Hi all.

My first post to this forum I think (if not the last one was so long ago I don't recall it).

So here I am developing my first Poser organic figure.  I've developed a lot of Poser vehicles and even invented new rigging tricks for some, but rigging an organic figure is new to me and I expect to find it difficult when the model is ready and I get started.  The modelling work is being done in Blender, and is nearly ready for export to .obj for rigging in Poser 8.  I think I may need a fair amount of advice when I am rigging this beastie.

My plan is to make this not just a single figure, but a set of figures.  One baby, one youngster, one juvenile with horns just starting to grow and then an adult female and an adult male.  After that I will make a saddle and gear for them all so they can be ridden by your Poser people.  I am making several forms as separate figures to minimise the number of morphs required, as morphs add quite a lot to memory use.  The idea is to build a figure that is reasonably convincing but also uses a relatively small amount of memory so that an entire family can be loaded on a machne with a fairly modest amount of RAM, and a whole herd if you have lots of RAM.  So they all share texture maps of course, and I will provide a lower resolution version as well as the default large map set.

The attached image is a Blender render of the family in their current state; the little one is obviously the baby, mother stands over him and papa stands in the background.

Here's a scaling image to help you see the size; the mannequin figure is Michael 2.

Finally, for this batch of posts, here's another image that gives an idea of the quality of the UV mapping.  If anyone wants the UV Test map, let me know and I'll post it, I made it myself so I can distribute it and it may be useful to others.  There are only three maps on the figure; one for the head, one for the rest of the body and a separate one for the eyes.  I made the eye map separate so that MAT poses could change eye colour without having to use different maps on the head, as the default head map is 4000x4000 and so uses a fair amount of RAM.  That will mean you can load two of the beasts and they will share all of the big maps even if you use a MAT pose to change the eye colour on one of them to make them look more individual.

Looks interesting. I see a lot of Star Wars-esque type renders for something like this. Well, SciFi anyhow. I am waiting to see how you are going to rig this. Bipeds are fairly straight forward (although difficult enough for one like me). This beast has 4 legs!

Quote - Looks interesting. I see a lot of Star Wars-esque type renders for something like this. Well, SciFi anyhow. I am waiting to see how you are going to rig this. Bipeds are fairly straight forward (although difficult enough for one like me). This beast has 4 legs!

This beast should be easier to rig than a human model; it has the same number of limbs, remember arms need rigging as well as legs.  However once I rig the feet I have no need to rig toes or fingers which simplifies things a lot.  The elephant-like feet mean very much easier rigging, and it's no coincidence that I chose this kind of creature for my first project.

Since I haven't done organic models before though it's going to be interesting to work on this one.  An opening door on an armoured vehicle is rigid and needs much less work in the rigging.  Hardest thing I've done so far was rigged tracks; yep, that was a trifle tricky in places...

I made a tracked vehicle some time ago and put it in the freebies section. It's only a static prop because I didn't know how to rig anything back when I made it.

I may take that one out of the box and revisit it. If I do, I may have to pick your brain as to how you rigged the tracks.

Will there be a Rhino penis for adult content?

Good luck with your project! How about posting a Smoothed Lined view, so we can get an idea of the mesh topology?

Quote - Will there be a Rhino penis for adult content?

And will there be a morph to give the Rhino a horn?

looks cool, man. Love to see any new creatures being made. Looking on with interest.

Is this going to be a free figure? Would also like to see a smooth lined view to get an idea of its morphability.

My only initial critique would be that the ears seem a tad vestigial, Which I suppose isn't much of an issue if there are enough polys there for some changes or variation.

... which brings to mind a question of why you chose to create separate figures for age categories/genders when such variety could easily be contained within one figure utilizing morphs and scaling?

Quote - ... which brings to mind a question of why you chose to create separate figures for age categories/genders when such variety could easily be contained within one figure utilizing morphs and scaling?

As I wrote before, morphs use a lot of memory so I want to keep the number of Morphs in the figure low.  Full-body morphs will be absent entirely.  That way you can load an entire family in a machine with a modest memory size, and a whole  herd in a machine with plenty of RAM.  The figures will share textures and will have only a few morphs.  In addition the baby (and the slightly older youngster) has 38,792 polygons while the older versions, which have provision for horns, have 43,706 polygons, which is pretty low for a figure that will stand up to close-up use.

There will be a few morphs to change the horn lengths and angles in the figures that have horns, and there will be a few more morphs to vary face shape and maybe eye size.  I'll keep them to a minimum though to keepthe memory footprint low.

Here's a shot of the mesh topology, I'll post another shortly giving an idea of the back view.  The yellow dotted lines are the UV seams.

Here's the second mesh view.  Note in both these shots that I have slightly increased polygon density where the joints are going to be.

OK, nice topology.

One general remark; increasing topology on joints.

You only have to increase on the outisde of the bend.

The outisde will strech in the bend, needing more polygons for a smoother flow..
The inside of the bend will crimp, and does not need the extra polygons.

 

Nice figure/model. Good Job.

