I noticed a strange thing on the shoulder (a.k.a. upper arm): when I do an x-scale, then bend the arm, the mesh breaks. If I scale in all directions, everything's fine. I wonder if that's JCM-related. Does anyone has some insights on how scaling and morphs interact in Poser?

Run for the hills.... It's the attack of the bobble head!

careful - she'll headbutt you to death.

:biggrin:

Now I understand a bit more, in my first renders with Antonia I used VSS so I didn't see the nostril glow. this time around I didn't use it and there were flashlights glowing...eeew. So when I added the AO, goodbye glow. :) I've never noticed that the ear canals do that. But I had a habit of forgetting to clone over the dark area in the ears maps and had a strange color until I figured it out. Lol. Lighting usually adds correct shadows there without any help from me. I'm almost finished with the texture, just a seam or two on the feet where they join the leg. Then add a few details and make some pz2's and mc6 files.

Bagginsbill, do you still prefer depth-map shadows to raytraced ones, as you seemed to do in that thread? (Or does Poser version come into play here - I'm using Poser Pro.)

Thanks for that link. Lots of info there.

Ah, nevermind... read on in the thread and discovered that you've preferred raytraced shadows since P7 SR3. :)

Glad of that... it seems a lot simpler.

hate to be one of those "leechers", but...

is it available yet? or will the testable version be this weekend?

Quote - > Quote - Yes, the texture still has a few issues, seams and such.

Ah, okay! Silly me thought is was all finished and stuff. Lovely work! I'm very excited that there's a texture for Antonia now. Let me know how it goes with the seams.

Quote - I think using trans maps for that and the eyebrows is wayyy better. :)

Speaking of which: I made a little "genital cap" the other day that I considered including with the mesh much like the toecaps. I ended up deciding against that, but I think the geometry could well be used as a basis for creating panties or pubic hair props. So I'll try to remember to include it when I upload Antonia this weekend.

Quote - And in keeping with the spirit of the thing, this texture will be FREE!

Awesome! That's the spirit.

Quote - But I have a fantasy tex in mind that will need to wait until she is fully read to go. :)

Sounds great.

Quote - On the "invisible" thing, I just automatically assumed it should be invisible and made it transparent...lol. Wondered what it was for though.

Well, it looks like it's not fully transparent. Could be the transparency falloff, as bagginsbill suggested. Also, I ended up setting the intensities for diffuse, specular and ambient to zero for invisible things. Not completely sure it influences the render, but maybe worth a try.

I can post the settings I used for making things invisible when I get back home tonight.

For the sake of argument here I prefer figure textures w/o painted on pubic hair. I can't tell you how much time I waste getting my paid for HiRes textures and freebies and remove the painted on black or red or pink painted on pubic hair so it will look right with the color hair on her head. For that matter I prefer not having painted on eyebrows either for there same reason...oh and don't forget bikini lines.
V2 which i am still using has a pubic hair/upper eyebrow prop attached. I prefer using those elements with textures and transmaps and give the figure the pubic hair/upper eyebrows I choose to give her...or none at all....instead of being forced by the texture artist what will or will not be used. Offering a broad range of choices...intelligently....at this development stage, brings breadth and depth to the figure otherwise not offering choices does not.
If it cannot be an attached prop or cap then make it smart propped but offer something please!  :)

Well, it IS a freebie, so....

I'll add that body hair such as pubic doesn't need to match the head-hair, anyway... methinks that would be a rarity IRL. You don't see a heck of a lot of blonde underarm either. (And hey, where's the prop for THAT, that's what I wanna know!)

