When I save my character Poses, I am asked if I want to save my morph channels. Where are these morph channels kept? Are they included in the Pose file or are they kept elsewhere? It may be that this happens when I save the character in my figures directory also. I am unsure. Can anyone drop some knowledge on me? Thank you, Brandon

The morph channels include any changes you've made to the character face and body and are stored in the pose file itself (pz2). This is not always something you want unless the poses are specific to a character or include facial expressions you want stored. Normall one would save the pose without morph channels because you don't always want the same body or head changes on all the characters you might use that pose on. A friend of mine gets most frustrated with some of the poses he's downloaded from the net, after spending hours working on a character only to have it destroyed by applying a pose that has had morph channels included in it. However, for character creation it's far easier to save the dial positions by using the "save morph channels" option because the pose file is much smaller than a character file. Nearly all of my characters are saved that way, so I can use a stock figure and just apply the character pose and hey presto, all the morph dials are included. This only works with figure files that have the relevant morphs applied though. It all depends a) on what you intend to do with the saved pose. b) whether you want to save all the extra morph dial positions you've added and c) whether you want to apply those dial positions to other models. All the "save morph channels" does is to save the dial positions at their location. So for instance if you created a character by changing the body dials and a dozen other things, altered the face and expression and want to save that, then yes, save the morph channels into the pose file. Otherwise, as a rule of thumb, don't. :) I think that made sense.

That was the most well explained and educated response I have ever seen on a forum message board. Thank you very much! You answered all of my questions not to mention the questions I should have asked. Thank you. BTW the purpose for this is that I want to eventually post my character in the marketplace. I was uncertain what files were going to be necessary. Brandon

Questor is correct , but there are a couple of extra points. A Pose file applies all morph dials, even the ones that are zero. If you make an "all zero" pose ( X,Y,Z rot = 0) on a figure that has all of your morphs and set all the morph dials to zero, and save this pose with morphs channels, then, when you apply this pose to a character generated using the same morphs - the character is erased because all of the dials will be reset to zero. If a morph is not in the CR2 of the figure used to make the pose file, this morph will be unaffected by the pose even if the pose file is saved with morph channels. The reason that this is important is that V2 has several morphs that fix joints (knees and elbows being the most). It is useful if a pose is saved using these morphs where appropriate. This also means that poses where they should be zero, need to be saved with morph channels and the morphs set to zero. You do not want these fixes applied where they are not appropriate. Having them reset to zero automatically is handy. They way to do this is to make a V2 CR2 with only the fix morphs (delete all the others) and set up your poses with this figure and always save with morh channels on. Questor - I found two more JCJ - slave the left eye X&Y rot to the same channels on right eye. I am going to try "point at" with only the right. The left should track in parallel instead of getting crossed. Even manual, it is easier when both eyes respond by adjusting only the right.

Jaager: Interesting. :) (noted) I'll add that when I do the other editing at the end of this week. I'm dying to try out that information you sent through. :)

OK, this is pushing my threshold- but still thank you. So, if I was to market My Vicky 1.0 character, I should save the character with the morph channels, and then package it up from the pz2, and the cr2 and all the other associated poses, faces, textures, etc...?

Ahh, that's a whole different ball game. Normally what you'd do here is create the character, then once all the morph channels are finalised (as in she's as good as you want it) then convert this to a single morph (spawn morph target I think it is), then strip out all the other morphs that no longer have any bearing on this character- such as the African American, Asian etc morphs. Then package that together with any poses you've created, textures, faces and anything else that is original to the character (making sure you have relevant permission for any props added and especially if you have used morphs downloaded from the net) and then you can market the character. That's very simplistic and there are people here who do market their characters, I'll let them answer this one properly. It's not something I'll ever do so I haven't bothered to look into the finer points of this. :)

Until V2 the combination morph method was the preferred method. With V2 , there are now two classes of Vicki owners: one with only the V1 morphs and a second with the additional V2 morphs. If you are going to sell or give away a Vicki character you must do it in such a way only those who have purchased V2 can in any way profit from the use of those additional morphs. Set up any non V1/V2 morphs as a single combination morph for each group. Use this plus any V1/V2 morphs to generate your character. Save this as a PZ2 file. Open your CR2 with your combination morphs and delete all the morphs but your combination morphs. You can take out a whole lot more, but you must pay attention to the { } pairs to do it. The morphs must be transfered by a customer to get to a CR2 with the V1/V2 morphs anyway. To get the morphs transfered using MM4/MaCon, all you need are the two geometry calls, the Body & Hip channels, plus any channels involved with your morphs. Everything else can go. Note: if you have V2 morphs, then you have V1 morphs, so there is no reason to treat them any differently. There are at least half a dozen threads here about this, and one in Copyright.

Do I have to strip out the original vicky 1.0 morphs when distributing my character? Sorry, I am digesting a lot here.

You do not HAVE to, no. But if someone has V2, then they already have the V1 morphs. The morphs increase the file size, cost bandwidth and take unneessary time for those of us without broadband to download. Plus the additional storage space on your website, much less that of the users. It just seems logical to make things as lean as possible.