thedutchview:
Excellent! Keep us posted.  I dont have DP, but 3D Coat instead I am hopefull that it will work much the same. Have not tried the texturing features yet, so keeping my fingers crossed.

odf: Watching the dev on this new JCM applications with interest. This is becoming quite the inovative project. Many new developments for Poser figures.

I have a tip for you phantom :) for example if your photoreference has small lips please morph antonias lips also in a smaller size. youll have less frustrations, oh and btw color edit the photos before hand in photoshop so the have approx. the same color and color out any bright areas if there are any:)

now that's a lot of new information and things going on!!

First of all these jcm for the legs: Top, simply top! If you do something you do it completely, right?!

@BlueEcho: Cool - we'll get an Antonia-Vampi! Congrats on figuring out how to create the veins - I am curious how this will look when it's finished!

...and more textures! Awesome work, almost scary how realistic the skin looks!

@shante: You can always sample the textures down to get them to work on an older computer. That's by far better than increasing a smaller texture for use with faster computers and/or close-ups what can end up with a kind of pixel-puree. Off of that is it far easier to do detailed work in a large format when creating the textures.

Thanks for the tip thedutchview, I am working on Brad my first model, but after I make a texture for him I may make one for Antonia too along with a character, I was thinking of giving her some wings and either make her an Angel-Valkyre (SP?) or a she fiend, perhaps a female draconian, something different anyway. I have CS2, I have looked at the new CS4, it supposedly does better shadow adjustments but too much money for me right now.

cheers,
Mike.

P.S. Maybe a female centaur?

that's a lovely texture.
i wanted to say that i opened Antonia obj in a 3d program, and i started remapping her for zbrush.
i still have to see if it's actually working properly in zbrush. :)
if it does, i'll have to figure out how to distribute it, if someone would be interested.**
**

I would definitly be interested if you can get her to work in Zbrush and find a way to transfer the morphs (if I got you right on what you plan).

no, i was talking about remapping the uv to all be on one map, so that you can texture easily in zbrush.

Ahhhh, I see!!

phantom3D

I will have a look at coat 3D:) who knows maybe i like it too:) btw how are you going to uv map your model? or how is it uv-mapped? is it lscm-mapped? i think thats one of the better head map techniques :)

i meant that deep paint 3d works best with PS CS2 it has issues with other versions and you get weird artifacts on the texture:)

Quote - Impressed!

The big 150degree should be fun. Do you flatten the calf and thigh groups or just let it dive into the back of the thigh..? I've not seen the new DAZ tools so I'm out of the loop.

Oh, I'll definitely flatten, but I'll probably allow a little bit of intersection still. That's usually better than leaving a gap. The nice thing about the cascading JCMs is that I can start with the flatting at the point where the thigh and calf would actually start bumping into each other. If you use just one JCM for the whole range, it's either/or: flatten too much and you get weird shapes on the small angles, flatten too little and you get incontrollable interesections up to the point where the mesh breaks.

Fortunately, I have a nice edge loop were the thigh and shin meet, so it's very easy for me to hide either part in Wings3D.

Quote - I've followed this thread for a very long time. i made a very early head/neck texture for Antonia:) so a lot of things are still going to change. I made the texture in deep paint 3d, as you see there are no seams on the neckline etc ( i stil have to do the hair better though) I hope you like it

That's impressive work! The model looks kind of familiar, too. :biggrin: I have to say I find it easier to get things lined up in a 2d program. I'd probably do most of the work in Gimp or Photoshop and only switch to 3d to clean up the seams. But that's just me, and I don't have much experience with texturing yet, anyway. I guess everyone works a bit different, and it's good if we have tools to support our preferences.

Looking forward to seeing how your texture evolves.

Quote - phantom3D

I will have a look at coat 3D:) who knows maybe i like it too:) btw how are you going to uv map your model? or how is it uv-mapped? is it lscm-mapped? i think thats one of the better head map techniques :)

Well, the trouble with lscm is that it only takes angles into account, not lengths or areas. So you have to use rather small charts for it to work properly. That's fine if you use a 3d program for texturing, anyway. But it seems like most people who do texturing in the Poserverse prefer Photoshop, and thus large charts with few seams. I found that the only usable tool under such circumstances was UVLayout, and even that leaves much to be desired. All the lscm-based stuff requires a humungous amount of fiddling to get usable results.

Hmm ODF... the advantage of a 3d package with projection mode is, if the model is not that well uvmapped or relaxed enough( mill 3 figures or elle) the projection mode is fixing these problems. if you are done and afterwards alter them again in ie Photo Shop you will loose the correction and thing will look not right. with v4 there is nothing wrong, her uv map is very well done.

btw lscm is not hard, use roadkill uv and it will be done automatically very easy to do. only takes a couple of minutes:) and roadkill is free, i already talked about it with Mike :)

No seriously! Least square conformal mapping cannot work unless one chops up the UV into nice small pieces. The original authors never claimed it could, either, which is why they presented a method to find such nice pieces in the very same paper.

