I like to use V4 for my renders. The body is a clearly better than V3 (bending of knees and ellbows) but Ihave problems with her face. Most of the time it looks a bit like barbie and if  I manage to avoid that it does not look to good. What do you think about the V4 face, any tricks?

I ended up adding A4 to her, that seems to add realism.. Some have said A4 makes a more realistic face than V4.  to Accomplish this I tweak around the eyes and turn up realism.  Other than that I have never liked V4 for face use.

The only advice I can give is to use trial & error. I think Daz purposely made V4's face pig ugly so you feel some sort of accomplishment if you happen to create something beautiful with her!
Mixing with A4 does add an extra element to this, but depending on what you want, just turn all the dials & see what they do. I found V3 so much easier to create an interesting & attractive face.

Have you noticed , the V4 lips are so "low-poly" , comparing to V3's lips , it's so hard to make what I want with such little number of vertices - for a custom morph .I don't understand why Daz made her face with such economy of polygons , our computers evolved and they can manage higher amount of polygons .Really , I'm very disappointed

I think it's worth while to take a look in the Gallery under Poser / Portraits (or elsewhere) to see what people have done with V4. I was initially disappointed too, but have found that she has largely replaced V3 now for most of my renders. Someone asked a question in a previous post about V4's face and what I recall saying was to look thru the DAZ 3D and Renderosity products and find one or two good faces/characters to purchase. If you find one or two you like, you can start your changes from there with her built-in morphs. I think there's one or two good free ones two. Look thru the items on sale, and there should be a few goods ones to start with. I always try to purchase the ones that are not just dial manipulations but actual unique characters. I come back to DM's Luciana a lot. That's the one that showed me you could get a good face from V4 (look at the ad under Land of Sorrow).** **I'm still hoping we will get more facial morphs from a talented vendor someday. There are the RDNA face morph collections too.

Good Luck

2/22/08

The Victoria 4.2 Basic Morphs, Aiko 4 Basic Morphs, Morphs++, and Muscle Morphs can all be injected into the Morphia figure from DAZ. When injected together they offer a lot of possible combinations, and great diveristy. I suspect the creature morphs would also work.

pdxjims will soon be adding his Vittorio 4.2 morphs to the mix. Though designed as a male morph for V 4.2, many of these will be useful to alter female faces and bodies.

There are several free morphs to be found to fix one or another feature, and the Poser Morph Tool may also prove useful.

If you can develope skill at making bump and displacement maps, these can greatly alter the appearance of a character. Texture maps can also add the last bit of detail needed to complete the face you are trying to achieve.

I find the body morphs of VAiko 4.2 to be more limited than the face morphs. There is a leg length morph in the above combination I listed, but not a decent neck length, arm length or torso length moprh. Even a taller shorter body type morph would be helpful for variety. I would love to see an hourglass (chest/waist/hips) morph, a Reubenesque morph, and several other body types.

If one is going to use VAiko 4.2 as a male model, something will have to be done about the unrealistic chest. The pectoral/breast morphs do not produce a convincing man's chest. The depth (front to back width of the chest) can be changed and the height by exposing the Y/Z scale dials, but the width (X scale from one shoulder to the other) cannot be scaled without breaking the figure. The chest bigger morph should be called the gorilla morph. It just fails to look better than monsterous. So, no broad shouldered men or women. The definition, ribs, biceps, triceps, forearm, axilla, and abdominal morphs are also unrealistic.

The male faces that are possible are another matter altogether. I find the presently available morphs to be more than adequate to acheive a great variety of male, female, and androgenous faces. When enough cloths have been made/converted for the Mictoria/MAiko/Vittorio character, the flaws in body morphs will not matter, as he gets covered over with clothing.

I am sure some talented modelers will turn their attention to morph projects as soon as they feel that the model(s) has(have) evolved into a stable product(s).

LMK

alizea i agree - particularly her lower lip - it can never be much more than an amorphous blob - i too have tried to make morphs in a modelling proggie and seen the dreadfu truth. well a lot of people complain about the amounts of polys here and there on a new figure - but the lip??? its a key part of the face - and why make it less versatile than V3? this lack of lip polys makes a lot of the for-sale figures here in the MP look samey and lije older women dressing up as teens. i'm quite surprised that people dob't bash V4 the way they bashed judy from EF. love esther

V4's face is just fine. You need some practice and it's ok. When I began using v4 I tried to simulate some real faces only by using morphs and maybe this is the way ... If you don't believe me, kick my ... gallery ;)

she can look great, but you just can't make a whole range of certain looks like you could with V3 eg a line down the centre of the lower lip. love esther

Oh estherau , that's my problem ! I've tried to make that middle line and it's impossible , unless using displacement maps , but this is tricking and use much more ressource . I'm not that free in making custom morphs in Zbrush ; with so little polys I get stretched textures .
V4 is very versatile but I feel very frustrating to have a particular idea and not being able to concretize .I saw lots of different faces of V4 , some very original - not "V4 alike " , yes she's very versatile - but I still can't make that middle line on the low lip and I haven't seen it on a V4 morph neither . It's a very natural feature , you can see it on lots of human lips , and I find it very cute and attractive .
So I'll change my mind the day when someone will be able to morph that middle line .

Hi, yep a lot of young girls have lips like that too. It is a very natural and beautiful feature. And yes, my textures have been stretched. I got close-ish to what I wanted but will never be able to achieve it perfectly because of her very low polygon numbers in the lower lip. I have thought about trying displacement maps but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I don't know what daz were thinking. but most people seem really wrapped with V4 so I guess it can't be that important if only a small minority of people are complaining. love esther

I guess we'll have to wait for V5 ...

that could be a really long wait - and then we could be disappointed. well mayne someone other than daz will come up with something sooner love esther

Have you tried "Cosmetics Lip Morphs for V4" at most-digital-creations.com or here in the Free stuff?

