Quote - Cage,

Here is my attempt at a pz2 file to (re)inject the slaving for the JCM. I haven't tested it. I can't even think of a way to test it in any sort of reasonable time scale, so it may contain errors and/or omissions.

I think what we'll actually need is a script to re-insert the ERC, creating a pose from a seed file.  The master figure won't necessarily be "Figure 1" in all cases.  A script would have to get the number of the conforming parent figure and work the insertion based on that.  I've written a similar script for something else, so the idea can work.  I just haven't gotten around to writing one for this.

Thank you for the pose.  :thumbupboth:  Hopefully others can make good use of it.

Makes sign of sweeping flat hand over head.

Phew, I'm glad you guys know what you're doing!

CHEERS!

Attached Link: Antonia-0.9.125.zip

From 0.9.124 to here, only the feet and the head/neck bend has changed. For details, look at the CHANGELOG file under docs.

This is an important release: it is the last chance to get any changes or corrections into the base figure - i.e. mesh geometry, JPs and built-in JCMs - from the chin down. With the next release, that stuff will be declared final and I'll give PhilC the go-ahead for implementing WW support.

That said, any further changes I am willing to make at this point need to have an excellent effort to value ratio. Also, obviously, anything that cannot be easily provided via pz2 will be given priority over anything that can. So please speak freely if there's anything you'd like to see fixed or improved, but don't be too disappointed if I don't grant your wish.

Just loaded and installed her without problem. Found no fishy things.

 Wow. Finally up to FINAL release! AND for the first time in six months, I got an Ebot to tell me,too! :laugh: Who'da thunk it?

I can't wait to see what's new! I've been busy in the real world. Things are finally starting to look up. SSi approved, on Medicare and money will be coming in ...SOON I hope.

All that and a final version of Antonia?  Wowee. Things ARE turning around!

Quote -
All that and a final version of Antonia?

Well, final as far as the body goes. I'll still need to work on her expressions. But yes, this will be an important step. I might even decide to just add empty expression channels and call it a Version 1, so that the actual morphs can be added on later via injection.

That sounds good, it's what the others do anyway. I promise I will have a play with this one. I never even looked at 124!

CHEERS!

Now, whoever had that glorious idea of making the Poser 8 library work with Flash? Because I need to know where to throw my rotten apples.

Quote - I might even decide to just add empty expression channels and call it a Version 1, so that the actual morphs can be added on later via injection.

I think it would be good if Antonia v1 shipped with at least some basic expression morphs. Mouth_Open, Smile, Frown, Blink_L, Blink_R, and perhaps a few basic brow morphs.

As an end user I really like the idea of being able to use a figure "straight out of the box", without needing to collect, install, and apply a lot of extras before I can start using the figure.

Quote - Now, whoever had that glorious idea of making the Poser 8 library work with Flash? Because I need to know where to throw my rotten apples.

I HATE FLASH! I find using stocks to restrain the person whilst the rotten apples are being thrown helps a lot. Personally I prefer using rotten eggs.

Quote - This is an important release: it is the last chance to get any changes or corrections into the base figure - i.e. mesh geometry, JPs and built-in JCMs - from the chin down.

odf, here is some information that has come to light concerning JCM, I'm not particularly advocating that you change the JCM, but feel you should be aware of this development before finalising the JCM. You will have noticed the posts by Cage, concerning JCM being stripped out of actors when they are made invisible ('off'). Cage and I have done some tests, and found that slaving the JCM morph to a valueParm, and in turn slaving the valueParm to the rotate channel, cures the problem.

I seem to recall that you were contemplating using valueParm in connection with the JCM at one stage, though I forget the details. I also seem to remember arguing against it. 

Okay, got the download. :)
I'll do some work with her later if everyone here at home will stop expecting me to hop every few minutes.

I've been offline since day before yesterday except to check email.
too stressed and also sick.

I'm looking forward to the final public release so I can post my retail texture/character set. Yay!

Now, whoever had that glorious idea of making the Poser 8 library work with Flash? Because I need to know where to throw my rotten apples.

Uhhoh! I hope BB is in a good mood, because he is the one who made the new poser8 library. I don't know if it was his Idea to use flash, but I know he has already had a whole load of rotten apples, tomatoes, cabbage loaf and other fermented vegatables over his head, because of his contribution on the new library of poser8 and poserpro2010.
Personally I like the new library, but perhaps you could be more specific to tell us what's wrong with Flash.?

best regards,

Bopper.

