Well, I'm not sure what's happening, or what I'm looking at. ;-)

Here's a screenshot of 3 copies of the same head. This is the one I uploaded the other day, with the new UVs based on the "Antonia-template-lo.obj" file you uploaded to the dev site.
All of them have the same UV checker applied.
When I say "distortion" in this case I mean the distortion along the edges of the little black boxes of the UV checker, not the size distortion of the boxes - the little squiggles.

The head on the left is straight lo poly, nothing done to it. The one in the middle is when I put it into subdivision surface (aka sub-patch) mode in LW, and the one on the right is is after freezing it down to a high res poly version of the subpatch version.

The middle version and the one on the right actually have less distortion than the one on the left, the lo poly, no subpatch version.
.................

So as I said, I mapped this in UVLayout using the SUBD mode, as opposed to polygon mode. UVL doesn't actually subdivide it in the preview, but I guess it internally adjusts the UVs for when the model is placed in sub-d in another program. Which is fairly evident in the fact there is more noticeable distortion in the polygon version, than in the sub-d version or the high-res, frozen-down version. And which is what one would expect.

I honestly don't know how to compensate for this. Clearly I can make a decent high res version by either mapping the low res in SUBD and subdividing it, or outright mapping the hi res itself, as I've already done.
But to do one that works the same on both the lo res and high res... like I said, I have no idea how to do it perfectly.

So, how did YOU do it originally? I know you mapped the high res version first, but how did you transfer that to the lo res version?

BTW, consider this whole thing a test. That is, the one I uploaded the other day, maybe an intermediate on the way towards figuring out the best way to get both hi and lo versions perfectly compatible.
There are things I see now that I want to do over, such as the size distortion on the ears is too much and needs to be fixed to be more even. And I'm not entirely happy with the how the feet turned out either, and want to try something different there.

Mike, that looks really good actually. You have a decent mapping on the high-res mesh with seams that are compatible to the low-res one. That's all I need. I can take that and transfer it back to low-res mesh, essentially by looking only at the vertices that correspond to low-res vertices and forgetting about all the others.

That might still be slightly distorted, and in fact it might not be better than your image on the left. But you have to remember that the low-res version of Antonia, at least in Poser, would only ever be used for background characters, anyway. So a little distortion is no problem. If we want a genuine sub-d version for D|S or other software, that's another story. But then we can always use your original mapping, since it was specifically made for sub-d.

Quote - Mike, that looks really good actually. You have a decent mapping on the high-res mesh with seams that are compatible to the low-res one. That's all I need. I can take that and transfer it back to low-res mesh, essentially by looking only at the vertices that correspond to low-res vertices and forgetting about all the others.

That might still be slightly distorted, and in fact it might not be better than your image on the left. But you have to remember that the low-res version of Antonia, at least in Poser, would only ever be used for background characters, anyway. So a little distortion is no problem. If we want a genuine sub-d version for D|S or other software, that's another story. But then we can always use your original mapping, since it was specifically made for sub-d.

Olaf,
OK, sounds good. I tend to be be hypercritical of myself at times. ;-)
Is it a whole lot of work for you to do that? Because now I would prefer to fix some of those things I don't like, such as the ears and feet before you go doing too much.

Quote -
Is it a whole lot of work for you to do that? Because now I would prefer to fix some of those things I don't like, such as the ears and feet before you go doing too much.

No, once I've fixed my software, it's just a single command I have to type which takes less than a minute to run.

OK, so then don't do anything just yet, if you don't mind.
I have a lot of stuff to do today, but tomorrow I'm going to work on fixing those problems I mentioned above that I don't like.

Well, I've fixed my software, so it can do reverse sub-d again. Whenever you send me a mapping for the high-res mesh, I can hammer it onto the low-res one.

About the toecaps (what you call "foot stuff"): the intention was to use them for second skin stocking textures. In the low-res mesh, you see that the first two rows of polygons of the toecaps match the corresponding rows of the feet exactly. The first row is meant to be invisible, and the second one for blending between stocking and skin texture on the foot and between transparent and stocking texture on the toecap.

