Okay...   this is my situation. I've have an original figure created from Hiro Toon which of course was created from Hiro Base. What I need to do, it get the original teeth from the Hiro Base through to my final character created from the Hiro Toon. I can do this easily enough in Lightwave, but I need it for use in Poser (Pro) in order to create morph targets for phonemes, expressions and such.

Is there a relatively painless way to do this? If so, can anyone explain how? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks!

I'm not familiar with the figures you mention, but it would seem to me you could export what you want and re-import it to Poser, then in the Setup Room load the figure you want. Only the bones will come through and assuming the groups are the same, the teeth will work. You can delete the excess bones.

Is this what you mean? I'm really not sure. Could you clarify?

Don't forget to use the "ZBrush mode" when exporting body parts from Lightwave for Poser as OBJ, else you lose the polygon and vertex grouping data with the "new and improved" (snicker) LW OBJ export.

Mike, Thanks for answering! I'll try to explain better. Unfortunately I'm not well-versed at all in the Setup room and how grouping works. We primarily just use Poser as a base and bring everything into LW.

First, I can use Lightwave5.5 to import/export any OBJ files. Essentially, what I need to do is ONLY replace the teeth from the Toon Hiro with the teeth from the base Hiro model. I wish it was as simple as opening one OBJ, altering it, and replacing it - but apparently Poser won't allow this since there must be more in the OBJ file than LW can see.

The new model we created from the Hiro Toon character apparently refences the Hiro Toon OBJ. So we figured if we altered the Hiro Toon character with the replaced teeth, our new character would have the correct teeth. But we can't find a way to easily accomplish this.

Any ideas?  ;)

I've done such things in the past, but I'm not real sure at the moment. Too distracted and busy with other things to think or experiment right now.
Hopefully you'll get a good answer before I can reply again, but I'll do some experiments tomorrow and get back to you.
I don't have any of the Hiros, but I do understand what you're trying to accomplish, and I know there's a workaround simpler than having to deal too much with the setup room.

I can wait a day or two.  :)

ANY insight would be MOST helpful. I've been working for MANY months on this project and for some reason I didn't realize that the Toon teeth just don't quite cut it. The original teeth are more realistic and will work much better.

I look forward to hearing from you Mike - or anyone else who knows who to do this as simply and painlessly as possible!

open the original figure in poser. Export. select the head (or teeth if separate, I don't think so on that figure but I dont use it) Take the resulting obj into LW. remove the bits you don't want. Stick the dentures into HiroToons head. After that its up to you, I know not LW rigging :)

Lyrra

Lyrra,  Thanks, but I already CAN do it in Lightwave. It's easy to bring in the original Hiro base figure, remove the teeth, and replace the Hiro Toon teeth with the Hiro Base teeth. That's not the problem. I need to use the figure (HiroToon with Hiro Base teeth) in Poser in order to create the phonemes and gestures for morph targets in LW. I already tried replacing JUST the teeth and resaving as OBJ, but apparently I lose everything that Poser uses to morph the figure.

Since the teeth are part of the head mesh in the mil 3 figures there really is no way of subtracting one set of teeth and adding another that I know of without loosing the morphs because you would be changing the mesh, and for morphs to work the mesh needs to retain the same point order as the original.

Yeah, what wdpre said. :-)

Like I said, I don't have any of the Hiro figures, but I'd imagine they're about the same deal as any other DAZ figure.
What I would do is first, make the "bad" teeth (and gums) completely transparent, or better yet, use LW to may a morph to make them really tiny and out of the way.
Then export the teeth you want from LW, into Poser, so you have only the teeth open up in Poser. When you export from LW make sure the OBJ_UV_map is selected in the surface editor under UV maps, or else it won't follow through in the export. (Why on earth are you using LW 5.5 anyway?)
So then with the teeth object ONLY open in Poser, click on the Setup Room thingie and ignore any warnings.
Then in the Setup Room just draw a couple of bones for the teeth, one for the upper, one for the lower. It may be a good idea to spread them out a bit prior to export. You can let autogroup do its thing and you'll at least have teeth you can control with bones and you can save the new teeth figure in Poser and later parent it to the other figure you want.
The unfortunate thing is, as wdpre pointed out, none of the former morph targets will work, and you'll have to make your own.
There really is no painless way to do what you want. You're either going to have to build a whole new figure, or plan on at least mkaing your own morphs.

I'm not going to delete what I wrote above or edit it, but after re-reading what you seem to want to do, I doubt my suggestion will help.
You're using Poser to Pose and animate him talking, planning on using the scene export form S-M or Kurv to get it into LW, aren't you? So that's why you need all the morphs to work in Poser, so it all follows through in the export.
I suppose you could do the above, but you'd still have to build your own teeth morphs, and you'd have a second figure to have to export. I don't know how either of those plugins work, so I can't help there, and I can't get the smith micro scene export thing to work to try it out on something.

Personally I think you'd be better off just  assembling your new mesh in Lightwave and using the  BGtoMorph plugin to add the MTs you want to your new figure and animating it entirely in Lightwave. (9.6, not 5.5). ;-)

But yeah, that's really time consuming, and probably not want you want to do. Can't you just make new morph targets for the "bad" teeth to make them closer to what you want?

Thanks guys. It looks as if I'll just have to replace the teeth in LW. Unless of course there is someone out there who would tackle this for pay?  :)

I currently use LW9.6, but we still use 5.5 for use with several LScript macros that only work in 5.5 - for archviz purposes. We've also used PolyTrans for getting the correct UV info in and out of LW on ocassion.

We ARE animating everything in LW. What we're doing is exporting OBJ stills of all phonemes and gestures and using Background to Morph in LW to create all of the endomorphs. No PLK plugins or anything of the like. We've already got a great Skelegon rig - courtesy of Maestro2 - and everything works pretty well. We've even used an older LW plugin called PoseMixer to easily animate the hands and things have been going pretty smoothly. It's just these simple-looking teeth that I've decided do not work for this project. Realistic-looking teeth will work much better.

We'll just end up creating all of the phonemes and gestures with the current figures and replace the teeth in LW for each morph. A pain, yes, but at least it's a workable solution.

Though...  if there is anyone who thinks they CAN recreate these figures with the same working morphs as the original figures, we would be willing to pay for this service. It entails replacing the HiroToon3 fake teeth with the Hiro3 Base teeth.

Thanks again!

I would tackle it by making the material group-teeth for the toon teeth invisible. Then i would grab the teeth from Hiro and make them a morphing prop, parented to the head. a simple open, close morph is all you need. 

It may be posible in Lightwave to slave the teeth morph to the head morph through motion-mixer but I am not sure. It wont add a lot to animation time if you cant.

That should leave all the head morphs intact.  

AS has been said , remove the teeth and you are likely to mess up the head vertex order.

It MAY be possible to identify and replace the vertices from the teeth but I would not try it myself , unless I was REALLY bored .

I've just decided to replace all of the teeth in LW. It's taking some time, but at least it looks good and I still have a base to go with. It would have been easier had I been able to do this quickly in Poser, but this is probably the next best thing.

Thanks for all of the replies!