Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: What's the BEST way to make face morphs?

ghelmer opened this issue on May 02, 2005 ยท 35 posts


Photopium posted Mon, 02 May 2005 at 11:50 PM

The ability to capture a likeness of a real person has always been the biggest draw and challenge for me in using Poser. Much akin to the search for the Holy Grail, morphing ELs is a path loaded with pitfalls, heartache and ultimately disappointment. All hope is not lost, however, and occasionally you will end up with results that satisfy. Be patient, have a pure heart (had to throw in that cliche, although I doubt that really applies here) and perservere. Never delete anything, as you may wake up one night in a cold sweat, realizing that version 3-28-04b is actually spot-on, and further versions were really just teaking the project into disarray. Most of your problems will be in the brow area. It seems that Millenium Models and their texture makers have little to no idea how real human being's eyebrows are placed and where they arch. Try 1 million different eyebrow trans maps rather than trying to morph it out. Use Head maps that are eyebrow-free and stick to the outer brow maps. If you need to morph the brow, you can do that by creating a new group with just the eyebrow material and then telling your magnets to only effect that group. This will avoid crinkled forehead. Watch out around the mouth with magnets, you might get everything perfect only to find that when you open smile, you have a victim of British Dentistry on your hands. Teeth are almost impossible to fix once destroyed. If you can hack a Cr2, I stronly encourage you to add slave dials for eye placement and control, as you will find that over time your eyes will eventually get out of place. Good source pics are the key, and all the better if they are ridiculous high-res and well-lit so you may use them in texture creation/modification as well (especially those pesky brows). Unfortunately, it is my experience that in your search for source pics you will find: The Model is closing his/her eyes The Model has her jaw agape The Model has hair on her face exactly where you don't want it The Model is making a stupid expression The Model was lit by a blind man Whoever posted the pics to the internet thought that a 1024X768 image would be best compressed at 14k The photographer really likes blur 99.9% of pics are useless in both morphing and texture work. Morphing M3 is extremely difficult. I haven't tried it yet, but if I were to work on a Male Morph i would take David, strip his morphs out, and morph-manage M3's morph channels back in and start from there. If you want to use Steph Petite or Laura or some other non-v3 model (and I think you do, unless you're working on Amazons) do the work on V3 then transfer two things to the other model: The completed Morph Target(s) and 1 morph target to make that character's face back into V3. Good luck, and if you have any further questions, I will answer them here for the benefit of all who might be interested. -WTB