pjz99...you are too good! - It was .25 :).

oddboots - the morph will be available for free once I figure out how to save it as a single morph (morph target?). I like the idea of having just one dial for the character, much like the majority of merchant characters.

Any tips would be appreciated. My efforts thus far have been fruitless.

Oh, and gotta finish up the body morph for the Fae varient too!

That's really generous of you - thanks!!! :)

I'm afraid I don't have the first idea of how you would go about making it a single morph, though...

You can simply save a pose file and include morph channels, and the resulting pose file will contain all the morph dial changes you have set.  It'll be about 650k though and will contain a lot of channels that are zeroed, which is probably not that desirable, although it works.  Since you are heavily experienced with Apollo, I expect that is probably the way you are used to distributing character morphs for him?

This won't get the scale changes though, I suspect you will end up having to just write that by hand.  Actor (bodypart) scale information isn't written out with pose file information as far as I can see.  I bet there is some documentation out there that details the exact syntax you'd need, if it's possible to do (reasonably sure).  Kuroyome's site is probably a good place to look for info on something like this.

Many of the merchant character morphs are built with some tool like INJection Pose Builder (DAZ) or the tool I used, Binary Morph Editor (for sale here at Rendo).  I recommend Binary Morph Editor here, simply because I got it to work, and the entire manual is available via PDF before you buy it, downloadable from the product page.

Also to add to pjz99's suggestions.  Save the face as a seperate face and body as separate files so folks can use what they want of the set.  I did that when I created Bruno for Vittorio 4.  He's got 2 MOR files in the pack.  One seperate file for the face and the full body morph.  In all honesty I couldn't figure out how to save the face morph info with the body info so I just kept it separate!! LOL 

do u have a preset lighting scheme for ur renders? can i have it pleaze

I'll look into those morph dial builders. Thanks pjz99.

@ Melisand - I don't use any one light set in particular. It's simply trial and error, with thankfully some luck accidents along the way.

My two most recent images, which are very similar in a number of ways, use a custom HDRI with AO (hence the muddy shadows) and a specular light for eyes etc. That's it! Just two lights! (Well, not REAL HDRI, but the Poser 7 approximation).

If you have Poser 7 I'd suggest using the included HDRI sets. They're realy quite good, particularly 'Pond'.

I also do ALLOT of colour and contrast correction in Photoshop. The raw renders can be horribly washed out.

The morph turned out very, very nice :)  She no longer looks like she has Down's Syndrome.

I would still like it if there were such a character though.

Very unique ClawShrimp, Love it!

Just uploaded a portrait of my Fae variant, in a similar vain to my last image:[

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1453985](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1453985)

The Fae will be know as Rhyme, the other as Reason. Thanks go to BtB for the 'Rhyme' suggestion.

Still trying to figure out a nice way of presenting these in a full body image. Will up when something 'works'.

Thanks!

ooh nice work :)

I'm so tired of skinny women (er ..sorry all you skinny gals out there)  As a student of classical art I tend to prefer a more rounded figure

So feel free to ask me to make a fit set for her grins

Lyrra

Hi Clawshrimp, to be honest I don't have time just at this momment to read this thread carefully but I wanted to pipe in anyhow! Looks terrific. Really this is a very lovely character and a great work. Connie has very good comments. The problem with Daz fat heavy morphs is at the wrists and especially the ankles. My only worry here is the gap at the groin but it is no big deal and also a Poser jointing issue. The face is remarkable, I like it. Thanks for showing.

Lyrra, I'd absolutely LOVE for you to make a fit for her!!! But first, I have to figure out how to save this character for easy distribution.

I've tried a number of different avenues, but nothing I do seems to keep everything intact. Any suggestions?

While I say the version I've pictured in this thread is final, I'd also like to drop it into ZBrush and fix a couple of minor issues; and possibly use the P7 morph brush to smooth out a couple of trouble spots.

What I'd like to be able to do is save this character so it can be applied from a pose file, with it's own single character dial (as I've seen countless times in vendor characters). Anyone know how I can do this? If need be I'm more than happy to buy a 3rd party app.

You're probably running into the same pain that I have - it's easy enough to customize a V4 character with some scaling and whatnot, but making it portable is quite difficult, and I have huge problems trying to move morph targets back and forth.  Maybe you'll have better luck than I have, I don't have a lot of motivation to figure out how to do it the "right way".

I am pretty sure that having it all go on one character dial is going to require some hand editing of the pose file.  The general category of tech you want to look into is "Extended Remote Control" or ERC.  Kuroyume again is probably a good source of info on this, let me look up his site addresss...

http://www.kuroyumes-developmentzone.com/index.html

or maybe it's not... hmm google google

http://www.nerd3d.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=8 a meaty, meaty tutorial on JCM that relates to ERC (or EMC in that doc)

http://www.rbtwhiz.com/rbtwhiz_ERC.html Rob Whisenant's version

another version
https://artzone.daz3d.com/wiki/doku.php/pub/technotes/content/erc

Thank you for this pjz99. In a way I'm glad I'm not alone with this problem. Makes me feel less stupid!

