2/14/08

 

pdxjims, don’t let me distract you.

Vittorio 4.2 WILL be an injected morphs package. That’s good to hear. It will be much easier to inject morphs than to relearn how to use RTE decoder again. And hopefully, injectable morphs can be used in other specialty CR2s.

 

For my part, I really do not mind long lists of morphs. In fact, I unashamedly make my figures bowlegged carrying the excess weight of extra morphs. I love versatility and I like a semblance of realism. I will turn dials for hours to achieve just the right character. I like having more than one or two meshes available because one can achieve a broader range of appearance. Most of my scenes include several figures, and I don’t want the characters to look like they are all from the same family.

 

The morphs now available for V 4.2 show an average (somewhat adequate) understanding of the underlying bone, muscle and fat anatomy of women. Women have thinner bones and muscles (with fewer muscle cells), and bulk is more often due to fat tissue. Consequently the muscles in women tend to be more uniform in their diameter from one end to the other. They do not tend to have bulges in their muscles. One can see this in the V 4.2 biceps, which, even when morphed larger and when using the flex morphs available, are longer and with less of a bulge than M3, D3, or even H3 Realistic. This is realistic for women, but not for men. The forearm muscles, however, strangely bulge (way too much) at the end near the elbow (proximal forearm). This is not characteristic for men or women.

 

The creators of the Poser and G2 figures seem to know that the outer appearance of the body is achieved by covering other structures with skin. Unfortunately, the underlying structures they simulate are not anatomically plausible. Their figures look best when completely covered with cloths. Some other available figures look like dents were made in a firm body part (arm, leg, abdomen) to subtly suggest the underlying structures of bone, muscle, tendons, etc. The end result is that higly morphed characters look less and less realistic. DAZ’s figures tend to look more anatomically correct to me.

 

I like the morphs available (in Morphia I think) to thicken or thin the elbow and knees. Many of DAZ’s previous figures had large upper arms, and large lower arms connected by jointed soda straw elbows. For the time being I suppose tendons and some other features will just have to be added with bump/displacement maps.

 

I am glad to see that there will be an arm and neck stretch morph. Sadly; V 4.2 also lacks a torso stretch morph. While the hip and abdomen can be scaled using the “y” scale, the chest is not as versatile. Scaling the chest with any “x/y/z” scales can break the shoulders. A “tall/short” body morph, like barbarian or voluptuous, probably would be the best way to go. Then minor variations could be achieved with other morphs, and might not break adjacent body parts so badly.

 

Note: Some of the morphs (Basic, Morphs++, Morphia and Muscles) for v $.2 can have their dial settings altered, and still produce decent results by pushing them beyond the programmed parameters.

 

The chest morphs apparent in the renders pdxjims shared look more convincingly male than I could achieve with V 4.2. My attempts looked more like flat chested men with gynecomastia (man breasts). For $7.99, I think I may go ahead and buy Vittorio now, to avoid the rush when he is released.

 

LMK

Probably edited for spelling, grammer, punctuation, or typos.