Wowee, Mike! That was INSANELY cool.:thumbupboth:

Progress:

www.youtube.com/watch

I keep thinking that DAZ should have hired you.  AMAZING!! 

LOL You should have seen me here calling my hubby and repeating "Look, look!!!" - that's so amazing, so much care for details! I am very happy to be able to have a lok behind the curtain. Oh and: Nice voice! If you ever find yourself unemployed you may consider making audio books

RamWolff:  I seem to be persona non gratta to Daz and SM.  Perhaps I can turn in something for Poser 9, we'll see.  :)

SaintFox:  Thanks.  No one ever told me that before  :biggrin:

 That is impressive deformation on the mesh. Very cool. You do have a pleasant narration. Perfect for public radio work and voice acting.:laugh: Lucky bastard. :lol:  Being Persona non grata at SM doesn't matter any more since they can't be interacted with anymore. They killed of their forums, so forget them! Still ticks me off.

You can hardly do anything at DAZ without getting a warning or such. Never critique ANYONE'S stuff or express opinions over there or you will offend someone. That's major suckage, and makes them a laughing stock to everyone else in CGI, so don't worry about them much. :laugh:

Just keep doing what you're doing and I think everyone will be happy!

Quote -  That is impressive deformation on the mesh. Very cool. You do have a pleasant narration. Perfect for public radio work and voice acting.:laugh: Lucky bastard. :lol:  Being Persona non grata at SM doesn't matter any more since they can't be interacted with anymore. They killed of their forums, so forget them! Still ticks me off.

You can hardly do anything at DAZ without getting a warning or such. Never critique ANYONE'S stuff or express opinions over there or you will offend someone. That's major suckage, and makes them a laughing stock to everyone else in CGI, so don't worry about them much. :laugh:

Just keep doing what you're doing and I think everyone will be happy!

Cursed political correctness...they fall victim to it in big ugly bunches....same, it seems, as everything else in this wonderful country of ours!  :(
I stopped posting my work there. It got too retentive for my tastes.

*I seem to be persona non gratta to Daz and SM.

I see what you mean... no reply at all - that's poor!

I don't think its the quality of work at all.. but you have stated that you are releasing this as a freebie, so what would be the incentive of Daz or SM to contact you?

To rig or develop another figure? What kind of time frame would you be delivering it to them? Keep in mind they have time constraints, and budgets that have to be met for developement. They don't have the luxury of working on one figure for 3 or 4 years to perfect it.

Not only that, most new figures have a hot "shelf life" of about a year.. after that, the community wants more/better, and the stores need more/better in order to drive additional sales volume, and improve sales numbers.

I supposed one of the stores could make him a new free "flagship" figure, but since you are so entrenched at Rendo, you are talking to the "competition". Maybe talk to Rendo as using this as a marketing driver?

Amazing work man!!!   I would seriously buy this character any time..  from the examples you've posted here he would be a pleasure to work with compared to any of the figures I have..   

gonna keep a close eye on this character...   ;)

M

please make a female figure to go with him... I will buy also..

on the existing figures those gen crease morphs are absolutely horrible...  lol

M

Hi marcus55:

Have you downloaded Antonia yet? She is a free figure by odf, absolutely gorgeous, and bends very well.

Here is a pic of her with a character texture by SaintFox (superb texture)  www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/media/folder_9/file_447857.jpg

You can download her from odf here
sites.google.com/site/antoniapolygon/

Thanks for the link..  will try her she looks incredible! 

;)

M

Still awesome Mike. :)

I'm forever in awe of your leet skillz, you know.

Now hand him over so I can play with him, you rotten tease, you!

;)

A quick attempt at geometry inserted pants.  Not a good job of modeling just a quick and dirty trial of the idea.

It works very well. I have actually reduced the poly count loaded into the scene by these lower poly pants, and they get loaded into the figure and weld in.  No poke through and no conforming necessary. I will do a much better job of the modelling on a better pair.  But it works! Need some JCM's which I will have to figure out how to load with the pants. And will need to adjust the fall off zones, which I know can be loaded with a Joint insertion pose.

Stop messing with him and gief heem to meeh!

threatens Mike with a fish

(I ran out of 2x4's)

I hates fishes. 

Hi Silke,

You want a semi finished version?  I will send it to you, but bear in mind it still has a long way to go. Let me know.

Cheers,
Mike.

Well.... if you send me a UV map to go along with it so I can mess with textures... :)

Quote - A quick attempt at geometry inserted pants.  Not a good job of modeling just a quick and dirty trial of the idea.

That is seriously cool!  :woot:

Seems like a cool idea, although I'm a bit concerned about the added complexity.

I'd like to test this thing of yours in Carrara. It handles most content fine, but there are problems with things like geometry switching and ERC. Send me a PM if interested :)

IMHO Geo added clothing is a bit of a system resource waste.. it could be that those are used only 1/80th of a time in renders, so that overhead is wasted for the majority of uses then.. unless you build a dedicated cr2 with built in clothing... but then how do you choose what clothing to include as well?

