Has anyone else ever tried this stuff?  I want to weld in a buttocks that is a child of thigh but resides in hip.  So I basically want to weld a buttocks in to hip and have it controled by the thigh.

This tutorial gives a litle info on how to do it, but I was just wondering if anyone else out there has done any experimentation with it, and if so what did you find?

Or any thoughts on the idea from some of you who know the workings of poser rigging and cr2's better than me, which should be most of you?

http://www.3dmenagerie.com/goodies/tut/illch.htm

I've used welding of illegitimate children in my sailing boat freebie. Works very well.

Attached Link: http://www.morphography.uk.vu/modtut7.html

Excellent! I was wanting someone to talk to about it.

I have welded in a left and right buttock peice and parented it to the thighs,  Putting in the new bones messed up many of my falloff zones, but I expected that.  I am having some trouble with the weld, it shows a line all the way around it.  But it is working!   Now when the thigh is dialed backwards the buttock goes with it and I don't get that flat spot and big crease.  I have wanted this for awhile so it would be automatic and you would not have to dial it in separately.

The weld line worries me though, I hope to be able to get rid of it.  Any ideas?

EnglishBob:  thanks for the input and the links,  I have not tried that yet it may work to get rid of that line.

I don't think you need to worry about the weld line. As far as I know, if it works, it will continue to work; I don't know of any instances where different versions of Poser will react differently to a three-way weld. I'm not fully following what you did, and since I'm at work I shouldn't stare at the naked buttocks. :) What figure are you starting from?

It's my own figure, I am working on two of them a male and female, trying to stay away from adding any magnets or JCM's unless I have to.

I just welded in a Left and right buttocks into the hip group but it is controled by the thigh and not the hip.

That looks like it is working.
 

4/8/08

phantom3D:

This appears to work very well, and looks quite realistic. Does it work as well on the Female firgure?

LMK

Quote - 4/8/08

phantom3D:

This appears to work very well, and looks quite realistic. Does it work as well on the Female firgure?

LMK

They are the same mesh so yes it will work pretty much the same, they use the same rig too so once I get it worked out for the male I can redo the poly groups on the female and pop the male rig in and adjust it and there she is.

Good to see ya, been a few.

Mike

Quote - ...pop the male rig in...

Doesn't that need a language advisory? (Sorry, dirty mind running at full speed again).

  Oops!

4/9/08

Are there other areas of the body that could benefit from this technique?

LMK

Oh yaa!  For instance one I am working on right now, The side of the leg where it meets the hip.  Always get a crease there when the leg is moved side to side. I am working on welding in a child which will not allow the mesh to crease there and also will adjust the hip as the leg moves side to sideso as tto be much more natural.  I don't know if this is better than a morph to do the same thing but it seems to me that morphs take up more in resources than a bone but I'm guessing.  There was also some info on actually using a morph such as a bicep flex morph to actually move the affected parts of the body.  Very interesting implications, could a model actually be set up to move and bend by the use of muscle flex and relax morphs instead of the joint parameters? Crazy!!!

Here's another thought what about a human model that does not have any bones or joints at all, but bends and moves entirely by the use of morphs?  No need for the problems of joints ect. the muscles ripple and flex as the body moves................probably take huge amounts of resources...............as long as poser could handle all the morphing it could work like a dream.

Just more insanity.

cheers,

Mike (phantom3D)

Absolutely amazing work !

As usual, many ways lead to Rome, but some are shorter than others.

Up to Poser 7 morphs were seriously handicapped because Poser read joint deformations first.
So people added more bodyparts to spread deformations more evenly:
First buttocks, then a waist  and then double jointed shoulders.

But a joint deformes the mesh according to a spheric influence field while a morph can allocate a new position to every single vertex of a bodypart.
So the information density in a morph is a lot higher that in a joint deformation, that's why a morph can give you a much more exact shape.

Additional bodyparts also make manual posing and cloth creation harder while a figures' joint fixing morphs can be simply ignored in loose fitting cloth and for tight fitting clothes easily re-added with the morphbrush.

