Since now it's possible to move/scale joints accordingly with morphs, maybe there's a possibility to create only a few Cr2 for some groups of figures.

My suggestion... correct me if I'm wrong.

@ED

My workflow......

I take an obj file I like, and morph it to my personal preferences.
The obj / topology (for my workflow) is the single most important thing.
Topology HAS to be exactly as what I was looking for.

But??? While morphing I pay very close atention to the uv map.
I want to morph in 3D => all 3 X;Y;and Z, but try to distrub the uv mapping as little as possible.

With the morphed obj finished, I go to the cr2.
I open up the cr2, and make it point to the new obj file.

Then I have a fresh morphed obj file and a fresh cr2 pointing to it.

Only then I look at the rigging.
And?? I do all 3 from here on.

Change the obj file if I encounter problems with the rigging, AND change the joints if needed, and maintain control of the uv mapping.

This last "fine tuning part" can take very long. Even on a lower poly model.

In the end it WILL be a; "this is as close as I can get without getting into trouble"

I NEVER use "hidden" things.

No JCM's
No hidden bones
No hidden magnets
Nothing hidden at all.

All of the above are shortcuts that solve a temporary problem (that mostly can be solved onterwise) and will get you into trouble afterwards when starting to make outfits.

Or?? You know how you did it, but no third party will ever go trought the trouble of trying to find out how you did it.

KISS, never fails.

KISS, keep it simple.
But focus on topology, uvmapping and rigging. Be it with conventional joints, or WM.

I found WM to be a fantastic tool if you do NOT have any of the nasty hidden things......(JCM's, ERC's, bones, or magnets.)

Thanks vilters. gives me some ideas.

Fonpaolo - in theory, yes. But multiple cr2s are still going to be needed, which goes against my original battle plan for these figures. My goal was to make them as scaleable as apollo. Cause even if you're not happy with his overall look, he's still the best scaling figure available, which was his high point of appeal. 

But all is not lost. I have an idea that I think will work for everybody. It just won't be as versatile as I'd originally intended. 

~Shane

Can you fix that using animatible joint centers Shane? This video looks to cover what you might need. I could be wrong tho...lol. But it seems to me this might be the thing you need :).

Laurie

ooops: crosspost ;)

Yeah, I need to take some time and study that video. I've watched it a few times.

~Shane

@ed

Yes, my plan initially was also to use a single cr2, but no joy.

Different morphed figures, sometimes need different rigging, hence, another cr2.
Arch :-(

I have found a great deal of interest in this thread, but do not envy (honestly, or even half understand) the workload taken on by attempting this. 

I am rather anticipating more info, updates and screen shots to come up!  Thank you for doing this.

Quote - Hello dear,
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Please reply me with my e-mail address here
(nechwa_jean @ yahoo.com)
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Thanks

Wow.  Spam.  Love it.  You have been reported.

Quote -
Wow.  Spam.  Love it.  You have been reported.

Tarring and feathering is too good. We should shoot them at dawn. Then again. why wait ;)

Laurie

The spam has been taken care of. :P

I am following thios post too. Amazing looking figure.

So, I've been looking at several of the other figures - both those that are currently available, and images of others coming available, and I'm wondering, how important to you are the small details in a figure?

Details you may not notice right away until you look closer. 

Things like ear shapes, finger nails and toenails, are toes moveable/poseable, are nails separate geometry - can they be lengthened or shortened, how realistic is the tongue or teeth and gums, things like that.

Also, clothing and accessories. I see a lot of requests for everyday clothing, both male and female, but is that really the norm, or does a more fantasy style appeal to the masses? Of all the styles, it seems sci-fi gear would have the least variation in what is currently available.

Any thoughts?

~Shane

Quote - So, I've been looking at several of the other figures - both those that are currently available, and images of others coming available, and I'm wondering, how important to you are the small details in a figure?

Details you may not notice right away until you look closer. 

Things like ear shapes, finger nails and toenails, are toes moveable/poseable, are nails separate geometry - can they be lengthened or shortened, how realistic is the tongue or teeth and gums, things like that.

Also, clothing and accessories. I see a lot of requests for everyday clothing, both male and female, but is that really the norm, or does a more fantasy style appeal to the masses? Of all the styles, it seems sci-fi gear would have the least variation in what is currently available.

You may not think teeth and inner mouth would be very important, but I make a lot of renders where the character is smiling...lol. I've done my share of vacuous expressions, but only because, frankly, most expression morphs suck. LOL

Any thoughts?

