I'm trying to create my first character morph ever. I played with existing morphs, trying to give the figure exactly the kinda look I wanted. When I was happy with the result, I created a morph target. Now my problem is that the value of the morph target is now 0... Is there any way to make it so that the look my character has now would be 1,000 and the basic face (with all the dials set to 0) would be 0,000? Any help will be greatly appreciated :) -E

You manually set all the dials to zero, and set your new morph to 1. then save the character to your character library.

Oh yah, I was dumb enough not to realise that I had the other dials still set to something other than zero. The morph is okay now, just like I wanted... NOW the problem is that I don't seem to be able to export the morph as obj. with Morph Manager... I know I should be, but the program dies on me every time I try that :(

Instead of use Morph Manager, you can export the OBJ as Morph Target within Poser itself. Next time you open a character (or even the standard nude figure) apply the MT to it, save it and it's all. Morph Manager still hasn't the ability to manage OBJ exporting, it can only copy a MT from a cr2 to another.

Um... I'm not sure I understood. I did save the character in my character library and the morph target is included... but I wanted to have the morph target separately (so that in the future when my character is finally ready, I don't need to include the .cr2 at all, only the morph and the textures when I make the character available). I have Morph Manager 4 and it claims to be able to export morph targets as .obj files, but like I said the program crashes every time I try to do that.

Set your parameter dials to whatever produces the desired morph. Create a morph target for the desired body part & give it a name. The new parameter dial will show up at the top of the heap of dials for that body part. Zero out all the other morph dials (not trans dials) below that. Set the new parameter dial to 1. Select Export from Menu. Select Wavefront OBJ from submenu. There are a couple of other selection screens that come up which should be no problem. But the important screens are the Hierarchy Editor screen & final choice screen about how you want to export. In the HE, deselect Universe, then scroll down to the body part affected by your new morph target. Click on that body part & click OK. On the next screen, deselect all the choices except Save As Morph Target.

<<>> I don't get any screens after the HE, after I choose the head it saves the .obj and that's that. And when I try to use the morph target, the face does change but not like I want it to, and the eyes sort of jump out... :/ Is it because I've got Poser 4.0? Thanks for trying to help me, I really appreciate it! :)

I'm sorry about the screen order thing, I was doing that from memory. But if you do the HE screen & export choice screen as suggested above your new target should export okay. But why might it not work the way you want, hmmm. The new morph target that you just exported is of course for use with the same body part of any other figure of the same type. To use the new target with the figure it was created with, you just set it to 1.000 or for whatever strength you need, while keeping the other morph dials below it set to zero, unless you want to add to the morph effect or revise it in some way. If you do later revise the morph effect slightly by using the other morph dials in addition to it, let's say you want to add more negative snarl to a face than you had originally saved with your new MT & you don't want to clutter up your figure's file with a superfluous MT: just go to your HE, select all parameters (it'll take a few seconds), scroll down to the body part (let's say HEAD), select HEAD, wait a second until that highlights, then drop below that to the title of your morph target, select the blob to the left of the new MT name, wait till it highlights, then hit "delete." Your scroll bar should do a slow walk upwards after you hit delete, then the MT will disappear from the list under HEAD. If you get any message panel asking if you're sure you want to delete the selected part, hit CANCEL, because you'll delete the whole figure instead of just the MT. This can happen if you select the MT in the wrong way, for example, without first selecting the body part. Once the MT has been deleted, you can then redo the MT creation process, as above. What I generally do however before creating a new MT, in order to have the zillion head morph targets settings as they were before zeroing them out, is I first save the figure to my library, with all the various MT settings as they were before the creation of the new MT. Another useful practice if you create a lot of MTs is to have in your figure Library a "morph" version of your basic figure, with all the morphs for all body parts & all the settings still intact. It's a large figure file, but after you're happy with the look of a morphed character, you can then delete ALL the morph targets in a finished figure except for the main morphs for each body part. Let's say you've got a character you're finishing named Susan. You'd wind up with something like "Susan Hip," "Susan Abdomen," "Susan Head," etc. instead of a zillion intermediary MTs which eat up a ton of file room. A Vicky based character with a lot of MTs can wind up being 15 to 20 mb, while the stripped-down version is less than half of that, especially if the work-in-progress version had a lot of head morphs. Like I said, it's a good idea to save a full-morph version with all the setting still in place in your Library & use that one to further develop your character. Then when you settle on a new MT, you can export it from your WIP version then import the MT into your more modestly sized finished version(s).

