Wow!  Great work!  Wish I was that far down the road.  I hope it takes off and turns into a major player!

MikeJ, thank you for the good thoughts sent for Aryca.

And you are right, the eyebrows on most 3d models do tend to look flat.
I started using displacement maps to make them a little better. lol.

*Looking forward to seeing what you do with your new texture!

As people seemed to like the previous one I wil try to comes as close as possible to it - by avoiding the flaws it had especially in the crotch area.

...and of course faking things is fun. As more as our faked things often look more real than the real ones. If you are unsure what I mean: Look into any expensive high-gloss fashion magazine and compare the models with Antonia

thank you, SF.

BluEcho: Sorry to hear that your little one got sick. All the best to her! She seems to be in good hands, though, and I'm sure she'll be fine.

Quote - This can be done in original cr2, or applied to a figure in Poser with a pz2. In the case where the original geom is loaded via a 'figureResFile' line, I suspect the original obj would remain in memory. If the original geom is loaded actor by actor the same as in a pp2, injecting new geom might overwrite the memory space, but this is only supposition, and I don't know how to check if that happens.

Well, if you find time to experiment with this, let me know. I'm not that worried about the memory usage in this scenario, since I'd expect it to be fairly rare that a user would load the alternate geometry. Ease of use and keeping the base cr2 free of clutter are my main concerns.

Of course this method would require splitting the mesh into separate files for each body part. That shouldn't be hard to do unless Poser does something fancy with the vertex ordering when splitting and welding. This is probably more of a question for the technical forum, but does anyone know anything definite about the details of those procedures?

Quote -
Off of this I found that especially on the fingers, toes, ankles and wrists the use of Puppet Master caused extreme rotations. This seems to be a glitch in Puppet Master but I was able to stop this behaviour by copying poses to an altered Antonia: I used "natural" values for the limits on the questionable parts and told Poser to use limits. And this brings me to the thing I wanted to ask since weeks: may it be necessary to alter the limits in the figure or ist it better to leave them as is? I think I always used Poser and Poses without limits  - but now found that there is indeed a reason for this feature being part of the application.

Limits - good point! I haven't really looked much at the rig in this respect. I normally don't use limits when posing, but they are definitely useful and sometimes indispensable when working with IK or any other means of setting up poses (semi-) automatically.

I've gone all professional on myself this weekend and started a to-do list. "Check limits" is now on it.

pardon, but for  the user how would this be different than just using a cr2 setting?  other than needing to switch library folders to either the over-crowded pose folder or the unintuitive prop folder?  it seems like a lot of effort to get around using a method i've never heard anyone complain about. 

in terms of bugs, i can't really detail any at the moment.  i kind of just go around obstacles when i'm working on a scene, so unless i encounter them consistently, i don't really notice particulars.  i know the two products i have with geometry switching i avoid due to bugs, but i couldn't tell you what they were without a new bout of testing.  i haven't been doing much 3d in a while, and what i have been doing is testing different cloth modeling techniques, so i'm not very prepared for Poser testing.  but i'll give it a shot when i have time.

edited to add:
i emphasized user because it seems like you're trying to get around the developer issue of having 2 cr2 files.  it seems to me that this is something you could automate?  if you're just generating a new cr2 with a replacement of one obj reference with another.

Quote - pardon, but for  the user how would this be different than just using a cr2 setting?  other than needing to switch library folders to either the over-crowded pose folder or the unintuitive prop folder?  it seems like a lot of effort to get around using a method i've never heard anyone complain about.

How would what be different? Sorry, I don't understand what you're referring to in this passage.

Quote -
edited to add:
i emphasized user because it seems like you're trying to get around the developer issue of having 2 cr2 files.  it seems to me that this is something you could automate?  if you're just generating a new cr2 with a replacement of one obj reference with another.

Okay, I see it now.

Since pose files have some limitation, I'm actually thinking a lot about ways of generating cr2 files automatically. But notice that that's not only an issue for developers. If a developer makes a change to the cr2 and distributes that, and another developer makes a different change, the user would have to download four cr2s to cover all the combinations. Obviously that's an unsustainable strategy. So we'd really need a easy-to-use tool that allows users to generate those new cr2s.

With just pose files, you don't have that problem. A user can simply load all the pose files they want and save the result as a new cr2. So whatever works with pose files, I like to put into pose files (except of course for features that are so commonly used that they should really be in the default cr2).

More specifically regarding the problem of changing UVs on the fly: a user would only ever change the UVs in order to load a new texture that uses those UVs. If the material settings and the UV switch were all done in a single file, then there wouldn't be any extra action required for the user at all.

I still need to work on her arms, hands and feet, lacrimal, inner mouth , tongue and teeth.

And I think I will let this one be a freebie since it is adapted from the other mapping.