A couple of joint fix morphs really also don't add much overhead either, as the majority of figures the head mesh uses about half of a figure's entire mesh, so by far the most RAM is used up for face/expression morphs.

But again, as I said before, it doesn't hurt to make the mesh bend as good as possible by itself before you bring in the morphbrush.
The less "fix" is necessary, the better.
So if you can get rid of that seam and make that buttock work properly, I'm all for it.

But avoid getting carried away with extra bones like teeth or tounges as these are a pain to adjust if you do some serious morphing or even swap heads with another mesh.
And please no multiple ERC functions with null body actors, morphforms or scaling poses or whatever.
I never liked the "sight of line" thingy of Apollo either as it added extra complexity and looked goofy in preview mode.
MIKI's eye controls that move both eyes simultanously are a great improvement, though.
V4 again carried ERC control way too far with all her faux-expression morphs.

The simpler you keep everything, the more other people will be able to use it.

Quote -
But a joint deformes the mesh according to a spheric influence field while a morph can allocate a new position to every single vertex of a bodypart.
So the information density in a morph is a lot higher that in a joint deformation, that's why a morph can give you a much more exact shape.

 
So a figure that did all its movement by way of morph (no joints or bones) is probably beyond poser or most home computers to handle?  I just tried a simple squat with just a morph, put in all the muscle deformations, creases in the abdomen and hip, joint deformations ect., involved in a squat and I gotta tell ya it looked so gorgeously perfect as it moved...........well maybe someday in the far far future.

The problem with using morphs  to actually pose a figure is that a vertex travels from the position it has at "morph set to 1" and "morph set to 0" in a straight line.

So an arm looks good at "1" and at "0", but not at "0.2" or "0.75".

You actually could inject "pose morphs" for static renders, and Poser would have no problem to handle that as it would be just another FBM , but it won't work for animation.

The weld commands are at the end of the cr2. Just add the one you need for the buttock and hip. Bloodsong used to talk about this quite a bit and mentions it in her book.

You can't use morphs to pose a bodypart because morphs don't travel along an arc. A leg morphing to a sitting position will shrink as it slides to finaal shape. Remeber that morphed vertexes travel the shortest path to there distination.

Poser doesn't natively support keyframed morph dials in a user friendly sense.

Quote - So a figure that did all its movement by way of morph (no joints or bones) is probably beyond poser or most home computers to handle?  I just tried a simple squat with just a morph, put in all the muscle deformations, creases in the abdomen and hip, joint deformations ect., involved in a squat and I gotta tell ya it looked so gorgeously perfect as it moved...........well maybe someday in the far far future.

It's not due to the computer power, it's due to the way geometry is handled in morphs - In all apps, Poser to Max and Maya. Morphs aren't meant for posing body parts. They work based on simple one diorectional vectors, and no weight maps.
For refined posing you need joints capable of spherical movement and spherically wieighted fallof zones.  Higher end apps have rigging systems that approximate this better and better.

You could use ERC to activate certain morphs when bending the character to mimic various muscle bulges and skin folds. 

Quote - The weld commands are at the end of the cr2. Just add the one you need for the buttock and hip. Bloodsong used to talk about this quite a bit and mentions it in her book.

You can't use morphs to pose a bodypart because morphs don't travel along an arc. A leg morphing to a sitting position will shrink as it slides to finaal shape. Remeber that morphed vertexes travel the shortest path to there distination.

Poser doesn't natively support keyframed morph dials in a user friendly sense.

I see what you mean,  I didn't understand that the morph moves the vertices to a certain spot in space regardless of where they start out from  I am sad, it seemed like such a wonderful idea.

Bloodsong has a book?  I was using the info set out in one of her tutorials, will have to look for the book.  The idea for welding a child to the hip did not work very well either so I took it out.  I had another thought though, for the inside of the leg, where it should sort of flatten when the leg bends so it does not croud the groin area.  I was thinking there might be a way to tie the rotation of a bone to another bone without it being the parent bone, I thought I saw something about it yesterday but I have not found it yet.

