CR2's with - were magnets instead. The shape magnets could be used to convert any desired item of clothing.

Since I took this as being aimed at those restricted to Poser, I am saying that there is no reason to go to OBJ, even to share a morph.

A very good reason:

look at the size of even your squished and zipped OBJ for V3 head - it is large - because it is an OBJ it will have every "v" line in the V3 head group - a huge group.

look at the deltas version - zipped. It will only have the data for the points that the morph affects - and this morph does not affect all that many.

Now - You DO want to go to OBJ - IF you want to make sure the morph is symmetrical. This is instance, the morph is taken into MASA'a MTM and mirrored.
You just need a copy of the base head group for the program to use as a reference.
MASA's new Shaper program, will do some mirroring and a lot more. One neat function is a looping animation of a morph's effect. It will also turn a multi-group complex into a single group for morphing (if your modeler makes it difficult to work on several groups at once) and then recuts this single back into the original groupings.

But that is for the one doing the morph, it still should be shared as deltas.

The point (or A point) in using poser magnets even if you can and do use a real 3D modleling program is that sometimes you might as well use a nutcracker instead of a sledgehammer. There's a time and a place for everything, and while the tut was deliberately limited to using just the Operating System-provided ustilities (e.g. Notepad) and Poser, the techniques are deliberately as universal and simple as possible. They don't depend on the V3 figure, a specific 3D modeller, installing Morph Manager or anything at all beyond being able to run Poser. So anyone can follow it. I'm positive that there are INJection morph tutorials out there, and any number of more advanced tutorials on a variety of related Poser issues (for example I'd be amazed if Dr Geep hadn't done a much fuller tutorial on using magnets). But this was just a "simple morph creation tut", for those who aren't already beyond this point.

In either way, this was a great tutorial :o) Thanks for making it.

Yes, this is great! Thanks so much!