According to the help files and the description given you are supposed to be able to rename morphs but when I rename a morph using it and then load the cr2 into Poser spinning the dial of the newly renamed morph doesn't do anything. I have made small changes such as taking out a forward slash and they still will work but if I completely rename it they don't. I mistakenly labeled one as the wrong body part and would like to change it to the correct one. I guess my question is... Has anyone had any success in renaming morphs in morph manager and have them still work? These morphs are some that I created using the program Morph master pro. Thanks for any help anyone can give me.

I must admit I haven't used Morph Manager for renaming for a long time, if ever... You can rename dials easily enough in the Poser interface, by calling up the dial properties. Depending on version, it's either double click on the dial, or through the little arrow to the right.

I believe that in MM although is seams it remanes, morphs name remains the same
Also renaming in Poser sometimes only changes the displayed name and not the internal morph name also... (in my poser 6 at least, I don't know if this was corrected on P7)

I just tried it, to be sure... Morph Manager renames the targetGeom line, but not the channel name line, so the dial remains unchanged. Poser 6 renames the channel name, and thus the dial, but leaves the targetGeom unchanged. That doesn't seem to be a problem in everyday use, unless you know of something I've overlooked? - Edit - To return to the original question:- the renamed morph dial still worked for me, so I can't answer that one. I'm a bit concerned about the reference to "taking out a forward slash" which doesn't sound like the sort of thing that would happen while renaming a morph. Sounds like something more serious went wrong there.

I think I know what's happening. I bet you have "Use external binary morph targets" (UEBMT) selected in your General Preferences. Yes?

What I think is happening is this. Your figure has been saved to disk whilst UEBMT was selected (either you saved it that way, or that's the way the figure came originally). Because UEBMT was used there are no morph deltas in your cr2 when you load it, instead there is a line saying "useBinaryMorph 1".

Say the original name for the morph was "OldMorph", and you have changed this to "NewMorph". Poser looks in the pmd file that was created for your character, for a morph with the same name as the channel, which in now named "NewMorph". Because there are no morph deltas in the pmd associated with the name "NewMorph", Poser can't find any deltas to load into the channel.

"Morph Manager 4" (MM4) was made way before pmd files were invented, so there is no warning in the MM4 help files about the problems you can have with pmd files.

So what can you do to fix things? Two things come to mind.

You could turn off "Use external binary morph targets", load your figure in poser, then save it back to disk. This will put the deltas in the cr2, rather than storing them in an external file. Now you need to do your whole procedure in MM4 from the beginning again.

If you don't want to turn off UEBMT, you could try this. As far as I know it is only the internal name of the morph channel that needs to stay the same for the pmd file to work, you could change the internal names back to the original names, and leave the dial name as the new name, the morphs should start working again. As Bob says that MM4 changes the internal name, I guess you would have to do this in something else, like CR2Builder, or a text editor. By "internal name" I mean the name that appears on the "targetGeom" line, and by "dial name" I mean the name that appears on the "name" line.

Personally I leave "Use external binary morph targets" turned off. Too much potential for problems, like the one you are experiencing, or others, when it is turned on IMHO.

I hope you can understand this post, looking over it now, I see that it is probably not clearly written, but it's the best I can do. Perhaps someone else can put it in better words.

How does this sound? Morph Manager changes the internal channel name, which is what Poser uses to associate with morphs stored in a PMD file - as a result the displayed dial name doesn't change, and the association is broken so the morph won't work any more. Conclusions: Don't use Morph Manager for changing morph dial names in any case, because it won't do anything; and especially if external morphs are in use, because they won't work afterwards. Like Les, I prefer to work without external morphs enabled, and without file compression for that matter. Too many "old school" utilities depend on having uncompressed library files with the deltas incorporated. If anything goes wrong, I can dive in there and fix it (or so I like to think, anyway). I'd better add a note about this on the Morph Manager download page. It's still a more popular download than any of my own work, dammit. :/

Ah, so that's what I meant! :blink:

Thanks Bob. Very clear and concise. 

You have managed to express in three lines, what it took me nine paragraphs to say. Makes me think that all that time and money I spent at the George Bush Academy of Clear Speaking, was just a waste! :sad:

As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" - but that was partly an insult to Robert Hooke, so maybe I shouldn't go there. :) You should ask dubya for your money back, while you still can. :lol:

OK, I going to go completely off topic now. I never realised that the famous quote by Newton was "was partly an insult to Robert Hooke". You have me intrigued. Can you elaborate a bit, or point me to somewhere where I can read more about this?

Attached Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_newton

Well personally I can't accept the idea that Newton was a fan of Randy Newman ("Don't want no Short People Round here").

Whilst Wikipedia is a great resource, it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, it attributes me as saying "If I have see more than others, it is because I trained my binoculars on the local nudist colony". I don't even own a pair of binoculars, I don't even own one binocular, let alone a pair. I use a 9 inch reflecting telescope.

P.S.
Sorry Contajen, don't know how I managed to drag a discussion on Morph Manager down to this level. Guess it's just natural talent.

I guess some way to rename morphs.
I want to show one way using CR2builder. 

