JoePublic posted at 6:42 AM Sat, 25 December 2021 - #4432392

Sorry to be "that" guy, but wouldn't an animated displacement texture be a more straightforward solution?

https://www.renderosity.com/forums/threads/2901601

So the problem is you want wrinkles to go along with a smile morph. (Or think how the soles of your feet wrinkle when you bend them. So far no Poser figure has yet solved that problem.)

So just ERC link a displacement map to the smile morph, and that's that.

Thanks for the link! I'd been wondering how to make dials for material room properties. It seems Poser is making that really easy these days. :thumbsup:

It won't show in preview, but most people don't care about a "nice" preview, anyway.

(I'm one of the few who really, really LOVE a "nice" preview, so I'd more than happily see subdivision work properly in Poser without slowing my machine down to a crawl)

I hadn't thought of that, but being able to see the morph in preview and getting an idea of how it catches the light is another plus for subdivision morphs, which I do care about.

In my experience, subdivision makes the Morphbrush jerky and unresponsive very quickly, and you need quite a bit of it to create really convincing wrinkles.

That's exactly it. I think there's a sweet spot for subd morphs at one or two levels of subdivision where Poser can handle the polys nicely in preview and render and one gets just enough resolution out for some nice extra detail. BUT the Poser morph tool gets overwhelmed really quickly and it's just no fun making these morphs in Poser. The only other option I know of is ZBrush via GoZ, and I guess I'm not yet ready to commit to ZBrush, both money- and interface-wise. So I'd like to be able to just make subd morphs for Poser in any old 3d modeler like Blender or Wings3d or Mudbox or what have you. Hence this project.

I realize now that "wrinkles" was a poor choice of words on my part. I was thinking more about larger-scale skin folds that appear with a smile or frown. Those should be a good application for subd morphs. Fine wrinkles indeed not so much.

I'm enjoying this thread, even if I don't understand ALL of it. ;-)

But from a practical point of view, as long as Poser's subdivision doesn't run as effortlessly as it does in ZBrush, wouldn't it be better to use it only in a scenario where it is "less harmfull" to the user experience?

Like a said above, I think the user experience using subd morphs up to a certain level is actually quite good, and arguably better than displacement maps if one wants some degree of flexibility. The user experience creating them, not so much, and that's the part I'd like to try and improve.

Here's a little visual aid, or should I say aide? Antonia at subdivision level 2 with several morphs made with the Poser morph tool. Painful to make, put so nice to work with once I had them. The full images are in my gallery.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.