primorge posted at 9:05 AM Sun, 31 October 2021 - #4429635

Oops. One other thing

Make the teeth and gums separate this time, pretty please.

Sounds doable. I was thinking about separate finger/toe nails, as well. What's your use case for separate teeth? Just easier morphing/hiding?

That's reassuring. Somehow I was under the impression that transferring morphs might be more problematic. Will have to do some tests when the time comes. A pose converter sounds like a great idea. I have no idea how to go about writing one, but pretty much all this stuff is learn-as-I-go for me, so no sweat. :-)

Maybe to talk to Nagra_00_? I spoke to him a year ago and I understand that though silent he was still active.

The up thing is that PoserPyhon now out of the box supports SciPy (good at doing quaternion rotations and other 3D goodies) and is open to PIP install any module from the HUGE collections available for 3.7. So there are a lot more options than in the old days.  if you can find someone who feels like making an AI based pose converter... LOL!  

odf posted at 6:43 PM Sun, 31 October 2021 - #4429650

That's reassuring. Somehow I was under the impression that transferring morphs might be more problematic. Will have to do some tests when the time comes. A pose converter sounds like a great idea. I have no idea how to go about writing one, but pretty much all this stuff is learn-as-I-go for me, so no sweat. :-)

Maybe to talk to Nagra_00_? I spoke to him a year ago and I understand that though silent he was still active.

Good idea!

The up thing is that PoserPyhon now out of the box supports SciPy (good at doing quaternion rotations and other 3D goodies) and is open to PIP install any module from the HUGE collections available for 3.7. So there are a lot more options than in the old days.  if you can find someone who feels like making an AI based pose converter... LOL!  

I have a technical question for you ODF, perhaps you know the solution.

So I figured out how to make a pose controller injectable via pmd. I'm curious about a particular facet of Poser IK, that is when you activate IK on the legs and rotate the hip in order to get a bend at the hip Pose it causes the figure's body to translate in the Y direction a bit. The feet are pinned but it's like a tippy toes or high heel pose resulting. You know of any way to maintain flat footedness when trying to do such a hip rotation?

I have a technical question for you ODF, perhaps you know the solution.

So I figured out how to make a pose controller injectable via pmd. I'm curious about a particular facet of Poser IK, that is when you activate IK on the legs and rotate the hip in order to get a bend at the hip Pose it causes the figure's body to translate in the Y direction a bit. The feet are pinned but it's like a tippy toes or high heel pose resulting. You know of any way to maintain flat footedness when trying to do such a hip rotation?

There's an idea! Thanks for the reminder on that, I'll test it 👍

Nope, doesn't work. I've tried forcing limits and locking actors too. The only way possible to keep the figure flat footed is by repositioning via a translation and rotating the feet back into default position. Pretty certain translations of an entire figure aren't possible via injection pose. I might be wrong though... it may very well be, it is a POSE feature after all, but is it possible to pass that through a pmd inject if its attached via an empty morph dial controller? Further experimenting I guess. Betcha Nerd could answer this real fast but he's strangely unpredictable to reply to technical queries.

Update; after a series of tests these are the dial features that can be passed via pmd inject, with a specific requirement.

In order for this to work you must attach any of these dependencies to a master dial in the body generated via spawn full body morph. This should be done on a completely zeroed figure so that empty dials and a master are created, that is unless you want to have already existing morphs attached in addition to the master. Spawn full body morph on a zero figure creates a master dial in the body and local empty morph dials in every actor of the figure, including parented props. Might want to use a 'blank' cr2. You can delete all of these dials and leave the body master dial intact. The options of 'create new master parameter' and spawn morph target will not work for copying to inject for these types of dial dependencies. The master MUST be in the Body in order for it to pass to the injection, although if for some reason you wanted a controller in another actor you could create another master in that actor that drives the body master dial.

Injectable dials are possible for

Translation of any actor or combination of actors and/or the Body

Scaling of any actor or combination of actors and/or the Body

Rotation of any actor or combination of actors and/or the Body

And any of the combination of above, in very complex dependencies if you want.

And of course morphs, FBM, JCM, MCJ, and dependant match centers commands as usual.

Anyway, problem solved. Sorry for the hijack ODF but these are questions I've had for a while and I finally sat down and tested each one.

odf posted at 5:47 PM Mon, 1 November 2021 - #4429733

I think machine learning would probably be overkill here. Modulo any potentially tricky details, the rough outline of the algorithm would be to make a pose for Antonia that matches the donor figure, convert that and the donor pose to general matrix form (or quaternions if one feels so inclined) compose the matrices and convert back to Euler angles. Not entirely unlike IK, come to think of it, but simpler.