Bloodsong has a nice tutorial on Joint Parameters for eyes, if either of your figure's eyes keeps popping out of place. Here's the link: http://www.3dmenagerie.com/goodies/tut/eyes.htm

One more thing: if you use Zygote's Vicky as a basis for any of your characters, Jaager (the Morph-meister) has some really great eyeball morphs for adjusting eye positions on all three axes. His Vicky morph section at Morph World was recently ended, but based on a thread in this forum a couple, he may have all his old morphs available in another place. I hope he notices this thread because he really has the last & best words on morph target creation.

Ghaaaaaaaaa...... thank you so much for all the help, even though i still couldn't get it to work. I don't know why it won't work the way i want. It's not only that the eyes pop out but also her lower lip changes in a weird way, even though most of the face seems to morph like it's supposed to. I guess i'll have to include the .cr2 when the character is finally ready. it shouldn't become too big in file size as i'm not going to include many morph targets. Thanks again, I'll check out the tutorial now and also hope to catch Jaager online sometime.

Sounds a lot like you have your morph(s) compounding one another in some way. The reason Jaager gives for using Ray Dream Studio for his morph creation is that it's very precise in the way polygons are selected & moved. If you do morph creation within Poser from scratch, using the Grouping Tool, it's easy to get bizarre & unexpected results because if you're not careful, you can accidentally select an unnoticed polygon & group it with the ones you really wanted to select. I don't know if that's the method you used for your morph, but I know it has happened to me in the past & the results were similar to what you describe. Since then, I've acquired RDS & once I master the program, such problems will hopefully be reduced or eliminated.

The morph I created works like a dream when I copy it (using Morph Manager) from one .cr2 to another, so I think it should be okay... I wish I could figure out why I can't export it so that it'd work right :/

If you're able to successfully export the morph & then when loaded onto another character it doesn't behave as it did when it was with the original character, then either you somehow picked up unwanted morph targets during export or the new character you're trying to use it with has morph targets already in place that are set above zero & may be screwing up the behavior. But I think you implied you're aware of zeroing out parameter dials when necessary, so. . .???

When I copy the morph target from one .cr2 to another with Morph Manager, it works exactly like it is supposed to and I'm very pleased with the result. But I can't export the morph target so that I would only have the morph target .obj which I could then load to other characters. If I try to export and choose the head (it's a face morph), it exports it but when I load it to another characther, it somehow screws up the face... I can only move the morph target around by copying it from one .cr2 to another .cr2

Upon rereading your original question in which you state that "the value of the morph target is now 0," that tells me you have cannot have zeroed out the other morph dials PRIOR to exporting the .obj, because it should work at full intensity when set to a value of 1 with the other character where you have imported it. Keep in mind that when you select "HEAD" & create the morph target, the new MT now possesses all the morphing qualities that were current for HEAD when you made the MT. When the new MT appears at the top of the dial heap, it has a value of 0. To see the effect & check the new MT, you have to set all other morph dials to 0 & set the new MT to 1. The new head MT at time of export should be set to a value of 1, all other head morphing dials should be at 0. When you then import the MT to another character's head, if it was exported properly, the look you hope to achieve will be obtained if and only if the new MT for the head is set to 1 & all other dials are set to 0. If this is what you are doing, the process is very simple & will work exactly right. I use Poser's MT export feature almost every day & it works flawlessly using the method above so obviously you must be doing something differently.

I did set the other morph dials to zero when I realised my first mistake. And every time I've tried to export the morph target it has been the only dial with a value other than 0, all the other dials have been set to 0. You say you "use Poser's MT export feature almost every day"... Is there something that's specifically for exporting morph targets because I have been simply trying to export the head (in which I have applied the MT) as .obj? Is that where I've gone wrong? The morph itself has to be OK because otherwise it wouldn't work the way I want on the other .cr2 (to which I copied it in MM4), would it?

When you export you're literally exporting a target geometry that differs from the default one & is a snapshot of the total history of that body part up until the time you created the morph, all the magnet work, shifted polygon groups, use of other MTs, dial twisting, whatever you may have done to change the geometry of the body part except use of posing parameters. Try this: create a temporary test character using a default head fresh out of the box, something off a content disk, anything you know is in a perfect, reliable state. Apply the new MT. If it works, it may mean that the other character you tried to apply it to has something in the head part that doesn't belong there. You may have picked up a bad MT when downloading from the net or the character's head got corrupted somehow. Apart from that, I'm clean out of ideas. Hopefully, someone else can think of some other cause.