Soon I will start some textures all new for these UV maps.

Limits can be helpful when setting up animations as well. Most of the times I turn them off but some premade sets require them to be turned on.

And as you are about to create a to-do list: You should add a "Send Antonia to PhilC" to it. As soon as you consider her finished (regardless the texture things and such) you may want to ask him for Wardrobe Wizard support. And there is another application called cross-dresser by EvilInnocence that can be interesting as well. As soon as a new figure is released I see people asking for WW and Crossdresser support.

...any chance that someone may help with setting up Antonia for Puppet Master?! Any?! The resulting dat-file can be used with the Universal Poses.

Well, I will certainly let PhilC know about Antonia when she's ready to be released. But whether he's going to support her or not is, of course, totally his decision, and having a large user base would almost certainly be the most convincing argument.

Quote - I hope you all will excuse Toni for exhibiting so much nudity but she wants to show how her texture is coming along.  :laugh:

I'm sorry, but that's completely inexcusable. :lol:

She looks nice. Her complexion works well with the hair.

Awesome! I admire how fast you work - in fact I am floored!! I am still in my pondering-phase

Well, I checked and realized there are no limits at all on bends. Just the defaults of -10000 to 10000 or something like that. So I'll go through all the actors and try to find some reasonable limit for each rotation channel. No my question: do people prefer limits to be on or off by default?

I guess that they prefer to have them off by default as many poses work best without them. But in fact this is only a guess so I hope that you get more answers.

You can change the whole obj with a pose that will include the first part of the cr2 that gives the obj path.
this will take only as if you loaded an empty of morphs Antonia
However since there will be new material zones there should be color settings for those new material also or else the new materials will load in random color. (with the same pose)
Also the old materials will appear in the materials list...

Quote - You can change the whole obj with a pose that will include the first part of the cr2 that gives the obj path.
this will take only as if you loaded an empty of morphs Antonia

Not good! If it doesn't work with a figure that has morphs preloaded, there's no point in doing it via a pose file.

morphs will continue to work just fine if groups are not changed

I made a test, loaded nea and applied the following pose to just change the obj
it takes some seconds (depending on the obj size) and all morphs work fine because nea and posette have the same grouping

{

version
    {
    number 4.01
    }
figureResFile :Runtime:Geometries:P4NudeWoman:P4NudeWom.obj
actor BODY:7
    {

    }
actor hip:7
    {
    storageOffset 0 0 0
    geomHandlerGeom 13 hip
    }
actor abdomen:7
    {*
..... ( the actor list continues)

additional there should be added material settings for the new material zones at the end of file

Ah, I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!

Another question: there are two figureResFile lines in a typical cr2. Do I need to include both in the pose file or just the first?

In my experimental ( I should say) file I changed just the first one, haven't tried it with the second one...
my file ends like that... in the between there are the remaining actors

actor lToe:7
    {
    storageOffset 0 0 0
    geomHandlerGeom 13 lToe
    }
}
 }*

Thanks! I'll give it a try.

Quote - do people prefer limits to be on or off by default?

IMO they quite definitely need to be off by default. The only way set the cr2 with them on by default is to force them, but un-forcing them would require a pose file to be applied. With limits un-forced, it is a simple matter of setting the switch in the Poser Figure menu to turn them on or off.
 

I don't think pitklad's method will survive a save and reload of the figure in P6, I think that would cause it to revert to the origional geometry. There again I may be wrong, and it is certainly worth a try, as it would be very convenient if it does work.

BlueEcho, i hope the little one will get better real soon!

  lesbentley you are right Poser 6 doesn't save the change... hmmm so that's not effective...

BlueEcho I'm also sending my positive energy for your little one! sorry to hear that but I'm sure everything will be all right soon!

As usually I am slow and picky - but meanwhile I've got an eye. I always start with the eyes as they are able to bring the character, still covered with the template, to life - what gives me a kind of push to create the lashes and the teeth and the face and so on.

First of all: This sclera was really a surprise, Mike. Not bad, just unusual for me. I saw it and said: Hey, I just have to add the old eyewhite and tweak the size!
I rendered the result and Antonia immediatly got a bad conjunctivitis!!

When I covered the sclera with some colored rings I found that the outer edge is the part that meets the iris! In fact not a bad thing, just unusual.

The only thing that bothers me (and it bothers me with almost all 3d-eyes) is that the sclera meets the iris in a most unnatural way.
When we look at a real eye the iris is not something that stucks in the eyewhite but both, iris and sclera are grown together and show a kind of milky seam where they meet.

As Antonia's  sclera slightly overlaps the iris I tried my luck with a transparency map that blends this small area into the iris. In fact this worked, only some finetuning would be necessary to the transparency, but - and this is a big but - if I use bagginsbill's settings for the sclera that we are used to (and that look pretty good) the whole sclera gets overly dark. I tried each and everything and found that adding a value over 0 into the Diffuse Value brightens up the sclera but the result is in fact a kind of "glow effect". Please wait a while until I get some samples rendered before you start to look into the thing.

