Hi, i have 2 questions about morphs in poser....

1] i just wondered how do an artist  create morphs for clothes?? { the mesh changes shape even without the skeleton movement} any other tools or plug in for that? i know that 'load morph target' is part of the way, but is there any other tools that can create morphs more precisely?

2] how do even artists create a character's expression such as smiling, open mouth, closing eyes.... is it sufficient just by exporting the head obj into blender, do sculpting ..... then import back as morph target into poser ????[ i noticed the morph doesn't work properly, take an example, i've made a character eyes closed when set parameter from 0 to 1, however the eyeballs poke the eyes skin on half way, say 0.5....as if the morph changes linearly]

As to number 1, Phil Cooke's Wardrobe Wizard is now included with Poser 8 and later versions.  Another option is Dimension3D's Morphing Clothes.

No info on the 2nd, I never did that kind of thing.

If you are using any of the free Daz figures, there's no need to do morphs for smiling or closing eyes...they are built into the base figures. You just have to adjust the dials.

Laurie

When you work on your eyelid morphs, make sure that you have the eyeball object in a background layer. While it is the nature of morphs to change linearly, I've never had a problem with the eyelid morph entering the eyeball at. 50% when creating morphs for my figures.

While making smiles you need to be able to sculpt the lips and cheeks without damaging the underlying teeth. In Zbrush I'd mask the teeth and tongue (provided that this is part of the head).  You should keep in mind that a smile doesn't just affect the lips.

You can open a mouth by selecting the jaw, inner mouth and lower lip and rotating the selection in the side view, with the "hinge" of the rotation at the back of the jaw just like real life. Then you'll need to smooth out the horribly stretched polygons on the cheeks and re-sculpt the area. This is a breeze in Zbrush, though the first part of this task might be easier in a conventional modeler.

I've wondered sometimes if it would be possible to create a chain of morphs in Poser and assign them to one dial. That is to say, the body parts effected by the morph chain would be influenced by morph 1 from 0 to 25 on the dial, morph 2 from 25 to 50, morph 3 from 50 to 75 and so on. This might be a way to compensate for the linear nature of morphs, but I don't know if it would be possible in Poser.

I looked at your gallery, so I am guessing you are using the miyuki figure to morph?
Paloths explanation is I think what you need, but you can definatly do a great deal of effective morphing in poser using magnets. the key to magnets ( at least for me) is to get the magnet zone
just perfect, and to make target groups with the grouping tool as needed.
morphing with magnets can be time consuming and a pain but I think effective, you often need to make alot of small zones and magnets for 1 good morph.
don't forget if you are making magnet morphs you want to make them on the face as you will see it, then zero it so as not to include existing morphs. sorry if thats obvious.

Quote - ....as if the morph changes linearly

Morphs always do change linearly, that's in their nature, and that's one of their shortcomings, the vertices in a morph always move in a straight line. And that's why morphs are useless at implementing rotations. You should be able to get away with with an eyes closed morph, because whilst in the real world the movement is rotational, the degree of rotation is very slight, and you can fake it by by linear movements. But never try to move an eyeball with  a morph, as that would move the geometry away from its joint centre (origin), and that will cause problems. For a bit more info on this last  point, see this thread.

Paloth,

Quote - I've wondered sometimes if it would be possible to create a chain of morphs in Poser and assign them to one dial. That is to say, the body parts effected by the morph chain would be influenced by morph 1 from 0 to 25 on the dial, morph 2 from 25 to 50, morph 3 from 50 to 75 and so on. This might be a way to compensate for the linear nature of morphs, but I don't know if it would be possible in Poser.

I think that should be posible, but it depends what you want exactly. There are verious scenarios.

1. At a master dial value of 1, Morph-1 reaches an rexpression value of 1, then stays at that value, whilst morph-2  begins to be expressed as as the master dial moves towards 2 where Morph-2 is fully expressed and remains at that value whilst Morph-3 begins to be expressed, etc. Or...

2. At a master dial value of 1, Morph-1 reaches an rexpression value of 1, then Morph-1 is gradually turned off, and Morph-2 is is turned on untill the master dial reaches a value of 2 where Morph-2 is fully expressed and Morph-1 has no expression, then Morph-3 begins to be expressed as the master dial moves from 2 to 3, whilst morph-2 is being turned off.

Scenario 1 is is definatly possible, and has been done, it is in fact fairly easy to set up. Scenario 2 sopunds more challenging, but I think it should be possible, I will look into it.

Attached above is the text of a cr2 where morphs are applied cumulatively via one dial, as in scenario 1 in my previous post. The morphs are expressed via the "Morph_Master" dial in the BODY actor.

Each morph is slaved to the Morph_Master valueParm channel in the normal way, and has it's limits forced between 0 and 1. In addition, the trick here is to slave each morph channel to another valueParm channel in the BODY named "One", the value, initValue, min and max of this channel are all set to a value of 1.0. The 'deltaAddDelta' ratio for each morph channel slaved to "One" is negative, and starting at zero for  Morph-01, incremented by one for each successive morph. So Morph-01 uses 'deltaAddDelta -0.0', Morph-02 uses 'deltaAddDelta -1.0', Morph-03 uses 'deltaAddDelta -2.0', etc.

It's as simple as that, the slaving to the "One" channel holds back the expression of the morph until the master dial reaches the desired value, and forcing the limits of the morphs to between 1 and 0 ensures that the morphs don't go outside the desired range.

Thanks for this example, lesbentley. It's good to know that Poser can do this sort of thing. I'm wondering if I could get a wing to flap with a chain of morphs, but I don't have any current project requiring this. I might try it sometime.

Quote - I'm wondering if I could get a wing to flap with a chain of morphs ...

While not theoretically impossible, magnets and/or rigging would be give a vastly superior result (and leave you with much more hair).

Attached above is an example of scenario 2. I have started another thread "[Some ERC Techniques](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2805551)" to explain this and a few other ERC methods. Sorry, but in order to make it comprehensible to as many people as possible, I'm going to start at the beginning, and take my time about coming to an explanation of the "ERC Example-02.cr2" posted above.

To give you a bit of a hint. The file is essentially the same as the first example, but each morph except the last one, Morph-04, has additional blocks of slaving code added to it. The new code slaves each morph to other morph channels in order to hold the morph back from expression when another morph is being expressed.

Here is what it looks like in operation. Each conner of the square has a morph that pulls it outwards, these are applied sequentially in a sort of fade-in fade out arrangement. Note that by the time the next morph has reached full expression, the previous morph has stopped being expressed.