FVerbaas posted at 3:45AM Tue, 24 August 2021 - #4425943

odf posted at 3:42AM Tue, 24 August 2021 - #4425942

... The result looks almost perfect, as far as I've checked, with one or two "small" exceptions. :-)

Yes there is a 'scale' parameter playing havock. Ususally appears also on hands.

It does appear on the hands. It's just not that visible with the hands being behind her head. No problem, it's easy to fix.

I just thought it looked amusing.

odf posted at 3:43AM Tue, 24 August 2021 - #4425941

Do you mean the solution to texture stretching?

Yes. What you are talking about is the extent of the colorization and bumpyness. Unless these are baked in geometry (normally not) they are skin texture properties best defined where skins are defined. I have not been able to dream up a way to mime the effect of a '2D magnet' with the material room nodes without becoming unduly complicated. Guess best approach is via definition in layers, one for each nipple, that can each be scaled from its centre and of course masked out where scale is back at unity.

Defining nipples and lips as a separate material was useful in the old V3 days when default figure was tinted via simple colors. It has no use anymore today with layered textures and masks/alpha channels.

So, stupid question: can I actually edit weight maps in Poser, and if so, how?

odf posted at 5:23AM Tue, 24 August 2021 - #4425949

So, stupid question: can I actually edit weight maps in Poser, and if so, how?

The joint editor lets you edit/paint the weight maps. In the manual see tools-> joints-> weight maps.

Here's a video where Phantom3d/Diogenes demos some of his Poser weightmapping process...

https://vimeo.com/35850999

Thanks for the link, primorge! Poser 12 has not been cooperating so far with the weightmapped Antonia's, which could be caused by something in their CR2s. So I guess I'll try rigging a test mesh from scratch.

In the meantime, I've started playing with breast movements, which is a lot of fun and so far seems much easier than the whole augmentation business. Don't mind Antonia while she's trying to practice her seductive faces.

I've found that using the translate/move gizmos in Blender with proportional editing active and adjustments to falloff radius works very well for such things, similar but in some ways superior to Wings advanced magnet functions. If you experiment with proportional editing I've found better symmetry accuracy via selecting identical polys on each side of the mesh rather than relying solely on Blender's auto symmetry, which I've encountered some bugs while using with proportional editing. Deformation problems similar to what you might see when parts of a mesh in Poser are falling outside of the spherical falloff zone in Poser traditional weights.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/controls/proportional_editing.html

Just saw a YouTube video about "Joint Corrective Morphs." What is this? I look away for a decade and JCMs have been retronym'd?

Darnit, I trusted you folks to keep the nomenclature pure. I don't even dare to ask what ERC stands for these days.

:-D

odf posted at 6:40PM Fri, 27 August 2021 - #4426160

Just saw a YouTube video about "Joint Corrective Morphs." What is this? I look away for a decade and JCMs have been retronym'd?

Darnit, I trusted you folks to keep the nomenclature pure. I don't even dare to ask what ERC stands for these days.

:-D

That's a DS video.

primorge posted at 9:27PM Fri, 27 August 2021 - #4426161

odf posted at 6:40PM Fri, 27 August 2021 - #4426160

Just saw a YouTube video about "Joint Corrective Morphs." What is this? I look away for a decade and JCMs have been retronym'd?

Darnit, I trusted you folks to keep the nomenclature pure. I don't even dare to ask what ERC stands for these days.

:-D

That's a DS video.

Psst! I've been trying to sneak that fact past the moderators. Are you saying Poser and DS have always been using different terms for the same thing?

Shrug. Isn't DS just Poser really though. Would there even be a DS without Poser? I suppose the terminology differences are just "innovations".

Hey you want to try a mindfuck? Re-rig a figure's (La Femme in this instance) tongue (it has 5 actors) with animated joint centers which change center and orientations to match a long, really long, tongue morph...

It works great in scene, I can make La Femme lick the tip of her nose or the bottom of her chin. And the deformations are really smooth with a single level of subdivision. Try to copy that to an injection and the thing get's scrambled (or drops info) somehow. I think I might be able to hack out the working bits from the cr2 and replace the non working bits in the inject. Shouldn't be difficult to do really by comparing the relevant channels side by side, and making corrections accordingly, hopefully. If not I'll have to leave that particular feature as for my own personal use. It's one of those things that might really only work embedded in the cr2, or at least in the case of my file internal hacking skill level.