Please watch this video.
http://briefcase.yahoo.co.jp/bc/kim99x2003/lst?.dir=/f29e/2924&.order=&.view=l&.src=bc&.done=http%3a//briefcase.yahoo.co.jp/
downloading the file named as "02m12h-RenameEzINJpz2.zip".
expanding the file named as "02m12h-RenameEzINJpz2.wmv" in it.

P.S.  Thank you. lesbentley.

You guys are super!! I have been out of town overnight so I am just getting to read your replies.

I am wanting to create a custom cr2 with only my morphs that when the morphs are copied over in MM they possibly retain the grouping (that's probably not possible) and at least have the same names in Poser that the original cr2 does when the new cr2 is loaded in to Poser.

About that forward slash thing... I created some custom morphs in Morph Master and when I named some of them I used "turnnoseup/down". The problem this caused was actually in Injection magic when I was generating INJ and REM files and extracting the morphs  (I kept getting a runtime error "path not found ") so that is why I changed them in Morph manager. It didn't seem to mind that part and dials still worked in Poser after the rename.  I was toying with the idea of a custom cr2 with blank morph channels and then injecting my morphs. It works but the dang names are not right and of course no grouping!

I did rename several of the morph dials and grouped them nicely into groups in Poser 7 which worked out fine until I went back to morph manager and loaded the original ToonBaby.cr2 and my cr2 with my morphs and copied my morphs to the original then went back to poser opened the new combined cr2...and Wah-La! Morphs with old names and no grouping.

I understood both explanations very well on the UEBMT as I had already done a little investigating on my own. The culprit may be the UEBMT being turned on. I did notice this extra file in the character folder with a pmd extension so I went to the help files to see what it was and turned this feature off and I am pretty sure I tried renaming in MM on a cr2 saved with it off as well and it didn't work for me. Although I have so many cr2s of this now I am drowning in them. I will look into this again.

I am probably trying to do to many things at once. I was trying to make using these morphs as user friendly as possible. I have learned a lot about pmd files and how to make a pose file that will group the morphs for you from a tutorial from Nerd 3d and how to put a readscript command in a file.

I actually did download the cr2builder and opened it but I had to leave so I didn't get to play with it further. I will download the files suggested and look them over as well.

You guys have given me some great ideas and a lot of good information. Thank you so much, all of you for the input.
 
Oh yea, by all means, talk amongst yourselves about whatever. I might learn something else I didn't know.

Quote - I understood both explanations very well on the UEBMT as I had already done a little investigating on my own. The culprit may be the UEBMT being turned on. I did notice this extra file in the character folder with a pmd extension so I went to the help files to see what it was and turned this feature off and I am pretty sure I tried renaming in MM on a cr2 saved with it off as well and it didn't work for me. Although I have so many cr2s of this now I am drowning in them. I will look into this again.

I am convinced that the reason the morphs do not work is the use of pmd in conjunction with the change of the internal name of the channel. The reason I am convinced is because I don't think it is possible to stop a channel working by changing its name. Even in your case, strictly speaking, the channel is working, it's  just that it contains no deltas so nothing happens, but the channel itself will be working fine. The problem is is not so much in the channel as in the pmd, now that the channel's internal name has changed the pmd does not know where to put the deltas. Put some appropriate deltas in the channel by any means, and I bet you a cookie it will work!

As to changing the dial name, that is a separate problem, and it seems that MM4 is not up to the task. As Bob has pointed out you can change the dial names in Poser. Another option is to use Cr2Builder, or Cr2Editor, or even a text editor. If you know the name that needs changing then it is simple enough to use Find & Replace in your text editor.

My thinking was that if I could get MM4 to change the internal name of  the morphs there will be no need to change the dial names in Poser because it seems to use whatever the internal morph name is when creating the dials in Poser. This is just a freebie so the grouping of the morph dials in Poser is not a must have but I would like the names of the morphs to match what is in my original cr2 when copied over in MM4 by the user.

I am going to go back to Poser and save the character file without the UEBMT turned and then try to change the names in MM again and see what happens. I possibly could have mixed up which cr2 I was using because I have saved so many. What you said makes a lot of sense about the dials not working because they don't know where to find the morphs.

thanks again for the advice

@ Contajen,

Quote: "...I would like the names of the morphs to match what is in my original cr2 when copied over in MM4 by the user."

I gather from your last post that you plan to distribute some morphs as freebies, and that you intend that the end user should copy these morphs to to some original cr2 using MM4.

I'm wondering which figure these morphs are intended for, and whether the morphs are entirely you own creation, or are made by combining third party morphs into new morphs?

They are for the 3du Toon Baby. These are entirely new morphs done by me. I made these morphs in morphmaster pro. You load the cr2 into morph master and make and name your morphs using the various selection and deformer tools then save the cr2 with your morphs in it then either use something like Injection Magic to extract them and create INJ and REM files or use other legal means to distribute them. I have already made a set of freebie morphs for 3du Sadie but Sadie has blank morph channels for injection where as Toon Baby does not.

The advice above about the pmd files was correct in being the problem with renaming in MM4. I took the original cr2 I created in MorphMaster and took it directly to MM4 and did the rename on the internal morph names then went to Cr2editor and made changes to the parameter dial names to match my morphs. Then loaded the cr2 into Poser with UEBMT off and all is right with the world. Thanks for the help.