...third time's a charm... I was thinking of a tool by CodeTwister.

" This program allows you to create new morphs for your Poser characters in an easy and powerful way.

*Morph Master works directly with your existing Poser CR2 or CRZ files and will automatically create full body morphs in order to link the new morphs that you create across various body groups in your figure. You can load a CR2 and pose it like Poser does, or load a Poser PZ2 file directly, and then modify the geometry to make a morph. You can also load multiple CR2's at the same time and conform one to another to make a morph for all the characters together. Or, use one as a template for the others. You can modify an existing morph target in your character, or take merge several morphs into one.

You can also use the pose engine to make morphs for correcting the behavior of joints such as the elbow, knees, or hip joint. Or, make morphs to improve the behavior of your clothes when they conform to the body in particular poses.*

The operations that you use to make the modifications to the mesh are stored by the program in a list. You have maximum flexibility in handling the list of operations, you can go back to one operation and modify its parameters, delete an operation, or even insert new operations in the middle of the list. "

Spanki, that sounds fantastic. Just cross your fingers I can get this thing to work for me.

pjz99: I normally use Wings3D. I'd probably use that for JCMs as well, but for some other morphs I'm thinking about switching to Blender.

Ex-cellent! ::rubs hands::

I downloaded the MorphMaster demo and worked through the quickstart tutorial. I can load and pose Antonia, move things around and change the shape. That's much further than I ever got with D|S. The workflow is different from what I'm used to, but it looks like one has a lot of control, so this program should be very useful. The demo does of course has save disabled, so I'll have to trust that the morphs this creates actually work. But so far it looks very promising. I'll buy it tomorrow and do some real tests.

More tips are still appreciated, though. I don't think one can have too many tools for this kind of thing.

Sitemail Philc, since he has made dozens of figures and knows more about poser than a dozen of regular mavens and learned folks, and ask for his two cents.  I know his two cents are more valuable than my twenty bucks.

Dimension3d's stuff I do not know at all.  Philc's I know an am in respectful awe of.

Hi;
I got a working morph of my old Antonia's face and fine tuning the texture.

I posted some questions on the developer's site, BTW.

Joel, I edited my web site and changed the background.
It still needs some overhauling when I get more time, which lately, I'm in short supply of...sigh.

Quote - Ex-cellent! ::rubs hands:: ...  The demo does of course has save disabled, so I'll have to trust that the morphs this creates actually work. But so far it looks very promising. I'll buy it tomorrow and do some real tests. ...

I bought it quite a while ago, but only played around with it briefly at the time (got distracted by other projects) - I don't recall any problems off-hand.  You might do some forum searches to see if anything popped up about it and/or IM him to see if there are any issues with P7 files (I think it was written in P6 times).  Then again, I recommend doing all of your work for "P5" as a target - then you can still user the Material Room, but target a wider audience.

@ Blue--saw, liked it!  The blue moons are mystical and mysterious, NOT irritating.  Very cool!
Are any textures out anywhere?

How do you feel about going back to the standard mapping for the lashes? Reason I ask is because Im having trouble not getting stretching and or clumping with the current straight mapping. Im not sure this it's so good for textures. Im curious to see what Baggins Bill comes up with. I know he was working on some procedural lashes ealier in the thread.

Here are is a comparison pic in blender of the current straight mapping and standard mapping ( curved ). Notice how much distortion the straight mapping has. I think with the current straight mapping your going to have distortion problems with textures.
To be honest I will probably re-map it ( atleast for my own renders ) unless Baggins comes up with a shader that works better for close ups.I know straighting Uv's on something that naturally curves can be notoriously difficult ( if not impossible ) to get distortion free.
 

JB123: Hmm, I wonder if it's the straightening itself or the incorrect aspect ratio I used that causes the problems. If I kept the lashes straight but changed the aspect ration as to minimize distortion, would that help?

Looking at your re-mapped lashes, it doesn't look like straightening those out should introduce that much distortion.

I'm happy to take a vote on this one.  If we go back to curved maps for the lashes, I can always supply masks for procedural shaders, so it's no big deal.

Just jumping in for the moment, but isn't there too much Gc in that render?  The skin texture looks somewhat grayish, something I have seen when you over Gamma Correct with darker skin.

