I have a suggestion regarding the Morphing Tool.

Many times I have wanted to fit a piece of clothing to a heavily morphed figure, and found that copying the morphs from the figure doesn't quite give me what I need. Even in the days before that functionality was available in Poser, it was always a tedious process to try and make conforming clothing fit. Simulation also doesn't quite do the job in the case where a piece of clothing has modeled details like hems and stitching, or buttons that aren't directly attached to the cloth mesh.

What occurred to me, was that the push and pull options of the Morph tool can preserve details relatively well, if they are applying a translation uniformly. However, as soon as I use the smoothing or flattening tools, they will smooth the details out of the mesh.

What if, instead of the smoothing or flattening function applying to the current mesh vertex positions, there were an alternative version of these tools which only applied to the deltas in the current morph. I.e. just smooth or flatten the deltas you've already modified, as though the deltas comprised a mesh themselves, rather than the actual vertices. That way, details that are built into the mesh cannot be smoothed away or flattened to nothing. Only the deltas will get relatively smoothed or flattened.

It seems to me that this would not require a great deal of reprogramming or development, merely the application of existing algorithms to an alternative data set, i.e. deltas instead of vertex positions.

Additionally, the tighten and loosen tools will iron out mesh details when in proximity to the target figure. The details could be simply restored (apart from the extent by which the original mesh has been stretched) by applying delta smoothing, as opposed to vertex smoothing.

[This was close to the last thing I posted on the SMS Forums, so folks may remember seeing it there]

---

My ShareCG Stuff

Verbosity: Profusely promulgating Graham's number epics of complete and utter verbiage by the metric monkey barrel.