Hello,

One of the features that most interests me about Poser 8 is the new morph brush tool and it's ability to be used across body parts. Has anybody used this tool yet and how well does it work? If you have used it can you post some pictures showing how well it works and what you have done with it?

Thanks for any responses.

From my experience, it's very unstable. What results I've gotten from it, i have been able to transfer to figures compatible with earlier versions of the program and DS via Morph Manager. -Les

I use it a lot. Great for smoothing out small imperfections or breakthroughs. More so now that you can use the tool across body part seams. I found that the default setting were too aggressive and difficult to control but once I had dialed them down everything was peachy.

A big downside is that the tool's effect is always a sphere, making it sometimes frustrating to use on a posed body part or in places like the head.  I put in a request to give the tool a mode where it affects a radius of connected vertices instead of a sphere, like sculpting tools in other apps have, hopefully they'll add that.

Thank you eveyone for your responses.

What I am interested in trying to do is create a full body morph. I have tried to do full body morphs by exporting out of Poser and modifying in a 3rd party program and then importing back into Poser but have had no success. I tried to acheive the effect that I wanted in Poser 7 using the morph brush but the body part seams have so far defeated me in getting good matchups. Does this sound like something that the Poser 8 morph brush will do well?

I use it extensively.  The cross-bodypart functionality of the brush tool in Poser 8 is really nice.

Yes, the new ability of the Poser 8 tool will give you what you want.  Basically, unless you check the "group" box, it will morph across groups and when you spawn a morph, it will add a channel to all groups (not just the affected groups).  It also adds a full body morph channel to correspond and control the individual group channels.

If you go to my website, you'll see a few photos on my home page (which link to products on Content Paradise) that shows some facial morphing I've done in Poser 8 for the new Alyson character.  The morph tool works dependably like the Poser 7 brush tool for this purpose.  I've also done some full body morphing (as mentioned above) but I really don't have any renders ready for display for that.  There are some vendors on CP who have created full body morphs via Poser 8 in that way.  You might go check that out.  Just search for "Alyson" for their new character and you'll see a bunch of products, some of which include cross-bodypart morphs.

Sorry; that was long-winded.  Hope it helped. :-)

-it can be used to make better expressions
-fixing cloth
-fixing a pose
-you can try to fake dynamic muscels.

I scarcely used the morph tool before Poser 8. Obviously, I didn't get sufficient practice to analyze the older version, but it was precisely this issue of only being able to work on one body part that was a huge stumbling block. While I do wish the tool was a lot more flexible, it's very handy. I never used it before for smoothing joints etc just for a render. Now I do.

I even used it in combo with scaling to transform a female figure into a male (turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself, except that I don't know anything about rigging, and I would need to change the rotation centers in order to get the limbs to function properly).

Also keep in mind that the resulting morph that you create with the morph tool is a dial and can be toned down.

I tend to use it for a quick poke thru fix.

Also keep in mind that you can use the grouping tool to choose specific polygons and designate them as a new group, which can be very thin, angular, tiny, large, square, odd-shaped, etc..  Then, the morph brush will only affect that group, unless of course you use the new cross bodypart/group feature.

I use it all the time to get clothes to fit skintight on highly morphed characters.

I've found the morph brush to be a very powerful tool - even more so in P8 with the cross body-part functionality. For character creation I use it mostly to build on and refine existing figure morphs. I have found that it can become unstable if you do too much all in one sitting. But so long as you work incrementally, saving custom morphs as you go, it works very nicely. I tend to push and pull the mesh to get overall shapes and then smooth these to get a nice finish. You can change the relativity of the push/pull/smooth operations to shift the mesh in whatever direction you choose - you can tighten up parts of the mesh in this way to create new creases and definition that wasn't there before (of course you're always limited to the starting density and structure of the mesh you're deforming).  Before P8 I got around the problem of working across body-parts by importing the figure mesh directly from the geometries folder, creating new shapes and then spawning & exporting body-parts to be used as new morph targets.

Above are all characters using Apollo Maximus, starting with his base morphs and refining the shapes.

P.S. Press Escape to freeze the gif on any given frame - refresh the page to start it animating again.

nice work, carodan!

I also use the morph brush tool to fine-tune hair fits and to create new hair morphs.  I use it for clothing fits as well where magnets won't/don't work.  It's good for expressions, too.  Oh, and for clothing movement...

Quote - I found that the default setting were too aggressive and difficult to control but once I had dialed them down everything was peachy.

Defaults not being appropriate is a general problem with several things in Poser, which leads to those who don't/won't experiment by changing settings having a poor experience.