Quote - JB123: Hmm, I wonder if it's the straightening itself or the incorrect aspect ratio I used that causes the problems. If I kept the lashes straight but changed the aspect ration as to minimize distortion, would that help?

Looking at your re-mapped lashes, it doesn't look like straightening those out should introduce that much distortion.

I'm happy to take a vote on this one.  If we go back to curved maps for the lashes, I can always supply masks for procedural shaders, so it's no big deal.

I think your right it could very well be the aspect ratio causing the distortion. I still think there will be some but not nearly as much. I think what you said would work.

Quote - Just jumping in for the moment, but isn't there too much Gc in that render?  The skin texture looks somewhat grayish, something I have seen when you over Gamma Correct with darker skin.

Yes it is very CG looking. It was the lighter texture I used and I washed it out with too high IBL and I played around with VSS settings badly. I only posted it to reference the lashes. It wasn't a "hey look at how real this looks" just a Im having problems with lashes but the Zuloni character with my asian eyes morph looks pretty cool pic. :)

It does indeed look pretty cool.

Quote - Heres a pic with B3D's Zuloni charcter/texture mixed with my asian eyes morph and VSS applied. Cool stuff works quite well with Zuloni. Great character and texture btw. For the lashes I had to use the lashes shader OFD did but I still get too much smear/clumping than I'd like.

Cool. Glad to see it's being used, but I still have to address the issue mentioned a couple of pages back - I have the scalp using the head map instead of the body. (It's not likely anybody will know the difference unless they start doing more detail work on the textures.) I promise I will fix it, but this week I've been migrating a whole bunch of web sites from one server to another, so haven't taken any "Antonia time."

Oh, and I meant to offer kudos on those eyes. They look very natural, JB.

Sorry, what was the question? :)

Hey, Phil!  Sorry, but we are an excited and chatty lot. :laugh: On the previous page (45), after my last post about JCMs, there was some confusion about the best way to do joints, fall-off zones and the JCMs over the joints. This is a learning experience for most of us (Like me, more learning than otherwise) and we need some guidance among all the other input.

We're just trying to do the absolute best on this figure, and we got inspired.  ....AND chatty.  Did I mention that? :lol:

Hi Phil! My original question was whether there was a program other than DAZ setup tools - which I can't get to work on my machine - that would let one model JCMs directly on the posed figure. Better yet: take the pose and the posed and morphed mesh and reconstruct the required deltas from it, so that one could use ones favourite modeler to make the JCMs. Also, I hypothesized about ways to do it that wouldn't involve intimate knowledge of every detail of Poser's posing process.

Then, apparently, we got chatty.

Just a note that I've finally got around to uploading the properly-referenced MATs for Zuloni to the developers Google site (i.e. scalp now references body rather than head map). That's the only change made. Hopefully all works well.

@JoelGlaine, that texture is among others in a pack on my sharecg page... http://www.sharecg.com/pf/SaHaNi It's a freebie set. :)

Thank you!  I'd have never thought to look on Sharecg! I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. WHICH pack? Can you make it clearer?  I can't tell which pack has the Antonia texture in it. Sorry.  I saw stuff for V2, V3 and Miki and Kate....but nothing for Antonia. Spotting stuff is not my long suit.

If it makes you feel any better, Joel - I have no idea where it is there, either.

The only recent ones I saw there were for the Mil Dragon and Mil Cat. Antonia's texture is not in the Cat package-I didn't look in the dragon one..

The Antonia texture is not there. odf has it. He can release it anytime he chooses or wait and let it go with the pack. The BlueMoon background is there in a backgrounds pack. I still need a bit of work before the new Antonia set is ready but I will release her on the developer's site for testing when finished. That will be soon. :) @Believable3D...are the Zuloni shaders going to be available as a resource? And will it be free or retail? I love how it makes my new Antonia tex look. :)

Honestly, other than the basic one, the Zuloni shaders are just my adaptation of Bagginsbill's default VSS skin shader until it looked good with an African texture. (Extensive adaptation, to be sure, but an adaptation nonetheless.) Pretty hard for me to sell something using what BB has provided for free. :)

I'm curious to see how those shaders look on a Caucasian texture... wouldn't have thought they would look that good, but of course I never tried it.

