So after three years now, of working with this rigging stuff, and mesh building, I think I'm as close as I'm going to get with just straight rigging. No JCM's or morphs.  The hardest dang thing was getting it to deform right, flat on top and not a huge crack up the back. You can still see a problem on the side of the hip-butt near the bottom left, but I think this is close to how the human body should bend.
I think with Poser 8 I may, using the extra falloff zones, be able to get away with no JCM's at all.

I rigged his ears, eyelids and mouth too, individual toe rigging. Well, pretty pleased with it so thought I'd share.

The Mesh has made a big difference in getting the body to deform properly.

Cheers,
Mike.

Looks good, is Brad close to be ready?

Congratulations Mike, persistance pays off ;)

Thanks pjz99, it has  alot to do with the mesh, a baffling subject for me. It took all these years and help from some people here before I started to understand. I could never in the past get the poly's to move in the right direction to deform that way. But finally I start to understand a comment made in the Max tutorials, that a mesh bends like a wire screen. The vertices will move but the edges will not bend. Sounds simple, but trying to predict how the vertices and edges will move in relation to eachother was not simple at all.

Here is another usually nasty bend with the shoulders.  Not as hard I think as the hip but still a difficult one. This one will need a JCM on the top part for P4-7, but not much. In P8 I am trying to add some extra falloff Zones and do away with the JCM's.  Pretty hard to get for a figure with big arms :)

Cheers.

Quote - "No morphs or JCM's cut off the gen for modesty :)"

Bollocks! We can see them, that is :P

Great-looking figure you've made, BTW.

That's some damned good bending. Always good to see what you can do with rigging.

 This is really impressive!

Cut off gens for modesty? AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!:scared: What kind of world do you think we live in?!?!?! Just click the nudity tag and be done with it!:laugh:

Those arms bend smoother than my OWN arms! Damn, I'm envious! Those are the most realistic bending arms I've seen in a while!

I'm glad you've gone back to working on him. You are making some TREMENDOUS strides! Keep going!

WOOOOOHOOOO!GO, MIKE,GO!

Thanks, I am really happy with it. It's finally starting to look finished (professional) you know what I mean? Daz figures always have that polished look. The ear rigging came out kind of cool. The eye lids will need a JCM Had to weld the top and bottom together in the cr2 instead of surrounding them with their parent.

The eyelids still need a JCM to take out the crease and shape them a bit better, but you can scale them or slant them (twist) Top and bottom.

All done with rigging and scaling.

cheers.

 Very cool! :laugh: So you can pull on his ears,eh?

When you say eye handles, do you mean something like Sadie's? She is the one figure with the BEST eye controls out there. Her hands don't have ANY grasp (of any kind including individual fingers) ,spread or thumb grasp ERCs which is suckage.

Speaking of which...does Brad have any hand ERCs? If not, Les with Sixus1 can help. THIER figures have the BEST hand ERC's out there!  If you could do a Sadie eye handle and Sixus1 hand controls you would have an absolutely ass-kicking figure!

Wow! congratulations, those shouldrs look better than the Daz figures, not sure about the extreme circumcision though

Thanks 3Dave.

Joel ;  Brads eyelids are done as regular actors. I tried to do handles but couldn't figure out where to hide the handle geometry. I don't have Sadie where do I find her?

Yes he has erc for the hands and feet and they are also fully scalable. I will have to check out Sixus1's erc setup. 

I have almost no content other than what came with Poser ,   M4 and V4. I need to get out and look around more.  :biggrin:

Quote - Thanks 3Dave.

Joel ;  Brads eyelids are done as regular actors. I tried to do handles but couldn't figure out where to hide the handle geometry. I don't have Sadie where do I find her?

Sadie is a figure by 3DUniverse she can be found @ DAZ store

good work on the rig, this is the boyfriend of Antonia ?

Quote - > Quote - Thanks 3Dave.

Joel ;  Brads eyelids are done as regular actors. I tried to do handles but couldn't figure out where to hide the handle geometry. I don't have Sadie where do I find her?

Sadie is a figure by 3DUniverse she can be found @ DAZ store

good work on the rig, this is the boyfriend of Antonia ?

