I am about done with Vickie. I can't stand the 'bent drinking straw" inside elbow and the bizarre shoulders.

Sure, the elbow etc. can be attacked in post processing, but I want to animate photorealistic.

And I spent hours today trying to morph her face into something that does not scream "DAZ VICTORIA THREE", but to no avail. I did make one short animation (excerpt, no sound track):

http://jrdonohue.com/holly2.mov large format, 7.6MB Quicktime
http://jrdonohue.com/holly3.mov small format, lo res 598K Quicktime

I still think it looks like Vickie.

About Poser5/Judy/EternalJudy/etc. I really like what I see of 3Dream's work on the Poser5 woman.

1. Does EJ have the elbow and shoulder problem?
2. Can I stay in Poser4PP and work with EJ?
3. Does anyone have a different character to recommend?
4. There must be a path to learning Poser character creation from scratch at the root. Can the pros around here point me to a thread or website that would help me consider that track? Is it Judy+face room in Poser5?
5. But if I have to learn that, I would probably go into Animation:Master and learn spline character creation or get on the bottom rung of SoftImage or one of the other big packages.

Thank you,
::::: Opera :::::
aka j.j.kirnan
aka John Donohue
Pasadena, CA

John, I prefer EJ to Vicki for animation. I just think she's easier to work with, and since she can natively support poses, clothes, and just about anything made for Judy, I find her extremely versitile "out of the box". Moreso than any of the Millenium characters. 2 things you might consider... EJ has TONS of morphs that can give you some complex results, but her facial expressions and morphs aren't really as extendable as Vicki's. Meaning, if you're having trouble making Vicki look NOT like Vicki, then chances are you'll be even more hardpressed to make EJ look NOT like EJ. She has a lot of morphs, but unless you really put some effort into turning all kinds of dials, she's very identifiable. Secondly, you'll find EJ's hands and some of her other features are not as detailed and realistic up close as the hi-res Vicki. Her proportions are very different. However, she does bend as good (or better) than Vicki in many cases, and doesn't seem to suffer from the "elbow bend" problem Vicki seems to have. I like working with EJ better than Vicki because for me, she's a much easier mesh to animate, and looks very good in motion... whereas, I find Vicki to be too "bulky" and clumsy to work with in animation, and I find myself taking up to 3 times as long to get her motions right compared to EJ. Dynamics like hair and cloth seem to calculate much faster for me on EJ than Vicki (perhaps due to the mesh density differences?), and she works better with the walk designer and with BVH files than Vicki in my experience. Anyway, it all depends on what your needs are for the given project. If you want something that's going to look ultra-realistic in close-up detailed shots, then perhaps V3 is a better choice. For faster integration and turnaround times, I find EJ to be MUCH better to use in that regard.

"if you're having trouble making Vicki look NOT like Vicki, then chances are you'll be even more hardpressed to make EJ look NOT like EJ. She has a lot of morphs, but unless you really put some effort into turning all kinds of dials, she's very identifiable." - This is also my experience.

hardpressed to make EJ look NOT like EJ. This (and her status as a R'osity Exclusive) has kept me from buying. I assumed that people just weren't bothering to personalize her face though. Isn't she compatible with the Face Room? EJ's face comes across to me as a bit cartoonish for some reason (the nose, I think). I can't imagine doing much with her in a more realistic mode. Even the EJ Alive (sic?) item, for all its animation, looks like a cartoon of a girl to me. I'd love to be shown I'm wrong. BTW: So far the best Judy add-on I've encountered is AprilSYH's Jocosa. On the "What to use?" question: I abandoned V2 for Steph almost entirely, and I've removed V3 from my computer as a waste of money. I don't have the RAM or the patience to mess with her. When I need high rez or details, I use Steph Petite. Not as "good" as V3, but like the girl next door, not as hard to get to know as, say, Elle MacPherson. M

Operaguy: 2) Can I stay in Poser4PP and work with EJ? I have Judy working in Poser 4, so yes, no reason why not. You need Poser 5 (obviously) to get Judy in the first place... 4) There must be a path to learning Poser character creation from scratch at the root. Can the pros around here point me to a thread or website that would help me consider that track? Is it Judy+face room in Poser5? I'd recommend B L Render's (Bloodsong's) book "Secrets of Character Creation in Poser 5". From all good bookstores :) and has just about everything you need to know, plus a CD with examples. mickmca: "Isn't she [EJ] compatible with the Face Room?" I don't think so; EJ's mesh has been "greened" compared to Judy's. It's not just a morph job.

