I been contemplating on getting Poser 7 sometime in next couple of months, and was wondering on this: 

Would the Poser 7 morph brush help me achive in doing like different morphs for characters (Sydney for example), as would ZBrush (considering that it is the standard for doing character morphs for 3d figures, quote me if I'm wrong)?  Has anyone tried Poser 7's morph brush?  I have read about P7's new features in addition to TalkDesigner, HDRI, Universal Pose, etc.

I have Poser 6 and they don't have the features as described above, plus I have installed a new hard drive and re-installed my OS after a bad one done creamed my C drive down {real bummer}, and I'm trying to slow down 'til the dust settles in.  Thank goodness for additional hard drives!

==I apologize in advance if this question was posted before==

Any questions or comments are well deserved.

Thanks,

JB

I don't have Zbrush. I do have Poser7, and do my displacement and morph stuff in Silo.
I find that (Poser gurus, correct me if I'm wrong) the morph brush in Poser7 is more suitable for small tweaks in poking, bulgin, and etc in clothing, and rough morphing of characters than a dedicated complete morph tool that would replace Zbrush (or Silo or Hexagon or Mudbox, or any other software that can do displacements and such).
Maybe I haven't dwelled enough with the Poser7 tool, but I find working faster for character morphs outside Poser.
However,
in the case of conforming clothing, which in some poses do strange things, it is a pain to export the mesh of the body parts and the clothes and somewhere else do a morph, and export the clothing mesh and then apply that as a morph target. In this regard, the morph tool in Poser7 in a gift from heaven.

P7's morph brush does not span across actors; you can get around this by a lot of exporting and importing and removing groups in UVmapper and stuff.  You'd have to do the same kind of stuff to get figures in and out of Zbrush as well.  However what you get with Zbrush (at twice the cost of Poser, should be noted) is a vastly powerful sculpting and texturing tool.  P7 morph brush is good for spot smoothing, but is very frustrating when trying to do fine, precise morphing.  At least the undo feature combos well with it.

"Would the Poser 7 morph brush help me achive in doing like different morphs for characters (Sydney for example)..."

Yes. (See pic)

In fact the P7 morphbrush is a lot more powerfull than ZBrush because of it's ability to sculpt "live" Poser meshes, so broken or deformed joints and tedious postwork to correct them are a thing of the past.

But you stll have to do it one group at a time so it is best for small fixes rather than full morph jobs. It might work well for heads but head and neck or head neck and chest would be very difficult. P7 worked like garbage on my computer so I never got to play with it though.

Nice job there, Joe Public.  Very convincing, and the character you made from P4NM is good  -- not a  "Dork" in sight  --

I do appreciate all comments given.  Granted I have some of the 3d modelers -- be it Hexagon, and Silo (still waiting for them to go solid) and are interested in doing displacements and such.

I hope to get ZBrush soon, if funding permits it.  But, will definitely be looking forward to upgrading to P7.
 
Now, if my new HD on my PC just don't die on me... :unsure:

Thanks, any comments are still welcomed,

JB

@ghostofmacbeth :

There are several ways to do full body morphs with the P7 Morphbrush.
The easiest for Unimesh figures is to import the object file from the geometry folder.
Once your finished, simply turn that morphed object into a new figure in the setup room.

@**jlovesart2:

Thank you!**

Wow, JoePublic, you made Duke look rather attractive. Nice job!!!!

But then you can't use other morphs? It is only good for that figure. Correct or not? I have never used the setup room really and I am imagining many ofther people haven't either so I am just not sure.

I find the P7 morph brush agonizingly slow to work with and rather cumbersom compared to using a dedicated modeler. and I have a fast dual core computer. so factor that in. if the morph brush is the only thing you have then yeah its worth it if you have a lot of patiance, but frankly in comparison, modelers such as have been listed and ZBrush are able to work extremely fast and clean.

**@ghostofmacbeth:
**Of course you can use other morphs.
You just have to use the original cr2 that matches the object.

If you used the M3 object, you need to point the setup room to the the M3 cr2. If you used V3RR, you point it to the V3RR cr2, and so on.
Turning a morphbrushed morphed object back into a fully working figure is a matter of 5 to 10 seconds, not more.

