I am not ready, nor do I have the patience to write a polished off tutorial on using magnets, so I am going to write a rough version here. Like I said, this is not polished off and there be lots of typos and stuff, but this is better than not doing it at all and I feel I owe all of you to share the knowledge I have on this subject. So sit back, and enjoy learning about one of the most powerful tools in poser. What is a magent..... a magnet has three parts 1)Magnet base - this is the origen and fulcrum for adjustments - this will make more sense later on in the tutorial 2)Magnet Zone - this is the sphere of magnet influence 3)Magnet - this is the actual tool that controls the distortion

What can you do with magnets? How about changing the size of the breasts of your character and the clothing at the very same time. Here is what two simple magnets can do to the p4 guy.

Why is this so great? I mean, yeah there are other tools for making deformations to your clothing that you can purchase, but poser magnets are still the only deformers that can be saved and used over and over again to automate your needs. For instance, if you make a set of magents that reshapes a breast and save each one and put them away safe. Later you may want to fit clothing to her, well all you have to do is apply your magents to the clothing and the changes will be made so the clothing fits her.

Here is a demonstration of what one magnet can do to hair. I always add one magent to my hair in the general position shown to add movement and blowing effects. After getting the zone and base where I want it, all I have to do is play with the magnet until the hair adjustments are made. This will add much more depth and realism to your renders.

thats all I have time to write tonight, I will write more tomorrow.

Don't lose sleep over this!!

thank you nakamuram, anyway on with the tut!

With poser magents you can do all sorts of creative changes to orginal goemetries. Here are fangs created with two very simple magnets.

Message edited on: 07/05/2005 10:58

This is exactly the kind of discussion I've been waiting for. Now...how about this? Trying to make long fingernails for Jessi. Use grouping tool to select just the very tip of the nail. Apply magnet. Set zone to group. Move magnet. Finger elongates with the nail. What gives?

I forgot to check the nudity box on this one. Anyway, here is the abomen rhinoplasty I did on the fly. This demonstrates how magnets can be layered or in other words many placed upon one another to do different tasks. Here is one magnet pulling out her abdomen in a jutting fashon. Another stretching that jutting portion upward into a nose ridge. Then two more magnets for each nostral.

Atelier: I have't had much experence with grouping particular items before pulling with magnets. It just hasn't come up much in my work. Although the the technique is valid. You are doing something wrong with the grouping. I never do grouping with poser at all, because I thinks its cumbersome, regrouping my fashon would require uvmapper and then working with only the .obj imported. I will get to that later.

What I am showing you is a progression from simple use of magnets to the complex....so please excuse me for adding this plug for my Market Place items V3-SP3, V3-A3, and V3-AD clothing conversion kits. These packages demonstrate the complex usage of magnets. Here we have many magnets working together as a team to the exact same deformation time after time with any geometry. I have set up three scripts to load all these magents automatically, but I also have made the package friendly to those who want learn from it. I am of course encouraging learning about magnets. I encourage learning about magents because one must in order to get smooth and accurate conversions. I will stand behind the this method and will say that I honestly feel this is the best and most professional conversions you can get with out being too labor intensive. These magnets are a good value even at he price advertised if you consider how much time it would take you to make a similar set for your own usage. You can find these products in Insomniaworks Store. Anyway, enough of the plug...on with the tutorial!

Okay lets go to the beginning and start learning. Here is something you can try to get started and begin getting familiar with magnets. I have loaded my figure, selected her ForeArm group and then selected object/Create Magnet. The magent loads and looks like this.

Now the first thing I have done was went to the parameter dials for the magnet and raised it so it stretches the geometry up for this demonstration.

note the space between the base (that yellow bar) and the magnet is very similar to the amount of pulling up on the geometry. Also note that the effects seem to be stopping the hand and upper arm, this is because these groups have not been choosen for deformation. Also note distortion is most in the center of the zone (that white outlined sphere) and decreases outward to the parameter of the zone where it eventually becomes zero effect.

Select the magnet itself and double click it to bring up the properties. There will be a selection called "add element to deform" - click this. You will see a hierarchy of body parts, of all figures in the scene. I am assuming that you are familiar with the usage of this tree. Select the body parts you want or need to add to the magnet's influence. For this demonstration I will only be choosing the hand and the upper arm groups.

now keeping the magnet way too strong by raising it up so high, I will select the zone and begin moving it, scaling it, sometimes rotating it. You have all the parameter adjustments at your disposal. Having the magnet in such an exagerated state will help you get the zone just where you want it. In this case I want to give my model larger forearms.