"EJ's face comes across to me as a bit cartoonish for some reason (the nose, I think). I can't imagine doing much with her in a more realistic mode. Even the EJ Alive (sic?) item, for all its animation, looks like a cartoon of a girl to me. I'd love to be shown I'm wrong." I don't know about that. I think she can be made to look quite realistic through good texturing and lighting. My problem is that she's just a lot harder to make expressive than Vicki is. She's got all the necessary dials to do just about any kind of facial expression, but getting the right combination seems much more difficult than it is with Vicki. Oh I think EJ is by far the best Judy variation I've tried, and I have quite a few. Just the way her UV's were cleaned up so meticulously puts her in another league (IMHO). I recommend EJ to anyone who wants a youthful, versitile character that really does look "unique" by herself, and has lots of compatibility right out of the box. Just be warned that it's a lot harder to get different facial variations out of her.

in fact, if she looks cartoon it is all the better for me, i'll like her even more but.. i do not have p5 so do not have judy but from what i saw in the promo pics, it is a wonderful thing

in fact, if she looks cartoon it is all the better >> for me, i'll like her even more Well, sure. I'm not suggesting this is a fault. It just doesn't fit with what I do. I have all the cartoon ladies I'll ever need. M

She is WAY more expressive than Vickie. But you have to work for it (IE: actually be creative.). Her face is just as changeable as vickies, and in fact the eye shape morphs for EJ are just insane, you can make any eye shape, at all. The number of dials will overwhelm you at first though. IMO: EJ is not as easy to pose as V3. Her limits seem out of whack. I LOVE EJ! She is just great. But I am not gonna quit using V3 any time soon. Between the 2 I can create a wide variety of female characters (with a few posettes in the background :D) C'mon! She is only like $13 just get her already.

As far as I recall EJ is not compatible with the face room.

Once again, very rewarding to post here at the Rendo Poser forum. Intelligent, pointed comments. Thank you everyone, and keep the opinions coming, others, if desired.

While I'm interested in cartoon look for certain projects, right now I'm trying to get a feel for how far I can get at the high end of the Poser/Vue world as a one-person filmmaker of serious stories. It's not so much the money aspect as the learning curve aspect for someone who wants total creative control as an aspiring indie filmmaker. I am not afraid of challenges; I have been on steep learning curves like Visual FoxPro (database programming) and Logic Pro (music sequencing). But for animation, at this point I have an Aki Ross taste on a Vickie 3 [time/resource] budget.

It's quite possible I will have to take the plunge into Maya and/or consider that the scope of my ambitions is beyond the capablities of one person and requires a team. But I am not by any means finished with Poser. I am going to read B L Render's book as recommended by EnglishBob and also invest a weekend in Judy/EJ to see what can be done.

I like this model developed by
digital artist Steven Stahlberg
(animations at his site here.):
Spectacular large format
jpg of this image here.

And of course there is Philippe Bouyer, here.

I also think I need a good strong reality check about expectations. Animation is not live movie-making; it is 'once-removed' and 'symbolically abstract' which means the animation suggests the action at it's keyframes, and the viewers imagination supplies the majority of reality/perception. I've got to get that message deep down. I think Polar Express is failing because the filmmakers did not respect this, while Pixar does. One of my ways of groking this is to watch Snow White, often.

::::: Opera ::::: Message edited on: 11/22/2004 11:01

This thread makes interesting reading for someone that's considering EJ.

But V3 won't be deleted from my machine any time soon -- at the moment, she's the best that we've got. Not to mention that V3 is the #1 market-supported model in history.

EJ would be an addition, not a substitution.

Maya isn't on my "to buy" list. This is merely a hobby.

An important thing to consider is this. If you buy a package like Maya it will take you YEARS to get really good at using it. Even then there is no guarantee that you will have the knack to be a great modeller.

I don't.

I've been doing 3d modelling/rendering for... god... about 11 or so years (started on the Amiga), and frankly I don't have a lot to show for it.

Last year I finally wised up. I want to make movies, not model things. The time and money investment I would spend in an expensive modelling package, is better spent getting my movie done in Poser. Sure you do still have to invest in other software such as editors, compositors etc...

I buy a lot of props, but I use and reuse them creatively. With patience any figure with sufficient morphs can be made quite unique. and with a good texture and a decent knowledge of the P5 mat room you can get stunningly high end looking characters.

I guess what I'm trying to say is don't sell Poser 5 short. with patience, and hard work, Poser can be used to make movies.

Message edited on: 11/22/2004 11:28

Im almost always using V2 because V3 is way too big for my sytem, and I never had a problem making here look any way I want.

Unfortunately many people seem to just load a premade-character and never try to play around with sliders themselves.

