Quote -    You're welcome. No kisses. I'm happy to help with Antonia that's good for me.

You're a wise man. May you set an example. :thumbupboth:

Howdi,

I've been lurking for a few days and thought I'd de-lurk for a few comments...

@odf (and gang): Nice work!  I know how a multi-year project like this can be... it must be nice to be nearing a release.  Oh and congrats on the wedding :).  Also, Robert (kuroyume0161) knows the .pmd file format.. I think they are just g-zipped text (Poser) files of some sort.

@Believable3D: I wasn't crazy about your really dark one, but the latest one you posted (medium tone) looks great to me.

@Phantom3D: Nice/interesting work on the rigging... but I do have a basic/general observation and suggestion...

When you set up the 'exclusion' bars (the red ones), you seem to position them too far... you're putting them 'at' the body-part seam of the grandparent (or even into the grandparent a bit), but if you're going to do that, you might as well put them fully into the grandparent somewhere.

For discussion purposes (I'm not looking at the figure right now, so this may or may not be the best example), take the chest 'side-to-side' setting.  It's parent is the abdomen, so the chest joint can fully affect the abdomen, but it can't affect the grandparent at all (hip? hip 2?).  When you're setting the red bars for that movement, you should leave them 'slightly' inside the parent and not cross the parent/grandparent border.  Doing it this way will help keep you from getting 'sharp' transitions (at the parent/grandparent border) in extreme poses.

I'd also recommend that you play with the 'bulge' settings... they can come in handy at times, even creating... well... 'bulges' :) (body-fat type bulges that make bend look more natural).

The above are just my personal suggestions and meant to be constructive, so please take them in the spirit given (and with as many grains of salt as needed).

Cheers,

Keith

Yay for Dimension3D's tools and phantom3D's generosity! Making an FBM complete with pmd-based injection and removal poses from a morphed obj file was just a matter of seconds.

I'm so lovin these textures and morphs. They're totally bringing Antonia to life!

Great job Believable3D :thumbupboth:
Great job BluEcho :thumbupboth:

Quote - Here's a render of BluEcho's texture with vss3.

Has BluEcho's textures been released yet, or do you and Blu have the only copies?  I'd like to try them out,too.

odf and blu are the only two, who has the tex at present.
But odf can decide if it should be released only at time of developer edition or put on the developer for other's to play with. :)

@Spanki:  You are quite right, the red stops should in most cases be set inside the parent.  However in some bends, most notably the thigh, I have purposely taken the red stop line far past into the grandparent thereby taking it out of play and instead use the outer falloff zone as the stop. This is to avoid the infamous flatening of the top of the thigh, and works quite well.  But I have wondered if this type of thing may or may not cause problems with clothing? But so far rjjack has not mentioned any problems with it so I'm guessing it didn't.

Bulges: yes I should use them more.

@BluEcho: Fantastic! Just gorgeous. I also had a question for you, did any of the JCM's or bends I used in the rigging cause any particularly bad problems with stretching or strange distortion in the texture when it's posed? Would you say it's better or worse or about the same as most other figures in that respect?

Yeah, I hadn't really looked at the hip/thigh rigging yet, but yes... if you use the fall-off zones, then the bar-stops come into play less (but can still be used for fine-tuning).  I was mostly commenting about the head/neck/chest/abs/hip center-line parts that don't (always) use fall-off zones.

I woudn't worry about the fall-off / thigh thing messing up clothing - as long as it uses (starts with) a copy of the base rig, it should work pretty much the same as the figure (the zones may need adjusting depending on the bulkiness of the clothing though).

EDIT: ...speaking of the base rig and clothing... something to keep in mind is that you need to end up with a 'blank' or 'dev_base' or 'clothing_base' (or whatever you want to call it) copy of the rig that has all the JCM stuff ripped out - and supply this as a separate file, but part of the package for clothing developers.  Also, if you are using Poser Magnets for developing the JCMs (highly recommended), you should keep (and package) those magnets as well - that way, clothing developers can use them to create matching JCMs on thier clothing - same thing goes for any body morphs in general.

Spanki: I thought I had followed those rules in most areas of the rigging, but if I didn't, then my bad, cause I should have. I think the only center line fallofs I used were hip (which is actually the child of "Hiphandle" in this rig) and maybe the head I will check and adjust lines (what the heck are those lines called again?) as necessary.

"red bars" :)   I dunno... I'm sure there's a technical name for them, but I haven't had enough coffee yet today to remember/care. :)

**phantom3D, I haven't had much time to work on her lately.

Had to finish some other projects and tend to family stuff.**

Maybe I'll get to check this evening and let you know. :)

Thanks BluEcho.

Spanki:  I did indeed find some spots that were off, thank you, I will send the info to odf in a pose file he can apply.