The Zuloni set as a whole is a freebie. I don't have any licensing info in the zip, but my thought is that it can be used: (1) as is; (2) with additional modifications for the user's own amusement; and (3) as a resource for further more detailed freebie textures/characters for Antonia. As it's a freebie, I don't want it to be the base for retail textures (frankly, I doubt it's high enough quality to suffice for that, anyway).

I'll do a render and show how it looks on my Antonia texture. :)

Yeah, the basic MAT isn't involved at all, so mostly what you'll see there is your natural texture (which is looking very good!).

I don't want to burst your bubbles and I know CG is hard and all but that render looks as "good" as the real-time renders from 10 year old video games. :)

@bagginsbill, actually if you take a longer look, what with me forgetting to change my lighting, you'll see that it isn't as good as a ten year old video game render...lol.

Harsh, BB!

For the record, my "good" was in reference to the texture, not the render in particular, which BluEcho seemed to indicate was just a quickie. And honestly, I don't really have particularly high hopes from that basic shader she (?) applied.

bagginsbill: I now demand a photorealistic render of a bubble being burst.

Careful. He'll do it. :)

Well let's hope it's not  too realistic, it might be a bubblegum bubble. :)

Which video games!?!?!? All I have are ten year old video games and none of them look that good, dammit.  I knew I was playing the wrong ones. I need better old video games.:laugh:

bagginsbill, any chance we could distribute Antonia with a material that uses this texture and vss3 shaders or some derivatives thereof? I'll happily to accept any licence restrictions you require.

I think the weakest link now is the lip bump.

Also, everyone who said seams were worse than distortion should have a good look at those freckles on the nose and cheeks. :tongue1:

Love the dress, Starkdog. I hope you can fix that little problem with the seams. I know next to nothing about the dynamic clothes, unfortunately.

Hey guys, here's an update on the stuff I'm doing for her. I have put my wip pix at sites.google.com/site/tlcprojects/Home/rebecca Any comments would be appreciated.

Starkdog - have you tried them as constrained groupings in the cloth room?

Last thing - where is the developer's site? As I would rather post stuff there for the other developers to see.

Well, show me your Google site, and I'll show you mine. :-) (Google says I have insufficient privileges.)

Seriously, show me/us a reminder of what it is you're doing (long thread and short memory) and send me a site mail or email (to Antonia.Polygon on GMail) with your email address. The developers site is invitation only at this point.

Whoops. Okay you should be able to view it now. I also forgot to ask about morphs. Will Antonia have channels or should we make them as needed? Or is there an alternate way of distributing morphs?

I am working on:
 A character - Rebecca
Hair fits
Tee-shirt - dynamic cloth
Capris - conforming item
Shoes - not started yet.

This list will probably grow as time permits.

Looks good, tlc! Let me know your email address and I'll send you an invitation to the developers site.

As for channels, I haven't added any yet. My preferred way of injecting morphs would be via pmd files, which can create their own channels on loading, but don't work on P5 or earlier. So far I haven't heard any loud protests. If we decide we need P5 support for Antonia, we might still think about using Python scripts to create the channels, since I don't think the system with the fixed set of empty channels is a good way of promoting a mix-and-match mentality for morph sets.

Thx, odf. I've sent you an email. I'll get to work on pmd's - I've always tried to avoid them so I haven't tried them yet but there's a tut at nerds I'll check out

Yep, the tutorial at nerd's should tell you all you need to know. As long as you don't do FBMs, it should all be fairly straightforward.

At the moment, we're all improvising a bit, but I imagine there'll be a special cr2 for developers at some point - with the JCMs removed and some blank channels added so people who use pre-P6 tools for making FBMs and such don't need to buy new tools. If all else fails, you can always send me your obj or modified cr2 and I'll create the necessary files for INJ/REM.

Poor Gram Tia is a little put out with hubby.
Always the practical joker, he laid out a karate belt instead of towels and a wash cloth for her,

Don't know if you already know this. Dimension3D's Poser File Editor can convert morphs to pmds and make the pose file for it, this includes fbm's. Just made one and it is so easy - no brains required :) Check it out at www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php

Yeah, I got that in my wish list until I get some extra spending money. :)

Oopsie, if an admin is watching this thread, how do I edit my above post with image.

I forgot to check the nudity tag.