willyb53 posted at 11:58AM Thu, 02 April 2020 - #4385120

A fully loaded V4 with external geometry still will take up 100's of megabytes of memory for each copy

Whenever I see references to figures taking up "memory," I always wonder: are you talking about hard disk space or RAM? I might be wrong about this, but I don't think there's a one-to-one correlation between MBs used on disk and amount of MBs taken up by RAM. At least, I've never seen that correlation in all my years of studying the Activity Monitor on a Mac!

ssgbryan posted at 1:31AM Tue, 21 April 2020 - #4385234

When I make a character, I first strip out all of the unused morphs (1 click). Then I use the "Dials to FBM" command to make a final FBM (1 click). Then I strip out the PBMs that made up the FBM (1 click). Make an injection of the FBM (1 click). Load FBM into a base mesh with only expressions and it is done (1 click).

Now he/she is less than 100Mb.

This is a bit off-topic for the thread, but I've always wondered what might be lost by consolidating all V4 character morphs using the "Dials to FBM" tool (which I think is part of the Wardrobe Wizard suite of useful tools unrelated to wardrobes!?) I tried it a few years ago, and I found that some things (most likely corrective morphs and expressions) didn't work as I expected them to b/c they were, apparently, depending on some specific character morphs (most likely Aiko4) that had been removed after I did the "dials to FBM" thing. So I haven't tried it again.

But otherwise I do something similar to what you describe, in that I have a fully loaded V4 (a Sasha-16 version) I use as a "starter" for designing a character, so I can fiddle with all the morphs to see what works best. She has A4, G4, S4, Elite, Aged, Faerime, Facial Expressions, Distinctive Features, and probably a few more, but not She-Freak or Creature b/c I haven't yet had a need for those. Once I've settled on the new character's face and body shape, I save a pose file with the shape info and take notes on which morphs I used so that I can inject only those into a base V4. Then I apply the pose file and save the new character (averaging around 90-120 MBs, depending on which morphs I used).

I've been hesitant to go one step further and condense all the shape morphs into one "dials to FBM" solution b/c I don't want to limit the figure's functionality. Have you not found that to the be the case? I suppose I could give it another try, at least for more minor character, as I continue tweaking my main characters' shapes indefinitely! (and I sometimes use shape dials to deal with pokethrough or weird pose-related issues)

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TOOLS: MacBook Pro; Poser Pro 11; Cheetah3D; Photoshop CC

FIGURES: S-16 (improved V4 by Karina), M4, K4, Mavka, Toons, and Nursoda's people

GOALS: Stylized and non-photorealistic renders in various fantasy styles