Yay again for BluEcho. That texture is looking absolutely first-class!

I feel like an idiot.

Blu--you did a pro job on that texture.  If you're NOT a pro doing textures, you should be.  That IS some first class work, and I'm sorry I didn't say so before.  Wierd things were going on over here and I got distracted.  That's no excuse, just an apology for not heaping well deserved praise at your door.

Okay, I think I'm done messing in the Material room. I'll try to get these converted to user files and bundled up by tomorrow. The texture is not nearly as detailed as BluEcho's, although as I said earlier, I did use photos on key areas like face, palms, front and back of hands. So I think it will render pretty well, especially if you're using clothes. :)

It's only one texture set, but four material settings. From left: Basic (hardly anything going on for shaders etc), Pale, Medium, Dark. Click to view full size (2000x568px).

Those look great, Believable3D. Nice work on the materials.

Since you mentioned VSS earlier: has bagginsbill ever stated whether it's okay to distribute texture sets with VSS-based materials? I mean, I know he's working on some special shaders for Antonia, but I also know he' s a busy man. So Bill, if you could say something about your release plans and licensing policy, that would be very useful.

**Believable3D, that is a great looking set of textures.
And it's mostly done with shaders?
Wow!
I'm just now learning a few shader tricks.

One could take your set, do a bump map and displacements to really bring out details.

BTW: Love the morph.

Now how do I save out my head morph?

Joel, thank you for the praise. :)
I hope all your problems ease up soon.

phantom3D, I did run a check and I twisted her body this way and that way, no distortion of the texture and no stretching of the texture.

**

Regarding BluEcho's texture: I haven't done a lot of testing on it yet, but I saw a few small issues that I thought needed addressing. That's basically the reason I was stalling a bit. But I'll put the current version up on the developers' site later today.

Speaking of which: I haven't announced it here yet, but there is now a Google site for Antonia developers to share their work in progress. It's a private site - invitation only - because we know how much Poser people love collecting, and we don't want our unfinished work to pop up on an old harddrive a million years from now and embarrass us. :biggrin: Also, the developers' site should be open for people who want to show WIPs of commercial work and thus might appreciate a little secrecy.

So currently the rule is this: if you have made something substantial for Antonia - a texture, a pose set, a morph, some clothing, etc - and present proof for it, you can get an invite. The best proof obviously is sending me a zip file, but showing a render or two of Antonia with your product should be fine as well. After all, the reason for the site was to reduce the amount of bilateral emails.

So starkdog and rjjack, if you read this and are interested, give me a holler (and an email address). Anyone else who has made and posted stuff and isn't in yet: you might have to remind me. Sorry, the thread is long and my memory is short.

Thanks, BluEcho - yeah, that's my hope, is that this is a starting point that people can build on. There are no bump or displacement maps here - just textures and shaders.

odf, I thought I recalled Bagginsbill saying that work based on his was distributable, but yeah, it's definitely good to get that verified. It's probably buried somewhere in the big VSS thread if he said it, and that's a lot of wading.

Quote - Okay, I think I'm done messing in the Material room. I'll try to get these converted to user files and bundled up by tomorrow. The texture is not nearly as detailed as BluEcho's, although as I said earlier, I did use photos on key areas like face, palms, front and back of hands. So I think it will render pretty well, especially if you're using clothes. :)

It's only one texture set, but four material settings. From left: Basic (hardly anything going on for shaders etc), Pale, Medium, Dark. Click to view full size (2000x568px).

I love the last two.

odf, I'm trying to figure out these Poser Power Tools too. Have you found anything in there that will convert a .pmd based morph to just a pz2-based one? I know a guy could use the pmd, but I'm kinda still wanting to cater to DAZ Studio users.

Hm, I discovered that the Binary Morph Editor does this, but I must be doing something wrong, as the resulting pz2 file isn't working for me.

I dunno if I should bother with that. There's a script to use PMDs in DAZ Studio, anyway. The nice thing about the PMD head morph: my pz2 call is 1 kb, and the pmd with all the morphs is 59 kb. Pretty hard to beat that. Makes loading the morph a breeze - takes a split second. :)

If DAZ is smart, they'll add native binary support to Studio.

Hi Believable3D,  Did you know that Antonia's CR2 must have open channels to load a regular morph, so if you want to create inj/rem morphs of the regular kind you must put the channels in the cr2 for them to work. All the Daz figures come loaded with lots of extra channels for people to use for making morphs.

That explains why my morphs are crashing Poser Pro!

But that's not something I should be doing (Edit: i.e. adding channels to Antonia's cr2). odf needs to decide how many to put in there, so that everyone can use them.

Yup, there's probably nothing wrong with your morphs, they just need some channels in order to load.

