To answer my own question: yes, it does, and it even works retroactively, but only after I edit the morph some more.

https://youtu.be/n5fD7TnAh4s

"Anyway, subdivision morphs have a couple of different ways of working in Poser... Depending if you bake down for subdivision. Its basically "works at any res or works at a specific level". "

Bottom of pg.239 of this thread

Thanks primorge! Clearly I need to dig harder for older tutorials on the Rendo channel.

And sorry, I have terrible memory.

Oh dang it, I can't resist posting another update. Finished up the abdominal area for now (I think) and started adding some volume on the upper chest. Serratus anterior and such are next. This is too much fun, although sometimes I still think I'd rather have a large bag of clay to play with.

I like where this is going. It's good to refresh the old girl and make her a little more competitive with the other models.

odf posted at 2:41PM Sun, 25 July 2021 - #4423890

Oh dang it, I can't resist posting another update. Finished up the abdominal area for now (I think) and started adding some volume on the upper chest. Serratus anterior and such are next. This is too much fun, although sometimes I still think I'd rather have a large bag of clay to play with.

You think. One thing I'll say for certain, don't ever try sculpting with fine porcelain... it's like sculpting with cream cheese; you'll be very lucky to make it to bone dry greenware stage without cracking or springing and then you better say a mighty prayer to the kiln gods. Most challenging material I ever worked with, even with slip casting. I spent close to 200 dollars on doll porcelain slip to cast a life size torso I sculpted, without success. Had to resort to low fire earthenware and painting and low fire glazes... below* is one of the painted versions. There's probably about 5 of these scattered around various weed dealer's houses in the bay area lol. The anatomy is passé; surreal and lurid being more the intent, but still made for interesting conversation pieces on the living room table lol. Much easier to sculpt polygons or even polymer clay than the traditional ceramic stuff... too temperamental, especially the needing to soak in a volcano for upwards to 24 hours and more, multiple times if glazing. I lost probably 5 years of my life working with the stuff. It's why I often find the discussions of realism and consequential judgements here hilarious. You should see my portfolio and how often I keep my mouth shut when I hear some of the things said :-D, it's pointless. Nevertheless, I get it.

But... there IS 3d printing now so...

Anyway, your sculpts are coming along nicely, especially using the morph brush. Sorry about the drift but your mention of sculpting with "real" clay caught my interest. Well done.

The above does have the dubious advantage of being able to be put in the dishwasher if necessary.

One of the things that Antonia is sorely lacking is a skin MR. I'm not sure if people were selling stuff for her though. I know you were encouraging it. The skin she ships with is pretty good though, but you can't modify it and share it in any way so it's even more restrictive in that regard than, say, V4. The clothes can be converted but I'm not certain how you can get past the skin hurdle without resorting to painting, which is fine for certain types of content. Most people aren't skin texture specialists, which is a very demanding practice, most things rely on merchant resources to a great extent. I really do get the feeling that you aren't particularly concerned about others making things for her now though. It's your figure so it's, relatively, a unique position to be in. It's one thing to have developed a toon or non human figure and a few bits of add ons... another entirely to be the sole developer (at this point) of a human figure with a catalogue of content for it made by others. So in a way it's kind of your private island. Does that make sense?

You are of course correct, primorge. Physical materials have their own problems and limitations, which is part of why I like to work digitally. My original motivation for getting into 3d figures, back in 2001, was that I had been doing black-and-white photography for a couple of years and then went overseas for a few months where I didn't have my bathroom-darkroom. So I thought Poser might help me understand portrait lighting, which I guess is true to some extent, but then I never really got back into photography.

That doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice to have the immediate feedback I'd have with something like clay. I've only done one rather small figure study from a live model in clay back in the day, so I wouldn't know how it is to do a life-sized one. My dad and his second wife used to work in clay, I never really got to that stage.

It's true, a skin MR would be great. I'd like to try my hand at making a new skin for Antonia at some point. That's one of the three things I'm planning on making for Antonia in the nearish future: a refined body shape, a basic wardrobe, and a new skin, probably photo-based. I'd also like to learn doing painted/modelled skin at some point, but it feels like that's more of an advanced skill.

I studied under John Defazio at the SF Art Institute. He's known in the bay area ceramics scene as, I guess you could say, part of the Funk Ceramics movement (if you Google Funk Art you'll get the gist)... His work is elaborate frankensteining of slip casted disparate elements from kitsch and pop culture, often with intricate decaling, lustres, and many layers of underglaze and China paint. It's a bit like punk rock or underground comix combined with precious traditionalism in an ironic way. Strict "realism" or academic adherence to rules isn't really a focus but there's nods if necessary, if suits the work. I was attracted to the medium because of it's process oriented nature and it's marginalization as merely "craft" in the fine art world. Plus seeing DeFazio's work, and others like it, was simpatico with my own aesthetic leanings. I was a Glazer at Heath Ceramics, which is well known.