Or something along those lines. At any rate, I was asked to make it so that where the feet and toecap have matching polygons, those polygons would also have identical UV coordinates in order to make that kind of texture blending easier. Look at my mappings to see what I mean. Obviously, I can't and won't force you to do that , but I thought at least I should share that information.

Quote -
Well, I've fixed my software, so it can do reverse sub-d again. Whenever you send me a mapping for the high-res mesh, I can hammer it onto the low-res one.

Olaf,
Okay, you lost me now.
I thought the idea was to map the low poly version and transfer it to the high poly version? If I do another mapping for the high res version, wouldn't that create the same situation that caused me  to go mapping the low res version? That is, seams not lining up, or being off due to the way it was subdivided.
So I'm confused now...

Okay, I'll have a look at the foot stuff.
You know, the reason I named them that in the UV templates was because when I was saving out those templates, I couldn't for the life of me remember what the actual surface names were called and figured I'd rename them later, but I forgot. ;-)
I still can't remember for some reason and had to look it up - "toe cap" and "invisible".

Okay, having looked at how you did your "footstuff" in the original mapping, it's not a big deal to make the "toecap" and the "invisible" UVs line up with the UVs for the feet.
I have to wonder about the resolution of those parts though. It doesn't seem to me that there's enough geometry there to function well as textured stockings. By the time they get morphed halfway up the calves, the textures would be stretched way too much, so I think the better idea would be for them to be higher-res and start out at full size and then shrunk down, not the other way around.
Unless I'm just misunderstanding their purpose?

And speaking of which, why are they a part of the figure itself? Why not just a separate conforming figure?

Let me know whether you want a high res version or a lo res version. If you do actually want a high res version, I still don't know how to avoid the lining up problems that led to this whole situation in the first place, and again, I thought it was agreed it would be easier to do the lo res and adapt it to the high res.

MikeJ: Sorry about the confusion. No, I don't want you to make an extra high-res version. I just need the high-res version of your low-res version :laugh:, because if you only gave me the original, I wouldn't know how to apply it to the high-res mesh. In fact, please give me both the low-res and high-res. But I'm interested to see what happens if I take the one you adapted to high-res and transform it back to low-res. Will I get exactly the same mapping, a better one, or a worse one?

Regarding the toecaps: they are not meant to be morphed into socks, but to stay exactly where they are. The idea is this: instead of making conforming stockings, one applies a stocking texture to the legs. But then one ends up with stockings that have individual toes, which is not ideal. So I've modeled just the part that would cover the toes and included it in the figure. One can then texture that with stocking texture, the actual toes with a skin texture and the rest of the foot plus the legs with a "stockings with some skin showing through" texture.

In fact I'm no longer sure that making the toecaps part of the figure was the best way to go about it. I seem to remember having my reasons for doing it that way, but I'm not quite sure anymore which. :laugh: I think it's generally not a good idea to include features that "might be useful in the future"[tm], but it was a request by BB. On the other hand, they made me realized that there was a problem with the toe rigging, so in that respect they've been useful already. At any rate, they're in now, and removing them at this stage might be just as inconvenient as just carrying them around.

Olaf,
Okay, so you want the high res version of the low res version - no, both. ;-)
Alright, soooo... So I fix my lo res version and then sub-d it and freeze it,  and send you both of them?
OK, so when I sub-d and freeze, what should I exclude? Remember I was asking why my poly counts were so different from yours when I did that?
Obviously the eyes, brows and lashes aren't to be included. I think. But as I said that still didn't cover the discrepancy.

Thinking about it, I'm confused here again.
I think LW won't do the same freezing as you expect, since you wrote your own subdivision program, so I don't see how there would be anything to gain. I mean, it's not a problem for me to quadruple the poly count and zip it up, so is that simply what you want? But the resulting mesh will still be a couple thousand polys more than the original high res Antonia 114. Why that is, I still don't know...

Also, it's worth mentioning that LW has several ways of subdividing. You can simply subdivide all polys, smooth, or metaform - all result in every one polygon becoming four.

Then you can also put it into Sub-d, either Catmull Clark or LW's own algorithm, and freeze it into a polygon mesh. Doing either sub-d method also results in  the same thing - four times the polygon count.

