anone know what the vickie update dated 01/12/01 does and has anyone gotten the mac sit file to expand. I e-mailed zygote, but no one has answered yet.

Thanks for letting us know about the update. I also use a Mac, am in the process of downloading the file & if I can get it to expand, I'll post a note with a comment about the new features. Appreciate it!

Hmmm. . .the .sit file wouldn't open for me. I use Stuffit Expander 5.1. I didn't even get an error panel or anything at all. I use Expander every day so I know that's not the problem. Let us know what Zygote's response is to your email.

Expander 6 reports it as "corrupt or an invalid archive"

The update includes a new .cr2 file, plus 2 new .cr2 files ("Vicki Map" and "Vicki Map2). I liked at the difference files from the old .cr2 and all I found change was the figure became :5 from the old :1, also there was some cleaning up of the exponentional numbers e-05 became e-005 and so forth. Vicki Map differs from the new Vicki by replacing the figure number :5 with :4 and Vicki Map2 replaces it with :3 I assume this is to allow Vicki to play better with other figures and with the 2 new files to allow multiple Vickis at the same time. Sam

I just loaded the new "Vicki Map" figures and they looking for the vicky texture files

I assume they fixed the hand offsets too- do they say it is for the Curious Labs Poser update only?

The .sit is about 5MBs short of what it's supposed to be. Looks like the upload was terminated before it could finish.

Huh? What's going on? Some sort of Victoria update? Is it free for Vickie owners? Why was I not informed? ;) Wait a minute---perhaps I should just go and have a look for myself, eh?

Well I just went to DAZ/Zygote and found and downloaded and installed the new Vickie update. Of course, I backed up my GeometriesZygote People folder first as well as my favorite .cr2 files. Opened her and I have no idea what has changed. As is typical of Zygote, they appear to think that we all just instinctively know what's going on. A little documentation would be nice, ya know? So does anyone know for sure what this update has done? Will it affect all of my Vickies in their various incarnations? I'm not even so sure I know what has been updated.I already HAD a Vickie Map and a Vickie Map 2, becasue that's waht the characters are called when you buy them with the textures, which is what I had done. Otherwise, no troubles with the .exe file.... Mike

Put side by side you can see a slight improvement,more realistic,less ugly.And it is free.The other files aren't touched.

message from zygote today said the file has been fixed and expands properly. Still no word on what the improvements are. Just got a new G4 today 1 gig of memory to install and all my poser goodies need to get reinstalle don the newer mac so I won't be installing the new vickie tonight but if any one else finds out what her improvements are, share them with us.

I just installed the Mac version (I'm bi-lingual!), it worked fine, but it did not fix the finger offset problem, so it should not be used (directly) with the Curious Labs Poser update. Of course, many don't seem to have noticed the problem in the first place, so it wouldn't bother them, maybe I'm a hand person (but I've always thought of myself as a leg man!), but if your intrested, that is what my CR2 in Free Stuff is for. I wonder if DAZ is aware of this whole situation, maybe I aught to ask 'em. I also noticed there are 3 CR2s in there, I wonder how many people would rather just have one, and put the maps on themselves, and save the download time. Incidently, I don't actually see anything that is changed.

Jim, What do you mean about what you have in Free Stuff? I haven't checked out the Free Stuff in quite a while. Is it a hand fix for Vickie? Because I've noticed the problem. Actually, I've only noticed one problem, which is if you scale her left hand down, the index finger joint gets all out of whack. I'm sure there are other problems, but I spent alot of time trying to fix that and simply gave up, without looking into other problems. I noticed ONE thing that's changed: With the non-patched Vickie, you know the way she loads kind of on a slant? Well, rotating her hip on x is no good, so you have to undo the inverse kinematics, bend her legs straight and then reposition her to get her standing up straight. Or, you can just choose Figure>Edit>Restore Figure, and she'll straighten out, but her feet will also be straight, and below the floor. With the new Vickie, that doesn't happen; you have to straighten her out manually. I really have to wonder why DAZ: A) felt the need to release a "new" Vickie with no immediately apparent improvements, and evidently NOT fixing the ONE thing many have noticed--the hand problem (what about the "eye thing"-- I haven't looked yet?) and, B) To do so with no write-up whatsoever. It REALLY just blows my mind when I think that they can't include a simple Read Me to tell us "what" and "why"... Cheers, Mike