Could be if he can ever get himself ready.   :biggrin:

Daz store eh.  I will go look. I picked up  Dystopia there awhile back, very cool!

You should have him mapped for M3 textures.
dph

This looks very, very good. The best bends I've seen on any figure for Poser.

I'd love to see some renders with decent shaders and lighting - is he UV mapped? I think you sometimes get a few surprises with models and how well they work when you follow the materials/lighting/render process to full conclusion.

Also, how scalable is he generally? I love full scaling ability in a figure, in all body parts. I know this isn't always practical or easily achieved but when it's there I think it hugely increases the potential of a figure.

Could you post a render or two of the mesh? I use the morph brush for tweaks, but also for extensive re-shaping of the head/face and there are definitely some meshes that don't play well with that tool. For example, I find V4/M4 are just too mesh-dense, and figures like Ryan and Alyson have topology (e.g. on cheeks and brows) that cause horrible creases and defy smoothing (with that tool anyway). Apollo is the only figure so far that has given me no issues with the morph brush - very nice to work with.
This is a very Poser-centric concern, but interesting to know.

I wondered what had happened to Brad. Good work!

 I've been thinking about Brad lately so it is good to see him progressing.
Love esther

Hi DP, UV mapped for M3 would be great. He is mapped now but its a bit messed up, had to do some retopo and shape changes since I mapped him.  But I think he is in his final shape. I will know in the next week if I need to add any poly's or change anything.

Almost done with all the scaling, and if all that comes out without a hitch then he is finished geometry wise.

Hi carodan. Thanks. He will be fully scalable, including the fingers and toes. I am working on setting up the teeth for scaling too.  :) Had to put in actors for the teeth anyway for the jaw to work so I'm setting up some scaling for them. The scaling for the fingers and toes is a little tight, but you can get them longer or shorter, I will keep working on it. Of course the entire hand scales with propagating scale as well.

I will post a render of the mesh, this one is pretty high poly about 60 K.

Hi Esther. :)

Looks very good!

So you will need the original figure to use him? You will do this with morphs?
Looks great so far.

 Don't be too long.  NOthing in this world is perfect.
He can be Brad 1, just make him useable, and you can spend another 12 months perfecting Brad 2 etc hehe, just like DAZ.
Love esther

 I didn't know you meant that you had the EYELIDS as seperate actors! That's dreadful in my opinion because it makes it horribly difficult to morph his face!  I can see why you did it, but as a final release, they should be deleted so people can morph his face easier.

The more difficult he is to use, the less support he'll have. For morphs, nothing beats the Blacksmith suite for forming morphs and deforming meshes. I've used it in my work flow for years and I recommend it highly.

I would suggest a discrete grouping of morphs for the face set for "Brow" "Eyes" "Nose" "Mouth" and "Chin". A seperate group for general face morphs would be useful. I have no idea what facial morphs you already have, but setting the morphs into groups would be a HUGE help for anyone using the figure. I have Apollo, but never use him because he has to MANY morphs to go through such a library that is in no particular order. 

ANYWAY...that is my input on face morphs and such. if you find it useful, that's good. I know you've worked really hard on Brad, but somethings, IMO, just don't NEED to be reinvented.

60K polys? That is pretty heavy, but he does deform well.

Quote - I have Apollo, but never use him because he has to MANY morphs to go through such a library that is in no particular order. 

 

Semideu's Morphs Categories pose for Apollo solves this, but you're right that morph grouping is a useful standard for figures.

Marque, no morphs, its all rigging on an original figure.

Joel, why would that make morphs difficult?

Esther, no I'm done, he is as perfect as he is going to get. I need to move on to the two kids Cory and Darlene. Besides, (never thought I'd say it) I'm sick of rigging.  :)

 None of the morphing tools I've ever seen allow creating morphs across actors.  If there are programs out there that allow creating morphs across actors, I don't know about them. I'd like too! :woot: More tools are always useful!

Ooooh - are we starting another epic thread?

Amazing figure.

Even if you don't have UV mapping done, you could slap the VSS shader on him sans textures just to get a sense of him skinned. I did that early on with Antonia.

 Maybe! A new figure that can bend that well is just exciting stuff!

Blacksmith wont morph across groups, even if they're welded?

Hi Bagginsbill, I am going to try VSS with him. really need it to add that extra even with a texture.