This is the default eye, BB's material settings, my texture.
Don't care too much about the Bumpmap yet, this is only a quick "sketch" for testing purposes.
But I think you can see the sharp edge between sclera and iris.

And that's precisely why I mapped the iris and sclera the way I did, although they are spearate geometries. For easy texture blending!

Maybe you should forget what I told about not being able to plug the transparency map into the given shader without flaws... I am just rendering something that looks promising.

Leo took your eye into Cinema and showed me exactly where I have to blur the tranparent part. The omly problem left is that "blurring" and "exactly" are things taht do not go together well

by the way: When I am finished with the new Toni I would like to try my hand on the additional eyes as well as far as you have plans to distribute them as well.

I'm actually not following this. Maybe it's too early for me, or maybe I'm just too distracted. ;-)
That last render above looks pretty good to my eyes. No pun intended...

So... are you saying you don't like them mapped that way, or you do?

Wow, I'm really not happy with how I mapped the eyes now.
You know, this is really strange and I can't explain it, but looking at earlier versions of Antonia I could have sworn both sets of eyes were mapped separately, so I had that in my head, and that's why I did it the way I did. Now I see they were both sharing one set of UVs. Major brain cramp there, I tell you...
How come nobody said anything about that? ;-)

I can, of course, redo that easily enough, or maybe Olaf could just substitute his original eyes in the geometry itself instead.

*So... are you saying you don't like them mapped that way, or you do?

*The only difference between the  "common" way of mapping the sclera (V4 for instance) and Antonia's sclera is that the part that meets the iris is on the outer edge for Antonia and in a circle around the middle of the sclera for V4. So in fact your way is far more exact as I do not have to guess where I have to put the brightest part of the sclera and the most detailed veins. The outer edge shows me where it has to be. So yes: As soon as I found out where to put what I liked the way you mapped it! *

*For later use by people who are not already used to the model it may be useful to add some hints to the template to show them what attaches to what. But as we here are already familiar with the mapping we should be able to do without. 

I think as well that I should keep the eye above and do some variations basing on this. And as said: If you plan to add the alternative eyes to Antonia I would like to texture them as well as they look promising and may be preferred by artists that like to render portraits.*

That is interesting about the eyes and that is a great eye texture
.
I started a completely new texture yesterday so I'll keep that in mind.

Is there a way to have the lacrimals somewhere on the eye map?
I had a struggle finding them where they are in the eye socket.

Can't do more  tonight because my right hand is swollen an in severe pain again, left one starting to ache...sigh.

Update on grand-daughter Aryca.
She is being treated with Tamuflu and was on oxygen and monitors all week.
Yesterday they took her off oxygen and monitors.
She was released from the hospital today but still in the contagious stage for the next week.
So she can't be brought here around Mom who is in poor health.
Mom is a high risk  for H1N1 if exposed.

Thank you all for the well wishes and kind thoughts.

This is good and bad news at once as I am sure that her mother suffers as she's missing her. On the other hand it is good to hear that the little girl got rid of all those wires and tubes.

The lacrimal is included in the head texture, it's the white area in the eye corner. Wait a moment and I'll post a screenshot...

This is a part of the template, size 4000x4000, left eye. You should be able to put it into your head-texture and match it to the template you use.

Do you have use for the transparency I've done so far? I am not sure if it's perfect... I still have a slight shadow caused by the cornea under specific camera- and light situations. But this should not be caused by the transparency of the iris. If you have need for it I can send you what I have done so far (psd-format) to make your start a bit easier.

i'm glad your granddaughter is doing better!

...you can find the zipped psd-file under "Antonia Eyehelper" in the Textures section!

I hope it enjoy here still an image.

Looking real good Saint Fox! 

And did I already say that I like all these sweet expression morphs?!

That looks great, SaintFox.

Thanks!! :biggrin:

I have a question... I am working on the innermouth at the moment and this part is giving me a really hard time. It is not easy to tell teeth from gums and the fact that the flesh between the teeth and the rest of the innermouth are seperated makes me end up with seams.

Is it possible to map this part again? Perfect would be: Teeth as one part, gums and if possible inner mouth as a second part. If this is not possible I'll try my very best to geth rid of unwanted overlappings and Leo will fix the rest in Bodypaint. But I hope that it is possible to separate these parts in a more texturer-friendly way. The way it was before was not bad at all although I like the simple shape of the teeth better in the new map - and of course the fact that all innermouth parts are kept on their own map.

I think as it's "just" the inner mouth another change to the mapping would not hurt the other texturers too much as more as it should be possible to "recycle" what we got so far.