V2 has so many default morphs and if you add magnets and a 3D application like Wings the combinations are endless.

Right now Narcissus is developing a "new" Posette:

My point is, if one can do this with Posette, how much more can we do with V2 and V3 ?

We dont need more meshes, but we need people who are willing to improve what we have.
So that a "new" character in the end would be really new, and not just a brand new package with the same old stuff inside.

stahlratte

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=808814&Start=1&Artist=PapaBlueMarlin&ByArtist=Yes

I just love neftis's style. Elle is a very cool looking figure, but her complete lack of support is what's kept me from picking her up. I'm also interested in that Solondra III spinoff character (Can't remember her name)but she has the same quality of being very expressive, that Elle has.

I don't know...... Elle.....there's something about all of those teeth that bothers me. It's as if she's getting ready to jump out of your screen and latch onto your finger.

LOL!

I just ordered the Poser5 upgrade and B L Render's book from Curious Labs. Quite an experience ordering from them...they are armored-up against phone calls. Can't get through on any of four numbers I eeked out of the internet and phone company. To be fair, I did leave a phone message Friday when I was about to order, and a polite person DID call me back about 5 hours later, but I missed the call. Anyway, my order was placed early today, I paid for overnight shipping, and it said "in stock" as I was ordering. I tried to email them asking if it would indeed arrive tomorrow, but even their email is armored-up; I got a generic email with answers about "when will it ship" back, even though I had asked a particular question in my email. Anyway, hopefull it will arrive tomorrow. I'll pick up EJ and the two extra pacs and see what I can do with her. ::::: Opera :::::

Xeno, the teeth aren't that bad on Elle... But I agree there has been very little support for her...

We are going to start support Elle a bit with some clothing conversion kits (our clothes to fit other figures, Elle included). :) --Rebekah--

Xeno, the teeth aren't that bad on Elle...

OWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!

Thank you Sixus1!!!

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2010331

This started as a brow smooth morph and ended in a very good result...

As a plus to the final edition I'm planing to do some hydrids with Neas head and judy's,Maya doll's,Victoria low res body versions...

and this project will be free any Poser 4> can use it

pitklad

Stahlratte wrote: "My point is, if one can do this with Posette, how much more can we do with V2 and V3? We dont need more meshes, but we need people who are willing to improve what we have." Posette is still interesting to work with because of the huge number of morphs that Trav and Jaager and others did. In many ways she's still the most adaptable figure around. None of the Daz figures have ever got the same third-party support; you have the Daz morphs and that's it. That was also true of Judy (in fact, worse) until EJ came along. EJ is a good development; she just needs a lot of work to get the most from her, particularly when most of the morph targets have difficult-to-interpret names.

**Wednesday morning

** My upgrade to Poser5 arrived yesterday at 5:45 PM. I went to bed at 3:30 AM this morning. That speaks for itself.

My interaction with Curious Labs was favorable. They performed, including answering my calls and emails.

Here at Renderosity I purchased **
EJ by 3Dream, $12.25
EJ - Extra Pak I by 3Dream, $5.95
EJ - Extra Pak II by 3Dream, $5.95
BAT's Lovely Lingerie by BATLAB, $5.00
Nikki So alive! by Posermatic, $11.90**

My goal is and has been to see if I can get on the level of creating cinematic characters in the tradition of 'Romantic Realism." By this I mean: fictional re-creation and representation of actual people, like you might see on the street. My first candidate is "Holly," who is pretty, smart and interesting, but not a supermodel. You would find her perhaps two years into her career as an attorney. I want 'realism' but not hyper-hyper realism. I want the image to call forth in the viewer's mind not someone from a 'possible' world, but rather someone from objective reality. I also want 'romantic' in the sense of someone who has created a positive, proactively valuable life for herself.

I spent a lot of time trying to get Victoria 3 over the last year to win the audition, without success. After my first evening with Poser5Woman, EternalJudy and Nikki, I think I am finally on the first rung of what could be success. I am grateful to Curious Labs, 3Dream and Posermatic for their efforts. I am in a state of humility and respect for the amount of work that has gone into this technology. The attention to detail and exhaustive tool-making involved here deserves to be recognized. My hat is off to all of you.

I did not choose to open Poser5 yet. That learning curve will come, but I knew if I went down that road I would not get a screen test on the first day! So this test was performed in Poser4 with ProPak. I am on Windows XP Home, Pentium4 2.4GHz with 1Gb RAM.