Okay, not that I was pretty sure about my zone of magnet influence, I began adjusting the magnet downard to get a natural body deformation. At this point I may go back and forth adjusting the position, size, etc of the sphere and back to the magent making farther adjustments until its just right.

At this point I can save this distortion as a morph by simply selecting the two groups being distorted in this case and then clicking object-spawn morph target from the popdown menu and naming each morph in each group. I then can dial up the morphs in the parameter dial up to one and delete the magents if I wish making a permenant morph in your figure. I will write more later, I have some business to take care of. Feel free to ask questions. marty

Lesson 2: Magnet Zone Falloff Graph

You may not need this for a while, its sort of rushing you ahead real fast, but since its handy I may as well introduce you to the Magnet Zone Falloff Graph.

This gives you control of the how the Zone acts. All you have to do to access this is select and double click the magnet zone. The zone properties window will pop up. Select Magnet Zone Falloff

You are presented with a Graph, a red curve, and two points that control that red curve.

For a demonstration of what happens I have posted an image where I selected and raised the right-most point (that little black short line).

Take note here how the arm distortion is mimicing the red curve on the graph. That is no accident. You are changing your degree of control and seeing it both on the graph and on the figure at the same time.

The Left-most control point on that graph is a control ner the center of the zone and the right-most is a control over the outer edge of the zone. You can change the nature of your zone by moving either of these up or down. Dropping the left-most control point will lower the magnets effect in the center of the zone. Raising the right-most control point will raise the effect on the outer edge of the zone.

You can easly add another control point by double clicking the red curve on the graph. Afterwards you can move it add more effects. By adding a series you could make a set of water like ripples across a flat surface or add realistic wrinkles to clothing.

You can remove control points by clicking before on the graph and dragging and a grey area will show up over the selected control points and then hitting your delete button.

You don't have to become familiar with this at this time, but remember its there, you will probably want to use this later.

Message edited on: 07/05/2005 13:46

Lesson 3: Magnet Base

Now to get familiar with the purpose of the base, I will mutilate this fine little scooter for my demonstration. I have already selected the handle bars and and front suspension group and then loaded on a magnet. Note the positon of the base right now. I am going to bend the handle bars and the headlight so it points strait up instead of how its suposed to be. I will move the base where I want the bed to occur. (warning things do not like to bend with morphs or magents, they tend to distort as you will see, but I am demonstrating the why the position of the base is important for such a task.)

Message edited on: 07/05/2005 14:25

The first thing I did was selected the base and scaled it all down to a workable size. note: when you shrink your base you also shrink the magnet's size along with it and the magnet's power along with it. You will be using using higher parameter settings on the magent than in its formal larger state. This hardly needs mentioning, but you should be happy with the magent and base size right now before you begin adjusting it. I then rotated the magent in the direction I wanted to bend the scooter's handle bars. I increased the size of the zone really large so to keep the bending distortions as low as possible. Then I adjusted the mag zone falloffs so they were high on the outside of the zone and then adjusted the zone where it worked best. Now most important and really what I am trying to teach with this lesson is this. Look at the location of the base and where the bending is occuring. I was careful that the magnet base was selected and highlighted for this image. Note the crosshairs in the middle of the magnet base,...this is the exact fulcrum of the bend.

Take note that most of the time, the magnets location and size and what not isn't important at all, but some times it is. It is important when rescaling a geometry because the size will changes will be relative to the base's location. In my conversion kits, I have bases right in the middle of limbs for instance because the rescaling and bending is taking place from the center of those bases.

Lesson 4: Surgically Planting those Zones

I have gone back to this image because the most difficult part of this was getting the zones the correct size and in the correct location.

Note how small the zones are, they are that way so they will not effect the teeth beside the teeth I wanted to add points to. Making the teeth point is easy, all you have to do is adjust your magent down on the y-trans. Then I went about scaling down the mag Zone very small, the zones are less than 1.0. You can just see the zones if you look closey at the two pointed teeth. It was a matter then of moving the zone around and readjusting the x scale, the y scale and the z scale individually so the zone took on just the right shape to effect that single tooth. I then adjusted the magent for a better setting where the point was exactly the ritght length. I went back and forth tweaking both the zone and mag a few more times until the tooth pointing was just right.