I think that tongue work you're doing would really have excited lesbentley back in the day.

No doubt. Learned alot from reading his contributions to the forum. I remember he tore me a new one when I first came onto the forum and was foolishly spouting off some erroneous info. Probably the best way to learn things, irritate someone into revealing the proper way lol. Nice guy though, helped me learn how to construct a sliding door properly; complete with an animation and a working reference file. Love all those old threads.

Oh gods, I'm doomed. I just checked some of Antonia's rotation centers and orientations - both original and WM - and now I want to re-rig her. The collars are way off, and I'm not super-confident about the shoulders and hips either. Probably all due to Poser's weird fall-off zone system, so I'm not blaming phantom3d, at all. But I feel like I need to at least try if things can't be improved in the weight mapped version. Maybe leave the things in place that work well and try to tweak those I'm not happy with.

Which probably means I'll pull my hair out for a week or two and give up because rigging figures is just too hard. :-(

Just had a quick go in Poser 12, and painting weight maps is so much easier than manipulating those goshdarn fall-off spheres and angles. Maybe not all is lost... :-/

If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet it should even be more easy.

FVerbaas posted at 5:11AM Sat, 28 August 2021 - #4426183

If you have a pressure-sensitive tablet it should even be more easy.

Good point! I should dig out my little tablet that I've bought on sale ages ago and never used.

Not to be a doubting Thomas but I don't think using a tablet with Poser weight painting will make much of a difference. I have one (and also use an HP tablet convertible laptop) and find it only useful for drawing type tasks. With weight painting it's not drawing that needs a significant amount of fine "gesture" or pressure variation as in weighted line work you might find by utilizing a brush. If you're not used to using a stylus and tablet it might actually make things more cumbersome as you don't have the by rote muscle memory of selection and such with a mouse.

Just a caveat, some people hardly use a mouse at all because they're very used to a stylus

@primorge Also a fair point. Can't hurt to try both methods and see what works best for me, though.

Totally. You might find you like the stylus better, just my observation on it. I only ever use mine in photoshop or when drawing. Very little for sculpting, which probably sounds like heresy, I'm just so used to a mouse. I think sometimes there's the tendency to hear "you need to use a tablet/stylus, it makes things so much easier" but my experience in contrast is that sometimes you just don't need such a fine tool. Many times actually, especially with lazy mouse functionality/line smoothing algorithms being very standard. In contrast it never hurts to be in practice with a stylus, it might take some time getting used to if you are using a small tablet though. You suddenly discover how large your arm and hand is in terms of range of motion lol.

The argument I heard was that sculpting with the mouse puts more strain on the wrist, but I think that was aimed at people who do CGI professionally and may spend hours on it every day.

I used a tablet and stylus in lieu of a mouse on both my pemanent workplaces. (had one in home office and one in company office) and it helped me get away from pain in the fingers, because i had something to play with while not doing the mouse-y tasks. Now retired and sharing workspot with fanily, who tend to put the Wacom I have there to the side. I find myself to lazy to put it back into position every time but pull it when oing drafting tasks. Poser does not like tablet touch operations or pen action with touch active. It may get confused between pen and gestures from the side of my hand holding the stylus and hang. I had to switch that off.

Probably. I could see where , under those circumstances, a stylus would be MUCH better. Consider that under those conditions it's very high frequency sculpting with millions of polys and that pressure sensitivity would be very useful. Not to mention the gear you would be using there would be far superior to what's actually required for Poser figure editing (at this point). The "sculpting" we're doing is more like advanced tweaking rather than sculpting in all reality, wouldn't you say? I've done a little high(er) frequency sculpting, mostly for displacement maps, and some relief work type sculpts. For Poser, Displacements maps is where it's most useful. Typically the things we do for Poser as far as morphs would be 2 levels of subdivision at highest. I have seen some interesting stuff being done by MEC4D over at Hivewire that seems much different. As with anything there will always be different views and methods, not to mention experience.

Gave up on that multiple animated joint centers to inject experiment. Works well in scene, just isn't copying to a perfectly working injection. Seemed to be compounding the morph portion during bends. Fact is you can pose La Femme's tongue in the same way using just the translate, bend and scale dials built in (probably due to the new smooth translations feature) so in reality... a redundant experiment. I did learn how to use the animated centers feature pretty well though, which should copy to inject ok if just one joint (fine tuning an eye's match centers for instance), so not a complete loss.

