To bad James I never got an adequate wife and kids.

James I, Koji I and Miki I were the only Poser meshes I was really impressed with the sculpting and expression morphs. Ok, the rigging pretty much s*cked, but that's another story.... :-)

So here's what I did:

First some re-scaling to achieve more realistic proportions. Default James I is as ridiculously tall as M3.

Then some texture brightening and re-coloring to get rid of the dark orange suntan.

Added a "nostril" material zone to prevent the nose from SSS-blueing.

Then some SSS shaders. (Modified EZSkin)

Then some weightmapping to get rid of the bulgy shoulders and some morphbrush work to lower the armpits. (Mirror now actually WORKS !)

Finally changed the skinning method to Unimesh and set subdivision to 1.

The eyeballs had stray vertices so I excluded them from subdivision.

I think he looks pretty good for 41.400 polys including clothing.

Again, too bad there were never good kids and a good female mesh to accompany with him. James-I had a lot of potential that was never really used...

 

Full body render...

Original James and Jessi weren't bad, they just need some tweaking to put them on par with newer characters.

Yeah, I did like James...but not much of a fan of "The Forehead" LOL. Miki 1 was the cutest Poser figure ever...with Miki 2 a close second. She sort of hit the skids after that ;).

Laurie

Nice work on James. he was always my favorite poser native figure too.

I don't know why he wasn't worked into becoming poser's native alpha male. Whole market of untapped potential there. 

He does have some rather screwy geometry tho, and the UV mapping needs serious work.

I sent a request for permission to rework him sometime last year but it went ignored.

A well. I'm sure anyone interested can use him however they please on a personal level, just not much marketing potential in his current state.

You still see him on TV in various commercials, reinactments, etc. I just saw him being used in something a week or two ago, just can't remember what it was.

 

~Shane

Have you seen Rex? Maybe he doesn't adhere to whatever it is you find appealing in a male (I know that can be personal taste thing) but I found the retopo Darrell did over my sculpt, while not 100% the way I would have done it, to be quite morphable. In fact, I find it lends itself more easily to more extreme morphs than some of the older male meshes released with Poser in the past.

 

I haven't seen Rex or Roxie yet Teyon. At least not clear enough to make an informed decision yet. The glimpses I have seen do look like a great improvement over Ryan and Alyson tho but I haven't seen either of them "in action". 

I'm in the process of downloading PP2014 at the moment and its taking a while, so my comments only apply to 2012 and back. 

:)

 

~Shane

 

 

@AmbientShade: Thank you. :-)

@LaurieA : Fixing Jessi-I's head was never such a big problem. A few magnets here and there... But fixing her cartoonish body without properly working scaling would have meant some serious rigging and sculpting work.

Even now, I think I just do a quick fix to casual Jessi for the heck of it, and leave the nude version alone. ;-)

@teyon: While Rex' proportions aren't bad, I see no edgeloops that would allow me to show really detailed muscularity. And as I don't want to work with displacement maps, I'm sorry but I have to pass.

Ten magnets later and the weird headshape is history. :-)

New proportions. Hooray for the fixed scaling.

I still prefer my remapped Dork!

 

The Dork would actually be my next choice. He can look pretty realistic with a nice M3 texture and some scaling. The mesh topology is a bit "mad scientist" - like but he has lts of nice muscle detail.

:-)

A close-up of the remapped P4 Dork in PP-2014 with unimesh skinning and subdivision level 1.

And here subdivision level 2.

Using 3D MAX, I made a hybrid of Dork's body ane the M3RR head. (I took the necks of both, sliced them horizontally in half, and then joind the bottom half of Dork's neck with the top half of M3RR's neck, and then loade the body, the revised neck, and the  M3RR's head in Poser, and then exported the 3 pieces as a NEW mesh object).  Thus I hade the Dork musculature, with Mikes more natural looking head. (Except for his eyebrows, Dork has a good head)!

Quote - And here subdivision level 2.

Ha ha - that looks like Mads Mikkelson who plays Hannibal in the TV show

Quote - Have you seen Rex? Maybe he doesn't adhere to whatever it is you find appealing in a male (I know that can be personal taste thing) but I found the retopo Darrell did over my sculpt, while not 100% the way I would have done it, to be quite morphable. In fact, I find it lends itself more easily to more extreme morphs than some of the older male meshes released with Poser in the past.

 

 

Now that I've had a chance to look at Rex and Roxie, I can say that overall I like their shapes. The faces are definitely the best feature, but its the details that make all the difference. So I still have to agree, James I and Jessie I are still the best poser figures to date in terms of realism. 

I don't want to sound overly critical tho, cause I know first-hand how much work goes into building a figure, and I'm sure working with deadlines and time constraints to get them into the program prior to launch has a lot to do with it. So I'll leave out all my nit-picks. There are rigging issues and weight mapping issues I see just in 5 minutes of fiddling with them that should have been addressed before release. 

Overall they are definitely an improvement over what the last 2 poser releases gave, but still have a long way to go. 

 

~Shane

I am sorry I shall have to disagree on the OP statement.  The buttocks on James (never mind why I looked there), are not high-poly enough to bend accurately in a human way.  Check the same area on the other series 1 males from Smith Micro (or was it e-Frontier back in the day).  Not so good.

There is a hiRes version of James too. 

And the bending isn't bad on either version, just could use some jcm work to get it more accurate.

And now with weightmapping jcms wouldn't be needed. There's plenty of geometry.

 

~Shane