I'm in the process of making a character for Poser. He has several tentacles, and just to make sure they would pose correctly before doing ALL the work, I exported one of the tentacles to try it out. It seems to pose very well, but has some small artifacts. They aren't really noticeable unless you bend them at an extreme angle, but they're still there and it bothers me. What should I do about them? Or should I just ignore them and go on with my character? My basic setup is this. I made the object in rhino from nurbs. I cut the joints into the nurbs, meshed it, welded, and exported. Ran it through phi builder, made the joint order yzx so the joints would come out properly. Then I converted the heir file, and that's where I'm at now.

Message edited on: 10/30/2004 19:53

There's also this - While in "Cartoon w/line" preview mode, you can clearly see the joints outlined. I've referenced other "tentacle" figures, and this doesn't happen. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong :-

It looks like the vertices aren't welded completely. Try welding them and check it again

Alright. I went into uvmapper and welded the seems. This helped quite a bit. However, there were still holes in the mesh. I went back into uvmapper and used "fix seems". This seemed to help a little...but they're still there. You can't tell too much when it's textured, but here's what I'm talking about.

Really need to see the wireframe when its bent like this..but guessing: Id say that the mesh is bending back in into itself. The vertices are actually overlapping inside the model when the bend is applied. Not a whole lot you can do (its one of the reasons there is a "curve" joint)... anyhow..thats my guess luck BT

It puts me in the mind of Bag from My Stepmother is an Alien.

I actually like the overlapping part of the neck. It makes it look real to me

Alright. Remade the mesh from scratch, welded in UVmapper, and turned "curved joint" on under phi builder. Seems to be working now....But I have another problem. The eye is actually a sphere inside a sphere: The outside sphere is for the gloss. I have the gloss sphere parented to the eye, and the eye parented to the socket. However, everytime I try and rotate the eye, they cause the entire tentacle to move....

I know how to fix that (the only thing I know how o do, it seems ;P ) The eyeball and gloss sphere need to be props, seperate from the figure. 1. Save your figure without the eye spheres. Delete their notations in the PHI file too. 2. Save the two eye spheres together as one object. For more than one eye, save each one. This is important because Poser will be able to put them in the right place. 3. Bring your model into Poser, and import your eyeball object. Make sure to UNcheck "centered", "place on floor", and "percent of standard figure size". It should load in the correct position, in the eye socket. If it shows up as pure white, the ambience has been turned on. Use the material room to set ambient color to black. 4. Now parent the eyeball to the relevant part of the figure. Now you should be able to rotate it normally. :)

Turn off "Bend" on the eye. I think that'll fix it. You can do it in the object properties window. If that doesn't work, then remove the affector channels from the eyes and head so the eyes can't affect the head. That'll kill it for sure.

Terrific model - I was looking for andorian antennaes and your model looks pretty close without the eyes! Will you be making it available sale or free???

Ajax: I'll try that out, and see if it works. Porthos: This one is going to be for sale, if I can ever get it working. However, the above eye isn't the entire model. Just a part of it :)

I'll second what Ajax said about removing the affector channels. --Rebekah--

Hmm....Where might these "affector" channles be found :) ?

In the head, look for a hidden dial called "jointx righteye_jointx" or something like that and delete it. There will also be a corresponding jointz and twisty and three more for lefteye. The eyes themselves will each have three similar dials that refer to the head. So that's a total of 12 dials to delete so far.

You may also need to delete the SmoothScale dials that refer to the eyes from the head or the head from the eyes. There should only be one of those you need to delete in each body part, so four all up. Of course, you've only got one eye to worry about, so that halves the number of dials you need to delete :-)

Message edited on: 10/31/2004 14:46

To add to what Ajax said...if you are having problems finding the correct code clode block to delete...depending on how you made it, it might not say (for example) "jointx righteye_jointx" but it might have it listed as jointx bone12_jointx" ....then you can look for the other actor (otherActor rEye:1) line to see which bone it is for. Hope that helped some. :) --Rebekah-- BTW--Ajax, I never knew what those were called before, referring to "affector channels", I just knew when to rip them out. :)