Anyway, painted "realistic" skin is probably difficult, texture painting with 3d painting tools is alot of fun. One of my favorite things really. Painting or working on other people's poser figures to the expectations of realism can be tiresome though. If I personally were going to try and create a photorealistic skin from photos I would get good high resolution full body reference from 3D.sk or similar and projection paint it onto the model. I have a similar resource I bought here for that purpose, made by BlackHearted, but I haven't really used it yet. Painting toon or creature skins is more open to creative interpretation.

Here's that resource...

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/sofia-high-res-human-photo-reference---extended-license/118225

You're probably are already aware of 3D.sk

Here's photo based projection painting in Mudbox... which seems a bit less tedious than the traditional method using seam guides and photoshop, though that still is very useful. There's a long tutorial on the latter method for Gen3 Daz figs by BT Sculptor IIRC, hard to find. Seems very difficult. Nothing but respect for the old school Poser skin creators for sure. A subscription to Mudbox is 10 bucks a month, sculpting tools are very good, 3d painting tools are fantastic.

https://youtu.be/gRZ5TUkmT-s

Sorry about the typos, I'm on my tablet.

Thanks for the tips! I'm watching the video now while I wait for computations to run. One of the perks of working from home: no one can judge my time management. :-)

It seems Blender does not have a projection brush, but one is in the works. So I'll have to reassess that situation when I'm actually ready to start. Also, I had forgotten about that photo resource. Looks quite similar to what 3d.sk have, but may be easier to just buy one item on here and I think the model fits very well with what I had in mind for Antonia's skin. The downside might be that there are probably a bunch of characters already wearing the same skin, but honestly that wouldn't bother me too much.

I haven't seen anything recognizable on La Femme or Dawn, more than likely it would be La Femme. I haven't purchased anything recently though other than Blender add ons elsewhere, and D3d's morphing clothes utility here. I wouldn't fret about it. You can spin it when the time comes.

Nice talking 'bout art and poser again.

Goodnight.

By the way, I think the limitations of the morphing tool are actually quite useful for me at my current stage. They force me to work quite slowly and deliberately. A bit like when I decided to do Inktober last year, and since I happened to have a glass of ink and a decent Number 12 brush at home, I decided to do ink washes. That was brutal, but I think I learned a lot.

Also I guess after some time with the morphing tool, sculpting in Blender will feel like heaven. :-)

Starting on the back sculpting. Again showing Antonia's default shape first for comparison.

Very impressive with the updates to Antonia, odf. Keep up the good work.

Thanks! The sculpting is a lot of fun.

odf posted at 4:12AM Thu, 29 July 2021 - #4424119

Thanks! The sculpting is a lot of fun.

How did you do the sculpting? Was it by Blender, Poser’s Sculpt tool or…?

All in Poser right now, but I'd like to switch to Blender at some point for most of the sculpting and only do final tweaks in Poser.

odf posted at 5:28AM Thu, 29 July 2021 - #4424123

All in Poser right now, but I'd like to switch to Blender at some point for most of the sculpting and only do final tweaks in Poser.

Nice. I’m trying my hand at sculpting in Blender. Poser Morph tool helps with the little things.

Thanks

Hi odf!! Long time ...

You mentioned not having projection painting in blender yet. Perhaps I misunderstood, but I think it has it. Check this out:

Youtube video demo showing projection painting of a face (photo) onto a geometry and then remapping that to its existing UV layout

Hi bagginsbill! Nice to see you're still around.

I haven't looked into this in much detail, but apparently Mudbox has something called a projection brush which lets one clone from an image onto the model where they overlay in the 3d workspace. The video you linked to seems to essentially use a custom UV map patch for each projection direction, which means there's an extra step involved and the overall workflow is - I presume - not nearly as smooth.

When I get to that point, I'll try making a photo-base texture in Blender, anyway, whether or not is has a projection brush by then, and see how I like it. The endgame would of course be to paint or sculpt all my maps by hand based on references, but surely that'll require a lot of study and practice before I can hope to produce anything useful.

Bagginsbill is correct (as usual lol), but yes it's... different. I personally don't use Blender's painting tools that much, I'm  more comfortable painting in mudbox as it has a photoshop layers system and a direct bridge with photoshop. Plus I've converted most of my photoshop brushes to a usable format in mudbox using ABRmate and an invert in photoshop... 

https://abrmate.software.informer.com/1.1/

I mostly use blender for retopo or when I want a traditional modeling transforms/sculpting hybrid workflow. Or just regular box modeling stuff. The amount of tools available in blender for that are staggering. Again for pure sculpting it's Mudbox. Handy to be proficient with Blender though, personally, if I ever decide to cull Mudbox from my toolset... though I don't foresee that happening any more than I see dumping photoshop.