Please do a Catmull-Clark and freeze that. Include everything. I'll take it from there.

OK, gotcha.

I should be able to have that by tomorrow evening.

No stress!

No, no stress.
I just was already planning on doing that tomorrow anyway, since out of this whole week, tomorrow I'll have the most time for it.

from the peanutt gallery
I like the toecap idea. If the uv wraps right, I really think the BB stocking is the way to go. Conforming stocking never seem to work, for the products I have anyway. I thought the idea was really innovative. Seeing how well Antonia bends I think it would be even harder to get conforming stocking to work.

fades back into the background 

Yes, if the UV wraps right! See, the mapping I made had the legs connected to the torso, which made it hard to tweak the leg UVs to support stocking textures.

Mike has the legs separate and is obviously really good with UVL. But I'm still not sure it's possible to get the UVs the way BB would need them without a massive amount of manual work. I seem to remember some option to force vertices on both ends of a seam to lie on the same v coordinate. But maybe I just dreamt that, because it would be so neat. :laugh:

Quote -
But I'm still not sure it's possible to get the UVs the way BB would need them without a massive amount of manual work.

So this footstuff is for BB?
I guess that's why he asked something about making the leg seam straight way back when, thinking about it now.
What, has he got some kind of stocking fetish or something?
Not that there's anything wrong with that. :laugh:

I don't think it really can be done without a good deal of manual editing, but the Pro version of UVL has some pretty good tools for moving the stuff around.

Edit:
No, a very good job.

Edit to the Edit:

So, it's the "invisible" part that needs to line up exactly, right?

Rather than triple editing my above, I see now what you have is two rows of polys that are are the "invisible" part and two rows that are the beginning of the "toecap" part.
Those 4 rows of polys all line up just right, then go off on their own.
That's what I'm shooting for, right?

Quote - Rather than triple editing my above, I see now what you have is two rows of polys that are are the "invisible" part and two rows that are the beginning of the "toecap" part.
Those 4 rows of polys all line up just right, then go off on their own.
That's what I'm shooting for, right?

Yep, except that I think you've been looking at the high-res version. In the low-res one it'll be just two rows.

And I only got those lined up as well as I did because I moved every vertex in those rows manually and then pinned it.

PS: See, part of my super-secret plan for world domination is to write a UV-mapping tool in which you would mark a region, such as the leg, and then ask the tool to optimize that under certain conditions you specify. In the case of mapping for stockings, the condition would be something that amounts to "make the differences in v coordinates proportional to the differences in y coordinates".

Well, good with that world domination thing. I'll be rooting for you. I'd just like a place in your conclave of evil minions if you don't mind.

But hey if that doesn't work out and you just run for mayor  or something some day, I'll vote for you. ;-)

Quote - I have to say I am totally looking forward to your figure being released fully to see how she's received and supported.  I see a new female figure that's just been released at another store (RDNA) and not bashing her at all but I am more and more impressed with Antonia when I'm looking at other female figures.  Hell, I'd buy her!! 

I'll just be here waiting and watching and of course reading!!

I'll ditto that!

I appreciate a lot of work is going into this, and I am looking forward to the end product.

Hang in there!

Klutz  

Well I guess I lied...
I had expected to have little to do today, but then the phone started ringing and one thing led to another...

I got a start on redoing the UVs, but considering how much work I have for the rest of the week, it probably won't be until the weekend now before I can finish it.
I know there's no rush or anything, but I just don't like it when I can't deliver something I had set a time limit for.

Oh and the above was supposed to have said "good luck with that world domination thing." ;-)

Why are you redoing the UVs again? I thought you had them almost finished. You even showed us nice checkerboard renders.

Not completely redoing, just have to deal with the "footstuff" in the way you wanted, and there are a few things I want to fix, such as lessen the distortion around the ears, and I'm not entirely happy with the feet UVs.

But to say maybe not til the weekend is just my disclaimer - I might have enough time tomorrow, I'm certainly going to try. :-)

. So where should I put them? Should I link to a download here or what? At the moment they're part of the CR2 (that's the easiest way for me) but I can make them into a PMD if that is preferred? The pic shows a mix of quite a lot of them, nothing in particular in mind, I was just turning dials...