Well this is the first Poser render of the creature.  The model has a rigged jaw rather than a morph to open the mouth, as I thought it would provide more realistic results.  In addition the jaw can move slighty from side-to-side to provide users with a means to show it chewing if they want to.  It seems to work fairly well.

In other ways this first effort at rigging was very unsuccessful with poor shoulder and hip movement and I will be returning to Blender to rework the grouping.  I have plenty of experience rigging Poser vehicles but this is my first Poser animal, and I did not know the best way to set up the groups to make rigging work well.  Fortunately changing the grouping is easy enough in Blender and it shouldn't take me more than twenty minutes or so.  Rigging the figure again in Poser will of course take much longer even though you only have to rig the centre parts and the limbs on one side.

So I'm learning quite a lot on this project.

Quote - OK, nice topology.

One general remark; increasing topology on joints.

You only have to increase on the outisde of the bend.

The outisde will strech in the bend, needing more polygons for a smoother flow..
The inside of the bend will crimp, and does not need the extra polygons.

Nice figure/model. Good Job.

Thank you!

It's much easier to cut an edge loop than it is to increase the polygon count on one side of a joint, so that was why that happened.  Also won't the mesh crease better as well if there are a reasonable number of polygons on the inside?  I have seen unpleasant buckling of a mesh on the inside of a joint when there aren't enough polygons, so it won't hurt to have them all round.  For some joints like the ankles there will of course be movement in more than one direction, so those will benefit from the all-round extra edge loops.

I would be interested in seeing someone animate the baby walking after the family is released into the wilds of the internet. :)

Quote - Rigging the figure again in Poser will of course take much longer...

As long as the group names have not changed, you can just edit the two 'figureResFile' lines in the cr2 to point to the new geometry. The figure should still be able to use the old rigging. Of course you will need to adjust the joints to suit the new grouping, but that may be quicker than doing a whole new rig from scratch.

Quote - > Quote - Rigging the figure again in Poser will of course take much longer...

As long as the group names have not changed, you can just edit the two 'figureResFile' lines in the cr2 to point to the new geometry. The figure should still be able to use the old rigging. Of course you will need to adjust the joints to suit the new grouping, but that may be quicker than doing a whole new rig from scratch.

Well I wish I'd read that before I'd rigged it again from scratch.  :biggrin::rolleyes:

Here's the next item on the list for thispackage, very early as yet, but you get the idea.  There will be some substantial saddlebags behind that seat, and maybe the possibility of a second seat as well.  No texture yet, it's just a plain colour though I have UV Mapped what I've done so far.

Here's the next Poser render; I have started adding the morphs in the head that I think will be needed and several have been used on this figure to give her some expression.  She looks annoyed or scared, either way it might be best to keep a distance...

There are now morphs to lower the upper eyelids independently, and blink morphs which move both eyelids to bring them together.  More morphs can vary the length of the horns, flare the nostrils, raise the upper lip, lower the lower lip; these can be used to expose the teeth without using the lower jaw's movement.  There is also a morph to raise the corners of the mouth which combined with exposing the teeth using the upper lip morph gives her a silly smile.  In common with some of the other morphs that one can be set to a negative value to lower the corners of the mouth.

I should mention that the inside of the mouth needs work, as the texture is simple plain areas of colour and there are no features on the bump map for the tongue.  Naturally I do intend to texture inside the mouth properly.

Here's the lineup of the characters in the family that I have rigged so far; the adult male in the foreground, the adult female next and the juvenile at the far end.  Most of the rigging is identical, but some tweaks are needed to the mouth rigging and the shoulders and neck for each individual figure.  Loading this lot takes comparatively little memory, and the baby won't add a lot more.  I rigged the adult female first and then edited her .CR2 file in a text editor to create the .CR2 files for the other two, then worked in Poser to refine the rigging.

Just a quick update: I am now working on improving the material work, in particular eliminating the seam problems and adding a separate specular colour map.

This is really awesome!!! I have enjoyed seeing your progress and your process. I look forward to your end result ;)

> Quote - This is really awesome!!! I have enjoyed seeing your progress and your process. I look forward to your end result ;)

Thanks!  Haven't had time to be on the computer much lately so progress faltered, but today I got the saddle rigged, though as you can see it still needs texturing.  The reason for the temporary vivid colour is that it shows poke-through really well, so if there was any I'd see it.

I also realised today that I haven't posted any Poser images of the baby which is now fully rigged.  The baby's default size is the smallest size, but it has an ERC rig and the age dial changes the figure's proportions as the size increases to keep it convincing.  Here's a quick mother-and-baby render with the baby at default size.

Developing the textures for the saddle now and also making some poses to bundle with the figure.  The image shows an adult male Tavrohk in a "warning" pose, so if he were real it would be wise to leave the area if you saw him in this sort of posture...

Today I've done six texture sets and MAT poses for the saddle, and worked on a few poses to be bundled with the figure.  Here is the adult male using one of the walking poses and the baby using the first "Leaping" pose.  Of course you could apply one of the leaping poses to an adult Tavrohk...

I just updated the thread on this item in the Markeplace Showcase forum.  I hope it will be ready for uploading tomorrow.  I just have to update the ReadMe and render the rest of the promo images and I think I can get that done tomorrow.