Quote - Now, whoever had that glorious idea of making the Poser 8 library work with Flash? Because I need to know where to throw my rotten apples.

Do you have the SR3 installed? It does improve things, honest!

CHEERS!

Quote - Now, whoever had that glorious idea of making the Poser 8 library work with Flash? Because I need to know where to throw my rotten apples.

Save them for the Wine developers-it's apparently a long-standing issue with Flash in Wine.  I filed a bug report almost a year ago and it hasn't even been assigned...

bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi.

Oh, yay!  :woot:  A new version!  :laugh:  Thank you, thank you, odf!

The Poser 8 library didn't stabilize for me until I loaded SR 3, so perhaps that would help.  Not sure, since you're using the Linux.  :unsure: 

Unfortunately, SR 3 also seems to have made more prominent the "dropped ERC" bug, about which lesbentley posts above (and about which I've posted, ad nauseum  ).  Les seems to have devised a fix for the problem.  :woot:  I just spectated and did some testing while he figured it out.  It might be worth making the suggested ERC adjustments to Antonia, to save a lot of potential hassle for the end users.  It seems the changes can possibly be pose-inserted, so perhaps this might be like the brow re-mapping, where one of us can do the tedious work.  ???

I have misgivings about the way the library has been linked to Flash and, apparently, IE or whatever.  But I'm led to understand that BB is not to blame for the flaws, only the coolness.  :thumbupboth:  The functionality of the new library is great.  When I switch back now to P7, the old library seems horribly klunky.  But there's those dependencies....  :sad:

Quote - ...perhaps you could be more specific to tell us what's wrong with Flash.?

First off I should state that I don't have P8, or know anything about it's GUI. My hatred of Flash pre-dates P8 by a long way, and has nothing to do with P8. To my mind Flash is just another one of those dysfunctional propriety formats like QuickTime, that use kluncky software to produce poor results that the user has little control over, and, most irritating of all, that Microsoft, numerous web site, and a few applications, go to extraordinary lengths to force upon me when I don't want anything to do with it. No one tries to coerce me to use JPEG, MPEG, or PGN, so why am I constantly coerced (eg constant pop-pups) to use the crappy Flash format?

My dislike of Flash is based on two points, its coercive promotion, and my opinion that it does not do anything that other formats can't do better.

If you're going to throw rotten eggs, may I recommend (of my own personal experience) duck eggs?  The shell is thicker (I used to carve them into pretty shapes), so you'll have greater impact before releasing the lovely scent within.  (If you're going to carve duck eggs yourself, clean them out as soon as you get them; don't save them until you have "enough".  And don't use compressed air to help blow out the yolk and the whites if you suspect they might have gone rotten.  The results can be explosive.)

My pet complaint about the old library was that it didn't alphabetize uppercase and lowercase letters together.  If it still had that problem, it would now be the least of my troubles.

The new curl morphs on the toes look a bit odd to me, when the negative settings are applied.  This only shows up when you see them from below, in which case the pads of the toes seem to stretch and bulge a bit at the back, near the joint.  Not a big deal, and I may be mistaken about it looking odd. 

The neck and head joints are actually still doing odd things when there's any Y scaling.  I checked version 124, and it's doing the same things.  I thought it wasn't, but I may have been confused about when I made my customizations for my characters.  This can be fixed by adding some falloff zones to the rotation and scaling for the neck and head.  I'm not sure whether this is anything you'd want to consider addressing at all, but I thought I'd bring it up.  :unsure:

But these are small things, or outside the scope of current updates.  Version 125 is looking good.  :thumbupboth:

Quote - > Quote - I might even decide to just add empty expression channels and call it a Version 1, so that the actual morphs can be added on later via injection.

I think it would be good if Antonia v1 shipped with at least some basic expression morphs. Mouth_Open, Smile, Frown, Blink_L, Blink_R, and perhaps a few basic brow morphs.

As an end user I really like the idea of being able to use a figure "straight out of the box", without needing to collect, install, and apply a lot of extras before I can start using the figure.

Mind you, I would definitely release an augmented version 1.0.1 or 1.2 with all the expressions pre-loaded once they where finished, even if I didn't include them in the original Version 1. But your suggestion sounds good to me. Start with the most common expressions, include those in Version 1, and then add the more 'exotic' ones later.

Quote - You will have noticed the posts by Cage, concerning JCM being stripped out of actors when they are made invisible ('off'). Cage and I have done some tests, and found that slaving the JCM morph to a valueParm, and in turn slaving the valueParm to the rotate channel, cures the problem.