Also.. is someone working on expression morphs already or should I start on those as well? I noticed the available version didn't have any :)

Oh and.. If there's any morph that someone feel is lacking, let me know and I'll add it. I ran out of ideas.

(btw I'll be gone most of the day tomorrow so don't be alarmed if I don't answer)

TrekkieGrrrl: Those morphs look great. If you want to make them public right away, you can just post a link here. Since I have a little public site up for Antonia now, I could actually go ahead and start a link collection there, so yours could be the first one I'd add. :laugh: If you'd prefer to have them tested by a smaller group first, the developers site would be the best place. Message me your email address, so I can let you in. You can either upload the morphs there (if there's still room - we're kind of close to our limit) or post a link.

I'll try to transfer those morphs to the lo-res mesh and see what they look like. That might result in some loss of detail, more for some morphs, less for others. For example, I don't believe you could get those ears that pointy in low-res. Depending on how interested you are in having good low-res versions of your morphs, you might just leave them as they are or tune them a bit.

I was planning to do the expression morphs, and frankly I'd rather get going with that today than tomorrow. In fact, that was my initial motive for starting the whole Antonia mess. I wanted to make a character that would emote well. But I still have to finish the JCMs, and for the last month or so I've been working on software to rewrite cr2 files, because doing it by hand or with Poser-specific editors is becoming way too tedious. We have a few expression morphs by JOELGLAINE (in the official package) and LaurieA (on the developers site). You could add some of your own to make our preliminary expression package a bit more complete. I'll try to use whatever I can of those when I do my "official" expression rig, but frankly I'm not quite sure if it won't be easier for me just to start from scratch. On the other hand, LaurieA made an amazing smile, which will be hard to top.

trekkie, could you do some fangs for that set?
she would make a great vampire. :)

odf, i'll be working on the Celene texture set and wonder if I should put it on the developer's site to get testers?
this will be a retail set.

BluEcho: that's completely up to you. Retail content is definitely welcome there. Just make sure people know it's not free. You could also post a call for testers in this thread or on the  developers site and negotiate with people directly.

Olaf, do you think that it is clever to release the texture (not the psd-set, the poser ready textures) we've made for Antonia for the public now? Or would people complain or get puzzled when we redo them later?

And this elf-morph is adorable, trekkie - can't wait to check all those moprhs out and most of all enjoy some mixing!

SaintFox: How about we release it with the next preview? I was planning to get the JCMs complete for that, include some empty morph channels a la DAZ and some more little things. So she'll be pretty complete except for the expressions.

Your texture still has those little problems in the crotch, but is overall more complete and detailed than the free one BluEcho made, so the sooner I can get it into the official release (or as a separate download if you prefer a different license), the better. Don't get me wrong, I love BluEcho's texture, and learned a lot playing with it. So I won't abandon it. But I think it could still use some work, and at the moment I just don't have the time.

This is an experimental project, so if no one ever gets puzzled, we're doing something wrong. :lol: If and when we switch to Mike's UV mappings, we'll just have to tell people to download the new textures that go with them.

If Antonia gets her re-mapping we will do the whole texture and developer set again from scratch! So far it looks that the crotch-part will be easier to texture. If you decide to release what you have now first please let me know and maybe send some close up renders of the boo-boos. Wit circles around them - because if you work too long on one and the same part you get business-blinded I will look into the problems... and ask Leo to fix them eg

This is an experimental project - a very modest term for "legendary idea"!!

 BluEcho - I already did fang morphs :) One for her upper and one for her lower canines. So people can choose if it should be like a carnivor or a vampire. It was just hard to show since she couldn't yet open her mouth L (or did I miss a dial somewhere?)

So here's a link: http://86.52.123.106/Antonia/
. It's ok with it being public, I was making these for free anyway -  I love to make face morphs :)

There are some for the tongue as well btw. 

Quote -
It was just hard to show since she couldn't yet open her mouth L (or did I miss a dial somewhere?)

There is an open mouth morph that comes with Antonia, but something went wrong when it was made. I'm not really sure who made it, but the head had been moved slightly before the morph was applied, so the head bobs slightly when opening the mouth.