I think its best that mat zones are provided for quick clothing options, and maybe a foot toe "sock" morph, but other then that, leave quick clothes options as things like an applied displacement map using the mat zones.

As I understand it, the process phantom3D is working on does not add geometry, it swaps it and welds it in place. Because the clothing geometry uses the same rig, and usually will have less polys, it does not use more resources (except the space to store the insertion poses and geometry on the hard disk).

It seems to me that the real problem will be in applying MAT poses. Poser does not seem to handle partial MAT poses very well. With conforming cloths this is not a problem, because the clothing is a separate figure. When the clothing is part of the same figure, it will take some ingenuity to change the MAT of the clothing, without changing the MAT of the skin.

lmk

I'm pretty sure geoswapping does add overhead. IMHO it really doesn't make sense to build something in not used most of the time.

 The mat zones are the REAL killer, though. Atypical mat zones do add more work for the user and mat makers, as well as needing specialized shader use if anyone is using BB's VSS shader system.  I've run into this with Behemoth 2 which has a CRAP-load of different material zones that do not match up anything.

Also the more mat zones you put in, the more likely the figure won't be used much.  Ease of use really helps everyone. Simpler is always better than complicated.  I'm not saying to not use them, but limiting the sheer number of mat-zones would be a real help to the rest of us.

If the Geom-switching can change the mat zones, that might be useful!

This and other threads cover a lot about the history of P3D's work on Brad (and Antonia). You are actually accomplished at making figures, and I am not. So these threads would probably make more sense to you than they do to me. Eventually, Phantom3D will come along, and give a better explaination than I can.

Phantom3D did not want to create a figure that used extra resources by having  geometry loaded , but not used. He was trying to figure out how to have a base figure without genitals, and add the genitals with a pose file. He did not want to use the method you talk about, because he agrees that that is a waste of resources.

A conforming figure has a lot of problems that he wanted to avoid.

The solution he found isn't built in, it is substituted for the original geometry by an insertion pose file, that replaces the original geometry, and is then welded in place. Cage and others have used similar techniques for some of their work. Now that he can add and remove the genitals, P3D is trying the technique out on some other ideas, like clothing.

It will be interesting to see what he can accomplish, even if in the end it doesn't turn out to be useful to everyone.

lmk

Hi, Gareee, lkendall, Joel.

I have been working out the low poly version of the geometry.  So far I have it down to 17K with all loaded (gens, teeth etc.) I decided to do it now since it will be very hard to cut down the figure later and still keep any UV mapping. I dont think I can get it much lower than 17K and still keep the integrity of the mesh.  The biggest poly pig in the face-head right now are the ears, the ones in there now are up over a 1000 poly's.  Got to pull some more out of them.

Anyway I would show you some pics of the low poly figure right now but I have been removing so many poly's and smoothing the results, that he does not have much shape left right now. I only have a few more to remove from the face and ears, and I will have a low poly Brad for animations. At 17K the divided mesh comes out to 68K for the high poly version, more than I wanted, but at least the low poly and high poly can match for UV's and all.

So thats where I have been.

Gareee, you are right, for the usual methods of geometry swapping it does indeed use system resources, since the alternate geometry is loaded into memory even when it is not in the scene. This is why I did not want to use geometry swapping.

And so, as lkendall pointed out, I am using a different aproach to achieve the same thing, that does not load any geometry into memory and is not built in at all. With this method the clothing is completely separate from the figure and is not referenced in the cr2 in any way, just like conforming clothes only without the need for its own rig and all underlying geometry actually gets removed from the scene. So you can have as many different sets of clothing you wish, just like conforming clothing.

The materials for the clothing are not referenced in the cr2 either, in fact nothing of the clothing is ever loaded untill you load it. For the JCM's in the clothing they will use regular empty morph channels, as per Cages and Anacents (sp?) instructions, on the insertion of JCM's from a pose file. The mats are inserted in the same manner, as well as joint changes.

This saves so much headache with clothing creation and use. Imagine all the time spent on poke through alone? Uneccessary! Or all the problems with scaling comforming clothjing? Uneccessary! Crosstalk? Doesn't exist. Many others.

There is a price.......Some of the things loaded into the figure cr2 cannot then be easily removed, at least I have not figured one out yet. So even though you remove the clothing and return the figure back to its naked state, there are unremoved lines left behind in the cr2, I am trying to figure out if there is a way to use remove poses to remove them.  But even if not, you would just not want to change clothes too many times in a single session.  Once you reload the figure of course you start over with a clean cr2.

I also might add that this does not preclude making conforming clothing for the figure just like any other figure. Brad in that respect is like any other figure.

Does this new system take into account joint tweaks and changes needed for clothing, or is it limited to the original rigging?

Gareee:

Good question. I have to assume that the genitals that he is inserting would have to have a rig. I believe he said that the material zone for the genitals was included in the base figure. I never asked if the rigging was there also.