That's excellent news. As I think I've mentioned earlier, some of the JCMs are already implemented like that, and it would be easy to modify the ones that aren't. I think it might also make programs like MorphingClothes cooperate more willingly if JCMs had control parameters (although I haven't tested that yet).

Maybe I should then also apply the usual naming conventions and call the individual targetGeom channels something like 'PBM_JCM_xxxx', whereas the control channel would just be called 'JCM_xxxx'? My first impulse was to skip the 'PBM_' part, but I guess some or all of the available software tools might expect it? Any advise from the enlightened?

Quote - Now, whoever had that glorious idea of making the Poser 8 library work with Flash? Because I need to know where to throw my rotten apples.

Uhhoh! I hope BB is in a good mood, because he is the one who made the new poser8 library.

I'm not blaming BB at all. He did an excellent job with the library, and I love the way it works, when it works. If I recall correctly, it wasn't his idea to use Flash, and he had his fair share of trouble because of it.

I won't say anything more about this here. Just got very annoyed when I started up Poser last night to try out the BB eyes, and the library had suddenly stopped working, so I couldn't contain myself and made that 'rotten apples' post (there's a subtle reason it had to be apples, by the way). I posted about what happened in the 'Poser on Linux' thread, and that's where it should be discussed.

@Cage: Dangit, I should have checked the thing with the scaling. Well, if it can be fixed by adding falloff zones, I might still do that without having to remake my JCMs. The head joint is definitely a tricky one, though, and I don't think I'll get it to work perfectly in every way this time around. A task for another day, I guess.

As for the toe curl morphs, I think that's in the nature of the beast. Since morph targets are additive, they are somewhat limited in simulating rotations. The toe curl morphs were not that hard to make. I just had to select the right set of polygons for each toe and rotate them around the right axis. So it would be relatively easy to make an extra 'uncurl' one and maybe even an 'extreme curl' or such. But I felt it would be better to stick with the basics for now.

It really is getting to the point where someone NEEDS to start working on face morphs which allow any user to alter her appearance. The ability to create different characters is now an absolute MUST for Antonia. Every other figure out there has them and it really is time they were developed for Antonia.

CHEERS!

About the scaling on the neck...
Distortion seems to happen if you use the individual parameter dials above a certain setting.
But if you use the main dial you can use a fairly high setting.

Toe curl...
I have noticed with some of my family when they are barefoot that even when they stretch their toes upward, the toes look like that.
My daughter, my sister for instance.
Others in the family, their toes look smooth on bending straight or stretching.
Guess it's just one of those things. lol.

Question...has anyone heard from Saintfox or DigitalLion recently?

Leo told me Meike has been sick and I'm wondering if all is well.

Quote -
The neck and head joints are actually still doing odd things when there's any Y scaling.  I checked version 124, and it's doing the same things.  I thought it wasn't, but I may have been confused about when I made my customizations for my characters.  This can be fixed by adding some falloff zones to the rotation and scaling for the neck and head.  I'm not sure whether this is anything you'd want to consider addressing at all, but I thought I'd bring it up.  :unsure:

If you have a fix, can you show me how? I tried and failed. The same thing happens with all the limbs when they're scaled and posed, and it's quite frustrating indeed, since I think that scaling is the key to true variability in a figure. It seems to work in V4 and friends, so I'm assuming something's wrong with Antonia's CR2, but I have no idea what it could be. If I could fix this, that would make me very happy.

Quote - I am working on a mini t shirt for Antonia. I attached a promo shot. Could this be added to the Antonia resource site?

BluEcho is hosting a site for free Antonia content (designed and implemented by DigitalLion). If I understand correctly, you can create a free account on there and upload your item once it's ready. [

Here's the link](http://www.antonia.bluecho4u3d.com/members.htm).

Ill finish it this weekend.

Quote - If you have a fix, can you show me how? I tried and failed. The same thing happens with all the limbs when they're scaled and posed, and it's quite frustrating indeed, since I think that scaling is the key to true variability in a figure. It seems to work in V4 and friends, so I'm assuming something's wrong with Antonia's CR2, but I have no idea what it could be. If I could fix this, that would make me very happy.

Sure.  I almost uploaded a joint insertion pose before, but then I realized that my adjustments completely fail to cooperate with any of the new JCMs for the head bend.  The changes I've made help the neck a great deal, with scaling, and they help the head as well in version 124.  But the new 125 morphs do not work with the process.  I assumed you wouldn't want to sacrifice those changes to accommodate this case, so I didn't follow up.