Thanks phantom3D! I've been saying that several times, but I seem to be really bad at explaining things this week.

Well, I might need some help deciding if and how many empty channels I should put in there. It basically comes down to whether the tools people generally use expect those channels to have certain fixed names or not. If I understand correctly, PLH uses a special file format with a list of empty channels, which means it can in principle work with different channel names than the ones used by DAZ. If I use the DAZ names, I need to know which ones are reserved for DAZ use and which ones can be used by extensions.

I have to say I much prefer the pmd solution. P6 has been out for quite a while now, and apparently there's a way to make them work in D|S as well. So the question is, do we really need to support the clunky old way with the magically named empty channels?

I'm coming around to the idea of sticking with PMDs, but then again, I'm not a DS user. Being able to have your head morph at a cost of only 60 kb... that's pretty hard to beat.

I dunno. I guess what it boils down to is whether you're wanting to appeal to people who maybe aren't quite savvy enough or informed enough to find and run the necessary script to get PMDs to work in DS.

And odf, no doubt you were plenty clear about the channels... I was probably zoned out when I read that.

Here's another dumb question then... Is rsr just a thumbnail file for older versions of Poser? they won't see PNG images?

I think rsr's were thumbnail images but I think they were also able to contain other information.

Reading in this old Poser book, there were different kinds of RSR's. There were geometry RSR's and Poser RSR's and thumbnail RSR's. It also says they had a habit of becoming corrupted.

Hm. Maybe I'll just leave them in the folder. (They were generated by the app I used to create the material injections with.)

Okay, I believe Zuloni is ready to go, although I'm not entirely happy with the upper lip. For some reason, I'm having more trouble there with Antonia than I've had when doing V4 textures.

I'll upload the zip to the developer site momentarily.

Excellent!  I'm pretty good at posing this rig, so I thought I might put some pose sets together and upload those. It would be nice to have your textures so my pose PNG's will look good

The character set is there now.

I'm just working on a posed render at the moment. Maybe I can throw something in the gallery and attract some more attention to Antonia. (Not that a lot of people pay attention to my gallery... I think I'll sneak her into that thread at DAZ too.)

Too bad there's no clothes available yet.

(I'm gonna try another scene environment now. All my previous renders were without any props other than hair.)

Quote -
So starkdog and rjjack, if you read this and are interested, give me a holler (and an email address). Anyone else who has made and posted stuff and isn't in yet: you might have to remind me. Sorry, the thread is long and my memory is short.

pm send with the email

Quote - Er... what's going on here???? I haven't had any problems with my renders up to this point, but here, suddenly Zuloni turns invisible except for head and nails. What would cause this? Something in my shader interacting with the props in the scene?

(I'm gonna try another scene environment now. All my previous renders were without any props other than hair.)

That's weird! My first guess would be that you accidentally made the skinBody material zone transparent. Maybe tried to apply the 'invisible' material to something else and missed?

You mean in the scene? No, I didn't go in the material room after loading the figure. Not having the problem so far with any other props or scenes. I'll have to go back in there and look again, but I'm mystified.

The fact that the nails are visible but the fingers and toes aren't means that it's a material problem. Check the skinBody material and see if it looks right. If not, see if reloading her materials fixes it. We need to know what's wrong before we can try to figure out what causes it.

Quote - Excellent!  I'm pretty good at posing this rig, so I thought I might put some pose sets together and upload those. It would be nice to have your textures so my pose PNG's will look good

A pose set would be great. I would make one, but I don't have the patience. Usually I just do an ad hoc pose for every render, so after a year or two I might have enough for a set. :biggrin:

Okay so I've decided to make a skin and maybe some clothes for Antonio. So I do my uv test of coloring each part of the uv map a diff color and then applying it to the figure as a texture so that I can see where all the parts fit. Everything looked okay, except that the scalp was not textured properly in that it was partly blank and partly covered by the face. I then loaded Antonio into uvm pro and discovered why - the scalp section is overlapping the face section.

Yeah, odf, I'll look again later. Right now I'm rendering the scene I put together afterward... which will probably have to run overnight, since my little spot render took a good 10 minutes.

We need clothes!!!

tlc, glad to see your jumping in. Just so you know: The name is Antonia. Antonia is a boy's name. :)

ACK! AntoniO is a boy's name. Blech.

LOL. That'll teach me not to start a project at 3 in the morning ;) BTW - I just found the scalp on the body uvmap....

News to me, unless she was remapped....

The version I have downloaded is "Antonia-Preview_37101.zip". This is the version currently in the file-locker. The scalp is at the top right of the body uv map. In uvm pro if I delete everything except for all the head bits then the scalp overlaps part of the left side of Antonia's face uv. Maybe you got an earlier version?

My first scenic render with Antonia is now in the gallery... not closeup, mind you....

www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php