false1 posted at 7:26PM Wed, 29 March 2017 - #4300624

Are you for real Cage? That's an issue that more people should know about. I'd not heard it mentioned before.

Yeh. I've assumed the Poser Team considers it a bug, from the way it's referenced in the documentation for all of the later SR releases, but I don't know if they actually consider it to be one. The best way it's been explained to me is that the subdivision morphs belong not to an actor, but to BODY. As such, the most straightforward way to store them would be to convert the valueParm FBM control dials in BODY to targetGeom, where the deltas can be stored. That makes some sense, but... it's weird, and it breaks some features in previous versions. Weird, because valueParms were introduced to Poser to be control dials for FBMs. I suspect it's a feature that's here to stay.

The trouble being that one needs to clean up figures created in or just processed through P11, before they can be properly compatible with earlier versions. That affects anyone creating or modifying figures for distribution. All those targetGeoms in BODY need to be changed back into valueParms. That's not an easy modification. You can't just rename the dials, because targetGeoms contain 4-5 extra lines which, if present in a valueParm, cause Poser to refuse to load the renamed dial at all. The dials need to have their type names changed and those lines need to be removed, from each and every dial. It takes forever, editing by hand. I consider that a major design flaw. IMHO, if the Poser Team had to do it that sloppily, they weren't ready yet to introduce the new subdivision morph feature. They hadn't prepared an adequate cr2 design infrastructure for it. It needed a bit more work, before being built in.

So I've been grousing about it, instead of seeking a solution. I shouldn't do that. A few days ago, my brain started working and I contacted Dimension3D, to see if a batch file could be made for the Poser File Editor, to automate this cleanup process. Only a few hours later, he sent me the files. PFE cleans up the mess quickly and easily. I'm hoping he'll distribute those batch files with a future update for PFE.

I really shouldn't gripe about Poser like I do. They're going to kick me off the Beta Crew for disloyalty, or something. I gripe because I love the software and I want it to be better than it is. But the Poser Team really tries. I'm sure the new team will work as hard as the old one, to make Poser the best program possible.

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.