Even so, I'll try to get a pose together with what I have.

The new JCMs are quite excellent, BTW, until neck scaling is involved.  I'm not trying to impugn the new morphs.  And the twist improvements you made to the neck for 124 do work nicely with scaling.  The problem here is mainly bend and side-side.

Quite possibly any problems with scaling may come down to Antonia's reliance on JCMs to correct the joints.  This may just be an area where the two things are incompatible.  :sad:  Scaling rearranges the mesh just enough that the JCMs no longer make things look better.  Possibly.  A bit like the incompatibility of some body-shaping morphs with the joint-controlled morphs?  :unsure:  I'm thinking about my problems with the "cameltoe" effect, when trying to smooth out the genital crease in a spandex morph.

I've uploaded three different JP insertion poses which I've been using, to the Developer's Site, as neck_JP_injections.zip.  I should have an additional pose later today, but I'll have to do some processing first.

The first of these poses is ripped directly from the Batgirl character I uploaded and seems to work tolerably well with Antonia 124.  The others are my efforts to work with version 125, before I realized that the changes were (perhaps inevitably) going to be in conflict with the new JCMs.  The one I'll have later is just a more recent effort for 125, which has the same problems with making the head bend look worse, due to the JCM incompatibility.

I really suspect that this is an area where we're struggling with the inherent problems of Poser's joint system.  Poser's scaling is even more rubbish than its joints.  :lol:  I doubt any workaround we can some up with, on a user level, can compensate for the bad joint system in all cases.  Possibly SCMs (Scale-Controlled Morphs) in addition to JCMs could help.  But there will be the problem with the morphs being linear and the joints not being linear.  (I keep saying it: the true solution to Poser joints is still actual vertex-mapping with transferable skeletons.  This would enable greater subtlety and more user-control in the joints themselves, before any fixes are applied, and would ultimately be easier to set up.  Think of how much easier conforming clothes could be!  Sigh.)

Thanks for the files, Cage! I'll look at them as soon as I find the time.

Obviously, the new JPs only need to work with version 124. The delta calculation for JCMs is very sensitive to the JPs in place when they were loaded, so I would never expect existing JCMs to still work when the JPs are changed. Once I'm happy with the new JPs, I'll re-calculate the deltas and then see if the JCMs need to be adjusted to work better with scaling.

Cage, I had a look at your modified JPs. Thanks again for sharing those!

They seem to help in some situations, but not others. So I think I'll stick with the existing JPs by default, after all, which stretch the neck more evenly overall. But I think it would be very useful to make your JP modifications available as pose files, so that if someone comes across this problem, they'd have a choice of workarounds. So I'd like to include some or all of your pose files in the official distribution, if I may.

I think it would also be interesting to look into scale-controlled morphs for the neck and maybe some other limbs at some point. They have problems as well, particularly the shading artifacts I noticed when I tried using them with non-smooth scaling, but maybe in this case they will behave reasonably well.

I've started work on a new prop-based mechanism for loading the BB eyes into Antonia, based on the geometry-switching version that lesbentley created some time ago. So far it works pretty well, although at the moment I have to make the original eyes invisible by hand after loading the new ones. Questions:

1. Does anyone know a way to make Antonia's eye actors invisible with the same file that loads the props? I can load and parent several props with one file, which is the key to setting up the new eyes plus eye covers in one go, but apparently I can't hide the existing eyes at the same time. Maybe I'm doing it wrong or missing some trick. No big deal, really, but it would be nice to have a true one-click solution.

2. @bagginsbill (if you haven't given up on this thread): since the version of the eyes that Les used has the corrected eyeball size, but the one that can be downloaded from your Google site has the original, larger eyeballs, I'm assuming that the former is a more recent version which isn't publicly available (yet?). In the meantime, I saw you speaking of another new version of the eyes (or is that the one Les was already using?).

Obviously, I'd like to know which versions of both the geometry and materials you are authorizing for use with Antonia, and what kind of licence you had in mind. I know you were unsure about the Creative Commons licence, which is fine. I can prepare the files and put them online separately from the main Antonia download with whatever licence and copyright text you like, or I'll prepare everything and leave it up to you to publish them as you see fit. Just let me know.

Les has the newest eye. I dont' remember how it got to him. Did I upload it to the Antonia developer site? Did I upload them to my site? Did I email them? I have no recall.

