I need some help with my Zbrush created character morphs in Poser. I have made the morphs and applied them to V4 in Poser without any problems, but to save them as INJ things are starting to get a bit confused. I have three separate morphs on the head/neck that I'm working with and I want to know how to combine two of the morphs.

I have a morph of Elf ears, the facial morph as well as a morph on the neck because my sculpting crossed the seam where the two body parts connect. It is the two dials, one dial on the head and the other on the neck, that I want to combine into a single morph. I saw something about this a few weeks ago but I have looked at so many tutorials, done so many Google searches and been directed to so many dead pages that I don't know where to begin to find it again.

I can't create a Full Body Morph because I only exported the head and neck.

Hopefully someone can help me with this.

You can dial the 2 morphs in and then export the figure to OBJ and then load it back into the figure as 1 FBM.

Oh, thank you very much! The thing that I read the other week I remember vaguely that it was somehow done inside Poser to merge the dials together, but I can't remember the specifics. This way is much simpler though!

Unfortunately, the morphs that I spent 8 hours creating last night are no good because when I was testing it in Poser I discovered that the jawline was deformed too much and when the character smiles, her bottom teeth poke through her chin and she just looks very ugly. I have to start from scratch, which has left me feeling very bummed.

I have spent a few hours tonight searching Google (which isn't helping me feel less bummed about the wasted time) for a current method of exporting the figure from Poser to create the morphs. Can you please confirm that exporting only the head and neck is the correct approach for creating the facial morphs? Do I need to include the teeth and the tongue and the eyes as well? Or should I be taking the complete figure into Zbrush and separating the head and body from the eyes and teeth and tongue into different Subtools?

What little I can find is only exporting the head and the neck, while the rest of what I find in my searches take me to dead links. It's incredibly frustrating.

I don't have zbrush but I would think you'd export the head, neck, and teeth if your previous attempt didn't change anything else with eyes, nose, mouth, or cheeks. You could leave off the eyes and probably the tongue. The other option you could try is to use Poser's morph brush to correct the jawline deformation. It would probably be quicker to do the correction in zbrush, but it should be possible in Poser to correct that depending on how severe the deformation.

When you've searched for threads, did you specifically search for zbrush or modelling the attempt in any general 3d modelling program? That might give a few more chances for finding answers... maybe....

The eyes only deformed a little but I imported a second model including the eyes to see where I needed to pull out the bottom lids to correct the poke-through. For that reason, my next import had the eyes, just to make it easier for me the second time around.

As for correcting the jawline deformation, it would have been impossible to do that in Poser because the amount of morphing I did with the face wrecked the alignment of the jaw so when I had the character smile or open her mouth, it was a huge mess. I'm starting again because of the mess, so I'm going to try and limit the amount of deformation around the jawline and mouth so this doesn't happen again.

I looked for both Zbrush specific and I looked for character creation in general. A lot of what I found wasn't relevant or there were dead links - the vast majority of information I could find took me to dead links - so that's why I tried to focus the searches for Zbrush and get more specific with my pipeline.

Ah... this might help a tiny, tiny bit. It's a youtube tutorial exporting from Poser to Blender then back to Poser

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfrosl15lbM

Thanks, but no the video doesn't help. He only included the head when he exported and, as seems to be the way that happens with 3D, he used different export settings and a different method for the full body. I must have seen five different combination of settings when exporting from Poser! Personally, I haven't had an issues with exporting the obj from Poser, so I'm going to continue doing this rather than tracking the base geometry in my runtime.

What I ended up doing last night was exporting the head, neck and the eyes and then separating the eyes into a Subtool of their own. This didn't cause any problems with exporting the head from Zbrush and loading the morph, but it allowed me to keep an eye on the eyes and make sure there was no poke-through. I also masked out the mouth when I was adjusting the jaw and chin, just so it wouldn't move as much and I think, so far, that has avoided any ugliness with things going crazy when I try to apply an expression to the face.

Thanks anyway, Kazam561.