I really thought it would be as simple as making whatever changes to the figure I saw fit, exporting the resulting 'character' as an OBJ, then re-importing as a Morph Target to the default V4...How silly of me :).

Looks like I've got a fair bit of reading to do over the weekend!

Yeah, the problem is that some things are included in the OBJ export (raw point deltas) and some things are not (scale changes, apparently).  It's very troublesome when developing a V4 character because there's no easy way to tell whether a given dial is purely a morph (and can thus be exported to OBJ with no trouble) or if it contains some scale change or something that will manifest some problems when joints are bent.

At least it's confirmed that you CAN put scaling into a slider mixed with other things:
**http://www.rbtwhiz.com/rbtwhiz_ERC.html
EMC evolves into ERC.***Beginning a month or so later, having the information fairly fresh in my mind, I couldn't "leave well enough, alone". The newness and shock of it began to wear thin and it occurred to me that what we discovered could quite possibly affect more than just morphs. So, I began testing; any and every channel I could find. I was ecstatic with what I found. Nulls (valueParm), morphs (targetGeom), rotation, translation, scaling, deformers, lights, cameras... they all worked! *
It occurs to me that this is very likely how V4's "MorphForms" work under the hood. 

Does every merchant/vendor go through the same crap?

If so, they deserve every penny they get!

Oh hell.  Suddenly a lot of things make sense, why I've had such problems with import/export(and why you're having similar problems).  Export -> Wavefront OBJ -> "As Morph Target (no world translations)" ...  so of course, it's doing exactly what I tell it to.  I have been thinking about this for some time.  I think the way around this is to back out any scale/rotation/translation changes before export (so the figure is properly, completely zeroed), and then move them back in when done.  I suspect one would just want to avoid scaling etc. like the plague if one wants to do any export/import with external apps.

A lot of merchants, when you actually apply their character INJ pose - they just spin the dials in the great majority of cases that I've seen.  This is why almost all V4 characters look pretty much the same.

I'm at work right now and left my laptop rendering on my desk at home, so I can't test this right now.

But if this works...I owe you a bottle of wine!

Would have been nice of DAZ to publish which dials are ERC, so they can be avoided when necessary.

Then what would we do with all this spare time?

well technically if you use any DAZ morphs when creating a morph the resulting morph cannot legally be distributed without encoding it against the original file

What you want to do is save the figure in your library as a cr2 (you must have "exterior morph targets' and compression turned off in Poser)

Then use MATPoseEdit and open the cr2.  If you set the options correctly, you can then save a Pose, without material information, but with Morph and Scaling channels. And MPE is free. The program page has tutorials on using it including to make MOR (dial and trans setting) poses

  http://koti.mbnet.fi/%7Eilaripih/MPEHome/ 

with v4, unless you have your own morph obj, INJ files are unneccasary

And if you guys had any idea how much work goes on 'behind the scenes' to make clothing look and move correctly .....  sighs  Frankly hardcoding pose files is easy peasy in comparison.

Lyrra

"Technically" or not, all the V4 characters I own were distributed this way, with just the DAZ built-in dials spun to create the body shape.  The idea isn't to distribute the deltas themselves, just the dial settings.

That is good info, that MAT Pose Edit will save scale channel data, I was about to ask about that in the Poser Tech forum.  I'm reading in Rob Whisenant's documents that there is some risk that MPE will have trouble with very large files?  V4 CR2 files are typically 50MB or so.

http://www.rbtwhiz.com/rbtwhiz_rScript.html

A really interesting thread here, though the character ClawShimp is making looks terribly wonderfull!!

It's exactly what i'm looking for, a way to save morphs to be released. I had no luck with INJection Pose Builder. I mean, i succeeded to have INJ/REM files, but no way to know which settings are for... :(
I think IPB has been made in prior for 3rd unimesh character. Cause V4 loads with all her dials, the settings MUST be different then.

Yeah I had a similar difficulty with DAZ IPB.  I went with Binary Morph Editor available here at Rendo because I could get it to work for the freebies I offer, but I am pretty sure it ignores scaling, which doesn't help too much here (might be good for you though Vince).  The complete manual is available via PDF before you buy.

I'm in information overload right now!!!

Lyrra, that's some really great advice. Even more reading for this weekend!

Once I finally get this thing sorted out and the morph out there for all to enjoy, it'll be back to Apollo for me! :)

I know exactly how you feel :/

LOL

I had a run at what you suggested pjz99:

• Zeroed ALL Scale / Rotation / Transformation dials
  * Export > Wavefront OBJ > As Morph Target (no world translations)
• Load Morph Target to default V4

...Poser 6 hangs, Poser 7 closes down completley.

Am I missing something? It's probably me :).

I'll give Lyrra's suggestion a try tonight.

If you are working with V4.1, you probably have some bugged morph data on the head that can make Poser crash or otherwise act fruity in a variety of ways:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2996094&ebot_calc_page#message_2996094

Can you give more detail on what steps you're taking? 

Well, firstly it was V4. I haven't bothered installing 4.1.