A quick first study for my intended collar rerig. Took phantom3d's original Antonia WM, transferred to lo-res, moved the right collar origin to the actual origin of the collar bone, aligned the twist direction with the direction of the bone, and did some very quick-and-dirty tweaking of the up-down weight map, just around the collar bone itself and the lower neck. The left collar is unchanged.

Antonia is trying to raise her arms with just the collar joints here, no shoulder involvement. Identical settings for both sides. I should add that twist, up-down and back-front are all used, but I've only edited the weight maps for up-down.

Apparently a joint can now influence any actors one likes, not just the actors it's on and its parent. I'm not sure that's going to make a big difference for tweaking Antonia, but can imagine it will make the grouping much less of a puzzle game in newer figures.

Setting up an anatomically correct collar joint where the collar bone does not turn into rubber is tricky without deforming the lower neck in funny ways. I think that area may need some mild JCMs, but the good news is that there's not a lot of clothing this would affect. Basically just turtlenecks.

You may want to take a look at the Project Evolution figure. Ït implements the arm raise quite well if you follow the posing instructions.

FVerbaas posted at 9:08PM Sun, 29 August 2021 - #4426251

You may want to take a look at the Project Evolution figure. Ït implements the arm raise quite well if you follow the posing instructions.

If I had that figure, I would. But I don't think any lessons I might learn from it are worth 30 dollars. Especially because the lesson would most likely be "make a mesh that supports those bends better than Antonia does."

There is a [free demo]https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/78511/project-evolution-demo) also. It is (a curtailed version of) a version a tad older than the PE One available in the store here. It does not have the morph set and the hi-res textures, but the rig (as far as I remember) is not truncated.

FVerbaas posted at 5:47AM Mon, 30 August 2021 - #4426283

There is a [free demo]https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/78511/project-evolution-demo) also. It is (a curtailed version of) a version a tad older than the PE One available in the store here. It does not have the morph set and the hi-res textures, but the rig (as far as I remember) is not truncated.

Oh, cool! I'll have a look then.

I'll go out on a limb here and claim that the collar and first thumb joints are the hardest to rig because they don't correspond to extremities. They're both just embedded in a fleshy mass. Very tricky!

What you need is a little X-ray vision :D

Shoulders are very hard, there are 4 joints to emulate. The improvement to that collar bend is really good.

caisson posted at 5:11PM Mon, 30 August 2021 - #4426325

What you need is a little X-ray vision :D

Are you trying to imply people have skeletons inside? Next thing you'll claim bones aren't made out of rubber or something preposterous like that.

Shoulders are very hard, there are 4 joints to emulate. The improvement to that collar bend is really good.

Thanks!

The three Antonias - a teensy progress (or regress?) check on my edits to Antonia WM. On the left (our left) we see Mother of JCMs, on the right the Original Weightmapster, and in the middle my humble attempts so far. Same pose on all three of them.

And the corresponding back views.

As a first baby step towards reviving and pythonifying my old mesh tools, here is lo-res Antonia loaded in from the OBJ file, subdivided twice and displayed via Polyscope. Polyscope is really nice for testing this kind of thing because I can get it to display my mesh from within Python with literally half a dozen lines of code.

As you all will have noticed by now, I'm jumping around a lot, starting on mini-projects in the context of my big bad Antonia revival program, and then jump on to the next one without finishing. That is of course completely on purpose. I'd like to understand the big picture, what works, what doesn't, before I come up with the big overall plan. I also don't want to wear myself out, and I've found that jumping around between a number of subprojects is a good way for me to keep things fun.

So in this spirit, tonight I've finally managed to wrap my head around projection (a.k.a. stencil) painting in Blender after watching a few videos and taking a bunch of false starts because I can for the life of me never remember where things are in the Blender GUI. Anyway, it is easy and worked really well until Blender crashed on me. So unfortunately, I can't show off any results, and I'll have to remember to save often when I start working on a texture for real.

I've got one question, though: what's an easy way, preferably in Poser, Blender or DAZ Studio, to convert overlapping UV maps to UDIM?

odf posted at 5:11AM Mon, 06 September 2021 - #4426790

I've got one question, though: what's an easy way, preferably in Poser, Blender or DAZ Studio, to convert overlapping UV maps to UDIM?