The approach you indicate for pose conversion is indeed the most logical route when only the end pose matters, as is the case when using conforming clothing. For dynamic clothing the route to the final pose is important and that is where the AI approach could come in because the feasible space of intermediate poses is quite curved and complex and the figure has to navigate those narrow channels. Trial and error would work but I expect this is impractical and time-consuming.

Quaternions or matrices is a matter of preference. Quaternions strike as more robust than Euler matrices because they do not have the gimbal lock and therefore also in general have less risk of bad condition. 

What does really help is to have a good library of hand poses. Fingers are the end of the chain and that is where converted poses need the most work, especially when they need to connect to something. Often less work to just reset the hands and start with target figure's hand dials or presets than sort out the mess. Maybe a pose converter could just ignore fingers initially. 

For the record: by 'Fingers are the end of the chain' I meant their transformations are the end product of the long row of local transformations of their 'ancestors' starting with hip and ending with hand.  Each local transformation is a translation of a local transformation in the donor and the effect of each step multiplies.

For the record: by 'Fingers are the end of the chain' I meant their transformations are the end product of the long row of local transformations of their 'ancestors' starting with hip and ending with hand.  Each local transformation is a translation of a local transformation in the donor and the effect of each step multiplies.

Quaternions or matrices is a matter of preference. Quaternions strike as more robust than Euler matrices because they do not have the gimbal lock and therefore also in general have less risk of bad condition. 

For the record, there is no gimbal lock problem with general rotation matrices. Any matrix that has a positive determinant and whose inverse is the same as its transpose describes a rotation. Multiply two rotation matrices and you get another one. If you're worried about numerical issues, you can re-normalize the result via the Gram-Schmidt method as you would also have to normalize your quaternions. Gram-Schmidt is not the best way to get the "closest" rotation matrix to an arbitrary linear transformation, but it's good enough to deal with the miniscule numerical errors you'd get from floating point arithmetic. The one big advantage of quaternions I am aware of is that if you try to interpolate between two rotation matrices, e.g. for animation, you generally get rubbish, whereas quaternions are much better behaved.

Kind of off topic (but also kind of not): as of yesterday, I am the proud owner of a Wacom Intuous tablet. Now to decide whether to paint Antonia's new texture in Blender, Mudbox or Substance Painter. (But that's probably more of a topic for the texturing forum.)

Tablet isn't really necessary for skin texture painting unless you are doing design flourishes and drawing type tasks. Pressure sensitivity sure helps for airbrush and natural brush/pen strokes line weight effects. I'm sure there will be those that heartily disagree but I'm just commenting from my usage of both a mouse and stylus tablet combo.

Texturing forum is a ghost town last I checked.

Go with substance, it's more expensive than Mudbox but has more up to date tools, features, and development. Mudbox is still handy to have, for a variety of reasons. Not bad as an adjunct to substance, still one of the best traditional 3d painting interfaces IMO. Now that Substance is owned by Adobe it's moot mentioning Mudbox's direct bridge with PS. Not sure if Substance can do flatten to UVs painting like Mudbox... but

You're not using Photoshop but rather Gimp so I guess all of that's all moot also.

There's the whole advantage of PBR materials interface with Substance too. Frankly there's a heavier advantage there with architectural, environmental, and non organic things, IMO, as far as generating the maps for that type of rendering.

Tools are nice, practice is paramount.

@primorge Interesting that you're recommending Substance as an apparently avid Mudbox user. I might still get the free trial versions for both, seeing as I'm a cheapskate and would rather get the cheaper software if it seems sufficient for my purposes. With the dreaded subscription model, it's not really a sunk cost issue anymore. If it turns out the more expensive software is necessary, one can switch.

Also if Blender gets proper layer support at some point, I might drop whatever texture painting tool I'm using like a hot potato.

