to the nice looking figure in the ad?  lol

I mean, how do you get from the butt ugly Alyson to the nice looking figure in the ad? Need to send my kbd back to school.

Which ad?

The one at smith micro.

Oh the box cover? We don't know. The person who did that is not a Rendo forum poster, I assume.

Thanks, and thanks for getting the update out.

I would suppose you do it the same way Poser people have been doing that sort of thing for over a decade - morph it out of her...

Post working real hair onto the finished image helps too! 

What do you think?

Very  nice.  I like her better than anything I've done so far.

Also though, BB, have you possibly encountered a glitch in the face room?  EClark and I
have both experienced Alyson's neck becoming very long and her teeth sticking out through
the bottom of her chin after we exit the face room, then re-enter to continue making changes.

I think it happens after chin adjustments actually.

P8's on my other machine so I'm going to try to reproduce it tomorrow.

PS ... EClark's message is on this thread .....

www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

I started using the morph tool, since I exhausted the possibilities with the built-in morphs.

Here's where I'm at. Mine versus original.

Speaking of chins, the thinner face with the narrower chin is definitely the ticket.

Tell ya' one thing though, I'm shutting down right after I finish this message because I'm
definitely getting the urge to pull out my other computer.  Think I lost about P8 hours
sleep since the release.  LOL.

Have a great evening, folks.

Thinner face with narrower chin? You mean the one on the right? That's Alyson un-morphed. You're saying you like the unmodified Alyson, exactly as shipped? 

I've always been a sucker for the "Mac Tonight" character, you know the Mcdonalds Moon face guy who plays the piano.

On one hand I had the characters that came with p8. Fugly. On the other hand, what would all the content creators sell if she was smoken hot??

I DO think alittle bit of false advertising is goin on though..... 8 characters???? you mean 2 characters with 4 different FBM and 4 textures maps a piece...

Me thinks someone at SM owes me 6 more characters. I didnt check if there were any different animals now that i think about it. They don't think a little puppy or a fish or somethng counts, do they??

Only a new dog as far as I can tell. Yes I can morph it out of her, but was hoping they had found someone else to model the new characters this time aruond. I agree about the 8 characters as well, not too honest the way they wrote it. They should have put the two new folks on the box the way they are, but wonder how many new folks would have bought it? The ad on their website and in the magazine makes it look like she's the character you get out of the box.

Quote - On one hand I had the characters that came with p8. Fugly. On the other hand, what would all the content creators sell if she was smoken hot??

Anything. (I want to be answering this question from eight months in the future when it's clear P8 figures aren't being supported.)

Quote - I DO think alittle bit of false advertising is goin on though..... 8 characters???? you mean 2 characters with 4 different FBM and 4 textures maps a piece...

Me thinks someone at SM owes me 6 more characters.

I don't think it's misleading. What would have been misleading is if they had said "8 figures."

If I make a morph and texture for Alyson and name it "Betsy" what have I made? A character.

Very true, but they look SO much like each other. And it's not very creative those character. smaller eyes, lets make her asian. wider nose, bam! she black. Mix and match, ooh hispanic. long nose, big chin, anglo-saxon in a box. They could have at least changed the waist, hips, make one fat, skinny, whatever....just mix it up alittle................. if I flatten the nose of a character and do nothing else but name her bobbie sue, I would only blam myself if no one buys it.

She is definitely workable.  8-)

Quote - Here's one of Alyson, with ONLY a combination of her built-in face morphs.

She is definitely workable.  8-)

That's beautiful, and so different from all the Vicky characters.

I think it would be very good if we had a Rendo sponsored Alyson morphing contest. We could vote on submissions, and then Rendo would give a $25 gift certificate or something. Maybe two prizes - one for using built-in morphs only, and one for custom morphs.

Here's the kicker. All the contest entries must be submitted to freestuff. Who else thinks this is a good idea?

DC - care to share any tips on how you did that? Textures, shaders, GI, etc? Besides the morph, it's just a great render.

The person who did that is not a Rendo forum poster, I assume.

The box shot is done by Mike Campau (I found the name in the receent newsletter I got from SM), you can find his gallery here at Renderosity by looking for Mikris and the box shot and other work on his personal page that can be found here:
http://www.seventhstreetstudio.com/simplecg.php

Attached Link: Alyson Dial Settings

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS play with the dials to see what they do. If you don't like the result, you can always dial it back to zero.  I just play with the dials, seeing what happens with each one when I go plus or minus. A little bit here, a little bit there, and you end up with a character you like.

As for the render ... one spot with your environment sphere and a seaside backdrop image that I downloaded from Flickr. I can be more particular with the render settings, but I'll have to look that up.

8-)

OH ... and that's DAZ's Hermes Hair, just repositioned and rescaled slightly with one of the textures and style poses applied.