Well, I know it is a freebie but the thread is for opinions here so I just tossed my two and a half cents into the fray!  :)
Actually there was an underarm prop made available for M2 years ago and made available on one of the Gay Poser sites as a freebie DL. I agree it should also be a standard with male models...at the very least.
I am not sure I understand what you mean as a rarity!?
The standard seems to be to add body hair to textures and not offering an option. I just want an option. The best way to offer that is remembering figures like V2/M2 (the only ones I am familiar with and am basing my argument on here...sorry) do have that optional and apparently often forgotten pubic hair and upper brow accessory.
Years ago some very creative texture maker offered through DAZ body texture set for V2. it offered several textures and tonal options which did not have pubic hair or upper brows painted on. They created various thick and thin brows/lashes/and transmaps for the pubic hair prop via Pose files to texture everything the way you wanted and the color you wanted. I loved it. I have modified these textures over time to get them the tone and color I want to use but the beauty of the set I will always appreciate as I continue using these is the option for the brows and lashes.
I think it was a more intelligent and versatile way to offer options....free or not!

This texture will be without pub hair and no eyebrows on the texture map. The eyebrows you see in the image are trans mapped and displacement map used. When I do my V3 and V4 (or M3-M4) characters I give two options, with and without body hair. simlifies matters. :) And I will do the same for any Antonia textures sets for retail. I do it this way because there are two sets of preferences from the buyers and I try to do for both. I tried painted eyebrows on Antonia at first, don't like them, I prefer the shaders and trans maps. As for the lips, I haven't tried shaders yet but think I will later tonight. So, would some of you also prefer one face map with only skin tones on the lips so you can do shaders?

BluEcho,

Natural lip color is best on the color map, not necessarily the same color as the skin. And with that, a black-and-white mask (such as ODF made already) to define the lip region. This can be used very effectively in two ways:

For the Photoshop user, this mask can be a layer mask where the lips can be colored as a layer and then flattened - the user can make his/her own choices about lip color then.

For the shader user, this mask is used (as I've already demonstrated) to vary the gloss, bump, and color of the lips.

The same can be done for the nipples.

If you really want to get into a powerful texturing/shader kit, you'd not do anything  but plain skin on the color map. Instead, make nice masks for:

Tan lines
Eye shadow
Blush
Eye liner
Freckle concentration and strength

etc.

I can easily incorporate masks like those into VSS shaders. If there was a standardized freebie set of these masks then I'd make tons of shader effects using them, since I could expect everybody has or can get these masks.

That's what I did for my Apollo shader set a couple years ago. I knew that Apollo came with or you could get displacement maps, hair maps, a caucasian skin and an African skin, etc. I built shaders for these - using the shader parameters users were able to transform these basic building blocks into hundreds of very different ethnic and other looks.

Quote - > Quote - ODf, I was just doing a bit of final touches on the head texture and when I did a render check I noticed something. She has mini-flaslights up her nose! There is no "nostril" material to darken that area. Is there a way to fix that?

Yes! It's called ambient occlusion. I really, really recommend using it.

No, seriously, do people still use nostril materials? I wouldn't really mind adding one, but it seems such a clunky way to fix the glowing nostrils problem.

Well there is no ambient occlusion in Bryce.  So people (like me) who want to use Antonia in Bryce would have hot nostrils allatime.  Just FYI.

Quote -
Well there is no ambient occlusion in Bryce.  So people (like me) who want to use Antonia in Bryce would have hot nostrils allatime.  Just FYI.

That was a silly thing for me to say and bagginsbill corrected me immediately. You need to set up your lights to cast correct shadows. For IBL lights that would be AO, but for other lights it's not. I don't have Brice and have no idea how lighting works there, but I imagine at least one of the methods he mentioned could be used.

Just summarizing the current state regarding masks and other support for versatile texturing:

I've already made a lip mask and a nipple mask to use in shaders and for photoshopping textures, which I will include in the preview upload (if I don't forget). I can make more masks if the need arises. I know diddly squat about makeup, so I imagine I'm not the best candidate for blush and eye shadow masks, but I can try.

Antonia has builtin brow geometry to make transmapped brows. She doesn't have builtin geometry for pubic hair, but I have a prop that can be used for that. It's just the one layer at the moment, but it should be easy to scale and duplicate that in order to make multi-layer pubic hair.

What I can do is include all these things in the distribution so that texture makers have a common standard to build versatile textures on. What I can't do, obviously, is force all the texture makers to use it. There may be good reasons for distributing "all-included" textures, actually, especially for people selling their products. If you make things too complicated, many people won't use it. That's particularly true in the Poser world, seeing as Poser is the 3d computer graphics application for people who are clueless about 3d computer graphics.