Sounds like you've got it working then :) Sorry the vid wasn't helpful.

Yup, I have. Perseverance, frustration and no sleep for the last two days I have gotten it working. :)

What's that quote....

Willy Wonka: Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple. Mrs. Teevee: That's 105 percent.

Possibly. I'm not familiar with the quote. But it sounds about right! You just need to add a high percentage of frustration in there and that will be the formula. ;)

You should watch the original Willy Wonka. It's dated but still has many moments :)

I've only seen the Johnny Depp version.

Back on topic though....

I have finished making my Zbrush morphs (for one character, still got another to do before this project is finished) and I'm trying to create a PMD INJ file but when I apply the INJ, I get an error message "The file being read is not a valid Poser file". It still appears to apply the morph to the character however.

I have double and triple checked the code in the .pz2 file for the INJ and it checks out to me. I have got DarkEdge's tutorial open and frozen where he is showing the code for the INJ file and it matches, other than the obvious differences in the name of the morph and the folder it is in.

Any ideas what could be causing this? Is it something as simple as me creating the file using Notepad whereas Ray used Notepad++?

Hope this problem got solved. My apologies. I totally missed seeing this thread update. Not sure, but Notepad++ is open source license and free. As far as the error message, couldn't tell without seeing more. I'd suggest try opening it in poser, and saving the morph into your library, then open a new scene, try applying the morph and see if it still gives the error message.

You didn't say what version of Poser you have. That's always important to note when asking how to do something specific.

If you have one of the pro versions, then you can combine multiple morph dials into one dial by going to the Figure menu and selecting "Spawn Full Body Morph". This will create a new FBM based on every morph you have active at the time. Active means anything with a value greater than zero. The dial will show up on the Parameters pallet under morphs.

If you have PP2014 or P11 Pro you can also use GoZ from Poser to ZBrush, sculpt your morph on the figure, and then send it back to Poser as an FBM. It has to be done all in one session though. If you close Poser or ZBrush at any point in the process then any work you've done in zbrush will be lost.

Kazam561 posted at 5:36PM Wed, 15 November 2017 - #4317976

Hope this problem got solved. My apologies. I totally missed seeing this thread update. Not sure, but Notepad++ is open source license and free. As far as the error message, couldn't tell without seeing more. I'd suggest try opening it in poser, and saving the morph into your library, then open a new scene, try applying the morph and see if it still gives the error message.

Don't worry about missing the update. I managed to get it sorted in the end. The error message was happening even when I opened a fresh scene or closed Poser and launched the program anew. I was getting fed up butting heads with it and scrapped making my INJ morphs from the PMD file and managed to create the INJ and REM using Poser Binary Editor. Everything worked fine with this method. I just needed to keep in mind the names of my morphs so I knew what to search for. After doing 5 characters, I got into a nice rhythm. :)

AmbientShade posted at 5:35PM Wed, 15 November 2017 - #4317979

You didn't say what version of Poser you have. That's always important to note when asking how to do something specific.

If you have one of the pro versions, then you can combine multiple morph dials into one dial by going to the Figure menu and selecting "Spawn Full Body Morph". This will create a new FBM based on every morph you have active at the time. Active means anything with a value greater than zero. The dial will show up on the Parameters pallet under morphs.

If you have PP2014 or P11 Pro you can also use GoZ from Poser to ZBrush, sculpt your morph on the figure, and then send it back to Poser as an FBM. It has to be done all in one session though. If you close Poser or ZBrush at any point in the process then any work you've done in zbrush will be lost.

Apologies. At this time there were a few threads that I was posting at this time and I must have overlooked the version on this thread. I know it is important to note the version number and I usually do. I'm using Poser Pro 2014 with Zbrush 4r6.

The problem with GoZ is precisely what you mentioned - everything has to be done in one session. (Which was a subject for a different thread I posted at the same time as this one and had no luck with responses.) For doing corrections, GoZ is brilliant but for creating facial or bodymorphs - not so much. It doesn't matter though. I have perfected my workflow for creating facial morphs.