 

~Shane

In a word, VERY. ;)

I think its the small details that make a model look more like a person if that makes sense. The veins in the neck, the tendon on the heel, the veins on the foot, the wrinkles on the kneecap, the details in the upper and lower eyelids that make all the difference in the world. One of the glaring things I've seen in recent and upcoming figures are really ugly feet. More like balloon feet. That, with tootsie roll toes turns me right off...lol. Gabe's Anastasia has the best looking feet in Poserdom, hands down. I still can't believe he got those awesome feet from the balloon tootsie rolls that are Alyson's feet...lol.

Now, a lot of detail can be achieved by displacement maps - and I actually think that's what most vendors are ignoring in todays figures that would really put them over the top - but still there are details that would look better modeled that aren't being modeled. I figure, if any vendor is gonna take the time to model a figure for Poser they may as well go all the way :P.

For what it's worth Shane, I think your figures have more of the stuff that I'm looking for in a Poser figure than I've been seeing lately.

I'm not bashing all figures that aren't particularly realistic - they all have their uses. I'd never have bought a Nursoda figure if I didn't think so (and I have a lot). But if what you're going for is realism, then maybe a vendor should actually look at and disect the human form once in awhile instead of trying to do it by memory. It never turns out right that way ;).

Laurie

Oh, and as for clothing: I DO like normal stuff. And pretty stuff. If you've ever seen any clothes I've made they're very much classic looks. I also like fantasy stuff, but not fantasy skimpy stuff...lol. For instance, I really liked the outfit Sixus new figure was wearing. I like the fantasy ranger look, medieval look, etc. Just not stuff that barely covers ;)

Laurie

I hate it when the ear is too simple, means you have to hide it, and with SSS you want to be able to show it off. Finger nails are far more important to me than toe nails. Teeth are important, gums that you would see in an open mouth (from the outside), are important to me.

Clothing, I'm the one who must buy all the fantasy and sci-fi stuff, cause it sells, and everyone in the forums hates it. I very rarely have use for current everyday clothing, but according to forums, I'm rare. Oh don't mind a bit of slut wear either, lol. Seriously a really good set of coveralls would be great from normal to futuristic, but I haven't found a set they really impresses me yet. I'd like some everyday, fantasy wear, too. But, I'm not buying another figure unless they have good textures (good for many types of renders), and bends well. Though, I said that before and still end up buying them and never using them. Oh and give me good boots! I can survive with dynamic, but need conforming foot wear.

So that's my opinion, but I am just an everyday general nutt.

I would mention I agree with what laurie said about the fanatasy stuff. I love fantasy, but not postage stamp armour.

Hehe...I've never seen any warrior more exposed than some of the stuff Vicky wears...lol. Just aim and swing. You're bound to deal a fatal blow :P

Laurie

Oh forgot. I really like period stuff too :)

Quote - So, I've been looking at several of the other figures - both those that are currently available, and images of others coming available, and I'm wondering, how important to you are the small details in a figure?

Details you may not notice right away until you look closer. 

Things like ear shapes, finger nails and toenails, are toes moveable/poseable, are nails separate geometry - can they be lengthened or shortened, how realistic is the tongue or teeth and gums, things like that.

Also, clothing and accessories. I see a lot of requests for everyday clothing, both male and female, but is that really the norm, or does a more fantasy style appeal to the masses? Of all the styles, it seems sci-fi gear would have the least variation in what is currently available.

Any thoughts?

 

~Shane

The little details are everything.

As far as clothes, I rarely use every day clothes unless it's something with a pin-up style. Other than that I go for the fantasy stuff.

Details are important to me too as I do large and often close-up renders. Without enough detail that doesn't work too well. Like Laurie said - feet! GND-Ana has the best feet around, they actually look like feet and you can point them without them turning into ugly balloons! V4's feet are an embarassment.

Clothing - yes, I go for fantasy/scifi stuff mainly. Everyday stuff isn't very useful to me and simple dynamic clothing I can make anyway so I never buy that. Detailed and interesting conforming clothing like Uzilite's scifi gear, Parrotdolphin's fantasy clothes and some of Xurge's fantasy and scifi stuff is the type of thing I go for.

I'm in the 'devil's in the detail' camp too but it's a balancing act, as others have suggested, with how you achieve that detail.

I tend to break it down into meta-shapes that you achieve with the mesh itself (including musculature and major tendons and large skin folds that might move with body-part posing), fine shapes that you'd look to displacement for (finer folds, creases, wrinkles and larger moles etc), and ultra fine details handled with bump maps (skin pores and very delicate wrinkles/creases). 

