Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: poser: fundamental flaws in characters

structure opened this issue on Nov 27, 2013 ยท 173 posts


JoePublic posted Tue, 03 December 2013 at 12:16 AM

Just wanted to add this: "Ghost bones" are as bad an idea as joint smoothing magnets are. Every additional actor slows Poser down, adds complexity to the cr2 and the weightmapped ghost bone is still not nearly as versatile as a simple JCM is. The weightmapping brush has a nasty tendency to "scramble" high res meshes. Especially at the buttocks and thighs this can become a problem. "Smoothing" won't help, so the only solution is to add a JCM to re-smoothen the mesh. This is no problem for LoRes meshes that get subdivided/smoothed while rendered, but it is visible on your average un-subdivided HiRes mesh. Ghost-Bones also makes cloth-refitting harder. You need to run an "outfitter" tool, whereas if you use JCM's, you either dont need to do anything at all, or simply transfer the weightmaps and JCM morphs to your clothing, which you can do directly in the PP-2014 pose room. Finally, you can't easily select ghost-bones by clicking on them, which makes manual posing a lot harder. The only real niggle I have about Genesis is the fact that I constantly have to manually select the hip bone in the menu, because clicking on the figure's hip selects the "pelvis" actor. The old "buttocks" grouping was much more "posing friendly", And, yeah, I know you can add "handles" to ghost bones, but then the figure looks rubbish in OpenGL. I want my figures to look like actual human beings even in OpenGL and not like some artificial 3D dummy, so here again, JCMs are the much more elegant solution. Ghost bones were a clever kludge as long as we didn't have an easy JCM making pipeline in Poser, but now they are mostly obsolete. I definitely would not want to use a figure that relies on them.