Hi,
i have put together a release candidate for my universal morph loader script.

Would be looking for pilots who would test it with an actual product.

It can do the following:

• load full body morphs from .OBJ files into figures
• supports creation of partial body morphs
• supports welded .OBJs, for easier processing in external tools
• can operate on scaled,rotated,posed, morphed figures.  good for making healing morphs where joints are looking not good.
• supports all known joint types
• can copy morphs betweens instances of the same figure type
• can aggregate dialed morphs into a single morph to free resources
• no local morph targets where no vertex movement is taking place

Use cases:

• helper for cloth makers
• helper for anyone dissatisfied with how joints end up in extreme poses of the favourite figure

If interested, please mail to mail [at] colorcurvature.com

Cheers :)

Thanks to joe public, whoever you are, for the beautiful example.

This sounds great, but too much going on on Real Life right now-Planting time...

"Click" Export
Sculpt the POSED mesh in ZBrush (Or wherever you like)
"Click" Import
Finished.

Thank you for the kind words, colorcurvature ! :-)

All I can say is, this little script is the final piece of the puzzle I was trying to complete when I started my quest for more realistic Poser figures 10yrs ago.

Since then there were lots of improvements in rigging, lots of better ways to create our own sculpting, lots of helpful add-ons making our work easier.

But this script gives us finally 100% CONTROL over what we do in Poser.

We can now easily export a welded, pre-morphed, pre-posed-and pre-scaled figure out of Poser into a professional sculpting software like ZBrush, do anything with it we like, and get it back into Poser as a fully working figure again.

With just a few mouseclicks.
And with PERFECT results.

Even the most extreme poses causing severe "broken" joints are now easy to fix.

JCM morphs for clothes are child's play now because you can work in ZBrush on the POSED clothing.
(And unlike using MorphLoaderPRO, the results are PERFECT in Poser !)

For anyone interrested in more realistic joints, for anyone interrested in better fitting clothes, for anyone wanting  to seriously speeding up their workflow when rigging content for Poser figures, this script is a MUST HAVE.

I WANT IT NOW !!!  Pleeeeeaaaase

sounds like that could be a pretty handy utility for those of us who use ZBrush/mudbox etc. a lot

Quote - I WANT IT NOW !!!  Pleeeeeaaaase

Please excuse my lost of controll,but this is exactly what I searched so long in Poser.To be able to load morhps that fix bad joint deformations.Combining with the edit dependencies option introduced in Poser 8 this is adream come true.

What if the Poser morph brush is actually the best morphing option you have available?  I assume the exported .obj can just be imported into Poser, treated with the morph brush, exported again, then re-loaded using the script?

Sounds like a wonderful utility!  :thumbupboth:

"I assume the exported .obj can just be imported into Poser, treated with the morph brush, exported again, then re-loaded using the script?"

Yes, you can do this.

While the MorphBrush in Poser8 / Pro 2010 has gotten a lot better, it still has problems smoothing extreme joint deformations.
So morphing a (welded) object is a lot more accurate with it than morphing a "live" mesh.

So you just grab the posed and welded mesh that the script exported, re-import it into Poser, morph it using the MorphBrush, and then export it again as an object so that the loader script can convert it back into a morph.

BTW, the morphs that this script creates are "ordinary" morphs.
So, unlike the "special" MorphBrush created morphs, which need a special morph channels and can't be injected easily, they can be distributed and injected and used by owners of older versions of Poser just like any other morph can.

Simply said, this script can do anything DAZ ' MorphLoaderPRO can do (Which you can only get by buying the  PRO Rigging tools bundle), but it does it easier and faster and especially MORE ACCURATE.

The fix morphs don't need to be "re-fixed" in Poser.
You will get EXACTLY the same shape on the actual figure that you sculpted on the welded object.

I can see me buying this as soon as it hits the store.  Could save truckloads of time

Sounds fabulous!  :woot:  Deserving of a Woot and a Squee!  :lol:  I agree with -Timberwolf-: I want it now!  :laugh:

Cool!  I have been using morph loader pro in the DS setup tools, but sometimes (especially shoulders) the morph looks good in DS but is broken in Poser.  Joe, I know you know what I mean, so does this app fix that?

"Joe, I know you know what I mean, so does this app fix that?"

Yep.
No need to "re-fix" MLP generated fix morphs any more.
With this script, what you see (In yor modelling software) is what you get (In Poser) . :-)

One thing - is it compatible with Poser 7.
I've not upgraded to anything later than that because I don't need all the bells and whistles (I render in Vue or 3DS MAX)

And it works with all figures, regardless how "primitive" the rigging is. :-)

Excellent!  :woot:

"One thing - is it compatible with Poser 7."