How far you go with any of this stuff at any given level of detail is going to depend on what you think potential end-users really want from a figure, as well as what you have the time/capacity to create. Personally right now I'm looking for as high a level of realism and flexibility as possible so including detail in elements like nails, ear, inner mouth and eye parts in the mesh itself are a must. I'd like a mesh that allows for fairly fine musculature and major tendons, but which can also be smoothed for less defined looks. The renders you've already posted of your male figure look pretty good to me in many respects. Animators will have a very different view.

Mesh is very important to me as it's so vital in terms of how it interacts with varied lighting states. Too little detail and the realism can easily break down - there's only so far you can go with a light mesh and texture maps.

A higher density mesh lends itself toward better shaping flexibility - if the polys arn't there you can't shape them. Of course, if the aim is to make a fixed or limited shape figure with few morphs you only need the polys where they're needed for that specific purpose. Strategy.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Food for thought.

Quote - For what it's worth Shane, I think your figures have more of the stuff that I'm looking for in a Poser figure than I've been seeing lately.

Awe, thanks Laurie :)

You aint seen nothin yet ;)

~Shane

Quote - Thanks for the feedback everyone. Food for thought.

 

Quote - For what it's worth Shane, I think your figures have more of the stuff that I'm looking for in a Poser figure than I've been seeing lately.

Awe, thanks Laurie :)

You aint seen nothin yet ;)

 

~Shane

My curiosity is officially piqued....lol.

Laurie

I check here every to see how you are going.  These are very exciting times for us poser people.

Love esther

Hi Shane - in terms of preparing your figures for market, I reckon you maybe need to look at bundling a decent range of flexible starter, conforming, clothing options perhaps... to get things started?

e.g. Morphing Scifi Outfit, Morphing Formal Suit, Morphing Overalls, Morphing Fantasy Gown... that short of shizzle... and include shoes in that... things that can be readily adapted and extended by second-line content creators with some morph and mat, add-on type products??

A good bundled selection of hair props would help too I imagine...?

...and a mega-jumbo-sized pose-pack?

Cheers ;-)

Your best bet is to get some help...lol. If I were a better modeler I'd offer my services, but I'm not a bad texturer if I do say so myself ;). Only clothes tho. I suck big time at skin...lol.

Laurie

hair is going to be problematic too.

Quote - hair is going to be problematic too.

Why would hair be a problem? Hair is about the easiest thing to convert to another figure that there is...lol. Even conforming hair can be smart propped to a different figures. Just a few scaling tweaks, move it around a bit...maybe a little morph brush and ur done ;).

Laurie

Already figured that stuff in.

When he launches there will be a minimum of 3 complete sets of clothing, each unique in style. 

He'll also have a bonus for those that jump on him out of the gate. I'll give more details on that later. Don't want to spoil the fun. LOL

~Shane

I think there will be a lot of people jumping in at the gate.

Love esther

Yeah... you definitely should look at partnering up! With some good professional grade peripheral makers... so you can launch with some good bundles; i.e. the "Lucas Complete" bundle... and so on ;-)

The more a user can do with your figure out of the box, the better... the more folk will buy it.

The more folk buy it, the more vendors will be interested in making more content... and the more that your out of the box content includes, in terms of some generic, morph-able, mat-able conforming clothing, the easier it will be for more vendors to respond on that front...

...of course a load of really sexy looking promos will help a lot I imagine ;-)

In time, hopefully that will happen. But there are multiple factors that currently make that not necessarily likely for this innitial figure. Pretty sure I'm going this one alone. I don't know how to give a more accurate answer to that without sounding like an ass. lol. 

~Shane

He he... well cross-posted there actually... it sounds like you're on top of things anyhow!

If you're able to produce some good base clothing figures yourself, to accompany Lucas on his launch, then cool ;-)

I'm open to people wanting to help out with that, definitely. It would make things go much faster. But so far no one has actually made a serious offer, and I haven't taken the time to search for anyone I'd be interested in working with. Plus I'm not at the accessories-building stage just yet, (asside from concept art) so there's nothing for them to really work with at the moment. 

~Shane

I had hgoped to be able to do some textures for him but I'm not sure now.

My time will be seriously cut down as I want more time to spend with Mom.

Her cancer is at stage 4 and her time is short.

Quote - I had hgoped to be able to do some textures for him but I'm not sure now.

My time will be seriously cut down as I want more time to spend with Mom.

Her cancer is at stage 4 and her time is short.

Sorry to hear about your mom :(

I can still let you know when he's ready for texturing if you want to give it a shot.

Have you ever heard of the Gerson therapy? or Essiac tea? Meany people say it has worked even for people in advanced/terminal stages. Might be worth looking into. I'm thinking about trying it myself, once I can afford the right machine.

Either way, best of luck.

~Shane 

Quote - Don't want to spoil the fun. LOL  ~Shane

Party pooper  :P

Laurie

lol.

