You're welcome Laurie. I still wonder why Daz or others never do this? Maybe there is something wrong with it? Don't know.

OK odf I sent you an old muscle  man character I was working on, it was never finished so dont laugh at my awfull geometry :blushing:  But it has the subgroups in it for the lips etc.

Laurie

I like that face!

 @Mike--I think DAZ and others didn't ever use the seperate sub gruops is simple.   They forgot it.  I knew exatly what you were getting at, but I had completely forgotten that Poser could do that! @__@  Well, fooey.!

LOLOLOL Like I said:This thread is damned educational!:laugh:

Laurie: that's really gorgeous. I love it!

Dang, I need to learn to use that cloth room....

Laurie

I just followed the tutorial that comes with Poser.

Now I need to do more in DS. :)

@Laurie,

Quote - My favorite face thus far ;o).

That looks very good Laurie.

Okay, so I've created a provisional site for our favorite imaginary friend. There's not much to see yet, but here's the URL for you to bookmark:

sites.google.com/site/antoniapolygon/

I'll try to do some basic work on it over the weekend. I guess there should at least be a download page, an FAQ and a gallery. I don't think Google sites have open forums, so if it seems that this thread gets to small, we might want to try Google groups for a while.

Jules53757: Tell me more about that subdomain offer of yours. If your provider supports Ruby on Rails or Apache Tomcat, I'm your man.

@phantom3D,

Is the old vertex number preserved in the new group? In other words, if a morph is made for the new group, can it be applied to the old head? I am suspecting and hoping that the answer is yes.

@Anyone,

If anyone has grouped the lips and or lashes in this way could you export the head obj and post it at the Antonia Developers site, please, pretty please?

If exporting from Poser, the export options would be "Include existing groups..." and "As Morph Target...".

You can see in the attached image, the one on the left is with the old blink morph and the one on the right is with my fixed version.

Anybody wants to have them, you can download them here:
mj41865.home.comcast.net/AntoniaStuff/EyesBlinkNew.zip

OBJ format, again. Sorry about that. Maybe I should learn how to do that injection thingy once and for all.

@MikeJ,

Big improvement!

Thanks... but maybe not...
I just discovered the head moves ever so slightly. Very slightly when cranking the blink up.
It's not something I did, but is inside the original eye blink morphs.

It's not really noticeable when used within reasonable parameters, but still there.

In fact, all those original morphs in the head are causing it to move back very slightly.
The morphs I made aren't because I used the original figure OBJ file from the geometries folder, but somewhere along the way the head got rotated slightly, or maybe moved up. Hard to say what happened.

 When I did the origanl head expression morphs, I don't remember seeing ANY head bobbling.  I'll take a look in Poser and see where it's coming from.

EDIT: After checking, I found no lateral movements or wobbles when the morphs are applied to the head actor.    I used versions 91,96 an 114. I'm not sure what you are observing, Mikej.

What Version are you using and what kind of movements are you seeing on what morphs?  Olaf might be able to help more than I have.

Easiest way is probably just for me to show you with this 7 MB H264 .mov  movie
Right click, save as:
mj41865.home.comcast.net/AntoniaStuff/AntoniaHead.mov

At the very beginning I move the head into position where the right ear is just against the document window border, then proceed to move various sliders. The head is clearly moving, to varying degrees.
Later on I slide down to the section with the nose morphs I made yesterday and slide them around and you can see the head is not moving.

As for version, you mean what Antonia version? I don't know really, I guess it's the latest one, as I just downloaded it the other day from the link in odf's signature.
The Poser version is Poser Pro. Smith Micro, not Pro Pack.

(edit). I've just noticed something else...when I use the included morphs (the ones that make the head move, it affects the rear of the skull as well. This might be the problem.

Laurie

Thanks for confirming that Laurie, I was starting to wonder.
I see the skull thing happening now too. I hadn't been looking at the back before.
My guess is whatever program was used for the original morphs was moving the geometry slightly, or maybe resizing it. Either that or the head just got nudged slightly, early on.

 I just tried to replicate that on my machine and nothing!  NONE of the morphs I have in the Cr2 of the original Antonia move her head like that, no matter how much value I put in the dials. Weird.  I wonder is something else is going on.