Never mind, it took me about ten minutes in Blender.

A crappy test render to demonstrate that after the appropriate amount of frustration, I seem to have somewhat wrapped my head around texture painting in Blender and started some semi-serious work on a new color map for our protagonist.

I've filled all her skin and nails with a base color and started projection-painting her face from my photo refs using color blend mode. I figure I'll do a quick pass over all of her body first before going back for detail work such as the nostrils, eyes, ears and lips and in general any parts that are occluded or covered or need precise boundaries. Detail work will also include removing any highlights and shadows that have managed to sneak in. Then finally I'll do any necessary color corrections on the complete map, and start worrying about how I'll do the bumps and roughness.

I'm completely new to texturing, so does that sound like a reasonable plan?

Slightly better render with fixed SSS, a bluish light to compensate for the excessive orange, and some primitive procedural lashes to make this look a bit less uncanny.

Okay, not a fan of projection painting for photo textures. Too hard to control. Went back to the traditional 2d patchwork method. Here's a bit more progress.

You might already be doing this but I've found its best to have 2 versions of your figure in scene, one with shaders work applied, one with just the diffuse maps work plugged and no specular, nothing else. Both referencing the same work files. Selectively hide/unhide, use the reload textures render feature and have your OpenGL preview resolution set at a resolution that matches the largest texture size. Speeds up checking your work.

Don't skimp on effort with things that you might not find useful in your own work. Mouth interior, fingernails, lids punctum, those kinds of things for example.

See you in a couple/few months when you start painting makeups ;)

Good tips, thanks!

I don't think I like photo texturing much, neither in 3d nor in 2d. Obviously the reason I'm bad at it now is lack of practice, but honestly, I don't like the whole concept. It feels very backwards. So here's the start of texturing experiment number 3: brows, lips, her right cheek and the right side of her nose are hand-painted, the lashes are procedural, the rest is just one plain color. So far this is by far the most satisfying and least tedious method. I mean for Pablo's sake, I've been able to do a reasonably realistic portrait in pencil or gouache forty years ago as a teenager if I just put in the time and patience (which did not happen very often, but I'm older and less easily bored now).

If you are going to do a lot of hand painting, something I personally like doing too (in conjunction with 3d painting tools), best to use a seamless pattern fill of a skin tile as your base fill. In  photoshop you can scale the pattern filling, I imagine you can do the same in Gimp. It might seem, in theory, that using a pattern fill would lead to some obvious repetitive appearance but I've found that it really depends on the tile. Oddly enough suitable skin tiles are difficult to find... this is actually a very good one

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/skinsource---artist-tool/88029

Also you'll find that baking cavity or AO maps and using them as a multiply layer, or other blending modes, of varying intensity, and judicious use of clone stamping and noise based brushes (and erasers!) will be very useful... I personally have dozens of skin and detail brush sets for Photoshop that I've also taken the time to convert to mudbox that I use quite a bit.

Hand painting things such as tongue details, wrinkles on knuckles, etc is tricky. You could patchwork photo sources for this. Make sure not to make the wrinkle details too dark, most photo resources will cause this. Knock back the opacity a bit and rely on bump for the "shading". Also sculpting these details and using generated displacement maps as a multiply layer or cavity map is helpful for these kinds of details.

Every image you show of your texture work has multiple shaders attached with SSS, specular, and procedural bump present. It's not an accurate public depiction of your texture work. Just pointing this out. For this kind of work it's useful to dump vanity.

Every image you show of your texture work has multiple shaders attached with SSS, specular, and procedural bump present. It's not an accurate public depiction of your texture work. Just pointing this out. For this kind of work it's useful to dump vanity.

Good point, but at this stage I'm mostly trying to see how things translate to the final render, in particular whether the texture makes an actual difference. Also how prominent brush edges and such appear. But I'll remember to show some plain OpenGL previews with no specular later in the process, if that's what you're getting at.

By the way, I may have forgotten to detach the bump map in some of the renders, but the last one definitely has no bump anywhere on the skin.

If you are going to do a lot of hand painting, something I personally like doing too (in conjunction with 3d painting tools), best to use a seamless pattern fill of a skin tile as your base fill.

Yep! I've also been considering playing with procedural textures in Blender, driven by maps, and bake into the texture whatever works. But you know, a little bit at a time. Many new things for me, including switching my drawing hand from left to right because I think it fits the workflow and setup better.