Quote -
I am not sure I understand what you mean as a rarity!?

I was talking about in real life. Most people in real life have relatively dark underarm and pubic hair. Some people have fairly light arm hair, but in general body hair does not match the hair that grows on the top of your head.

As far as options: I like the sorts of things you describe too - but I don't expect them from a regular character texture unless it's a pricey one. It's more what I'd expect from a merchant resource, where I definitely want as little as possible painted on.

I do have a question about UV mapping. If I use UV Mapper and use assign material and name it "nostrils" after selecting the little holes in her nose, is that how you create the material map? The reason I ask is that when I made Sweet Pumpkin and her earrings, I did that so I could apply different texture front and back. It worked fine. Gee, I'm learning more here on this thread than all the tutorials I've read. :)

"Gee, I'm learning more here on this thread than all the tutorials I've read."

That's because it's TONNES more focused on what's going on and focused on practical things that have immediate application.  That's why I always throw myself into threads like this.  Not only do other people learn stuff from them, and you help the thread-starter, you also help yourself.

@odf--A pubic hair prop might be best.  Wouldn't affect current geometry, and can be deleted if desired, or moved around at will or just "Lock Actor"ed to the hip.

Most poser users just don't use the material room to any good benefit.  It's not just laziness, it's a real fear of screwing stuff up so much, you can't fix it.  I got over that a year or so after I got Poser 6!  Fiddling with new stuff that can blow up your projects is scary stuff!

THAT said--if someone wants to make a "Basic" material collection for Antonia with the masks and a 'basic' texture in place, then people who have a middling amount of experience of the 'Advanced" tab in the Material room can browse to new texture maps and not toast themselves.

That's just an idea for folks doing textures and following this thread.:laugh:

I'm sorry I didn't investigate this in a more timely fashion. I've been too busy with other projects.

I decided this evening to take a look at the UV mapping of the toe caps and the legs. I ran into a couple small mathematical issues because you UV mapped the toes at the top of the map, while the legs are at the bottom. That was no big deal - just a little extra math.

Pictured above is a test. These are not proper shaders - just a few nodes driven by U and V coordinate math.

I don't remember where (or even if) I said something about lining up the UV map of the legs so that I could use a simple threshold on the V coordinate to control stocking tops. Well maybe I wasn't clear. This is what I'm talking about.

The stocking tops, based on a specific V coordinate, do not match at the seam. What I was asking for was that you align the UV map so that the left-edge of a leg matches the right edge, and that a straight horizontal line in UV space is a straight across cross section through the leg. Pretty much when in zero pose, the U coordinate of any point on the leg should be proportional to the Y position of that coordinate.

Since that's not the case, I can't make procedural stockings. The only way to make these is to use hand-drawn maps. I'm not going to draw any maps - not my thing. If somebody wants to make a mask that correctly identifies where the stocking tops, reinforced heel, seams, and other stocking goodies go, then I can use them.

Or you can rebuild the UV map. But then BluEcho will have to start over on her textures.

bagginsbill: I agree that getting the UVs to align properly on the legs would have been the cleanest solution, but it turned out to be too difficult with the tools I had at my disposal. That was in fact one of the reasons I decided to start working on my own UV editing tool. But unfortunately that tool is still largeley vapourware - it can load meshes and display them, and you can select UV charts and turn them red, but that's it :biggrin: - and I'm afraid by the time it's ready to use we'll already have a bunch of textures that use the current mapping.

So my preferred solution is a 'height' map as you suggest. It doesn't have to be hand-drawn, though. I'm planning to write a little script that will go through the pixels in UV space and translate the corresponding y coordinate on the figure into a gray value.

Let me know how soon you want it. Also, what's a good resolution? I need to get that promised "poseable Antonia preview" up this weekend, but after that I should be free for map-making.