 The latest hi-poly version DOES do that, however!

Yeah, something must have gotten moved somewhere.  There might have been some kind of movement in the origianl morphs that no one noticed, and when it done over for the high poly version, it must gotten exagerated?  All the morph objects I looked at read zero translation. SInce they're all vertexes now, I can't check more than that.

So I'm lost.  It IS doing it now.  Of course stuff like this is why she's in the test lab, instead of general release, I would suspect.

If I have to redo all the expression morphs, I will, but it may be later this weekend.  Olaf can let me know.

Quote - @phantom3D,

Is the old vertex number preserved in the new group? In other words, if a morph is made for the new group, can it be applied to the old head? I am suspecting and hoping that the answer is yes.

@Anyone,

If anyone has grouped the lips and or lashes in this way could you export the head obj and post it at the Antonia Developers site, please, pretty please?

If exporting from Poser, the export options would be "Include existing groups..." and "As Morph Target...".

Hi Les,
I have done some experimenting, and in answer to you question, as long as you make your subgroup selection in Poser itself with the grouping tool, or in UV mapper, it does indeed preserve the vertex order so all prior head morphs will load and work. If you make the new groups in Zbrush then it does not preserve the vertex order. I have not tried Max yet.

I will upload the obj I made with the lashes and lips in a subgroup to the dev site. Remember though that there may be special things in that odf has in his obj file that I know nothing about (and probably dont understand). So with this regrouped obj. I would not do any serious work untill odf has had a chance to go over things to his sastisfaction. But you can see how its done and experiment with it.

Also I wanted to say this is a usefull thing for other things as well. I have in brad sub groups for the fingernails and toenails, lips, eyelashes, eye lids,nipples, teeth pairs, and foreskin. The eyes I have sub groups within subgroups, for instance the pupil is a subgroup of the iris, and then the iris and pupil are subgroups of the eye.

@phantom3D,

Thanks muchly for your response. :)

I notice that the origin of Antonioa's eye does not seem to align with the center of the pupil. I seem to remember that this was a problem with Jessi when using 'Point At'.

Re the head movement issue: this shouldn't be hard to fix; just needs the appropriate lines stripped from the INJ file.

The picture I'm attaching shows the new lash location. The one on the left is what I did, the right is the former default lash location. They're two morphs, one for the right, one for the left.

Total EDIT:
I had included a link to the morphs, but have decided to delete that. The morphs I made have a slight flaw I don't want to upload. I'll upload a better copy later, if anyone is interested.

Hm, can't the same thing be done with the lashes as was achieved with the lips? (I.e. the grouping method discussed earlier.)

Probably, but I'd rather do it this way, since I use LW and Modo 302 to make morphs and I hate Poser's grouping tool about as much as I've ever hated anything. ;-)

But for the morphs I want to do, it really requires a modeling program and being able to drag  and snap points and slide edges around, according to object space, element center, geometry center and so on, blah blah blah.

Laurie

@MikeJ: Good catch with the shifting head! One more thing to watch out for when making morphs, I guess. No idea how that happened. I always thought that PMD files contained just deltas, so there shouldn't be a difference between versions of Antonia. If the deltas move the head in one version, they should do it in all the other versions as well.

By the way, I think you've earned an invitation to the developers site. Let me know your email and I'll let you in.

@JOELGLAINE: No worries! I'll figure out a way to fix this.

Quote - @odf

I notice that the origin of Antonioa's eye does not seem to align with the center of the pupil. I seem to remember that this was a problem with Jessi when using 'Point At'.

Thanks for reminding me. Yes, the eyes are rotated outward by 5 degrees. That makes the 'point at' thing a bit tricky to get right, but I know I had it working at some point.

 This is all what TESTING means.  To find those things bolloxed up and figure out how to fix 'em!

Like I said before--this thread is EDUCATIONAL.

