Okay, time for another progress report...

I've been home with a cold since Thursday, which meant I found some time to work on what I'm calling 'scale-controlled morphs' for Antonia's hands and feet (in between lots of much-needed rest, obviously). Since DAZ Studio does not support propagating scale, I could not use my normal JCM workflow for these and got into quite a number of false starts until I figured out how to do it. One crucial detail that took me embarrassingly long to understand is that by scaling an actor one also scales all the morphs applied to it. This means I had to divide that channel value by the scale of that actor to get the linear behaviour I needed.

As you see, I managed to get the mesh to deform smoothly now, but unfortunately there are some unsightly shading artifacts left that I don't completely understand yet. My best guess at the moment is that when one applies a morph, Poser does not recompute the normals after displacing the vertices. This would usually not be a big problem, since most morphs are relatively smooth and do not change the directions of faces too much. But in this case I needed to turn the sharp step created by propagatingScale into a smooth surface. So what I think we're seeing here are the normals left over from that step. At the moment, I don't have any idea as how to fix it.

Anyway, this seems to be more or less the best I can do right now. If someone who understands smooth scaling better than I do can figure out how to get that to work satisfactory on the hands and feet, I'd be more than delighted. I for one have given up, so for the time being, propagating scale it is, as much as it hurts me to leave the DAZ users behind.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.