Ah yes, now I remember us talking about the height map. Basically any sort of arbitrary transformation of UV coordinates to another, better set of UV coordinates can be encoded in an image. Actually the possibility exists to use not gray scale, but red, green, and blue to represent X, Y, and Z. Or other things are possible, like a straightened UV map encoded as red/green, so I could also rely on a given U coordinate to be straight up and down, thus able to produce a straight seam on the back of the leg.

I don't think super high resolution is needed, since interpolation between sampled points is likely to produce very little error. So i bet a 512 by 512 would be good enough. But experiments will need to be done to confirm that.

I don't need it any particular time. When you feel like it.

Yep, I think my evil plan was to take just the leg and foot and make a special purpose stocking UV map. That map will not be optimized to be as distortion free as possible but to have just the distortion and alignment one would expect on a stocking. If I want the vertical lines to align property as well, I'll probably have to do it by hand. But since it's just a small, relatively simple part of the figure, that should be manageable.

Then if the required resolution is not too high, I think I could actually use the existing UV chart as the geometry and render that using the new UVs to produce an image map. If that works, I can even give you that object and you can render your own maps using whatever shader you think is best.

Quote - > Quote -

I am not sure I understand what you mean as a rarity!?

I was talking about in real life. Most people in real life have relatively dark underarm and pubic hair. Some people have fairly light arm hair, but in general body hair does not match the hair that grows on the top of your head.

As far as options: I like the sorts of things you describe too - but I don't expect them from a regular character texture unless it's a pricey one. It's more what I'd expect from a merchant resource, where I definitely want as little as possible painted on.

Oh yes. I am sorry...you're right. I don't normally use pubic hair anyway preferring what I grew up calling it "The Turkish Delight". But when I do I try to match the brows and head hair. I guess I am a bit retentive about that stuff. But as you say both in the real world as well as in the Poser World it doesn't work like that. I just like options...in real world as well as in Poser World, whenever I can get it.  :)

Ta-da!!

The first preview of the rigged version is now in my file locker. It is very bare-bones at the moment. There are no poses, no skin, no clothes or props. Also, scaling the hands or feet doesn't yet work. But all these things should come together eventually.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements - or, better yet, if you can provide those improvements. When ready, Antonia will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, so ideally any contributed content meant to go into the main distribution would be under that license as well. But of course, everyone's very welcome to publish content for Antonia under any other license that suits them, commercially or non-commercially.

If you're making things for Antonia, please post in this thread, send me a site mail, or contact me at Antonia dot Polygon at google dot com. While there's still a chance that bugs might be found and fixed and things changed around a little, it will be important to stay in close contact with content developers as to make sure no-one will lose too much of their work.

Cheers!
O.

Yay! Will download right away... hopefully get a chance to play sometime this weekend.

Hey ODF I missed this tread,my bad, I try to keep up with ODF,Patorak,Phantom3D.

Your Charater is making Killer progress, Very kool.

For a 1000 defrent resons ,I am learning C++.

When I have a PC

Old PC gave up the goast ,

Trying to get this new PC up and runing , fun fun. bang head agianst wall.

Not a lot of time to 3D these days.I miss it a lot thou.

I will never have the time to get my meshes ready for Poser.

May be I alt to just release them to you all.

rjjack: Ha! She has clothes. And hair. And a background. She's like an actual Poser figure. :biggrin:

I like the clothes you made. Sexy, but not fantasy-slutty-sexy. Not that there's anything wrong with fantasy-slutty-sexy. Just nice to see something a bit more down to earth for a change.

Yay!!! Got her, and later I will check her out. I'm hoping to put the finishing touches on her texture set over the nexr few days, If any changes have to be made in mapping, I can still adjust the texture. I've tried her with Kozaburo's Long Hair Style but couldn't parent it to her as she's still a prop and front view is all I could do. Now that she's a figure I can and I'll post a couple of images. If this ear infection doesn't flatten me out today...sigh.

Quote - Well the rigg is getting there.  Have alot more added now. Hands and feet next (fingers and all that UGH!)   Then have to run her through a gambit of poses and fine tune, but looking good so far.