Whether we want it to be or not. :laugh: LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Thanks much, odf, I do appreciate it. :-)
The email you can use is:
lwaver@comcast.net

Been working on some eye morphs for the last few hours, and I imagine tomorrow I'll have some better stuff to upload. Right now it's time to go out and do some partying.  ;-)

odf, revisiting the male morph - you mentioned something on this, but could you clarify what impact it would have if some re-rigging happened on the male morph (i.e. moving the rotation centers outward on the shoulders, as well as something at the hip leg bend). Would that mean it would require a separate .obj, separate Cr2, or just what?

How difficult is it to learn to do something like that, given I've never ever touched rigging before?

Quote - odf, revisiting the male morph - you mentioned something on this, but could you clarify what impact it would have if some re-rigging happened on the male morph (i.e. moving the rotation centers outward on the shoulders, as well as something at the hip leg bend). Would that mean it would require a separate .obj, separate Cr2, or just what?

How difficult is it to learn to do something like that, given I've never ever touched rigging before?

Hmm, I think you should probably talk to phantom3D about these things. I really don't know much about rigging. :laugh:

But you know, why don't you just experiment a bit and see what happens? Play with the shoulder joints and save the result out as a new cr2. Then make that cr2 read your modified mesh instead of the original Antonia (use the original you made from Antonia's mesh, not one exported from Poser).

If maintaining your own modified rig seems too complicated, try to change your morph so that it works with the existing joint centers. So basically, don't change her/his proportions in the morph, but do it later on using the scale dials. When you have a shape you like, save it as a pose. Then one of the pz2 gurus here should be able to tell you how to make a pose file that will load both the morph and the new proportions at the same time.

Thanks. I thought you had done some of Antonia's rigging - thought I recalled you saying how much you liked the setup tools for DAZ Studio for that.

As for your suggestion re the scale dials: my latest attempt WAS based on scale dials. I was hoping that doing it that way would do as you suggest. But I had no such luck. The shoulder goes way too low when the arm is down, and when the arm is higher than the "t" pose, the upper arms starts doing really wonky things - juts and general ickiness. I managed to fix a lot of that with the smoothing tool of the morph brush - good enough for my use in certain situations, but not distributable, and the low shoulders remain a bit of an issue, in any case.

Of course, maybe someone else could do better. I have some experience with using Poser scaling, but not x-axis scaling to this degree - and very little experience with the morph brush. So... I'm sure it could be done worlds better than I managed.

What you seem to imply here is that rigging changes would not be treated as a morph - i.e. couldn't be saved as a normal pmd / INJ pose file and function. Is that correct?

I'll eventually uploaded them to the dev site and if someone wants to take a crack at them or fiddle with them, they are welcome to it ;o).

They look a little funny now because the rest of the nose and what not are still Antonia's ;o).

Laurie

Quote - odf, revisiting the male morph - you mentioned something on this, but could you clarify what impact it would have if some re-rigging happened on the male morph (i.e. moving the rotation centers outward on the shoulders, as well as something at the hip leg bend). Would that mean it would require a separate .obj, separate Cr2, or just what?

How difficult is it to learn to do something like that, given I've never ever touched rigging before?

Hi Believable3D,
Usually I would say yes moving the joint positions would require a separate cr2. But I remember a thread 8 months or so old  where I believe EnglishBob had a method of saving new JP's in a pose file. I cant seem to find it But I know it was there. Les may know about this method too. I can adjust the rigging for you if you wish.

If you can use the scale dials like odf suggests to change the size and then do the morphs just for shape that would work too.

Quote - Thanks. I thought you had done some of Antonia's rigging - thought I recalled you saying how much you liked the setup tools for DAZ Studio for that.

I've made some small changes, yes. I also did a complete rigging for Antonia before Mike stepped in. So yes, I dabbled. But I'm not an expert. In fact, this whole character creation thing is new ground for me. So basically, all my experience is from the few things I've already done with Antonia, and everything else is just extrapolation.

Quote - As for your suggestion re the scale dials: my latest attempt WAS based on scale dials. I was hoping that doing it that way would do as you suggest. But I had no such luck.

Okay, I hadn't realized that. How did the morph bend before you applied the scaling? If you want, send me your files so I can get a better understanding of what's going wrong.

Quote - What you seem to imply here is that rigging changes would not be treated as a morph - i.e. couldn't be saved as a normal pmd / INJ pose file and function. Is that correct?