Good things come to those who wait ;)

~Shane

Been working on building peripherals all day - teeth, gums, tongue, fingernails and toenails, etc. Body detailing, geometry cleaning, twisting, tweaking, all that. 

So Lucas' lo-res version comes in right about 35K - including all the extra bits listed above. That's about 10K less than M4 before all those extra bits mentioned above.

Lucas' hi-res version is approx 130k. The picture included is a hi-res head shot - which is not simply a sub-divide of the low-res as you get with a lot of models. I've specifically gone in on both versions and tweaked every vert by hand, condensing geometry in the hi-res where it's not needed, etc.

There are no tris and no 6+ pointed stars, anywhere on either version. He is 99% optimized.

I say 99% because I've spent quite a while (about 2 days now) obsessing over the geometry in the bottoms of his feet 'cause I just don't like the way the mesh there looks but can't get it to work just the way I want, and there is still an area on the top of his shoulders that I just don't like, so I'm trying to work in a solution that defines the muscles better there.  Ah, and a little spot on the inside of his shins that bugs me.

There was a low lo-res version - around 7k, but it's just too low to really do anything with.

So I've concluded that the lo-res version will be the backwards compatible Lucas, and the hi-res version will be the weightmapped Lucas. I think that should work... ?

~Shane

Really looking good.

Wow. Second that... looking amazing Shane :thumbupboth:

Looking forward to seeing even more... but in your own time... feel free to continue being a perfectionist 

• Bamf *

He's looking great! Thanks for the update and the lower poly version. I normally don't use anything over 80k polys so I appreciate it any time someone offers figures with lower polys.

Ok, I'm going back to lurking...

• Bamf *

looks excellent, easy to see a lot of thought is going into this figure... nice flow, hes evolving nicely...thanks for the update

:O)

Existential, you are really doing a great job of your loop lines. I know why you created the loops at the forehead, I just hope they don't become problematic for you...but please don't take that as a ding...you are doing a fantastic job brother.

thanks DarkEdge. 

I'm actually thinkin about removing those forehead lines. Makes the mesh look too cluttered and doesn't really serve any purpose that a displacement map can't solve. Seemed like a decent idea at the time but on 2nd thought I'm just not liking it. 

Fixed the geometry in the shoulders finally. Still not 100% happy with them but it should work. Still not happy about the bottoms of the feet but I'll deal with it I guess. 

~Shane

From what I see of the mesh, it looks like her will take textures quite well.

I'm hoping his UV will be like the M3 and V3 UV set. Too bad they changed those because I found they were easier to texture than the new type.

But what ever you decide, I'm sure I can adapt. :)

Looks like this is going to be an exceptional figure and thanks for sharing your wips. I'm enjoying using Anastasia and especially Shae (as above - with Irina's shorts and boots), so to have a figure designed by an artist of your calibre from the ground up promises to be rather special.

Had a thought - how about using an ultra low-res version as a proxy for dynamic collisions? So a user could pose Lucas, load and conform the low-res figure then use that in the cloth room as the collision object for the sim, then parent the resulting cloth to Lucas and delete the proxy figure. The morph tool could be used to clean up any poke-thru, and given that the proxy wouldn't need details like individual fingers/toes, teeth, eyes etc it could be very light in terms of poly count which should result in faster calculations.

Another thought - would it be possible when rigging the figure to use bones in the face to drive basic expressions? I'm thinking of things like mouth open, brow raise/lower/squeeze etc, and then use morphs to add the detail? Have no idea how much work that would involve though or if it's practical - I remember diogenes talking about those possibilities for rigging somewhere though.

Having high and low-res versions sounds great - I use PML to go from Poser to Zbrush and back, so from my point of view 130k of well-laid out polys sounds perfect ....

mp33, I'm a bit confused by the mention of Anastasia (who looks to be a great character) here. There is no connection to Shane (ExistentialDisorder), is there? Or are you just comparing the calibre of the artists?

Shane, your work is looking very promising. Should be excellent if given solid weightmapping and strong clothing support.

Quote - ...Or are you just comparing the calibre of the artists?

I think that's the case ;)

A reasonably high poly version would be very pleasing to me.

I know it's been said that very few renders show an open mouth.  But I think that's a good reason to pay attention to the inside of the mouth.  So few renders of V4 show an open mouth because her teeth look like chiclets.  Poor girl can have a beautifully realistic skin but the moment she smiles, she's a toon.  No wonder so few people render her smiling.

Also, if your figure is going to be used in the erotic market, I'm just guessing that the mouth and lips might get a fair amount of attention.  I could be wrong, but hey.

I really like the idea mentioned above of a very low res proxy for dynamic calculations.