All I can say is "WOW"! 

She is above and beyond V4 in so many ways except for there is always that fear of support.  Watching with Interest!! 

Nice work.  I love her face, unique and as for altering her facial features... I say NAY!!  Do a comprehensive face and body morph pack or perhaps someone can like Netherworks and there you go.  Get support for her for Cross Dresser and Wardrobe Wizard and there are some of the clothing items filled.  Morphing Clothes can put those full body morphs into the converted clothes and there's that.  

Where is you file locker? You have a link for the rest of us or pm me a link?

Quote - Where is you file locker? You have a link for the rest of us or pm me a link?

Click on his avatar, then click on 'Artist Input', and thar' she be...

I'm unzipping her now...(that sounds naughty!)

Cheers,

Rod

I have found something that is very strange with Antonia's rig and have not been able to figure out what is wrong yet.

Anyway I wanted to know if you all are experiencing the same problem or not?

Here is a quick pic of the problem.  The one on the left is the way the hip is supposed to work and the one on the right is what I am getting with this latest version.  The pose is just a standard action pose for James and adjusted for Antonia.

I thought maybe the abdomen had perhaps come unparented somehow from hip but I can't seem to be able to reparent it in the setup room (poser just crashes) Don't know, I will keep working at it and try to figure it out.  Any suggestions?

Cheers,

Mike

It's the pose!  I had that happen to one of my figures , just this week and it drove me crazy!  I finally figured out, it was the pose doing something weird out of the fourth dimension or something!

Question is--Does she do it on ALL poses, or just that one?

Found file locker, Downloading now.  Will install and test her out ASAP and report back within the hour.

My initial response is quite positive... the regular movements morphs seem to work very well, and the shoulder seems to be a big improvement over V4. I think she will be very nice to work with.

I don't understand the JCM's though... when they do anything at all that visible to me, they seem to do funky things. Not sure what's up with that... no time at the moment to detail more. But maybe I'm not understanding something.

Also... having the eye movement in the Head morphforms is good... but it would be a lot more realistic if the eyelids followed the movement (which is what V4 has for her). When I look up or down, it's not just my eyeball rotating, my lids move with the eyeball.

Yes it does it on any pose where the hip must twist or swing. Very strange, I checked all the JP's and they are the same settings. I wish I could read CR2 stuff with much understanding.  It also does the same in P6,P7,or Poser Pro.

But I WILL figure it out and fix it, be assured of that.

For the eyelid movement that could easily be done by just attatching some morphs to the dial I will think on it.

 the set of poses is working on DS 2.3.3.99 without problem

Quote -
I thought maybe the abdomen had perhaps come unparented somehow from hip but I can't seem to be able to reparent it in the setup room (poser just crashes) Don't know, I will keep working at it and try to figure it out.  Any suggestions?

Mike,

I had the same issue-the pose in question is Action Pose #8 that comes with Poser 7.  I tried the pose with V3 and it worked fine.

Trying to change the parent of the Abdomen crashed Poser 7 for me as well.

I also noticed that when I bend her over at the waist I get the hip shrinking slightly where it joins the thighs, whilst the thighs don't shrink

Believable3D:

The JCM's are automatic you don't actually get to dial those in, they are dialed in internally, so dialing them by hand does not do much if anything. In the final version of the figure those will be hidden, I only left them visible for now for easy access to work on them.

WandW: yes That is happening for me as well.  rjjack is saying it is working in DS so I may try it in DS with the DS setup tools. (I really love those DS setup tools!)

you can test the problem in poser without a pose

load Antonia
deactive ik on the legs
set the hip z rotation to 90

if you tweak the x rot or x rot of the hip you see the deformations

rjjack:

I tried it out in DS and yes it works fine. I am wondering what has changed from the former CR2 to this one. I will have to get with odf (I think he is sleeping right now) and see how he wants to proceed. But since the former CR2 works right in Poser or DS, I think it would be best to transfer any changes ( like the scaling ect) to the former CR2 from this latest one and see if that solves things. I tried poserizing it from DS and it only half solved the problem, so I think it would be best just to go back to a CR2 that I know works and transfer the scaling to it. But I will confer with odf and see what he wants to do.