I also had a one-click load solution that hides the Antonia eyes as well. I don't know where I left that. Did it use Python? I can't remember.

It's 4th of July here. Must drink heavily in honor of my country.

LOL. Starting a day early are you.

Wait.. the 4th is tomorrow! Yer getting ahead of yourself!

Quote - Les has the newest eye. I dont' remember how it got to him. Did I upload it to the Antonia developer site? Did I upload them to my site? Did I email them? I have no recall.

I think you may have emailed it to him or something, since I can only find his finished pose files on the developers site.

I guess Python would be an option, since the materials are of no use in D|S or Poser <5.

I'll let you celebrate your exploding Christmas (Stephen Colbert's words, not mine) and get back to you about licensing and such later.

I've updated the Antonia site and the wiki to make version 0.9.125 official.

Does anyone volunteer to do some vigorous testing on the current rig by, say, July 15? I am of course aware of quite a few things that are not perfect with Antonia as she is, but I'm sure I'm missing some things, and probably forgot some that have already been mentioned. Anything that's not too hard to fix I'd rather take care of now before I give PhilC the go-ahead for Wardrobe Wizard support.

The hands do slightly odd things if "UpDown" is applied on thumb1.  But WW doesn't process hand parts, so that probably needn't be a concern now, if at all.  (Does thumb1 UpDown fit into the class of "unrealistic bending", along with forearm & shin swing?)

One odd thing I've had happen, after saving a scene file, and reloading it, Antonia has lost her morphs. The dial remains, but does nothing.

Quote -
The hands do slightly odd things if "UpDown" is applied on thumb1.  But WW doesn't process hand parts, so that probably needn't be a concern now, if at all.  (Does thumb1 UpDown fit into the class of "unrealistic bending", along with forearm & shin swing?)

I'd say so. In phantom3D's original rigging for the thumb, only two bend axes, grasp and spread, were enabled. When I changed the axis order and redid the rigging, I decided a third axis could be useful for making small corrections to a pose. So basically the idea is that you'd use grasp and spread to get as close to what you want as possible, and then add a little up-down for the rest.

Maybe I should start collecting a set of 'rules' on how to pose Antonia and try to express those as joint limits. Some are simple, such as 'use at most this much forearm swing', but others are more complicated. One rule, for example, might be 'never let the sum of the shoulder bend and swing be larger than 90 degrees'.

But I think testing the rig can proceed without those rules. It's probably better to see what the rig can and can't do and react to that, than to impose limits up front.

Quote - One odd thing I've had happen, after saving a scene file, and reloading it, Antonia has lost her morphs. The dial remains, but does nothing.

Ouch! I'll check that. Which morphs in particular have you noticed that on?

What's the current UV mapping on Antonia and is it likely to change? 

Quote - > Quote - One odd thing I've had happen, after saving a scene file, and reloading it, Antonia has lost her morphs. The dial remains, but does nothing.

Ouch! I'll check that. Which morphs in particular have you noticed that on?

FK morphs, off hand nose and some others in the head. I think there was a body morph too, I'll check when render ends.

Quote - What's the current UV mapping on Antonia and is it likely to change? 

There are two 'official' mappings now, one by me (used in Antonia-125A.cr2 etc.) and one by MikeJ (used in Antonia-125.cr2). Neither are likely to change. If at all, I would fix some slight distortions introduced by recent changes in the figure geometry, but I don't think that's really necessary, and even if it happened, shouldn't affect you if you were planning to make a texture.

There's also dphoadley's V3-compatible remap, which I am currently keeping in the freezer. It will be made available in some form or other by the time Antonia 1.0 appears.

Rightio.  Thank you.

Would it be ok to make textures just for one version, or should I make it for both? 

Quote - Would it be ok to make textures just for one version, or should I make it for both? 

I think it's perfectly okay to pick the mapping you like best and make a texture for that. Except for the mapping, those versions of Antonia are completely identical.

At some point, I hope to develop a tool that can transfer textures between different UV mappings for the same figure. But probably not before Antonia has her complete set of expression morphs and such.

Ok.  That's great, thank you.  :) 

I thought I'd read that one should use collar Twist, rather than shoulder Swing, in order to avoid unsightly creases in the upper arm region.  If I try to pull the arms back, however, using the Twist rather than the Swing, the upper part of the shoulder, at the back, collapses.  This isn't as pronounced with Swing in use.  So I'm wondering if there is a posing "rule" for area.

Maybe I just misunderstood the rule about avoiding Bend + Swing > 90?