If you want to map more complicated charts in one go, you have to use iterative methods like the one in UVLayout. Seriously, if you've every tried UVLayout, everything else on the market - including Blender and Houdini, for what it's worth - looks just pathetic.

Side note: Roadkill doesn't work on my machine, anyway. If I got a penny for every free, badly written WIndows-only program, I'd be rich.

As for the point you make about projection mode: completely agreed. If done right, it's the best way to avoid or componsate for distortion. With a software that provides a good interface for aligning the source images with the model, I can't imagine any easier way to texture. I was just talking about my personal experience with a very limited selection of software. DeepPaint is a bit outside the range of what I'm willing to pay for 3d software, so I can't say anything about it.

ive looked into 3d coat and it is very promising:) i tried the demo of bodypaint and it wasnt my cup of tea at all:) so i tried the demo of deep paint 3d and although im not a Mec4d or something its coming along nicely i think

I'm not quite happy with the front outline of the thigh yet. Also, the geometry hidden in the crease is pretty messy. I'll have to go back and forth between angles a number of times until this works, and then I'll probably make new versions of the earlier JCM stages based on this one.

Oops! I was actually confusing DeepPaint with BodyPaint. How embarrassing! I don't know how much DeepPaint costs. I'll see if I can get the demo to run. Always interested in new 3d toys.

PS: No offense regarding the lscm stuff. If you have my background, all the commonly used methods just look ridiculous. Even UVLayout isn't something that impresses me. So discussions about UV mapping software tend to have me ranting a lot. I should probably just bite my tongue.

No mesh crinkle. Not even V4 can do that.

You'll soon hit the "do I shorten the leg lengths to keep the feet under her butt" problem.

Nice work. And very helpful to new modelers. And some kind of workflow to get through this maze of softwares... maybe.

Since I know diddly about UV mapping, your rant falls on deaf ears. :laugh:  Wow....in this case, ignorance IS bliss!  Sonnaofabeech! I'm living a cliche'!

 
 BTW...That leg really IS impressive!  Yow! @__@ Amazing!

The knee bend in motion:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqUMtscO5gk

Wow, that looks great!

I wanted to do a couple renders of the new tex I'm doing but got to finish fixing my computer probs first.

But I will get them rendered soon.

I deleted the old one and put one up that shows the sequence five times, which I imagine is a bit more useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhq0s47--5U

More video practice:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBDS30dQxmQ

[/lurk mode]
 

WOW!   Realistic knees!

She's lookin' great!

[lurk mode]

I think this version of the knee bend might actually do for the first round. Encouraged by my success, I shall try the same technique on the hip bend to make it look good at up to 150 degrees or so.

I thought I'd give some more details on how I did it. In the following I'm assuming that you are familiar with how JCMs and, more generally, ERCs work.

The basic idea was to use cascading JCMs for the bend. So instead of one, I used three JCMs for this bend, lets call them A, B and C. So let's just talk about what I wanted to see, and then how I achieved it.

Up 90 degrees, only A is active and B and C stay at 0%. A reaches 100% at 90 degrees and then stays at 100%. Between 90 and 120 degrees, A and B are active. B reaches 100% at 120 degrees and then stays at 100%. You can now imagine what C does. In effect, I get a smooth transition between four shapes, including the normal one at 0 degrees.

In tabular form:

Get the idea?

So A needs to increase by 1.0 while the angle increases by 90, which means I slave it to the rotation channel with a factor of 1.0 / 90 = 0.011111. Then I just set the limits for A to 0.0 and 1.0, and A is done with. Now B is supposed to grow from 0.0 to 1.0 between 90 and 120 degrees, which means the factor for B must be 1.0 / 30 = 0.033333. So far, so simple.

But supposing that B starts with the value 0.0 at 0 degrees, with that factor it would already be at 3.0 when the angle is 90 degrees. Not good! So I have to make sure it starts with a nominal value of -3.0 at 0 degrees. Then when I set the limits for B to 0.0 and 1.0 as well, it will effectively stay at 0.0 until the angle reaches 90 degrees. But simply setting it to -3.0 as an initial value doesn't seem to work very well. So the trick I'm using at the moment is to add a channel with the name "one" to the BODY actor and set it up so its value is always ... wait for it ... 1.0. Then I slave my morph B to that channel as well with a factor of -3.0.

Okay, you see now where this is going. For morph C, I need a 100% increase between 120 and 150 degrees, so the factor is again 0.033333. That factor gives me a value of 4.0 at 120 degrees, so I slave my C morph to the "one" channel with a factor of -4.0. Et voila!