I might add that scaling her left index finger down the same as her hand doesn't fix the screwed up joint, though you would think it would--at least I would. I don't see that problem on the right hand. Maybe we need a "Vickie Fix" morph package, LOL Funny thing is, there are many many people here that would do it for free, but DAZ themselves, possibly the MOST qualified to fix Vickie, doesn't seem to be too terribly interested...

mjustmike: Zygote got the Mac version of the download to expand properly. I didn't see a whole lot of change. As far as scaling down her hands is concerned, here's what you have to do: let's say you want her hands to be 10% smaller, for example. Select each body part, head, neck, upper neck, eyes, collars, chest, abdomen, hip, etc. For now, DO NOT select the shoulders, forearms, hands or fingers. For each body part you select, scale that part up 10%. After doing this for each body part (except for the shoulders, forearms, hands & fingers), select BODY & scale that DOWN 10%. This results in the arm parts including hands & fingers being uniformly being scaled down 10%, while the rest of the body parts remain as they were before. Trying to scale down just the hands will mess up the joints.

Thank you Michalki, I'll try that. It's kind of a drag having all the same size Vickie's running around, ya know. I do apreciate the info. :) Cheers, Mike

From what I gather (Zygote has never said a word) there were some kind of a built in problem in Poser up to 4.0.3.126 (the Curious labs update) that required them to built in Z translations into the first joints of the fingers and thumb, one hand is forward, one is backward. Michael never got the offsets, which is why they said you need the latest version of Poser, but using that version with Vickie makes the offsets, as the problem they correct is no longer there. So after I figured this all out I made a CR2 file (with help from others here) that removes the offsets, it is in Free Stuff as "Vickie CR2 Corrected". I built the corrections into Super Model Vickie, Saluda also has 'em.

Thanks, Jim. I just downloaded her and I see what you mean. She looks good. :) Cheers, Mike

mjustmike: I should have added, in case it wasn't super clear, that if someone wants to go in the opposite direction, i.e., scale the hands & arms upward the same principle applies except that the selected individual body parts would then first be scaled DOWN by the desired percentage amount (again excepting shoulders, forearms, hands & fingers), then BODY would be scaled UP by the same percentage amount, resulting in an increase in the arm & hand parts. Most questions to the Forum that I've seen about Vicky's hands seem to be looking for smaller arm & hand parts, however. I've found out the hard way that simply reducing the X values for shoulder & forearm in an attempt to make a more petite Vicky & shorter arms messes up the elbow area, best seen when viewing the default arms out position using the top view camera. I was unable to correct the disjuncture at the elbow in those cases using the joint parameter editor. But using the method described above creates absolutely no elbow disjuncture problems. If someone on this Forum has knowledge about WHY one can't simply make arm reductions (by reducing X axis values) without having to go through the somewhat more time consuming process I mention here, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Maybe Jim can shed light on that issue, because his response in No. 18 above suggests he may have somewhat inside info (though not from Zygote itself) about this issue.

If I remember, the joint parameters on Vickies hands have problems, some of the scaling factors are reversed, others are in the wrong places. I tried to correct some of these problems when I did Super model Vickie's (SMV) hands (shown with Vickies), but I found some could not be fixed, as Poser would automatically flip the scaling when the figure was saved as a new set. SMV hands were fixed in the mesh, but I did have to redo all the joint parameters too, as she has smaller palms, so the finger joints are all moved. This was by far the least-fun part of building SMV. Anyway, you can see the offset in Vickie's fingers, especially in the pinkie and index fingers- this is an uncorrected CR2, in Poser 4.0.3.126 on a Mac.

Jim: Sounds like I wound up needlessly reinventing the wheel with my own character based on Vicky, because a month or two ago I did pretty much the same kind of arduous, thankless work. My figure is a very slimmed down, petite, girlish version of Vicky & when I got to the hands, it was obvious that I had some very boring work to do with the joint parameters. At first, I thought somewhere along the line I had created the problem myself due to sloppy saving of an interim file or something of that sort. Here's a plea to Zygote for the next version of Vicky, if she ever makes it out of the shop: Please design a set of hands that can be globally scaled up or down, instead of joint by joint. Also, it would be nice if Zygote published joint parameter data for the default characters so we could all have reliable base data to refer to when screwing around in the dreaded JE. Thanks for your additional comments.