Note that I didn't choose the k9 teeth for this example, this is because they are behind the cheek and difficult to get to on this model. With more work, I may have been able to get the zone in the right place inside the mouth.

Sometimes using magnet zones are not surgical enough, these occurances may require a tempory regrouping of the .obj while you make the changes. Remember, magnet only works on the groups you tell it to.

Message edited on: 07/05/2005 15:10

Message edited on: 07/05/2005 15:12

Lesson 5: Saving Magnets Like I have said before, the largest advantage magnets have over other ways of deforming is magnets can be saved. I like to set up Prop folders for each of my magnet sets to keep things organized. By the way, you will be saving magnets to the Prop folders. When saving a magent, be sure to select the magnet itself - not the base or zone before saving. If you have a base or zone selected before saving, the three parts will not save right. Some will combine magnets together while saving. You can do this by clicking "Select Subset" from the "set name" window. Here you can select all the magents and bases and zones and add them then save them all together. I prefer not to do the above because this could get messy. Here is how I load many magnets at one time. I usually name my magnets 01, 02, 03, etc. I then make a script in WordPad or any text editor and save it as anyname.pz2. Here is an example of what the code looks like for loading multiple magnets. You would have to change folder and file names to suit your individual needs of course. The below script loads magnets 18, 19, 20, and 21. ---snip--- { version { number 4 } readScript ":Runtime:libraries:props:V3-AD_MagsLower:018.pp2" readScript ":Runtime:libraries:props:V3-AD_MagsLower:019.pp2" readScript ":Runtime:libraries:props:V3-AD_MagsLower:020.pp2" readScript ":Runtime:libraries:props:V3-AD_MagsLower:021.pp2" } ---snip---

I will be happy to continue talking if someone would show some interest :) marty

I'm still with you, Marty!! I've been playing around with the "Ultimate Breast" magnest to experiment.

Hey Marty! I'm interested, PLEASE continue. I'm getting all sorts of cool ideas, and the way you present magnets makes a lot of sense to me. Thanks, -The Starkdog

Yes, please keep going! I've been following from your first post, but no time for playing with magnets yet. Martin

Hi Marty--

Very helpful tutorial. You might want to mention the issue of multiple loading of a particular magnet (or magnets) when a magnetized figure is saved as a PZ3 then reloaded. I learned the painful lesson long ago that once you set up a figure with magnets you should save it to the figure library without going through a PZ3 reload.

But now I have, saved cleanly in the figure library, a set of cloth fitting versions of my main characters with the original shape and fitting magnets still attached. Consistent with the approach you recommend, I use these fitting mannequins to bring in new clothing for my main characters which have all their formative magnets converted to MTs (magnet-free figures with a single shape morph are MUCH smaller in size so they load and pose and animate much more quickly). Thanks for sharing your wisdom and experience.

Tguy

I need to stick my nose in this forum more often.. this would be about the first magnet tute I have read that hasnt had me tearing my hair out; can actually understand it. Excellent stuff!! :-)

Hi, I must have missed the email reminders that there were replys here.

Thank you for the reply guys, I appriciate that my words are going to good use. I have learned a lot about magnets over a period of three years. I have learned slow, so don't think you have to learn everything over night. Remember, using magnets is an artform in itself, and actually makes poser do a lot of tasks that you may have thought you needed a modeler software to do. As an artform, it takes practice and personal experiementation. As time goes on, you will load them and put them to use with ease making brush strokes. I know that some of you are just like me three years ago and know nothing of the uses of magents,...to those of you, I just want to make you see what magents are for and tell you that they will make you a poser "power" user when you use them to suplement your work and renders. They have so many uses, that I still don't know them all, I am trying to relay what I do know.

Tguyus, yes I have saved figures and saved the magnets intact but that was only because it was convenient at the time. I have never had any use for doing this, Its interesting that you have. You might want to explain what your usage is. Since I work soley on products, I usually convert all my magents to morphs.

I think conversion from magents to morphs may be a good topic for my next lesson. If anyone has any questions or topics for this tutorial, please speak up.

marty

Message edited on: 08/07/2005 20:28