I've only started creating my own morphs, but am mystified as to how to open the mouth. I've read that one should leave dials at "0" prior to importing a figure into a 3D program, but it appears that opening the mouth prior to export will be the only way to work with it. I'm using Carrara which is a fairly limiting program when it comes to making changes.

heyas; what figure are you working on? a human figure or an animal? what you really need to do is set up the model so you can grab the various pieces you need in carrara. you could take the obj of the head into uvmapper, say, and change all the materials to groups. this should allow you to more easily select the teeth, tongue, lips, and inner mouth in carrara. frankly, if you have p4, this might be easier with magnets and the grouping tool. create new groups, and include each material. then apply a magnet to the head, and set the mag zone's properties to only affect the pieces you want. (lips, inner mouth, and skin, say; but not teeth, for example.)

I've been working on making a character with a wide open mouth, and it can be tricky. Note, I don't have Carrara, I use Lightwave, but here's the process I use. If you want to export a character with a morph, (I use the wavefront object format) set your dial to 1 (or whatever value) and most likely you DO need to check the "as morph target", otherwise you're head may be off-center and the morph will do bad things. What you need to have unchecked is the "weld body part seams", that is the thing that will remove your morph. When importing wavefront objects, Lightwave doesn't keep the object group names, but the actual groups are there and can be selected by the select connected command, and then given a surface. (I don't know how Carrara handles this, hopefully it either understands the group names, or has similar function for keeping the object groups grouped.) Once you have the object file in the modeler, select the points or polys on the chin, and use the magnet or move point or whatever Carrara calls it and drag down. And maybe add a little rotation. You may need to try this several times to get the bottom lip polys, the bottom teeth, and the lower part of the inner mouth selected without the upper parts, since Posette/Dork don't have these in separate groups. What I did was to select and add surfaces for lower and upper lip and teeth and export the head with a new name so I have these parts easily selectable. Bloodsong also reminded me, you have to be careful when modeling to not change the number or the order of the vertexes (points). Usually your safe with rotation/moving/dragging and magnet type of commands, but it's not always obvious. For instance, earlier versions of LW would change the vertex order when you used the cut and paste command. Once I finish modeling, export as a wavefront object and then use the load morph target. If I'm making a prop or character, I load the exported object into Compose, and then split the object into groups with the split by material command, and then use UVMapper to create a UV map. But those last two steps aren't necessary for morphs. Hope this post isn't as confusing as I fear it is! :) Regards- Lemurtek

heyas; morphs don't need material settings; i change them to groups to be able to select them in rdd by double clicking on a vertex. if carrara has a method by which you can select pieces by material, then you don't need to do that, of course. :) btw, somebody splain this to me... if i change the material facets into a group, does that make the edges doubled? between the two pieces, i mean? i mean, how do you end up with two polygons that share an edge being two independent polygons that don't?

Sorry Ricky, I don't know. About the materials thing: just open as a single group, use the marquee tool to highlight what you do not want, or is in the way and hide them. You can use as many steps as you need to get rid of the stuff. (But reveal brings all of them back). If it is complicated - serially save the rds file so that you do not have to go back so far to recover. When hidden, you can not move them by mistake and you do not need to reveal to save either the obj or the rds. And if you save an rds when everything is set up, you can use it for a base for future morphs - ready to go. I guess you could take the whole figure in as a single group, but with Compose, you do not need to and you need it to get the morphs out anyway.