The steps I took were simply what I stated. From your reaction it sounds like I may have skipped a step of ten :).

Great job! Kinda looks like my boss

Should I take that as a compliment equan? :)

I ask because my boss is a 67 year old Nun!

My job is somewhat...complicated :P.

As I understand it - and be aware my understanding may be quite poor :) - one way to get this to work is:

• Save a pose file that includes morph channels - you'd think body transformations would get scale changes too, but it doesn't.  This will also leave all the zeroed channels in the poze file, which you may not care about.  I wouldn't, particularly, but if you want to you can trim them out with some editor, possibly MAT Pose Edit as suggested.  Since you're going to zip the file anyway it will compress down quite small.
• Write a second pose file by hand that is modeled after the attached example, with a block for each bodypart that requires scaling and a sub-block for each dial that needs to be set.  It took me a few minutes to figure out the syntax but this works.

When you distribute, just have the user load both pose files as desired.  If you are seriously dead set on learning ERC to do this, more power to you, you can bundle all this together into one pose file I suppose and include the ERC channel configuration stuff (if it was me I'd not bother).

*note the attached "jpg" is the pose file, just rename it and remove the .jpg and place it wherever you like in runtimelibrariespose

Thank you again! I think you know this already, but you rock pjz99! :)

I'm going to try what you've advised, and also give Lyrra's approach a try too.

I've already spent far more time on this than I wanted to, but I'll give this one last shot.

Ultimately, while I'd like to share this character, it's hardly worth my sanity :).

If my next effort goes pear-shaped, I might just have to relegate this permenantly to the 'too hard' basket.

I'm a glorified dial spinner after all. Allot of this is way above my head...and I was content in my ignorance until now!

Well, it's good to understand how it all works even if you don't have aspirations to be a content vendor (I don't).  Good luck, I hope this works out for you.

At the very least I have a new found respect for the vendors that do it the right way (i.e. not just dial spinning...like me :P).

Just between you, me and the fence post, most vendors only spin dials too, at least from the selection of character morphs I've bought.  Blackhearted/Rio's GND2 and Aery_Soul's characters are the notable exceptions I can think of.

Too bad either of them or Sarsa doesn't stop in here to lend a hand and some advice on how best to export and load and test this wonderous morph of your Claw!!  Not discrediting any others advice but if it's still not working out then there must be a step in there missing or something that needs looking at.  Maybe PM them??

To clarify for your pjz99 (sorry it took so long, I missed that part of your comment). The reason I did the whole OBJ export/import is simply to see if it would work.
Ideally I would like to fix a few things (in one of the plethora of 3D apps I own) before importing back into Poser. I didn’t want to waste time making those changes until I was completely sure I could actually import it and load it as a morph target.

Of course, you know the result (or lack thereof).

Going into other apps:  I understand now why Richardson suggests exporting to OBJ, and stripping out grouping with UVMapper.  This will still have problems when using ERC dials that change scale of bodyparts though.  

I've actually learned a lot of useful stuff trying to help you out with this, and I'm sure you've picked up some tricks as well, so don't feel too bad.  Time to go figure out how to do displacement maps in Zbrush, and if you're interested I'll be writing that up in the Zbrush forum when I figure it out - given some of your characters' wrinkly look you may get some real use out of that.

I am absolutely interested!

There are only so many ways you can chop up Carodan's great Apollo displacement map :).

That was the main reason for my ZBrush 3 upgade.

I have some bad news.

I’m afraid to say that Rhyme and Reason (the aforementioned V4 morphs) are no more.

I had my third consecutive and most monumental system failure last night, and had to bid farewell to my aging HDD (and it's content).

Thankfully I back up all of my bought content to CD, and have all of my images and custom Apollo characters saved to my thumb-drive (love ADS!).

This has been a long time coming, so serves me right for not taking appropriate precautions.

It’s been a great learning experience though! Thanks again to everyone for their help.

I still have a bunch of test renders that I’ve saved, so I’ll hopefully have a tribute image to put up tomorrow.

Sorry to hear ClawShrimp .. It sucks when hard drives die.

That's terrible.  I was soo looking forward to her.  Hopefully you will have luck like mine and your next effort will far surpass this one = D

Hey Claw.  So very sorry to hear that.  Can you say SEAGATE??  5 year warrenty and so far fast as lightning and EASY to set up!! 

Good luck to you and best wishes! 

Richard ;-)~

Oh man, that really sucks!   I hope you recover from it soon!
When my hard drive crashed few years ago, I was feeling for a while like something died!
I lost several years worth of renderings :(, and that aws all before I put any in a gallery here.

I hope you didn't lose too much stuff!

[Kitty ponders a 'condolences for the loss of your hard drive' hallmark card]

Oh, poo  - just found this thread and was getting excited about her. :( . 

Sorry that this happened to you.  It seems it's always when you haven't backed up something you really wanted up that HD failures happen.  I also hope you didn't lose too much other stuff....

Maybe you'll decide to re-create her, and find it's easier this time, and even better! 

That's a shame, sorry that happened to you.  :/