If you don't mind odf, I've seen a few people, yourself included mention trying to come to terms with a Poser to Blender and back morph sculpting workflow. I mentioned briefly my method in another forum post and perhaps it would be useful to have a little demo for people that are curious about the topic.

For this demo I'll be using Colorcurvature's Pose Morph Loader export script, though the same would apply to a standard grouped and continuous figure mesh from poser Geometries with the intent of FBM dial generation in terms of settings during the import.

The PML export script takes care of the mesh welding from transformed in scene figures and also produces a dial for an independent morph that's the difference between any dialed in morphs/transformations. So it's a post transform morph. I won't bother going over again why this would be useful. This script does the same thing, with a few more bells and whistles, that ADP's script will do odf. So the workflow will be pretty much the same...

Here's a character morph for La Femme that I've been working on, preview image. In scene. The morphs comprising the character are dialed in and additionally some custom mouth open morphs are active. A variation of probably 8 morphs are active, including many dependencies and a jaw transformation.

I invoke PML exporter from the scripts dialogue...

In this case I want to export the head and jaw actors for morphing in blender. I select them from the dialogue and export them to desktop as demoCC. I always append the initial export with CC as this will indicate to me that this is PML's reference object against which changes to deltas will be compared.

Having done this, I open Blender, right click the default cube, delete, and import my reference object. File: Import: Wavefront (obj). In the Geometry section of the import dialogue I uncheck split by object and check keep vert order.

Jeez. That head looks awful tiny in Blender. Using Mudbox I have to scale up the obj to 2000 in order for the sculpting tools to work properly, Poser meshes are TINY. Before you go scaling the mesh in Blender's object properties make sure the object is selected in the scene collection and hit the dot ( . ) key. No need to scale here, the dot key will zoom the viewport camera to the selected object.

If you want to see the wires, go to object properties and check Wireframe in Viewport Display

Want smooth shaded preview? Right click the mesh and in the object context menu click Shade Smooth.

Want to adjust the viewport preview camera? The default has a bit of perspective distortion at a default focal length of 50 mm. Hit the n key, go to the view tab, and change the focal length to 100 mm. Hit n key again to banish the sidebar flyout.

Now go to the top left options drop down and select sculpt mode. Choose one of the sculpt brushes and start sculpting. There's a mask brush, you can hide parts of the mesh by selecting polys in edit mode and hitting the h key, alt h unhides. Additionally you can create selection sets in the face maps option in object data properties.

You can control the brush falloff radius and strength by right clicking in the workspace. There's a ton of options to do this, this is simply the quickest method while working.

If you click the brush dropdown at the top of the viewport you'll be presented with additional options including various auto-masking options, which is very useful if you're doing head morphs that include head parts actors such as eyes and teeth. You can choose in this way, in a very immediate fashion, what polys are being effected by your brush strokes. Often more expedient than masking or hiding. You'll also see dropdowns for texture, stroke, falloff, and cursor. It's worth the time to explore these. The brush symmetry options are the little butterfly icon at the top right of the viewport. Obviously there's many more options but I leave that for you to explore.

Note that for the sake of space and clarity I have the viewport pretty constricted. Many buttons are not showing...

...I just quick sculpted a diabolical creature morph with the pull and draw brush. I've been making these kinds of sculpts for so long that they come pretty quick. There's some asymmetry and carving but the mesh is pretty lo res for morphing at default subdivision level so complex details aren't a concern...

I go back to object mode and with the mesh selected export the sculpt to desktop via the File: Export: Wavefront (.obj) dialogue. In the Geometry section I uncheck everything and make sure to check keep vertex order. I export as demo.obj... I now have demoCC obj (my export reference) and demo.obj (my new difference morph).

Back in Poser I invoke PML's PoseMorphLoader script. There's a warning about potential figure corruption with PML. I'm here to tell you that after easily more than 500 morphs (probably more than a thousand to be honest) created with it I've never had such a problem with the script. Nor have I EVER experienced any problem with PMD morphs or scene corruption. Ever. And I can't even fathom how many times I've saved with external binary active. Just wanted clear that weird phobia that people have up. Maybe some people have had problems with pmd but I think that was prior to Poser 8. I've never seen it...

I name my morph Demetra_Diabolical. Hit Go! Select my initial reference obj from the dialogue and than select my difference obj from the dialogue. I make sure that make FBM dial is checked, and do not create empty local morph targets is checked. PML does it's thing. There's a weld split precision and morph precision pop up. I've never encountered any weld splits nor perceptible morph imprecision. If there's any imprecision it's not visible to the eye. Morph delta changes below a certain number are ignored, this number can be modified via an option in the script, I use the default.

