Howdy, I'm wondering if there is anyone that can offer advice or knows of any tutorials on creating morphs for poser figures using high-end modeling packages.  I have some training with Maya, so info pertaining to that would be right up my alley.

I've attempted to make morphs before, but became very frustrated very quickly.

Here are a couple of areas that I got hung up on:

1.  Morphs have to be loaded into poser body part by body part.  This makes it very clunky to work on a morph that crosses body parts.  For example: Vicki3's breasts are on the collar and the chest, so making a morph for them requires coordinating vertices on two separate objects which is a major pain.  Is there anyway to make this easier?

2.  I was taught that polygons and organics don't mix.  To make something organic I would use nurbs or sub-Ds, but since poser is so picky about it's geometry this isn't really an option, nor is adding or removing geometry in any way.  So I'm wondering, how do people get an organic result using nothing but polygonal tools?  Is it just meticulous vertex tweaking?

I see morphs like The Girl Next Door and Natural Gravity Morphs and it makes me scratch my head wondering how those vendors got such great results morphing poser figures, and I know they didn't use poser magnets.

I've seen some tuts that deal with poser magnets and some on how to make morphs in a modeling program that only affect one body part, but I want to do things that are more complex and so far the two points mentioned above have left me perplexed.  Thanks for taking a look at this message and if anyone has any info on this subject it would be greatly appreciated.

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1-I can't tell you how to do this with Maya but it is possible with Cinema 4d so I would guess other programmes have their work around. To do it in cinema you use a plug-in called riptide, this lets you open the obj file of a figure as one complete model, you can then do the morphs and when you export it splits it back up into the figures groups. Then you can use a program called add-morph which is part of the "tool collection" (available in the store here), what you do with this is load up the figure cr2 and then tell it where all your obj files (you just created with riptide) are and it will automatically create your body morphs in the selected cr2, the time saved with these two applications is phenomenal.

2-a few years ago I would agree with you about not using polygons for anything organic but now I much prefer working with polygons, again working with Cinema to create something organic and would start with a low polygon model and add it to a hypurnurbs (a type of interactive smoothing) and then work from that. Once you have the basic shape made you can then use magnets and brushes to add detail. The magnets and brushes can also be used to create morphs for poser models, for example if you had some clothing that you wanted to add a few creases too you could select the brush tool, set it up as a small bush with low power and set it to affect normals and then stroking the model would cause a clothing type crease. I hope this helps, Steve

Ok, as far as #1 goes I figure that I can put the overlapping body part vertices into sets, which would make editing the mesh seams much easier, (it just slipped my mind for some reason).  But I still wonder if anyone has tips on organic modeling using strictly polygons.

X-posted.

Thanks for the reply Steve.  Unfortunately I don't think your reply to #2 will help me.  I don't think maya has magnets or brushes, (it may have the same deformers with a different name, I'm not sure, I've never touched C4D).  I know that there are ways to make organics from polygons, but making morphs specifically for existing poser figures means you aren't going to have the luxury of converting to/from nurbs or subDs, or even adding/subtracting geometry, so my question was geared more toward working within these limits.

The safe way is to import the entire V3 object(blMilWom_v3.obj) into UVmapper and export its UVs. Then import this into your app. Once it is modified, return it to subD1 and save(new name). Import to UVmapper/import UVs and save,,,drop it back in the DAZ folder . Then point a V3 cr2(hack) to it(both times). If you like this and it poses and bends as you wish,, there is a script to produce a FBM for you (MorphfromOBJ.py) by svdl. Saves a ton of time.

Thanks Steve, I do use CINEMA 4D and this helped a lot! I'll give it a try using the Tool Collection.
One more quick question. After creating the morphs in C4D and using the tool collection to create the morphs, do I have to use the RTE encoder to sell a character product with those morphs? If so, can you give me the basic steps please?

Thanks Richardson, I'll give that a shot and see how that works, I never would have thought of using the UVs like that.

Depends on the figure Damsel, if its ok to distribute the cr2 then no you wouldn't need to encode the cr2....Dimension3d also does an app called Binary Morph Editor which will create your injection files BUT you should only use this for custom morphs you created yourself, if you figure has any morphs created in poser (from 3rd party morphs) you couldn't use this to distribute......Steve