I first attempted to work with the texture that came with EJ. That has promise, but the colouring was not right. I loaded the Nikki texture, but worked with EJ's dials. There are MANY dials! And I find the approach to morphing here quite different and advantageous compared with Vickie (V3, I still have respect for you, but we are just friends for the moment.) P5Woman/3Dream gives the user-modeller access to every feature of the face, exhaustively. I will write more about that another time. Importantly, you get to manipulate her features with exquisite control. For instance, you can model the eyebrows by moving from left to right along the brow and arch and shape it segment by segment. This not only gives you control over your character's default visage, but you can imagine the possibilities for setting human emotion in her face; she can give you 'a look' with her eyebrows, if you know what I mean.

This level of control extends to the eyes, the forehead, the nose, ears, lips chin, etc. etc. Exquisite control. The last thing I will say is: I am grateful to be able to model a character out of symmetry! Yes, symmetry is why we go ga ga over international beauties and supermodels. But the ones who are REALLY captivating to me are the women with the infinite variety of the gene pool in their face, and symmetry is present, but they also have imbalances. More on this at another time.

Anyway, this is just a first shot, I did not work with lighting, or body morphs (she has on Bat's lingerie although you can't see it in the examples.) I set the animation as well as could be intuited without much trial and just let if fly while I got a few hours sleep, so the motions are not rekeyed. I rendered with texture, anti-alias on, 24 fps at 640x360. I was getting a frame every 20 seconds. Hair by Kozoburo.

Here is Holly:

Download short Quicktime animation here, large format, 11.6 MB [patience, 2 min download on high-speed cable modem)
Download short Quicktime animation here, small format, lo res, 1.1 MB

::::: Opera :::::

Nice looking character. Wait till you get into Poser 5's materials. With skin shader node and such you will be floored by how much further it will take you. VIVA LA EJ REVOLUTION!

An interesting thread. Forgive me for the late jump-in, but I'm back into Poser after about a year's hiatus for a variety of reasons. My husband purchased me Poser 5 for my birthay (ordering it the day before Poser 6 was announced, lol) V3 and M3 quickly turned me off. It seems almost impossible to make a truly unique face for either, even with all those freaking dials! I just pulled down the free utility to group M3 and V3's dials from the freestuff here, so maybe that will make them more friendly. There are some fantastic clothes for them, so I suspect they will mostly be in my fantasy renders. My tendancy is to buy mostly for textures and make my own characters. V3-M3 looked more like they were optimized for prebought characters. As someone already remarked, Traveler's morphs made Posette one of the most versitile faces ever. I think the key was the morphs that could raise and lower the cheekbones. None of the DAZ figures have ever had that ability, and I suspect that is what limits them. Posette's body, however, was a disaster that even Traveler's wizardry can't fix. I'm interested in a lot of different art genres, including fantasy, pinups and erotica, and having a figure with a good body is kind of a requirement for the latter two. I just finished fixing up all my files and runtimes for P5 so I have not had a huge amount of time to explore Judy or Don. EJ looks like she might be a worthwhile investment. Spent most of this morning looking around the communities at stores, free stuff, and weighing re-upping at Poserword vs. renewing Platinum club (since I can't afford both this month, lol!) Forgive my rambles, I think I'm getting Poser overload.

I too purchase "characters" only for the textures. I look at eyebrows, especially, and lips. Please note that ALL textures for V2 work with EJ, and V3 textures work with EJ (i have been told, have not tried it) if you put them thru a certain utility program, Universal Texture Converter. So...that is a VAST library of textures. Next, a list of morphs for EJ's cheeks may be seen below my sig in this post...just the cheeks. FB means Forward/Back, S means SideToSide, UD means Up/Down. The various categories refer to small groups of morphs in the cheek structure. The categorization is systematic and clear. There is a similar array for nose, eye, lips, brow, etc. Obviously, with this kind of fine control, you can get tremendous power over the look of a face. The total count of morphs included with EJ: 861 Remember: You can generate perfectly valid male characters from EJ, as well. ::::: Opera ::::: targetGeom Cheek Dimple targetGeom Cheeks targetGeom Cheeks 2 targetGeom Cheeks Balloon targetGeom Cheeks Shape1 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape1 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape1 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape10 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape10 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape10 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape11 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape11 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape11 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape12 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape12 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape12 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape13 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape13 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape13 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape2 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape2 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape2 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape3 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape3 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape3 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape4 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape4 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape4 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape5 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape5 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape5 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape6 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape6 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape6 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape7 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape7 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape7 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape8 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape8 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape8 UD targetGeom Cheeks Shape9 FB targetGeom Cheeks Shape9 S targetGeom Cheeks Shape9 UD