Just make sure you don't move the object while morphing, so that the joint centers will still be match.

If you want to extract your new morph and turn it into a distributeable injection morph that you can sell or give away, a few more steps are necessary, but that is true for any custom morph.

Quote - In fact the P7 morphbrush is a lot more powerfull than ZBrush because of it's ability to sculpt "live" Poser meshes, so broken or deformed joints and tedious postwork to correct them are a thing of the past.

That's a handy feature, sure, but it's a bit inaccurate to say that the P7 morph brush is "more powerful" - it's got three modes that are hard-coded (push, pull, smooth) whereas Zbrush has user-configurable alpha masks to lay over brushes, masking, many types of strokes, and heaps of other stuff.  Even simply morphing one actor at a time it's still a lot more controllable and screen speed while morphing is tremendously faster.

I have Z-Brush 2 and 3, but I never ever missed a single of their features since I really started to use the morphbrush to it's full potential.

There is:
push/screen
push/surface
pull/screen
pull/surface
smooth/screen
smooth/surface

There are several brush sizes with the smallest making it even possible to move a single vertice.
And an unlimited amount of brush strenghts avalable just by spinning a dial.

What else could I need to morph a Poser figure ?
Yes, morphing across groups would be nice, but for now I don't complain about the workarounds.

Sure, when you do "free" sculpting and start with a gazillion polygon hi-rez sphere, all those other super special ZBrush morphing tools might become handy, but the original poster was asking about character morphs for Poser meshes.

And for that I feel that the P7 morphbrush is more than complete because the maximum polygon size of a typical Poser mesh is quite limited anyway, so even if P7 had all those additional sculpting brushes, you wouldn't be able to properly use them anyway.

I also feel that the ability to work with a fully textured figure or object directly in Poser in "real time" is much easier and inspiring for me, especially for face morphs.
I don't have to guess how the result will look in Poser, because I can actually see it while I'm sculpting.

ZBrush is especially useless to create new or to improve default expression morphs for Poser meshes.
With the morphbrush, this is no problem anymore.
I dial the expression with the default morphs to get a starting point and then modify it with the morphbrush untill it looks like I want and then just safe it as a new morph.

With the morphbrush, I can go backward and forward, play with ideas, do minor changes, undo them, look at the object under actual Poser lights, spawn different morphs, recombine them, all a lot easier and elegant and more efficient than the constant exporting and testing needed with an outside app like ZBrush.

And it's ability to re-sculpt joints lets me finally get that kind of realism I always wanted when looking at "professional" weightmapped charcters, but never was able to achive due to Posers "primitive" joint system.
Now it's actually the other way round:
I can make joints look any way I want and now weightmapping is the "primitive"  rigging system in my opinion.

So while ZBrush is a fantastic sculpting tool, to really improve Poser meshes, it's way to limited for my taste.

Joe, it was just my opinion and I wasn't trying to bash or embarass anyone or other programs.
They asked about ZBrush and I thought I would try to provide another thought to the thread...that's all.

Regards

I have used ZB2 extensively for morphingand love it.  It's quite a big learning curve, but incredibly powerful.  You can do morphs across actors by being a little selective in the tools you use in the edge areas.  I've just upgraded to ZB3, and there is a bug in the obj exporter that makes it completely useless for doing morphs (on V4 anyway).  So save your money for the moment.....

Face_off,
Have you tried scaling up with objaction scaler before opening in ZB3, then scaling down after exporting from ZB3?
I know it's a couple of added steps, but it does seem to fix the problem. Of course if you use ZB2, the extra steps aren't necessary.  :-) 

Yep that scaling thing works for me as well (if you were having the problem of morphs moving in  y-axis) Wish theyd fix this in zb3.1

About morph brush, its a cool little tool for when you just want to do quick edits on your mesh. Works esp well for fixing joints and poke through. I wouldn't use it for any serious morphing though, it's really too slow for that. And one very nice feature of zb is the nudge brush that lets you move your polys into better position without changing the surface itself. Works very well for organising your mesh while creating a morph. The masking features also help a lot.

And of course zb has lots of other tools besides sculpting so you can also create original content in it like clothes and textures or original characters.

Well I guess I'll have to try the scaling trick then!