No, I haven't, but from the look of the mesh in my own modellng proggie I would say it's impossible to achieve the particular look that I want. (which was easily achievable with V3) purely because of a paucity of polys in the mid lower lip, those morphs are nice though. thanks - i will get them too. Love esther

There is an -utopic? -solution , maybe someone has already done it ? taking V3's head and joint it to v4's body . I saw some threads on putting one character's head on another . The dream would be to use V3's head morphs and v4's bodymorphs and textures ...

Or - maybe - subdivide the head , create a new V4 obj file , and do the same for all needed head morphs :
a head morph dialed on 1 - export - subdivide at the same level-  import as a morph target for the new head and so on ...
Personal use only and not compatible with character packs -unlesss doing the same for a custom head morph ! , but easily compatible with textures .

well I don't hate V4 head totally. I think at rest V3 can be morphed to a real beauty, as we discussed above, but V4 has better more natural looking expressions when you make her smile etc, and the pose packs would also be problematic. Love esther

tretete, I can't find "Cosmetics Lip Morphs for V4" although I found a link in the free stuff, the website didn't have it. I did find lots of other nice things though on that website. love esther

Barbie, what happened to you?!?!

I agree that certain faces are hard to make with just her morph pack. But I wouldnt' agree that the faces you can make are limited.

2/27/08

estherau:

http://www.most-digital-creations.com/free_poser_poses_textures_morphs_props_13.htm

Search the page for lip. It dowloaded for me just a minute ago.

LMK

thanks for the link LMK. and thankyou Adam Thwaites for all that wonderfull free stuff. I just picked up a ton of it. I also bought some of your things recently too. they are great! bagginsbill certain quite commen nice looks are impossible to make even by making morphs in a modelling proggie. However I agree she is still quite versatile. what i really didn't expect was for her to loose some functionality that V3 had. that was a bitter disappointment. Love esther

The two major problems are, as with nearly all Poser figure content, a) the eyes are too big by default and b) the nose is too small by default.  It only gets worse when content vendors make the eyes bigger and the nose smaller.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3114868
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2718312
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3082599&ebot_calc_page#message_3082599

I really like your free lip morphs pjz99, and you were my inspiration to try making my own lip and eye morphs in C4D and chin morphs too. I had a great time and learnt heaps about making morphs, but it was there in C4D that I learned the terrible shocking truth and finality about the V4 lower lip. Yes, sometimes those big eyes just make her look alien, and that cutsie nose is a bit over the top but that is able to be adjusted. Love esther

true - but my disappointment is that I expect V4 to be better than V3, and the face and the lips especially are such an important part of making a model better. That's why I spend money buying better computers so I can cope with higher poly models. Your picture really illustrates the problem for me, but for people who have never tried modelling, it may be hard for them to understand the awful truth. I don't know what DAZ were thinking. They must have had a different person creating V4 compared to whoever they had helping make V3 or it would never have happened this way I think. To me those models look like they were made by different people. I'm not saying V4 isn't a nice model. She is certainly better than the EF figures. However she doesn't seem like such an advance to me. V3 was a great advance compared to v2 and I was expecting really big things for V4. Still I am going to use her of course. Her expressions are nice. So tell me alittle about displacement maps. Can they only displace polys or can they actually displace parts of polys to make fine adjustments? Love esther

Attached Link: Raytraced reflections on a sword blade? by vincebagna

There is a limitation, however. A displacement can only raise or lower the surface. It can't bend it. But for fine-detail adjustments, this is not a serious limitation.

Have a look at this sword by Vince Bagna:

I helped him make the shader for the blade. He did the displacement map that creates all that fine filigree work. I added noise-based displacement to create the small flaws in the metal, those dark pits. If you were to try to model all that, you'd go crazy.

The attached link points to a thread at RDNA where we worked on this. There are dozens of detailed renders there if you're interesting in seeing more.

Well, "better" isn't really objective - for other purposes, "better" might mean lower polygon count.  And yes the modeling probably was done by different people, certainly there are enormous differences in the topology of the models - tons and tons of triangles in gen 3 models, none at all (apparently) in V4 - generally this is thought of as a better way to model, although it isn't such a big deal in Poser-land.

You are on the right track with a displacement map.  You can think of it as a bump map, only better - you can displace across polygon edges as Bill says, and together with the renderer's Smooth Polygons option, and the result is nice and organic-looking.  The layman-terms difference between bump mapping and displacement mapping is that bump mapping is a shading effect, that will not alter the geometry at all - while displacement mapping actually creates polygons ... and this will cost you render time, but it's a powerful and useful effect.

:)) now I see the point ...
Here's an advice : It's not necessary for a character to have lips like Angelina Jolie's.
Believe me.  :)

hehe you are right of course. But I do want my character to be able to have those lips if I choose. Love esther

I have never made morphs for v3 . I 've started directly with V4 and I didn't understood right from the start why I couldn't get the morphs I wanted . I was looking on the marketplace for a character with THAT middle-line , I was ready to purchase it . But nothing came in ... Recently I had V4 and V3 in the same scene and I've changed the preview mode from texture smoothed to polygons , then I understood . People  who - like me- never used V3 to make morphs can't see the difference ,V4 is such a nice evolution . I guess merchants don't criticize her - openly - but I'm not merchant , I would be glad to make morphs and share them for free .
In the meantime we can only use displacement maps , but we must let know Daz that there are some end users that are not satisfied with that low-poly policy - at least for the face -, so they don't do this again for the next generation .

I notice a lot of merchants for hair products still use V3 in their promos presumably because her face is nicer. Love esther