Well if you do decide to give Mudbox a spin you'll definitely need more brushes, you can never have too many. I have hundreds I've collected, created, or purchased over the years. You can convert photoshop brush files (abr) to png and then invert them in an image editor and load them into your Mudbox stamp library. I use this to convert abr to png

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

This might be a bit off topic but Carrara Pro has a really good 3d painting tool built into it, it's the software I started 3d painting with. Don't recall that its tablet friendly though, it's been years since I've had it installed. You can also use photoshop brushes there after converting them. No lie, the painting tools are outstanding really, once used to navigating the rooms environment, even as aged as they are. Has a layer system that's very robust too, and paints stacked UVs effortlessly. There's a small bit of text editing of a file to add brushes to your brush presets library but it's easy. Additionally pre weight mapped Poser figures work there natively. Unfortunately Carrara is dead in the water development wise, it's a great piece of software, or least it used to be, and a damned shame it's withering away in such a manner... but I digress.

Oh, and regarding practice: yes, lots and lots of it, starting very humbly. For the next month or so pretty much all I see myself doing with the tablet is doodling things in Krita while listening to podcasts.

Welcome to the Wacom crowd. Hint switch off touch while using Poser or Poser may take the hand holding the pen as input and get confused.

Hint: while you're spending money anyway put a Connexion 3D mouse on the other side of your keyboard.

Thanks! Mine doesn't seem to react to hands, though, not even in Poser. You must be thinking of a more advanced model.

Just apropos of nothing, I would like to remind everyone that if someone were to sell a new figure with a mesh or other features that had some striking resemblance to Antonia's, the worst that could possibly happen would be some passive-aggressive comments from me to remind that person to give proper credit to the original creators. Otherwise, they'd be completely welcome to make whatever changes they wanted and squeeze out as much money as they could from the sales without owing anyone any royalties.

Hey, glad to hear back from you.  Any updates to her?

jartz posted at 1:06 AM Tue, 30 November 2021 - #4431048

Hey, glad to hear back from you.  Any updates to her?

I'm also working on a Python script that fixes the vertex order of a mesh, because I'm the kind of person who forgets to check the "keep vertex order" box in Blender.

odf posted at 10:23 PM Mon, 29 November 2021 - #4431047

Just apropos of nothing, I would like to remind everyone that if someone were to sell a new figure with a mesh or other features that had some striking resemblance to Antonia's, the worst that could possibly happen would be some passive-aggressive comments from me to remind that person to give proper credit to the original creators. Otherwise, they'd be completely welcome to make whatever changes they wanted and squeeze out as much money as they could from the sales without owing anyone any royalties.

Hypothetically, of course.

Further imagine if someone were to appropriate said derivative mesh/figure and make additional changes to that, correcting/altering second hand errors or shortcomings and sell it or redistribute without giving credit to initial offender :D

Hypothetically, of course.

primorge posted at 4:43 AM Tue, 30 November 2021 - #4431052

Further imagine if someone were to appropriate said derivative mesh/figure and make additional changes to that, correcting/altering second hand errors or shortcomings and sell it or redistribute without giving credit to initial offender :D

Hypothetically, of course.

Hypothetically speaking, they should maybe try to fix the most obvious and recognizable quirks of the original figure so that they don't get caught? Because if that original figure were Antonia, I'd definitely expose and shame them. :-) If on the other hand it were, say, owned by some big old company, I'd keep my quiet and grab my popcorn.

Truly the wisest and easiest approach I'd agree. Popcorn bothers my teeth, but I do have a peculiar sado masochistic hybrid tendency; as I get older it's become more of an extreme attraction to things that are darkly depressive... oversharing of course lol.

So, a quick heads-up before the news ends up infiltrating all the forums (fora?): Faery_Light's "Antonia Free Site" is back up. There was apparently a small technical glitch that went unnoticed.

Somewhat relatedly, I've started revamping my Antonia Google site and am planning to start adding some of that content there, too. I might go a bit slowly about it and prioritize items that seem essential and work well with Antonia 1.2 and/or Antonia WM. I might also attempt to upgrade some of the content made for older version if the license allows it or I can get an okay from the author. But I've also got a complete archive now just in case.

For those searching: the address for the Antonia Free Site is:

sahanisworld.com/FL Site One/AntoniasFreeItems.htm

(not a direct offsite link to a competing store so AFAICS it can be shown here without violation of the Rendo TOS)

Lazy typists might also try antoniafreesite.sahanisworld.com.

And I'm back to working on a basic wardrobe for her, a.k.a. learning some elementary MD and pattern making.

You are doing well!

You are doing well!

Pants! They're tricky.

Good job, odf.  I love MD as well.  I know how you feel about doing pants, but I'm getting the hang of it.  I'm liking your outfit designs for her.  You're getting there.

Some pant progress and crop-top thingie. I'll stop spamming this thread now, I promise.