Yes, a morph cannot change the rigging. You could, however, change things in the joint editor and save the results as a pose without creating a complete new cr2. I forgot about that possibility.

Laurie

Phantom, thanks for that. I'll try to send you something later this evening. What would I send you? My Cr2 file I saved to my figures library?

odf: There was no morph before the scaling. I started again from scratch and then morphed. However, the missing step here was that I didn't attempt to test the rigging before doing further morphing. I probably should have, but I've never really done anything quite this radical to a figure before, so no doubt I'm missing a lot of obvious steps. :-p

I'll note that one of the odd things in the scaling is that I had to rely on the central chest area to accomplish most of it, and in fact IIRC I actually had to reduce the x-scale on the "collars" in order for things to not look completely weird. No doubt that's the cause of a lot of grief, but with my limited knowledge, my logic would tell me that a reverse situation would have been problematic, not this one. Shows what I know. :)

As long as the results can be treated as a pose, I don't care whether it gets called a "morph" or not. The basic thing is that it wouldn't require keeping track of a whole new Cr2, still less an .obj file. I suppose the pose could still break with future versions of Antonia, but that's a possibility we'll have to live with and deal with if/when the time comes.

Quote - This is about as oriental as I can make her look for now with the morphs I've got so far. Cute, but still not great ;o).

Laurie

I really like this, Laurie, although she looks more mixed race (or possibly Polynesian?) than strictly Asian. But it's a good start.

I'm honestly not sure how much more can be done with the morphing tool, though I've seen some characters I could never have thought possible from it. (An app like Argile can throw a quick rotate around the eyes and have a marked effect pretty easily.)

Looks great to me LaurieA, Afew little things here and there and you'll have it.

Believable3D, I found that thread where EnglishBob talks about saving new JP's in a Pose

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

send me the morph and all you have for the character (cr2 if needed)

phantomthreedee@hotmail.com

Quote - (An app like Argile can throw a quick rotate around the eyes and have a marked effect pretty easily.)

I'm still biding my time until my birthday and 3D Coat! lol ;o). I've a feeling that's really going to help me a lot.

As for tilt, the eyes are tilted, just not too much (a little goes a long way ;o)). If I got too far she looks more like a fae than anything else...lol.

Laurie

Believable3D: I just played with Antonia for a bit and, yeah, chest and collar scaling doesn't work so well. I did a lot of work on the scaling support, but I think there are just some fundamental problems in the way Poser works.

Here's a trick though: scale the whole figure up to, say, 110%, then scale everything but the chest and collars down until you get the proportions you want. Except for the hands and feet, all other limbs should scale pretty well in any direction. I'll eventually add a dial to scale the hands as a whole, but I think for your male morph they should be just fine.

If modifying the joint works better for you, though, by all means do it. It gives you more freedom when you do the morphs, but then you might have to work a little bit harder to get the joints to work again. The only potential problem I see is that the JCMs might not work with your modified joints and you might have to modify or disable them.

Laurie: I think your 'slightly Asian' character looks extremely pretty. I guess you're really getting close to the limit of what can be done with the morph brush here. One of my Poser pet peeves from working with the older figures (Posette, V2, V3 etc) was that there was no real variation in the eye shapes, and I think the reason it that it's hard to model a realistic eye. So morph makers tended to simply fiddle with the size, slant or aspect ratio, but rarely with the shape as such.

One small thing: I'm pretty sure Asian people find the term "Oriental" offensive, so we should probably avoid using it here.

Dialing instructions: 

• scale the body to 110%
• scale hip2 to 90%
• y-scale chest, abdomen, hip, thighs and shins to 90%
• dial the "CTRLHeadGrow" channel on the head to -0.05

That's it.

Poser 8 refused to save the scaling into a pose file, even with "body transformation" checked. :cursing: So unless someone knows a trick, one would have to write the pz2 file by hand, unfortunately.

To any Asians whom I may have offended:

I apologize profusely for my use of the term oriental rather than Asian. I assure you it was used in the most benign way possible and in all innocence.

Please forgive me for my apparent and unforgivable lack of political correctness.

.....

So what's wrong with the term oriental?