Doing your method for "Spawn Full Body Morph" I'm not sure how I will then be able to create the INJ/REM files because the morphs for the head and neck morphs, as I mentioned in my opening post, will still be separate and I won't have a single morph name to search for in Poser Binary Editor in editing the .cr2 file. This is how I ended up managing to create my INJ/REM files for the morphs I created in Zbrush.

Perhaps in later characters when I create the bodymorph in Zbrush, rather than spinning dials in Poser, I won't have any issues with the neck morph have a separate INJ file because I will include the neck on the body morph and it will have its own unique name that I need to isolate.

ObscuroArcanum posted at 3:51AM Wed, 15 November 2017 - #4317984

The problem with GoZ is precisely what you mentioned - everything has to be done in one session. (Which was a subject for a different thread I posted at the same time as this one and had no luck with responses.) For doing corrections, GoZ is brilliant but for creating facial or bodymorphs - not so much. It doesn't matter though. I have perfected my workflow for creating facial morphs.

Ah. Apologies for not being more clear on this. You can have multiple sessions, as long as you send each stage of the morph back to Poser and save the figure to the library in order to save your work. If you save the figure in a zbrush format or if you close or even restart/start new scene in Poser or zbrush, then the goZ connection will be lost. It still exists in the cache but for whatever reason Poser will no longer recognize it as being connected to the same version of the figure you're working on - i.e, can't read it - so if you try to send it back to Poser later, it will import as a new, separate OBJ.

So to get around that, for example, if you create a morph in zbrush, then send it to Poser to test it, and need to make corrections, just save that version of the morph in Poser's library (by saving the figure with the morph in it to the library). - (I always do this, and I usually use some form of naming system like FaceWIP01, FaceWIP02, etc.,) Then you can send that morphed figure back to zbrush and add to it, change it, etc. The changes you make will be sent back to Poser as a new, separate morph, and will only look right if you also have the original version of it dialed in, but you can then combine the two morphs into one via the Spawn full body morph command, and delete the original two morphs.

In order to send a morphed figure to zbrush with the morph active, you need to check the box that says 'Export Posed'. Alternatively (and I just discovered this tonight, after using goz for a few years now) - you can open the Settings dialog on the morph dial and set it's min and max values to 1.000. Then when you zero the figure it will only zero out the rotations and the morph will stay at 1.0000 and Poser will send the morphed version of the figure over to zbrush without having to check 'export posed'.

If you have your own system now then a lot of that might not be of much use, but it's there if you decide to experiment with it later. The same method applies to morphing the base OBJ for the figure via goz - the only difference is that you'd import it from the library, send it to zbrush as an object instead of a figure, and then export it as a morph target and reload it via the load morph target menu option in Poser.

ColorCurvature does have a script called PML (Pose Morph Loader?) that will create morph injections from a morphed version of the figure if you've lost your connection between Poser and ZBrush, or if you can't get a morph to load via other means. It's a very handy script and highly recommended. (To give an idea of it's potential, I used it recently to combine all of my daz generation 3 characters into one master figure as fbms).

Doing your method for "Spawn Full Body Morph" I'm not sure how I will then be able to create the INJ/REM files because the morphs for the head and neck morphs, as I mentioned in my opening post, will still be separate and I won't have a single morph name to search for in Poser Binary Editor in editing the .cr2 file. This is how I ended up managing to create my INJ/REM files for the morphs I created in Zbrush.

Here's a link to a guide on creating INJ/REM files. Its rather old but it should still work. http://www.acrionx.com/3d_modelling_poser_tutorials/?pg=how_to_make_INJ_REM_Pose_files_for_Poser_custom_character_face_morphs

Any morph that spans two (or more) body parts is treated as a full body morph as far as I'm aware. I'm really not familiar these days with hand-coding INJ/REM files, but if I recall correctly, it will still inject the morph into the figure and set it for each body part that the morph affects, even if it is only one morph file that's being referenced. I use P11Pro which has a built-in morph injection exporter so I haven't needed to hand code injection files since I started using P11. I'm not 100% sure but 2014 may have the master synched option in the morph dial that is automatically checked on FBMs. So if you do need the morph to be separate morphs, then you can break them apart again by just unchecking 'Master Synched'. But that may only be a P11 feature.

