AsteroidLady opened this issue on Oct 09, 2014 · 14 posts
Morkonan posted Mon, 08 December 2014 at 8:46 PM
Thanks, what I was really asking is how to remove some information from a morph that is already created, so that I don't have to do it all over from scratch. Everything I've done is now baked in together, and some parts have gone wrong. I know there must be a way. Can't fix it with dials in Poser because the damage was done in another program. Can't undo it in that either. It took a long time to make. Need to know how to keep only the parts I want.
You can't do that easily in Poser. The "Parts" that you want do not exist. Instead, the entire "Face" (The "head" group.) includes the ears, nose, eyes, mouth, etc... Those are all one "part." (A "group.") There is no way to apply morphs separately to specific features of the face. (Though, in certain versions of Poser, you can elect to apply a morph to only one side or another, along the x axis.)
Your most immediate and effective solution is to correct Faceshop's errors using either an external modeler or using Poser's "Morph Tool." You can try combining your manipulations with Poser's Morph Tool with dial adjustments for the ears from a standard morph pack, in order to get some speedier results or more correction choices. Because the ears have very dense geometry, due to their intricate topology, you may be able to get really good results just using the "Smooth" tool in Morph Tools.
Make sure you have selected a "New" morph, when using the Morph Tool. This way, you can apply the morph separately, later. You can even export the head and neck, once done, as separate objects, and then import them as morph targets in order to "back out" your adjustments and, perhaps, help to restore the mesh a little bit. It's going to take some fiddling in order to get right.
As was noted above, it is possible to use some advanced third-party modelers to manipulate object morphs in order to only allow certain vertices to respond to the morph. But, you probably don't have access to those. Still, it's worth looking around for free 3D software and its capabilities, if you really want to try to fix this.
You could also do this manually... by editing the .obj file and removing/re-zeroing the deltas for the vertices that contain the ear geometry. I wouldn't suggest making that a first choice, though. It'd be like hunting hunting a needle in a boxcar full of needles...
It might, just might, be possible that you can try to fix this issue using Poser's grouping tool. For instance, you could try loading the morph, then regrouping the ears as a new group, then zeroing out the new group, then restoring the entire "head" group and exporting the finished head as a morph target. I don't know how well this would work or if it would work, since regrouping an object generally destroys its ability to work with morphs for a now-unrecognized group. Then again, Poser does a lot of weird stuff with that sort of thing, so it might be worth a shot in the dark. (It'll probably just go nuts and lock in whatever morph you have and make it a base object, which means no morph dials will do anything at all. But, it's Poser... maybe magic will happen? :) Trying to fudge it by regrouping and hoping to fool something is better than jumping into a pool full of man-eating sharks, right? Of course it is! Probably won't work, though... :))
You could try to see if there's something in Blender you could use. It's free and only slightly less annoying to work with than a box full of wet cats. But, it has a very large user-base and a very helpful community, all who probably love herding cats... I wouldn't be too surprised if someone hasn't come up with some sort of tool or script that enables you to do this very thing. Minus the cats.
Faceshop is notorious for mangling geometry. That is mostly caused by the difficulty in applying landmark targets for the program so it can recognize geometry placement. The rest of it is caused by... Faceshop. I've had several iterations of the program in hopes that it would yield a quick, easy and cheap solution to custom face-morph bases that can be cleaned up later in a 3D app. No such luck. I've never used any Faceshop morph for anything at all - All were unusable for any decent morph result. (Because of the problems with the first iterations of Facehop, I learned how to accurately sculpt custom face-morphs in 3D applications. So, it's got that going for it, I guess... )But, your mileage may vary and if you spend a heck of a lot of time with it, you might get a usable morph out of it for one render, just so long as you don't plan on doing anything else with it.
A far better program for this sort of thing is Facegen. However, it is comparably expensive. But, it is also much more versatile.
(Note: There are plenty of old Faceshop-bashing threads, I'm not trying to bash it, here. I'm just being as honest as I can be with a frustrated Faceshop user. I couldn't code Faceshop, so it's a much better product than I could ever produce. That's not saying much, though.)