I myself tested it mainly in Poser 8, but as far as I know, there are no problems using it in Poser 7.

OK, OK ! I think we've waited long enough! Please submit this to the store so I can spend my hard earned (or hardly earned) money!

Wow joe, these are really excellent fixes you made :-).
Makes me work twice as hard to get it into the store.
I am still putting a cookbook together, and some debug output has to be hidden =).

Still looking for 1 or 2 volunteers to try the pilot. Will only submit it if its completely issue-free and highly usable :-)). mail (at) colorcurvature.com

In my cristall ball I can see lots of kicked out Poser figures coming back to life .  ;)

Sounds great! Could you grab a time machine and send it back one year or so? :laugh:

Seriously, MorphLoaderPro has been a life-saver for me. The same functionality directly within Poser would be fantastic.

Maybe its possible for P7 users to print out some text that can be copy/pasted into the .cr2 easily. But I never set up such a chain manually myself. Anybody knows how to? I would happily integrate it.

In the meanwhile, here is a preview screenshot of it.

colorcurvature

Making a morph into a dependent parameter is a fairly easy cr2 hack for P7, Smith Micro just added a few tools to make it even easier.

In essence if you create a full body morph you are creating a dependent parameter. To make the morph work as a cross talk FBM you simply add the following lines to the FBM dial in the body section of the cr2...

valueOpDeltaAdd
Figure 1
(control group, for example rThigh: 1)
(control attibute, for example xrot)
deltaAddDelta (and the value = the ratio of morph to original diial)

You can use this in each of the morphs in the various groups, but since you have already made them a FBM it;s less work to make the Master FBM dial read the cross talk form the controling figure and then pass the "orders" on to the "slave: morphs in the individual groups.

I know my explanation may be a little confusing but if you want I can email you a cr2 with this set up.

In poser 8 and up there are tools set up to input all of these factors. They also have a handy check box called "Include Morphs When Conforming" but I've found this control to be a bit spotty and still use the same JCM system from Poser 7 for most of my figures, at least until I can figure how to make this work more consistantly (probably my own fault, I haven;t spent nearly enough time reading up on P8+ features)

The slaving of morphs to bend channels is actually the functionality in MLP that I've been least impressed with. For one, you have to do the maths yourself. When I want my morph to be fully expressed at 90 degrees, I have to tell MLP to use a factor of 0.011111. Not really a big deal, but it's less intuitive and can be a bit of a mental stumble block. Another huge annoyance is that the channel you want to slave to is not read back in correctly from the configuration file, which means I have to steer through three nested pulldown menus to fix it each time I tweak and re-load my JCMs.

From my experience, here are two things I'd really like to see in an advanced morph loader with ERC (i.e. morph slaving) support:

1. The ability to save a configuration and replay it later, so that when I make changes to the morph, I can still load it with one click and have it slaved to the correct channel with the correct factor.

2. The ability to save the deltas plus the ERC setup in a separate file. Ideally, that would be a pose file that could be loaded into Poser, but one would have to check if that actually works in practice. But since Poser, Daz Studio and I typically have at least three different opinions of what a proper CR2 should look like, I typically copy-and-paste any changes I make from whatever either software writes out into my clean "master file". So having just the bits I'm actually interested in in a file by themselves would be immensely useful.

Hm, maybe its possible to generate the ERC code directly out of the pose. E.g. you pose it, fix-morph it, and use the pose to derive the ERC parameters to have the morph applied 100% when the figure is bend into the current pose. This should be possible at least locally when there is only one bending dial active.

1. should work already because you can just overwrite the morph targets in an active figure. so you could rework the .OBJ, and reload it.
2. pz2/cr2 rules is indeed a  mystery :) an export into a pose file would be excellent. I think for morph deltas it is not so difficult, as long as in the figure the morph channel already exists.  at least i think the figure has to be prepared somehow, but I am not into pz2 details :(

regarding erc binding in a pose file, I do not know if it works. but isnt there the "simple m4/v4 fixes" product of corvas? i do not have a copy, but the product description sounded as if he managed to do it.

Well, for things like hips and arms, one sometimes has to do complicated things to get a figure to look nice in every conceivable pose. So for example, I would make separate JCMs for the x- and z-rotation of the thigh, then I would apply both rotations at once, fix the resulting shape and add half the difference to each of the existing JCMs. Another option I've seen discussed is to slave a new JCM to a product of the channels. It's pretty tedious to set this kind of thing up by hand, and it would be nice to save it independently of the CR2 and load it back in later (also for example, to make JCMs for a variant of the figure or an item of clothing that would use the same ERC settings).