Sorry for the wall of text, lol.

For people who like to make a morph injection without external tools and have PP11.

In PP11 you can File > Export > Morph Injection > Select Morphs to include in the Injection to make an INJ pose.

For this to work you need to go to Edit > General preferences > Misc > Check Use external binary morph targets.

If you also like to have a remove pose, this PMD Editor is handy for it: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/binary-morph-editor/51221

Regarding only being able to work with a morph in ZB in a single session. Poser appears to use the name of the sub tool to determine if its handled as a morph or obj when being imported back. If an older model is made to look like the subtool just generated by the Goz bridge, Poser can take it in as a morph. I don't know how reliable this process is but if a Goz session fails and you're faced with losing all your work its worth a try

Save the tool you're working on so there is a backup.
Start a new Poser session and load the base figure
Goz the base figure. In ZB there will now be a new tool for the base figure
Append the older tool into this to create a second subtool Rename the second subtool to match the name of the first
Highlight the older subtool and press Goz, it should go back to Poser as a morph

AmbientShade posted at 5:50PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4317986

Ah. Apologies for not being more clear on this. You can have multiple sessions, as long as you send each stage of the morph back to Poser and save the figure to the library in order to save your work. If you save the figure in a zbrush format or if you close or even restart/start new scene in Poser or zbrush, then the goZ connection will be lost. It still exists in the cache but for whatever reason Poser will no longer recognize it as being connected to the same version of the figure you're working on - i.e, can't read it - so if you try to send it back to Poser later, it will import as a new, separate OBJ.

No need to apologise. I know I can send my figure back to Zbrush each time I start a new session, picking up where I left off. I just found that a bit tedious and I found it much more comfortable to have a Zbrush project file saved so that I could just get back into working on my morph without having to establish the Zbrush-Poser handshake and then have an "physical" .obj file to be importing the facial morph onto my figure. Because these were also my first facial morphs I made in Zbrush, I wanted to keep things simple and also I am thinking ahead of when I need to port these V4/M4 characters I've morphed over to a Genesis figure. I don't know how well that will work, but if it doesn't I would rather have my .obj morph on-hand so I can use that as a reference in Zbrush to recreate the morph or something similar on a Genesis figure. (I don't plan on doing anything like this for a while. I'm getting comfortable in Poser with making morphs and clothing and props before I add DS into the equation.)

Also, for the character morphs that I'm creating for commissions, working on a Zbrush project file has the added benefit that I can us using the Layers inside Zbrush. Any major changes to the mesh I have a new Layer and the different areas of the face are isolated in their own layer, which made it incredibly flexible to make quick easy changes. Don't like the nose? Turn off the visibility of the nose Layer and start again.

AmbientShade posted at 5:50PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4317986

In order to send a morphed figure to zbrush with the morph active, you need to check the box that says 'Export Posed'. Alternatively (and I just discovered this tonight, after using goz for a few years now) - you can open the Settings dialog on the morph dial and set it's min and max values to 1.000. Then when you zero the figure it will only zero out the rotations and the morph will stay at 1.0000 and Poser will send the morphed version of the figure over to zbrush without having to check 'export posed'.

Hey, what a neat little trick! I will have to make a note of this for later! :D

AmbientShade posted at 5:50PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4317986

If you have your own system now then a lot of that might not be of much use, but it's there if you decide to experiment with it later. The same method applies to morphing the base OBJ for the figure via goz - the only difference is that you'd import it from the library, send it to zbrush as an object instead of a figure, and then export it as a morph target and reload it via the load morph target menu option in Poser.