I made an open mouth morph which is on the Head Shaping Morphs page of the Dev site and in a file called MouthOpen03.zip (under my user name there which is "lwaver"). AFAIK, it's the only one so far without the head-bob thing going on.
It's kind of rough, and I uploaded it mostly in case people wanted to use it as a base for more mouth motion morphs, but it's usable and workable. I built a whole face rig for Antonia in Lightwave, for the purpose of making that and other expression morphs, but then got sidetracked with all these UV redos that I haven't had a chance to get back at it. Or anything else, for that matter...

Ha, I was about to say the same thing. The head movement is very slight, and was probably caused by the change in Antonia's proportions between version 96 and version 114. I'm pretty sure I can fix it somehow, eventually.

Trekkiegrrrl, I had a look at some of your morphs. Good stuff! Poser 8's dials are kind slow for me when many morphs are loaded, so I haven't played around much yet. That might be a memory problem, though, since I'm running Linux in a virtual machine which only gets 1GB of my laptop's 2.

 I made the morphs for version 96, and the Mouth Open morph worked fine then, so I'm clueless.  I been so busy on my own projects, I haven't had time to revisit the morphs for a new version.

Attached Link: http://www.sharecg.com/v/37381/Poser/Antonia-Age_19

@Olaf,

I just sent you a Site Mail with a link to my latest UV endeavor, with a few minor fixes and the "footstuff" UVs matched to the feet. It's not perfect, but might be good enough, might need some more work...

I wrote up some other stuff in that message too, so I won't repeat it here, just letting you know in case you don't notice you have a message from me. I know I don't notice that Site Mail alert half the time. ;-)

Olaf,

I think I might have just stumbled upon a new technique. It figures that would happen after I call something finished and upload a link...

Let me know exactly what you think that whole toecap area needs to have done better, and I think I can make it perfect.

I also added a very basic smile, and a blink- and close eyes morph so that the total of the morphs in the pack is now 81. Perhaps we can get to 100? ;)

The above pic is made with a wide mix of the morphs :) I like Antonia more and more every minute - and she's a dream to morph!

One thing to notice: The morphs are all present in the BODY section but most opf them are on the head as well. That is because some spam nore than one group and is essentially fbms. This is how Blacksmith outputs them. If it's inconvenient, I guess they could be made into jcm or erc or whatever.. I just don't know how.

The new version can be downloaded at the same link as the previous one. I numbered this new one ..1 and renamed the other one to ..beta

Would love to see the  "Nibbling lower lip" morph for Antonia. I loved it when i saw it on the first GIRL and wish I had it for V2.  :(

Good idea! I'll see if I can make such a morph look believable :D 

Where was that Open Mouth morph again? How do I get into that developer site?

The new version, now with 85 morphs is up for grabs.

 TrekkieGrrrl that mouth morph rocks!
Expression morphs are so hard but you have done a fantastic job!

 Thanks, Pitklad. 

Now if only I could figure out how to ONLY select the polygons for the upper/lower lip at a time, then I'd be rolling.. 

Hmm... I wonder if I can make a temporary group in UVMapper.... worth a try... :)

TrekkiGrrrl: I'll definitely have to agree with pitklad. That lower lip morph rawks!

I need your email address to let you into the developers site. Please send me a site mail or email me at Antonia.Polygon@gmail.com

Open mouth morph: the current preview (the one from my file locker) contains a pose called MorphsJGL-INJ which injects (surprise!) a number of expression morphs by JOELGLAINE. One of them is the open mouth morph.

Since I saw that you made morphs for tongue movements, I thought I'd just mention that - at least in theory - the tongue is poseable, as are the teeth/gums. Antonia has body parts for the lower and upper jaw, the tongue and tongue tip. For moving the teeth and gums around, I think it's really best to use the rotation channels and use ERC to either slave the corresponding head morphs to the jaw movements or the other way round. Of course for the tongue, it's mostly a matter of taste (no pun intended). I've never really looked at the joint setups for the tongue, though, so if anyone wants to experiment with tongue poses and encounters a problem, let me know.

Yup, you nailed it Grrrl!!