Could anyone please tell me how i can join a half a face that i created to a mirrored copy of itself (im using one half to create a morph target ) so that the edges and vertices that are coincident only appear once ? thanx for the help .

What you do is: (this is for 2.5) 1. Bring the two halves as close as you can so they are in the right places. Right click on the move button to get a position dialog so you can enter exact values if need be. 2. Click on one half and slect Edit Mesh. 3. Click on the sub-object button so it is NOT depressed. The Attach button should appear. 4. Click on the attach button. It should stay depressed. Click ont he other face half. Now click on the Attach button again to deactivate it. Both face halves are now the same mesh. 5. Click on the edit mesh sub-object button to reactivate it then select vertices. 6. Go along the seam where the face joins and select each vertex pair. In the dialog below on the edit mesh there should be a weld vertices command. With the two vertices you want to weld selected click on the Selected button in the weld part of the dialog. If all goes well the two vertices will become one. You may have to move them a bit if they get shifted. Run through and do this for all the vertex pairs along the seams. Problems; Max may tell you there are no vertices within range. Just up the threshold number till they weld. Tricks: You can do the weld all at once. Just select all the vertex pairs at once then set the threshold to something small (dist between the two vertices) and click selected in the weld dialog. If all goes well the vertices will weld all at once with no cross overs. If it doesn't work (more than two vertices weld) you can reduce the threshold till it does work. After you weld the vertices the mesh is one mesh with no gaps. Hope that helps.

Thanx very much for the help ... i'll go through and try welding again ..the problem i had before is that after mirroring the vertices on the first half (edge vertices) and the vertices on the mirrored half were in exactly the same place so i couldnt actually see the 2 of them to weld .... i just tried again ... although there apears to be only one vertex selecting it and welding does drop the vertex count , i didnt notice that before. Once again thanx a lot for your help. Cheers.

sorry i forgot to change the header :(

But in the result the vertexes won't be in the right order to match the Poser model's head. The result would be like the result of using on the Poser 4 Business Man a head morph target intended for the Poser 4 Nude Man, but likely more so.

Anthony ... you are right everything is fine until i aply the morph and the mapping of vertices is totally wrong with some vertices being mapped to the other half of the head :( is there any way of fixing this ?

I just ran into a similar problem trying to do a clothing morph in Rhino. I worked on one half, mirrored and joined, but then there were to many vertices, because of the overlap. One possible solution, which didn't work for me, because, for some reason, the clothing item's .obj was NOT truly symetrical, it to use the steps detailed in this tutorial at traveler's site: http://morphs.bbay.com/tutorials/rhino3.html It's a Rhino tutorial, but it should still help. It has a link and instructions on using MASA's Morph Mirror to do symetrical morphs. Since you are working on the head, I assume that this will work. My problem was that the clothing item I was morphing, although appearing symetrical, wasn't, so Morph Mirror would not allow me to load it as the base. The second possible solution, which did work for me, but would likely be much more difficult with something as complex as the head, was as follows: I had the mirrored mesh, which would NOT work as a morph because of the overlapping problem you also had. I then imprted the original, unedited, mesh for the object I was morphing. I hid half of each object to make it easier to work and see what was going on. I had to work in the perspective window, mostly, rotating and zooming to get the best perspective. (I use Rhino, so I don't know how 3ds program is set up). I then truned on control points for both meshes, and set "snap to point". I then went around, a row at a time, snapping each control point on the original mesh to the new position of that point on the edited and mirrored mesh. It took a while and I had to be careful, but I was able to snap each point of the unedited mesh, onto the proper point on the edited mesh. I did one half, then hid that half and unhid the other half and did the same thing. I then deleted the mirrored, morphed object, leaving the new mesh in the same exact shape, but because it was just moving points on the origianl mesh, it retained all the same vetrices and polygion counts and orders. Make sense? A pain, but it worked. Hopefully, the tutorial above and Morph Mirror will solve your problem, but it not, you can try the second method, with a LOT of patience, to snap the points manually. :-) Hope that helps.

fiontar ... thanx for your advice MT mirror works fine (well with a little coersion :) thanks also to Mason and Anthony :). Here's how to get a nice symetric morph target in 3ds Max R3 for anyone who wants to ... A> in poser export the part you wanna morph as a .obj file and make sure you select to save as a morph target only. import this base part .obj file into 3ds Max (plugins available) B> * intentionally missing* C> select all of one half of the objects faces and hide them D> create a mirror !!! reference type !!! and select appropriate axis to get the full figure back.. ( the reference half shows all changes on the other half ) E> now manipulate the original half as you wish (im assuming the hidden half cant be altered here )when youre happy ... F> select the mirror half (type h for the selection window) and delete it ... i still havent figured how to unhide the half that was hidden yet but its still there in its unaltered state... G> export as a .obj file , this .obj will work as a one sided morph .. but unfortunately MT Mirror has problems reading the file .. (i couldnt figure why) H> open poser and load the original figure ... add your onesided .obj as a morph then set the slider to 1 for this only, and export the part thats undergone the one sided morph... I> last part :) .. open MT mirror select the base part saved originally , and your new one sided morph .. then do the symmetry you want and save out to your new symmetrical morph target . yipee what a pain .. but worth it .. mt mirror didnt recognise the .obj output with my plugin, so you haave to use poser to import then export to get MT mirror to read .. Anyhow Again ...thanx for your help folks. p.s. If anyone has a quicker way i'd still like to know .

What is MT Mirror? How can I get it? What does it do?

you can find it here ... http://www.eurus.dti.ne.jp/~masasi/PROGRAM/MTmirror.html what it does : it extracts symmetry info from a base .obj file ( containing only one object presumably) and uses this to reconstruct symmetry .. r->l , l->r etc in your modified version of that base .. this allows you to modify 1 half of an object then have the changes copied symmetrically. You need to use it really :) ... hope it helps.