Exactly. Once I have spent more time working in Zbrush and Poser, making morphs and content, I could end up tweaking my workflow to improve its efficiency and stability. Its useful to have information like this in one spot, rather than wasting hours and hours wading through the internet and finding 9-out-10 broken links to try and find something that was found 6 months ago and you need a refresher.

AmbientShade posted at 5:50PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4317986

Here's a link to a guide on creating INJ/REM files. Its rather old but it should still work. http://www.acrionx.com/3d_modelling_poser_tutorials/?pg=how_to_make_INJ_REM_Pose_files_for_Poser_custom_character_face_morphs

Any morph that spans two (or more) body parts is treated as a full body morph as far as I'm aware. I'm really not familiar these days with hand-coding INJ/REM files, but if I recall correctly, it will still inject the morph into the figure and set it for each body part that the morph affects, even if it is only one morph file that's being referenced. I use P11Pro which has a built-in morph injection exporter so I haven't needed to hand code injection files since I started using P11. I'm not 100% sure but 2014 may have the master synched option in the morph dial that is automatically checked on FBMs. So if you do need the morph to be separate morphs, then you can break them apart again by just unchecking 'Master Synched'. But that may only be a P11 feature.

Sorry for the wall of text, lol.

This tutorial is one of the ones I found, but running on zero sleep, stressed and sick it made very little sense to me and I just incredibly frustrated with it. Creating the INJ/REM files I've gotten worked out. Saving the figure as a .cr2 file, I then use Poser's Binary Editor to isolate the Zbrush morph and create the INJ file. Works like a dream. No mess, no fuss! :D And then for the body morphs that were made by spinning the dials, it's the same process of saving the .cr2 file but I then use Injection Pose Builder 1.5 to create the files. IPB was a bit of a pain to get to work, but now it does it's all good.

As for the master synched option... I can't say if Poser Pro 2014 has this or not because I don't know where to begin looking for it.

I'll give "Spawn Full Body Morph" a try and see if I can combine the head and neck morphs into a single injection. I don't need these to be separate, they just are because that was the way I knew how to make them. I would have liked the ear morph to be its own injection but something went hinky with it when I turned off the Layers of the rest of the face, keeping the ears isolated and my character in Poser deformed. I don't think it's nothing some more practice won't let me nut out so I can create a face and the ears and have the two separated so I can use the cute elf ears I make independently from the character they were originally made for.

lol No worries about the wall of text! It might be over a month after the fact but I'm just glad there is some helpful information coming in about this now. :)

ObscuroArcanum posted at 5:03AM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318059

As for the master synched option... I can't say if Poser Pro 2014 has this or not because I don't know where to begin looking for it.

I checked in my 2014 game dev version and it's not there. It would have been in the morph settings menu when you click on the arrow to the right of the morph.

Not sure how to unlink morphs from fbms in 2014. It's been so long since I used 2014 it's easy to forget which features are in which version.

@ironsoul - thanks for that goz tip. I will test that, as I have a few head morphs of my own that lost their poser links and just taking up space, so I'll use them for experiments.

AmbientShade posted at 11:49PM Thu, 16 November 2017 - #4318062

I checked in my 2014 game dev version and it's not there. It would have been in the morph settings menu when you click on the arrow to the right of the morph.

Not sure how to unlink morphs from fbms in 2014. It's been so long since I used 2014 it's easy to forget which features are in which version.

That's not a problem. It will be something for me to keep in mind when I'm working on future projects, having the neck included on the body morph when I create it in Zbrush rather than spinning the Poser dials. I will also experiment with my neck morph, if Spawning the full body morph to merge the face and neck will work for me.

I'm still learning how to read the flow of the topology, where I need to add the muscle definition and other details where I want them and for them to look anatomically correct. It might be something lots of people take for granted and it comes easy to them, but it's taking me a little time. When I was making my skin texture in Zbrush and was adding the displacement for the wrinkles on the knuckles etc, when it came to the elbows I put them in the wrong place! lol