cheers,

Mike.

strange, i have made the conforming cloths in poser Setup room  with Antonia but my clothes don't have the problem ?

phantom3D : i send you a pm with my email address can you send me the working cr2  ? i am curious about this problem

I did some simple morphs for her and saved it to a new a new cr2.  Below is a picture with some on. (I hope)  They are : Brow up-down
                                         Brow left-Up/down
                                         Brow Right-Up/Down
                                         Eyes Blink
                                        Eye Left Close
                                         Eye Right Close
                                         Mouth Smile
                                         Mouth Smile Left
                                         Mouth SMile Right
                                         Mouth Open
                                         Mouth Yell

I noticed the hip things as mentioned above, as well.  Haven't done much other testing,yet.  Been busy morphing.

Mike--PM me and I can send you the cr2 I did.

I think I may have found the problem, need to further investigate, but there are some deleted scale affectors in hip2 I don't know why that would effect the bends but maybe. who knows the strange workings of Poser........................

It's Poser's scale.  It's SO small in comparison to other apps, little things elsewhere are BIG things to Poser, and unnoticable things elsewhere are irritating in Poser! :laugh:  Poser always makes little thing big trouble.  It IS famous for it. :lol:

phantom3D: no need to go back to your original rig. It would be hard to mix in all the changes I made, anyway. To get the scaling to work, I had to do all kinds of subtle changes, not just the joint zones setups (which could have been transferred via a pose file). Also, there were a few small glitches such as incorrect rotation orders in that version that I've fixed in the meantime.

Anyway, I went through my old revisions and figured out what caused the problem, although I don't know why. It happened when I renamed some of the joint rotations. I don't see why that should be a problem, because I only changed the external names, but that's when the hip rotation starts to get wrong. I'll do some more investigating on this. If all else fails, going back to the original names for abdomen and hip2 will probably fix it.

Another thing I noticed is that if you do the rotation on the hipHandle instead of the hip actor, everything's fine. That means some library poses can't be used directly at the moment, but the same effect can be achieved by copying the rotation parameters from the hip to the hip handle and then zeroing out the hip rotation.

Oh, and I haven't yet bothered to hide any of the parameter dials because Poser seems to unhide them at random when you save a .cr2.

Quote -
Also... having the eye movement in the Head morphforms is good... but it would be a lot more realistic if the eyelids followed the movement (which is what V4 has for her). When I look up or down, it's not just my eyeball rotating, my lids move with the eyeball.

That's a good idea. The position of the edge of the upper eyelid in relation to the iris is significant. If it's low, the person looks sleepy, if it's high, alert. So if the eyes look up or down, the lids should follow in order to keep the expression the same.

By the way, when I looked at V4's face rig, many things seemed very familiar. I wouldn't be surprised to find a certain book on facial animation on her creator's desk.

Oh, and just so you know, I'm calling dips (sp?) on expression morphs and the face rig. Trying to make a head with a proper face rig was my main motivation for starting on Antonia. But then I guess I got carried away somehow.

Quote - It happened when I renamed some of the joint rotations. I don't see why that should be a problem, because I only changed the external names, but that's when the hip rotation starts to get wrong.

Oomph! I never wrote that. It's bullshit. I diff'ed the wrong pair of revisions there.

The problem occurred when I had Poser File Editor automatically clean up all the parameter names. Some of those 'cleanups' Poser doesn't quite agree with. But I should be able to find the one that caused the problem.

Okay, I fixed it. Joint channels that link to parents need to have certain internal names, unlike joint channels that link to children. I fixed that problem after I had introduced it, but forgot to do it for the hip because I hadn't realized the hip was not the root.

If you feel adventurous, you can apply the fix yourself by editing the .cr2 and changing 'hiphandle_jointx' to 'jointx', 'hiphandle_jointz' to 'jointz' and 'hiphandle_twisty' to 'twisty' in the hip channels. To be save, better work on a copy of the orginal file.