I myself believe that until poser is capable of doing the procedure of geographing it will never truly compete or compare with daz studio. That having been said I wonder if poser will ever truly be able to support the action of geographing to humanoid figures

I presume you mean geo grafting. It'd be a useful feature, for sure.

You mean geografts. For those who don't know DAZ, this is the definition from the DAZ forum: "A geograft is a special type of figure add-on which replaces part of the original figure by the add-on. For example it can replace part of the back by a new version with a rigged tail which would integrate seamlessly with the rest of your figure."

Note however that it's been announced that the Poser team are going to move Poser to Unimesh for figures, with the final Poser 12 - and as early as December 2020. Could that enable such things? Or, perhaps more likely, bypass the need for such things?

Is this a feature that so many would need? I can't think of a single instance where I need such a thing. But maybe that's just me.

I think people who do fantasy/SF would love this. Though if DAZ is any example, I suspect it will be vendors who make use of it, while ordinary users just buy the products created.

Seriously, folks. While I would like to have Poser and DAZ get on the same page again as far as content goes, this doom saying of Poser has to stop. It's been over ten years since Poser and DAZ stopped cooperating, and while I admit that Poser is no longer king of the hill, it is still ON the hill. Here's an interesting thought. Use the program you think will create the best render for you. Radical thought right? You know, right tool, for the right job. In the meantime, let's give Bondware some time to see what they come up with. They've owned Poser for all of one version so far. And they've made some improvements since then. Let's see what they do after three or four versions down the road. In the meantime, if you REALLY need geo-grafting that badly, then you can use Studio.

You kind of can do it with Poser. It's not something ordinary users do, but neither is geografting.

There's things like Little Dragon's Mia, with the Millennium Cat's head and cat feet on Vicky. And there have been centaurs, with, say, M4's upper body replacing the Milhorse's head and neck. And a lot of the things people are doing with geografting were done in Poser using conformers: wings, tails, etc. RDNA had a multiarmed Kali figure based on V4, though I don't recall how it was made.

The problem with these things are textures, but as I understand it, this is an issue with geografting as well.

Years ago Cage said that he thought it possible in PP2012, but as far as I recall he never pursued it. It does work via the DSON Importer..

Poser 11 comes with a number of grafting tools:

• A classic one: 'replace body part with prop'. Before applying the replacement, clone the figure and switch the original on which you will be changing a body part to Poser Tradititional skinning. Then apply the replacement. After replacement copy the morphs and the joint zones back from the clone so they are defined in prop that now replaces the body part. You can then switch back to unimesh skinning if you want. Note there is no geometric 'welding'so keep a good overlap between the replacing prop and the remaining body.
• 'Combine figures'. see the manual. (This function is at the moment not yet available in Poser 12)
• Fitting Room. Cast your figure as a prop (my fig-to-prop script may help here) and, use the grouping tool to delete the parts of the body parts you no longer want, add the items you want to add, morph-brush to align, and export as one geometry to .obj. Then reload and make a figure out of the prop in the fitting room or the setup room.

Note that Poser Traditional Skinning for grafting work, replacing body parta and such offers the best options. The body parts are separate entities with separate geometry definitions so you can swap geometry of one of them without affecting the rest. Unimesh is a lot less flexible in this sense. Aslo traditional Poser bending, with zones so bending weight for a vertex is defined by xyz positoin is more open to grafting than weightmapping is. That's why when using 'replace body part by prop' you have to do a 'copy joint zones'. With the loss of the old body part the bending info was gone also and needs to be restored.

Poser has indeed supported swapping body parts geometry as far as version 3 (or 4?), where I have used and abused this feature in my renders for years. However, geo-grafting is a whole different story, where the replacing geometry is actually welded to the mesh at vertex level, which temporarily changes the figure geometry and vertex count while preserving weight maps and morphs. The obvious advantage is a seamless integration with the figure that can survive even subdivision. Conforming alternatives are not seamless, and in some cases that can be an issue in renders and animations. We can try easing that up with transparency maps, but that can be a hit or miss depending on the case. If the figure is wearing clothes and has hair, things like tails and horns don't need to be seamless.

However, I was commissioned several times to create a geo-grafted replacement for the ball of the feet on Genesis 3 and 8 figures, where the low poly geometry and simplified topology have compromised feet posing on that area, creating ridges that look bad in renders. This can only be done with geo-grafting, and lucky me, those are DS figures where the feature is available.

I would love for Poser to have this feature, but Rendo has other things that have higher priority at the moment, so (IMHO) this is not the best time to ask for it.

Unless there is a drastic change to the Poser CR2/PZ3 file format, which removes features present for Traditional rigging, there should be no reason why a body part replacement with an actor containing its own mesh definition (not referring to a named group within the figure obj file) can't be done.

What Poser lacks presently, is any automated mechanism to transfer morph deltas to an unmorphed replacement actor. However, if the replacement has the majority of its vertices and facets in identical positions to those of the original actor, it is eminently possible to transfer morph deltas to the matching vertices via python script.

That could possibly be worked around by creating a dummy figure, whose only actor with geometry is the one which will replace an actor on the original figure. Conforming the dummy figure to the original, would then allow the Copy Morphs From feature to be applied. Identical vertices should get a very close match to the original deltas, while vertices further away from the original actor's surface will probably need some manual adjustment, in the same way that clothing does.

Maintaining vertex order and the mapping from the original figure's replaced actor to the replacement actor is difficult but certainly not impossible.

It will take some experimentation to see what the eventual internal unimesh Poser changes in how figures are handled and morphs transferred. Lots of things which are difficult now will hopefully be possible, if not actually easier when that change comes through.

If a whole actor is being replaced with another rigged actor, even if there are mesh/geometry changes, Poser should still correctly handle the actor seams during bending, so no overlap should be required. Geografting in Studio effectively introduced new actor seams, even if there were no joint parameters directly affecting those seam vertices.

In Poser, provided the replacement actor is UVmapped exactly the same way as the original actor, at least for the identical vertices, then the appearance should be seamless.