Not spamming at all.  You're doing great with the pants.  Is this the new version of Antonia?

Not spamming at all.  You're doing great with the pants.  Is this the new version of Antonia?

Did you have MD generate a fitting suit on your Antonia? (I silently assume you have MD10 or later.) These suits are quite good now  and they are very convenient. If you  drape the garment on an avatar with a fitting suit the drape of the garment becomes independent of the avatar so you can re-drape the garment easily on other avatars that have such a suit.    

jartz posted at 10:49 PM Thu, 20 January 2022 - #4433553

Not spamming at all.  You're doing great with the pants.  Is this the new version of Antonia?

Thanks! No, just plain old Antonia 1.2. Like I said a while ago, a proper new version probably won't happen before I go into retirement. What I'm hoping for in the nearer future are some interesting add-ons, or relatively "harmless" updates such as an overhauled WM rigging.

Ah, neat!  Looking good so far.

Antonia is a great figure but... I really wish there was a native morph to dial back that can opener beak.  Oh, and some good gen morphs, too.  I don't - believe it or not - do pr0n, but the option is always nice to have, should I decide in future.  :D

FVerbaas posted at 4:34 AM Fri, 21 January 2022 - #4433555

Did you have MD generate a fitting suit on your Antonia? (I silently assume you have MD10 or later.) These suits are quite good now  and they are very convenient. If you  drape the garment on an avatar with a fitting suit the drape of the garment becomes independent of the avatar so you can re-drape the garment easily on other avatars that have such a suit.    

Antonia is a great figure but... I really wish there was a native morph to dial back that can opener beak.  Oh, and some good gen morphs, too.  I don't - believe it or not - do pr0n, but the option is always nice to have, should I decide in future.  :D

Speaking of pr0n: I gave her just enough polys down there to make regular nudes look okay. Pr0n-relevant morphs with that topology might be a bit of a stretch, if you excuse the pun. If I ever try my hand at that kind of thing, I'll be sure to leave a cryptic comment here so you know where to look.

Here's a quick mini dress. I wonder if I dare try something with a princess seam soon.

Thank you for making me rediscovering a character I had completely forgotten 😊
Sorry for the nudity but I have never been able to convert anything at the time... Was it... RDNA's time?

I retrieve a really different character, with her own personality, a beautiful one 🥰

Thank you for making me rediscovering a character I had completely forgotten 😊

You're very welcome! Glad you like her.

Antonia is a great figure but... I really wish there was a native morph to dial back that can opener beak.  Oh, and some good gen morphs, too.  I don't - believe it or not - do pr0n, but the option is always nice to have, should I decide in future.  :D

SamTherapy posted at 4:59 PM Fri, 21 January 2022 - #4433579

Antonia is a great figure but... I really wish there was a native morph to dial back that can opener beak.  Oh, and some good gen morphs, too.  I don't - believe it or not - do pr0n, but the option is always nice to have, should I decide in future.  :D

DieTrying has a full range of free Antonia shaping morphs at ShareCG, which covers the beak, certainly.

SamTherapy posted at 4:59 PM Fri, 21 January 2022 - #4433579

Antonia is a great figure but... I really wish there was a native morph to dial back that can opener beak.  Oh, and some good gen morphs, too.  I don't - believe it or not - do pr0n, but the option is always nice to have, should I decide in future.  :D

DieTrying has a full range of free Antonia shaping morphs at ShareCG, which covers the beak, certainly.

Cage posted at 6:17 AM Sat, 22 January 2022 - #4433596

SamTherapy posted at 4:59 PM Fri, 21 January 2022 - #4433579

Antonia is a great figure but... I really wish there was a native morph to dial back that can opener beak.  Oh, and some good gen morphs, too.  I don't - believe it or not - do pr0n, but the option is always nice to have, should I decide in future.  :D

DieTrying has a full range of free Antonia shaping morphs at ShareCG, which covers the beak, certainly.

I've been meaning to try those out. I've heard good things.

I've found them useful.  The only problem I've ever had was with the combination expression morphs, which I found too intense.  IIRC, I replaced them with new versions that were half as strong, which has made them more compatible with one another and with other morphs.  Now that I think of it, I could probably just have changed the dial sensitivity settings for those morphs.  Hmm.

Thank you, Cage.  I'll take a look.

The reason I ask for native morphs is, I have about thirty billion different versions of Antonia and I never know which one is the right one to use.