You're right, one cannot create morph channels via a pose file (at least that's the conventional wisdom, and I haven't seen evidence to the contrary). I forgot about that. So I guess that would still require one to paste some channels into a CR2. Still, having all the deltas and the ERC setup condensed in one pose file would be very useful.

I'm not saying this kind of functionality would be necessary right away, as it seems pretty advanced and maybe not many people would be interested in it. I'd be quite happy to set up my ERC by hand and "just" have your program take care of the morphs. But obviously, the easier it gets to create good JCMs, the more ambitious people will become. So maybe this could be something to think about for future versions.

Ah yes, I think for the moment there are enough features to worry about :).
I've spent the last days with hardening the code, added self-checks, read-after-write-checks because of a bug in Poser's API, added warnings and so on.
Hopefully last thing left is an automated regression test concept. I want to check that the morphed figure is actually exactly what the morphed object contains.

mmmh... there it is, the first real problem :(

made some code to try to measure the distance between object file and morphed figure and that discovered something i did not notice before.

i found that v4 has a gazillion of magnets attached to its body parts.
this seems to be breaking some of my assumptions.

does anybody know when poser applies these magnetism effects? is it before or after morphs are applied?

Those magnets are part of the "Magnetize Clothing" feature that helps clothing follow V4's JCMs even if the clothing itself doesn;t have the correct JCMs. I'm not sure but that may even create certain JCM effects in V4, such as muscles flexing etc.  Bearing that in mind I would 'assume' that the magnets are applied after character morphs.

I think one or more threads in the Poser Technical forum addressed the order in which actor deformations are applied by Poser.  I don't remember offhand how the ordering of bending, morphs, and deformers works out, however.

Complexity is getting out of control ;)
I guess this can never be productized... beh...

I morphed a big spike into M4's head and let a magnet fly through it. It seems to leave the morph untouched. So magnets in general seem to be applied before-morph. That would be best for me. But maybe the figures are set up even differently. I parented the magnet to the head. But maybe if its a bodypart in figures... who knows.

Then i lowered the magnet to touch the unmorphed head surface and the spike began to deform. The heavily deformed spike I exported, morphed  and back loaded the semi-magnetized morph. Script told me it could that with acceptable precision, and it basically looked exactly like the deformed object. So Figure + Magnet + Morph = Deformed .OBJ. Correct =)

So that leaves some hope... will need more testing >_<

Hmmm... at least in one example the script worked better than it actually looked. The morph I applied was maybe just far too extreme.  I have been morphing posed characters into each other, but Poser does not recalculate the vertex normal vectors as it seems. Therefore, the shadow maps do not really match, and the surface shadowing suggested breaks where actually everything was fine and smooth.  What looked poor in shadowed preview mode looks excellent in hidden line preview. Bah...

But I guess that is an acceptable limit.

Maybe should not give up yet.. weeh.

colorcurvature this looks great! can't wait to see it finished :)

but then again - v4 refuses to work properly. she creates really wrong targets. mmmmh

_<
dgahdfsgh

morphing a zero-posed into adams posekit#82  does not have the issue that morphing from posekit#72 to posekit#82.

that i think, it must be the influence of the attached deformers. i just wonder why my magnet worked.
is there an (easy) way to make these V4 magnets visible in the UI?
or need to hack the .cr2?

Quote -
is there an (easy) way to make these V4 magnets visible in the UI?
or need to hack the .cr2?

In the hierarchy editor, make sure "show props" and "show deformers" are both checked, then simply hide and unhide V4's "Body" actor (by clicking the eye next to it in the hierarchy editor).

p.s.: check your sitemail :)

BTW, you know that those magnets are essentially acting the same way JCMs do.. right?  In other words, they are being adjusted, as the joints rotate.  So the strength / distance / pull / effect of those magnets is not 'constant'.

I think it is more than just the magnets.

I have written a new toolset just to debug the effect on morphs in the world coordinate space. I found that actually the layout of the whole virtual space is changed in a non linear fashion. Both the dialing itself as well as the axes of the (hyper)space appear to be unstable (from a linear point of view).  This is a fundamental issue and might be not the fault of poor v4. I hunted the issues down to m4 as well.

Poser seems to calculate in a way that I am not able to find out. It might be sums of rounding errors or be the cause of the core of their algorithms.