Topology looks perfect for the Poser morph brush tool - particularly the face.

Have to confess that the eye-lid rigging might concern me a little as well from a morphing point of view. It's more of an unease - I only use magnets and the morph brush (P8 morph brush now works across body-parts) and I have had issues working across body-parts in the past, especially with smoothing. I have to defer to professional morphers using the advanced tools as to how problematic it might be.

I know it's not a problem with Zbrush. But I have not tried the P8 morph brush on them yet. I really like having the eyelids because with the eyelashes rigged as well they follow the eyes perfectly, no morphs necessary. And you can scale the eyelashes or change the angle. I will dump them if I have to...  :(

Are the lashes rigged as a seperate body-part too (independent of the eye-lids)? This might sound silly and the only reason I ask is that as a seperate body-part we could set the lashes to not be visible in Raytracing, advantageous when using IDL which can cause ugly artifacts at present.

Yes a separate body part. And welded to the eyelids

I'm assuming the whole obj mesh is welded too - really useful for morphing generally.

edited - ah, I see you indicate this a few posts up with your Blacksmith comment.

Yup all welded, including the gens and the piece under the gen that is supposed to replace them when the geometry switch happens :) I have not figured that part out yet, how to swap out the gens for the no gen piece.  I was wondering too how exactly that worked. since I have the rigging in the figure for the gens which are several body parts, is that possible? I mean the gens dont have to be a single body part to swap like that? Just a separate obj Yes?

I don't know how the hip switch works.  I know poser has a bug about wanting to the gens back on even when it's turned off when a pose is applied from the library, so people got in the habit of using the alternate geometry for the hip. It's a pain in the butt, but it's no big deal for users who know about it.

Also I noticed unless all the gen geometry is named genital it will not hide it, and since I have 10  rigged bodyparts to the gens I cant name them all genital. So I am wanting to use a geometry swap if that will work.

Why so MANY? It's not an elephant's trunk, is it?

:scared: It can't pick up coconuts from the ground can it?  If so...he might be to much man for normal people!:laugh:

Quote - :scared: It can't pick up coconuts from the ground can it? 

Extreme LOL

Special request from another site  I am trying some backward scaling with the gens too. Since most often they are used huge and that causes poor bends when they are scaled that large, I started them out huge and scale them down for the default pose. Instead of the other way around.
Really helps for bending that way.

 :blink: So orinally, it COULD pick up coconuts and now it's scaled down to wrestle walnuts? Ahem. Alrighty then. Carry on.:lol: LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Yup! :lol:   Well I gotta get to bed,so tired, makes me ignant.  But I have a long weekend off, Going to try to get alot done on this figure. Post some more pics later.

Cheers,
Mike.

I agree with the others, best bend poses I have ever seen.  It will be very impressive once it is finally finished,  Can't wait so see more.

When the mesh is finished, let me know, and I'll map him for you the same way that I mapped Antonia. 
Does he come in a hi and lo rez version?
dph

Woot!  Great work, Phantom3D!

How does the rig differ from those with which you were working some months back?

Quote - Also I noticed unless all the gen geometry is named genital it will not hide it, and since I have 10  rigged bodyparts to the gens I cant name them all genital. So I am wanting to use a geometry swap if that will work.

You can just supply a pose file to hide those parts, I don't think there is any particular benefit to geometry switching.  The geometry still takes up memory and the texture maps are still loaded.  If your switch geometry is actually welded to the main character's mesh, it seems very likely this will make a bit of a mess when rendering with polygon smoothing on.

Fantastic to see Brad getting to the finish line Phantom3D. A low poly version for animation would be great. Partnering Antonia these superbly rigged figures would be the stars in my arsenal. Top of the line.

Hey... great figure. I would not bother with the geometry switch for all the the genital parts... maybe just make an alternate geometry of tighty-whities  for the hip and a pose to turn off the visibility on the penis and testical parts. You could maybe though ERC slave the various genital parts to switch to "invisible geometry" when the hip switch is applied. 

BTW for years I used terrific "geometry based" eyelashes for Posette, V2 and V3 instead of the standard trans-mapped style. I think modeled lashes are better that trans-mapped and I am a relentless lo-res advocate.