I know that he has been looking into injecting JCM's. There is more about that at this thread,

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2794829

You are a very experienced modeler and rigger. I am sure that everyone would appreciate any insight you can contribute to the conversation.

lmk

Yes you add a joint insertion pose to the clothing insertion pose and it will make the necessary changes. They are all part of the same pz2

And upom removal of the clothing it gets reversed back to the original JP's

The rigging for the gens is already in the figure. I should clarify that you cannot actually add new joints, but you can modify the joints already present.  So if you wanted some clothing that has different additional bones you would need to go with conforming.

You've really developed some new techniques, with this figure, phantom3D!  Brad will be expanding the boundaries of Poser Techiedom.  :lol:  :thumbupboth: I can't wait to see how all of it works.  :D  It's very exciting.  :woot:

 Mike--You are inspiring people with Brad's development. That's more than any developer can hope for. Keep doing it!  Innovate and inspire us all to greater heights!:laugh:

 I hope all is going well with brad.

Looking forward so much to him being finished - thank you for all the work you're doing here :)

There are no JCM's here just rigging and mesh.

 That looks great!

That looks fantastic!  Just out of curiosity, what is the vertex count of the head actor, on the low poly mesh?  (Just on account of the fact that I've been obsessing about head actor vertices....  :lol:)

Amazing!  :D

The vertex count without the teeth for the head is 3621 (3578 poly's)  With the teeth-innermouth-tounge is 5466 (5482 poly's)  I was able to save gads of poly's on the inner mouth-teeth-tounge by making it all moulded from a single piece. There is still plenty in the face to get some decent morphs.

Wow!  As context, Vicky 2 has 10041 head vertices and Antonia has 6487.  From what I've seen of your mesh design, I'd expect the head to morph quite nicely.  All those vertices don't really help Vicky much - of course, many are wasted on the teeth and innermouth.  Antonia handles quite well with 6487 and I bet Brad will, too.  Excellent!  :woot:

phantom3D:

It looks as if you will be able to release a low poly-count and a high poly count simultaneously. That ought to please a maximum number of people.

As you have noticed. Cage has been working on transferring facial morphs from V1/2 to Antonia. When he gets his process refined, he may also be able to provide reference files for M1/2, and Brad? If V3/S3 and M3/D3 could also have definition files made, the number of possible facial/expression/phoneme morphs for Brad and Antonia would be phenominal.

LMK

That would be interesting to see.

I'm getting my head around stuff atm, so I might throw a freebie texture for M4 into freestuff some time, but atm I'm battling with seams hehehe.
I'm game to try Brad tho when you're ready.
But I think I better get some more practice under my belt first. :)

My heart's going pitter-patter Phantom!

Keeping us informed in the forum probably keeps  you away from working on Brad but please don't stay away too long - need to keep the heart-rate up :)

How excellent results with low-poly Brad's rigging!  And the animators go wild!

So that's low-polygon... okayyyy.... WOW!! Michael will be green of envy (and Victoria as well as you Brad poses like she prefers to do ).

Yes I definitely noticed the new morph transfer tools by Cage  :)  I'm all over it, believe me.  :) Super idea to be able to borrow morphs from figure to figure.

Well, at a fork in the road right now. I basically have three different rigs, that are the same except for the thigh and hip joints.  The first two I should make a decision and choose one to run with. They both bend great for the thighs, but one is better over all except for the drawback.

In the rig you have seen above, the thigh center is aligned half way between alignment for the body and alignment for the leg.  This allows the leg to swing forward and backward in a relatively straight line. It does not move to the inside and so no adjustment is necessary.

In the second rig the thigh centers are aligned solely with the leg. This is best for scaling of the thighs and hip, and also it is better in the thigh hip muscle deformation. However the thigh-leg will move to the inside with a slight twist on extreme movements of the thigh bend. This is easy to adjust for with side to side and twist of the joint. I would personally choose this joint over the former because of the better performance of muscle deformation in both the bend and side to side. But you do have to compensate as I have mentioned, which means a little more work in posing.

What will others prefer? I dont know. Would some of you mind if I post an unfinished trial of both for testing, discussion and comment?

The third rigg will be the same as whichever of the former two is chosen, except I am adding my double hip variation. (Antonia style hip)

Michael might be envious for a little while till M5 comes out, then I'm sure Daz will have trumped me. Or perhaps Anton will do a new Apollo.  But C'est la vie, I shall have to come up with something better.  :)

From the sound of what you describe, I think I'd prefer to do a bit more posing to seeing more natural muscle deformation.
I tweak everything all the time anyway, so this isn't a biggie for me.

 anton has been pretty quiet lately, and V5 will come out well before M5, so brad will have his time in the sun.
Love esther
PS I've been using apollo a little lately, and he really is a very good figure.

*"What will others prefer? I dont know. Would some of you mind if I post an unfinished trial of both for testing, discussion and comment?"

The more I see , the better I like Brad.
Keeps us posted.
Thanks

Like Silke, I will happily tweak dials for hours. I would choose the figure with the greatest versitility. I don't mind the (tiny bit of) extra work.

LMK

i'm more concerned with learning to pose totally new figures in general than anything as small as making tweaks.  those are necessary in any case.  i definitely vote for the one that works better and has issues that can be overcome with posing.