However I have a small hope. By repeatedly applying my algorithm and tracking the movement of the vertices in poser I seem to be able to reduce the error from about 10^-2 down to about 10^-6.  At least for the worst example it worked.

I morphed M4 posed with AdamTwaithes Pose 72 into a V4 with Adam's Pose 84 and the error was estimated at only 10^-7.

If this would work in general than it would get as close to mathematical perfection as possible :).
However I have to redesign the script from scratch now, and noone can say if it works good on any other poser than mine. @Testers: You will have mail soon ;)

Wow, you are really taking this seriously. Good on you!

I think I am finally done.
If IK chains are active, the results are completely broken.
No idea whats up, but WorldVertex seems to go berserk if IK chains are active.

But if they are turned off, it seems to work just as planned!

I posed, scaled, bent, twisted the characters and even tortured them with a wave deformer. And still the morphs load at an almost exact precision!! The limit to precision were just the rounding errors of my deformer. Just hope P8 and 2010 behave the same.

Now only have left to review the code for harmlessness and package it to get it into beta.
But as I only have one I/O  "open(filename) "  and python documentation says default access is read-only, there should not be much to be afraid of :). Cage, do you agree =) ?

Maybe someone can help me where to get an "as-is" no-warranty disclaimer that I could use?

Quote - But as I only have one I/O  "open(filename) "  and python documentation says default access is read-only, there should not be much to be afraid of :). Cage, do you agree =) ?

I'm always prepared to be a bit afraid of something.  :lol:  I'm afraid, at the moment, that I'm not quite sure what you're asking?    If you're opening a file to read, you won't inadvertantly alter that file, if that's what you're asking.  You'd have to explicitly open a file to write or append, in order to make any alterations to the file.

Glad to hear that you're nearing completion!  :woot:

Yes, if  'r' is not passed to open(abc), it should still open for read, I hope ;) I saw most people use open(abc,'r'), but from the docs I think open(abc) is just the same, and I would prefer that notation.

Quote - Yes, if  'r' is not passed to open(abc), it should still open for read, I hope ;) I saw most people use open(abc,'r'), but from the docs I think open(abc) is just the same, and I would prefer that notation.

Yes, you can trust the documentation.

Quote -
Maybe someone can help me where to get an "as-is" no-warranty disclaimer that I could use?

You could look at the FTC site, especially this link:  www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/resources/forms/buyers.pdf  :lol:

More seriously, you could use any limited warranty statement that you will easily find on shareware programs for example.

Ooh, and BTW, I WANT to use your soft, even with no warranty at all :biggrin:

Cheers

Good to hear ;)
And there will not be any warranty =).
There are far too many variables in the game to bet one's life on it.
Figure setup can be very complex, and Poser does not always do the right thing. I noticed it cannot make FBM's for M4/V4/F4 properly if you are using the morphforms when you create a FBM. Because that is a morph dial, Poser tries to add the dial to the morph. But then the link?param to the BODY actor gets de-synched. In consequence you cannot save the pose any more. One does not need a script to reproduce this phenomenon.

While I think its ok that it tries to add the morphform, it is not ok that the dial sync gets broken when that FBM is in use.

So I added a big warning on the banner screen, that the user is always in charge to  check that what he got is what he wanted. Posers system is too complex and too intransparent to be sure unless one checks :)

I think :)

You could easily create your own Morphforms in Poser 8 / 2010 using the dependencies editor. Just  add your reversed deformer Morphs to them. I am so excited about this -byebye messed up joints .

yes, i want P8 too :-)
I have contacted the testers now, the release candidate is ready for test.
Joe reported its working in P8 and 2010, so I have hope it is now stable :).

Then all thats left is some talk with rendo admins regarding the EULA. They basically said that the EULA is also protecting the vendor, not only rendo itself. So this sounds good.

 bookmark

 Look very interesting!  How can I missed this thread!?

Hi colorcurvature:

Any news? Dont mean to rush/pester you. But, I really NEED this app badly right now :) I am doing JCM's for my Brad figure right now, and I have done some different things with his geometry that the DS tools will not work with. Poser has no problem working/exporting with Brads geometry, so I am desperately in hopes that I can get your Poser friendly app ASAP.

Cheers,
Mike.

hi, mike, I am waiting for tester feedback, but seems everybody was gone during the weekend :).  i hope its basically stable now, joe had a situation where the precision was strangely low (but appearently still made a fine morph).  you can try the tool if you like. drop me mail [at] colorcurvature.com.