The beauty if this scheme is that it works for any number of intermediate shapes, and with the DAZ setup tools, it is in fact fairly easy to rig. I'm happy to go into more detail if anyone has questions.

UBER-fantastic! WOW!  I think you're on the cusp for some realistic movement here!  Virtual humans have always been a bug-a-boo in CGI, but Antonia is starting to really move like a REAL human. Sort of creepy in one regard, but is startlingly awesome in another.  Keep at it man!  Damn, I'm excited, now!

Are you using the Advanced Figure Setup tool or the economy version?

those videos are fantastic!
This is going to be one super fantastic model.
I'm happy to be part of development, even if mine is just textures and an occasional morph.

All these things going on and what I see now from those extremely impressing videos give me the feeling to be a small part in something really amazing!! WOW!!
@thedutchview: that's a really nice eyewhite - so I'll keep it

Danke schön. Es ist mein eigenes Auge

BluEcho

Morphs and textures are very important for a model to become succesfull;)

Sure and if I take a look at Antonia, impressive, better then each and every Vicky even in this pre-beta stage. Great job! She'll be at least as popular as Apollo is and the JCM technology is a new stage of making figures, invented by talented artists and not by the big companies like DAZ and SM.

Oh, ein Nachbar!! Bedauerlicherweise ist Dein Deutsch weit besser als mein Holländisch obwohl ich von hier aus in drei Stunden in Amsterdam bin...

You betcha, Jules!  I'm all in favor of that! :laugh:

This whole project's just too exciting. Kneebends are wonderful.

Quote - Are you using the Advanced Figure Setup tool or the economy version?

I needed MorphLoaderPro, PropertyEditor and Cr2Exporter, so I had to get the bundle (which costs only marginally more than Advanced anyway).

MorphLoaderPro is the one that can import morphs which were sculpted on the posed figure. PropertyEditor is also very useful, because it lets one change a parameter in several actors at once. It also provides a very easy way of defining ERC dependencies.

I kind of despise DAZ's marketing strategies, but by making the setup tools available, they did a great thing for developers.

Quote - I made  a sample eye texture:) feel free to use it

I have to agree with SaintFox. That is indeed a handsome eyewhite.

One small thing: it's probably wiser to give the back of the eyeball (i.e. the little dot in the corner) the same reddish tint as the outer bits of the front instead of painting it black.

Edit: Oops! The PNG Bild era demasiado big. Yo musste JPEG lo first.

(CONTROVERSIAL): Just something to think about.Is this a workaround for the lousy Poser rigging system or is it simply making the best of poser? As allways the best things in Poser are invented by skilled community members not the software company itself.It feels like an open sorce app somehow- except you have to pay 500 dollars for Poser Pro.-However I love the Antonia Project and I am watching every step here.

Actually, I've made peace with Poser's rigging system over this project. We don't have weight painting - big deal! You can't get realistic bends just with weight painting. You need JCMs  - or shapekeys or whatever else they might be called outside the Poser world - anyway.

It's not the rigging system itself that's lousy - it's Poser's support for setting up figures that is.

In other words, I vote for your second alternative.

I often wonder how easy or complicate it is to set up other figures like DAZ's V3  or SM's G2 figures with that Antonia rigging.

I'm still working on my new tex but because of transferring computers, I have very little space on my main disk.
When I do work in Photoshop, it saves a copy of the psd to the documents folder on my main drive.
And there isn't space enough there right now to hold much.
I'm going to upgrade it to larger hd soon.

odf, That shoulder is looking great.
She is looking better and better. :)

Okay, somewhat off topic question, but since there are some Poser gurus hanging around this thread..

I'm trying to make a pose file that turns off visibility of a bodypart of a figure and one that turns them back on..  that in and of itself isn't hard but it's the exta things that are getting me..   I can get the visibility and the shadow casting off and on but I can't for the life of me find the code for turning off visible in raytracing.

So far I got this:

actor hip
 {
 off
 VisibleInRaytracing 0  *<-- Not working, wrong code
*castsShadow  0
 }

Do any of you know know what the code is for that?

Hmmm...
I am am using this so far (here: for V4's eyebrow)
{

version
   {
   number 4
   }
actor eyeBrow:1
   {
   off
   }
}

Now I am curious if I missed something...

yep, that doesn't turn off visible in raytracing or cast shadows.

Okay... I will stay tuned to see what others may recommend!

Got it..  I reverse engineered a prop file and figured it out.

to turn it off:

actor hip
{
off
hidden 1
castsShadow 0
includeInDepthCue 0
visibleInReflections 0
visibleInRender 0
}

to turn it on:

actor hip
{
on
hidden 0
castsShadow 1
includeInDepthCue 1
visibleInReflections 1
visibleInRender 1
}