Hi, guys! I'm a total newbie, just got Poser 4 today. And I have a question: How do you create a new character, face and all? Do you use Poser or another 3D program? Thanks!

Go to www.morphs.bbay.com and look around in their downloads section. You can create a character using just poser and morphs that other people make, but if you're talented enough in other 3d programs, you can make morphs in those...

...or completely new characters. Never forget that part. Yeah, you can get something new from something old but the ultimate freedom (and pleasure!) is in bringing something created from scratch into Poser and watching it do the dance of joy!

nods If I could build them... I recently got Anim8or, but I don't seem to be able to use it well. u.u

How do you create a morph? I tried to open one of the morphs I downloaded in RealSoft 3D and True Space, and 3D Studio Max and they say the file is invalid. What does a morph looklike when it's in a different program?

Attached Link: http://webpages.charter.net/chawkins2/

For a good tutorial on creating characters, check out the link above. (I think I'm starting to sound like a broken record.) If you want to make a brand new character (which personally I think is the most fun), you will need another program besides Poser. Any 3D modeller that will let you save obj files will work. The Anim8or program mentioned above is freeware, available at www.anim8or.com. There are other freeware 3D packages, but Anim8or is the only one I'm familiar with. A morph is basically target geometry. For example, let's say we have a cube file we want to make a morph for. Call it cube.obj. To make the morph target, you open the cube.obj file into your modeling software, and move the vertices (no deleteting, no adding vertices -- you can only change the positions). Then you save the result to a new name, like cubemorph.obj. That becomes the "target", or what the cube will look like when the morph dial is set to 1. So you see, morphs are pretty darn specific to the model they were created for, and that's probably why the morphs you downloaded didn't work the way you wanted. You might want to visit the Charactor Creator's forum, as this is the kind of stuff we talk about all day long, weirdos that we are. --Terri (I know, I know, speak for myself)

Attached Link: http://bushi3d.com

The problem with opening the MT .obj file in a 3D modeler could also be a result of the MT having been 'squeezed'. A squeezing program removes all the data from the .obj except for the coordinates of the vertices. This makes the file smaller and also prevents the use of the copyrighted .obj file by folks that don't have Poser. It's the recommended way of distributing MT files. I built such a program and it has been approved by Daz3D for distributing MTs of their figures. You can find it at the supplied link. Take a look at the MorphSqueeze area. It's a freebie. ;-)

Attached Link: http://www.3dtutor.homestead.com

for MT tutorial try the following

Also check out MorphWorld 2.0, Traveler has some excellent tutorials on morphing with Rhino and with Magnets, and he has hundreds of morphs for download. While I have done some custom morphs in Rhino, most of my custom work has been done with magnets via Trav's tutorials, very handy information in them. You can do unique characters with posette and the poser male [and with Vicki and Michael, but I haven't much experience there], and nothing but morphs and patience. I'll pass on a few tips here I absorbed on that from Lalverson: Download every morph you can find. Load a standard poser figure into the work window and apply all of the morphs, then resave it to a new library file. Then, once you have experimented with all of the morph dials, get a picture in your minds eye of what the character looks like. Get the basic facial shape right... and then tweak it with very small [0.001 - 0.05 sometimes] blendings of other morphs. Do the same with the eyes, ears, nose and mouth shapes, and always "step back" a bit to view what your doing from several angles. Use lots of patience and keep at it with minor increments until you have what you want. I do the body shaping the same way, with morphs for the musculature and magnets for the breasts, hips and buttock shaping. I also use magnets a lot for shaping the shoulder/collarbone areas. I find a lot of times that characters will take on a "personality" of their own as I develope, and they almost seem to shape themselves. Yeah, I know that's animism applying personality to a bunch of pixels and polygons, but that's the way it works. Hope any of this is helpful - Ironbear