Thanks for the detailed overview, primorge! That will come in handy.

I now have a FBM dial in the body. The morph is post transform and is independent of the currently dialed in character morph. I usually create a master parameter in the head and slave the FBM dial to this controller. From there on I can set up any number of controllers and dependencies such as MCMs or JCMs or combinations thereof using the dependency editor. The Demetra morph itself is several morphs and JCMs controlled by a single controller in the head. For instance if my custom character smiles a custom expression I can have the Demetra_Diabolical  morph dial in gradually as she smiles, or if I rotate her head likewise...

Wires...

Dial strengths back to default custom character... 500...200

Demetra Diabolical...

Hope this helps :)

I forgot to mention. All of this is injectable. Including custom morph groupings.

Very cool! By the way, it turns out I purchased PML back in the day and just found an email conversation with colorcurvature explaining why I ended up not using it for Antonia. :-) Now if I could only find my old downloads.

Unrelatedly, there seems to be an disproportionally large number of Germans in the Poser tooling business. Some kind of conspiracy? :-)

PS: Or German speaking people, anyway. Not all of those are German.

I've noticed lol.

And... I'm back to my old vertex-pushing ways. I think my past self would be absolutely stunned that I can now morphs lo-res Antonia directly in Poser and see a raytraced render at subd level 3 within minutes. Also, I'm quite stoked that my morph makes such a nice shape at -1 without any further tweaking.

A few notes on primorge's excellent tutorial for making morphs in Blender. If you don't have the script he mentions, you can zero your figure (and set the subdivision to 0) and export out one body part to morph it. Don't change the edge vertices.

If you want to do a full-body morph based on a morphed figure, you can try the script here.

Also, when working in Blender, as primorge says, Poser mesh is tiny. You can zoom in, but I recommend scaling it up. Hit s, 10, enter to do that quickly. Before you export, hit s .10, enter to put it back to size, or set your export scale to .10.

For those that don't have PML that is a very handy script, from my understanding it works in 12 too. ADP is very generous, he's been quite helpful to me and many others. I haven't really noticed any downsides to not scaling up, at least for the low frequency sculpting I do in Blender. Retopo is another story. I will say that in Mudbox it's an absolute necessity, like 2000% lol.

Thanks for your suggestions RedPhantom

Welcome back odf! I see an old thread revived, and work done on one of the few really free figures in the Poserverse.

I see a discussion on skins. I used dphoadley's V3 remapped version of Antonia quite a lot. It gave me use for my collection of V3 skins. I combined it with the weightmapped rig version.

As for clothing and hair conversions: Antonia was the figure for which I made the first versions of what later came to be the Prefitter, I needed a solution because of the arms position being so different from the base V4 it was difficult to use the (then new) fitting room. The Antonia morph target still exists and is working. If you are interested drop me a site mail and I can send you a copy of the prefitter and the Antonia Morph target. If there is interest I can launch the target also as a freebie.

As for Marvelous Designer: I have an Antonia base to use with the MDBridge for Poser . That essentially uses MD as a cloth room on steroids. Problem is that MD10 does have an incomplete Python implementation so the bridge works only on the versions pré MD10. ( MD7, MD8 and MD9).

Hi RedPhantom and FVerbaas, and thanks for the tips and links! I was going through the MD tutorials, but got distracted by sculpting morphs. :-) I've also bought a series of instruction videos for Blender, which I've temporarily abandoned. Eventually, I'll be sure to study and maybe extend some of ADPs scripts. So many ideas and shiny things, so little attention span.

The one thing I promised myself this time around is to not take on any gargantuan, perfectionist projects that will burn me out. It's all strictly for fun this time around. Although I guess part of my problem is that gargantuan, perfectionist projects are my kind of fun, up to a point. :-/

Speaking of remapped UVs: I've had this idea of using Poser to transfer a texture from one UV map to another, so that one could for example use a V3 texture on the standard figure after conversion (using dphoadley's remapped Antonia only for the conversion itself). Is that even a thing? Is there maybe a tool for it already? I guess I'll give it a try either way, at some point, because I like the idea of just using Poser, without writing any code.

It can be done as either a MATPose or Material Room Material Collection. Mec4D created a switch set for Genesis that included M4, M5, S5, the Kids 4, V4, and V5 UVs. That set was tailor-made for the Material Room. Another set was created for Genesis 2 that uses MATPose files to inject similarly UVs through Version 6 figures, I don't recall the creator of that one. The method might be practical because there is no conversion of the original source texture and if someone doesn't mind creating a series of UVs for multiple figures then the package could be offered free like the Genesis collection.