PPS --- I will package it up and see if I can upload to freestuff. It's been so long I can't remember if I have to host it elsewhere or not. 8-)

Mike Campau created the artwork for our Poser 8 box cover working with just Alyson's base mesh, an early version of the final texture, and primarily the face room morphs and a few of our face shaping morphs. He used a combination of his own custom trans mapped hair pieces with a few strands of hair. The cover art was rendered using Poser 8's ray tracer and some custom lights sets that Campau has created for his own rendering projects.

As far as differentiating between a 3D character and a 3D figure? These terms are interchangeable everywhere but Poser world.  But for clarity here, we consider variants off the male and female base mesh "Figures" to be "Characters"

I've added more detail about the Poser 8 characters' design in this thread:
renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

Hope that helps.

Steve Cooper
Poser Product Manager

Quote - Also though, BB, have you possibly encountered a glitch in the face room?  EClark and I
have both experienced Alyson's neck becoming very long and her teeth sticking out through
the bottom of her chin after we exit the face room, then re-enter to continue making changes.

I tried it today. It happened to me too - the head moved up, neck stretched, teeth stayed. Each time I went round-trip, the neck got longer. Pretty funny.

If you haven't already, could you please post an incident report at

http://support.smithmicro.com

Thanks.

Try applying the head as a morph target.  From the Face Room, click the "Spawn Morph Target" button. In the Pose room, the head, left eye, and right eye will then have morphs labelled "Head1", "LeftEye1" and "RightEye1" that you can adjust as needed. When each is set to 1, you'll get the same head shape you got in the face room (providing you start from the default Alyson face shape).

Then if you created a face texture, you can also use the "Apply Texture Only" button in the Face Room to apply the texture you created in the face room.

I will.   It happened to me again last night.

I finally got around to goofing around a little more with Alyson.  Been concentrating on
getting everything just the way I want it in my external runtimes as well as getting comfortable
navigating the library and all.   I'm not encountering any problems with it.

PS ... Oops.  Sorry.  Response to BB here.

The smaller figure in the back is the default Alyson face and body shape. The front one is Alyson after doing some head shapes in the Face room and applying it as a morph, and then tweaking some of her face and body morphs in the Pose Room.

"Out of the box" Alyson doesn't look like much ... but she's got a lot of potential!  We all have different tastes and opinions of what is "attractive" and what is "average every day."  I haven't ever used ANY figure "out of the box", I love tweaking parameter dials to see what I can get out of a character. And having all of these morphs built in gives me a lot to play with! 8-)

Quote - DC - care to share any tips on how you did that? Textures, shaders, GI, etc? Besides the morph, it's just a great render.

The hair does a lot of the work, IMHO. It hides the shape of the face (and a good share of the face itself).

Sorry, but the face looks way too androgynous. They could/should have rounded it out more. To be positive, it's not as fugly as Dina, but man... it's gonna take a lot of morphs and not a little postwork to make it as good as the ad.

Now to be fair, a default face should look like nothing and no one in particular - but instead made to maximize the range of characters that can be made from it. OTOH... this critter looks more like it should be on a console game (and I get the impression that the head could've used a whole lot more polys...)

Ah, but give it time. With a little luck, someone will cough up some decent magnets for it.

Quote - I just kept turning dials. If they made her more pretty, I kept it. If not, I un-did it.

Sounds like the Inuit sculptor joke. "How do you make your soapstone carvings?" "I take the block of stone and chip off anything that doesn't look like a polar bear," :)

That androgynous note strikes a chord with me, Penguin. (Hm.. a note strikes a chord? sounds like my music theory is mixed up.) I noticed when sculpting her in Argile that it was difficult to make her look feminine. And then of course the hairstyles are shared with the guys, so even adding P8 hair doesn't make her look female.

But as far as the face goes, my chief complaint is that mouth. It's the hardest thing to sculpt away (at least for me; either I don't understand the process well enough, or Argile's just not the tool to sculpt a mouth... maybe both), and it's neither realistic nor attractive. It's just... bad.

Same morph, default lighting and textures, before and after with no hair. All morphs used on the face are built into Alyson's CR2. This was only about 15-20 minutes of playing around.

Heh. It just struck me that Alyson's default would make a good Pharaoh. :D

You've nicely disguised her. I do like and appreciate the amount of morphs - and not simply shaping morphs, but the expression and action ones. Very helpful indeed.

Is it only me that think Alyson looks a bit like SP3?

Yeah I think you're right. But that's no good thing. They both remind me of Terminator

 She doesn't need to look ugly ;)

(This is a VIP but it's just to show the possibilities - and this is a custom morph btw)

(please excuse the artifacts in the hair, it was just a quick render)

You know... She reminds me of Camilla Parker Bowles...  Be that good or bad, LOL!

 Oh gawd.. That is BAD, dear! Ick. I think my Alice (or whatever her name ends up being) is prettier though. And some 50 years younger  >:o)

TrekkieGrrrl

I'm a fan, much love, but that's Joan Rivers, if Joan Rivers were a Transgendered individual. (Ducks and runs)