Quote - > Quote - It's not due to the computer power, it's due to the way geometry is handled in morphs - In all apps, Poser to Max and Maya. Morphs aren't meant for posing body parts. They work based on simple one diorectional vectors, and no weight maps.

For refined posing you need joints capable of spherical movement and spherically wieighted fallof zones.  Higher end apps have rigging systems that approximate this better and better. 

Ya you can do alot more with Max but not many people want a model for Max, So I'm stuck with poser. Poser rigging system is pretty screwy.

Quote - So I'm stuck with poser. Poser rigging system is pretty screwy.

Well, looking to the positive side....

You would have a very substantial potential customer base! 

Klutz

Quote - > Quote - So I'm stuck with poser. Poser rigging system is pretty screwy.

Well, looking to the positive side....

You would have a very substantial potential customer base! 

Klutz

That's what I'm going to hope for..

A question on Poser and morphs:

When you create a morph for lets say the hip and save it as a injection morph, Does Poser have to load all of the geometry in the hip when the inj is loaded or only the geometry that is effected by the morph?

And the second question:

When poser calculates the changes in the vertex placement for the morph, must it calculate where all of the vertexes in the hip are, or only the vertexes that will be changed by the morph?

In short is a small morph on the hip better than a larger one?

Thanks for all the help from everyone.

Mike, (phantom3D)

Poser only creates delta information for the geometry that is changing shape. Anything not altered isn't recordeded as morph deltas.

OK, thanks Anton.

sure is alot to learn!!

The problem I see for the "pose by morph" is conforming clothes...

CAL who is around here sometimes but not often had a trick in many of his props where morphs appeared to transition through space accurately. I always wondered if he had a hidden correction morph ERCed or something. He would have a chair fold or a lid swing open as a morph on a one piece prop without distortion. I tried replicating it with a rotational morph and a fix morph dialed by hand and it worked but I guess with ERC you would need the fix to ramp up and then down as the primary morph was dialed in.

An eye gimmick I really like is look-up/down left/right dials on the head with an additional "convergence" morph that controls the degree to which the line of vision of the individual eyes cross or diverge. I find it easier to work with than other methods.

I don't really like multi-part tongues as opposed to morphing tongues but I have wondered if it would be easier to deal with the eyes if the cornea was a separate (non moving) body part as opposed to a material zone. My preferences are particular though I know... I prefer the teeth and tongue as a separate body part for convenience in making morphs for the head and I don't mind posing them seperately since I often want to place them by-hand anyway.

I think I have said elsewhere my ideal for muscle flesh distortions such as bulging biceps, raised or lowered breasts, flattened thighs in sitting etc is body handles since they don't use the ovrer head of morphs I don't think... they can be manipulated by hand and they can be saved in poses and also animated. I have enjoyed body handles for ears and other facial elements and really liked them. I could stand a load of handles on a figure for all the major muscles and masses but I imagine no one else would go there with me. The problem is some body handles have very carefully done zones of influence but many that have gone on the market were poorly rigged and have given the method a bad reputation. When they are done right you can get simply amazing effects with rotation and scaling as well as the basic translation effects... imagine the control of a bicep or glute done with a properly rigged body handle.

I think I may have originally have had a "body handle" in the glutes on this figure.  Is a body handle a bone with no named geometry but instead just borrows influence of the geometry of  a body part by way of falloff zones?  If so I really like them.

4/9/08

I thought I had read a thread on body handles recently. A search found this thread.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3129844&ebot_calc_page#message_3129844

LMK

Aha! Now I know what they're called.  I have been using them for awhile and had no idea they had a name!  I am so ignorant sometimes, I swear.  That is exactly what I am working on right now, a body handle on the inside of the leg to deform it so that when the leg is raised the inside of the leg does not crowd the groin and lower abdomen.  But this body handle is going to be auto dialed by the thigh by means of a joint controled joint. a JCJ.  You can still dial it by hand to fine tune the area but most of the work will already be done automatically.

Thanks lkendall,

momodott: I share your love of body handles, they're fantastically usefull. and you're right the zones of influence are very precise.