I referred to grouping for garments models that need to be made conforming or hybrid. The pose room does not work too well for A-posed donors.

Ah, jetzt ja! I understand what you're getting at. I was assuming that if a figure came in the A-pose as it's zero pose, things would work better in the fitting room. But I can see how transferring groups and morphs could become more difficult in the A-pose. Dangit!

Main problem with a zero-A pose in the fitting room is the automatic grouping. Sometimes the collars do not have a ring of facets under the armpits.
Weight maps can be (more or less easily) rectified with a few brush strokes. Unwelded mesh is not so easily solved. That's why I use a separate figure specific grouping script when I make MD built garments into conformers or hybrid rather than rely on the Poser provided grouping.

It still gives me a more or less automated creation process without destroying the garment into T pose.

Thanks for the info, FVerbaas!

So, I've achieved my first conforming piece of clothing for Antonia today, which may inspire hope that one day she might have a proper wardrobe. It's all quite easy at the end with the fitting room and the morph copying function, but it seems that the secret lies in how on prepares the meshes. Also, perhaps not too surprisingly, I've found that the JCMs in the original Antonia 1.2 do not transfer well and so went with Antonia WM instead.

That said, it's possible that Poser simply does not transfer all the ERC setup for the multi-stage JCMs correctly, which require a special fixed channel with a constant value that maybe the code did not recognize as important. So at some point if I find myself in need of complicated ERC setups again that I want to transfer onto clothing, I might try to dive deeper into this subject.

Anyway, here is my excessively topless test image for the new conforming figure:

From one Westphalian to another,  Antonia is as Lovely as ever.  The pants are nice too.  I'm tempted to fire up Poser again.  It's been a while.  I use Carrara mostly.

The pants are nice.  The polka dot textures are procedurally created; I know because I created the original shader.

From one Westphalian to another,  Antonia is as Lovely as ever.  The pants are nice too.  I'm tempted to fire up Poser again.  It's been a while.  I use Carrara mostly.

Danke fuer die Blumen, fellow Westphalian!

The pants are nice.  The polka dot textures are procedurally created; I know because I created the original shader.

Glad to see you back, and I look forward to your clothing sets for her.

Glad to see you back, and I look forward to your clothing sets for her.

Finally some proper Antonia update! The TL;DR is that I've now started to work on a new weight-mapping (and refined joint parameters) in earnest, based on the low-res version of Antonia 1.2.0 (not phantom3d's WM rig). I'll probably transfer that to regular resolution Antonia later, unless I decide to make the low-res my new default figure.

Here's a first snapshot with some work on the elbow. Her right one is my edit so far without any JCMs, the left the original 1.2.0 with JCMs. The new version also has no bulges yet.

The longer version: as you may have noticed if you follow the galleries, I've been doing quite a few Antonia renders this year, often with new clothes I made in MD. This was probably the first time I properly worked with Antonia from a user perspective, and I noticed that my biggest and most consistent pain point was the way she bends. So it became increasingly clear that eventually I'd have to address that. I decided to use Antonia 1.2.0 as the base because I'm more familiar with it, and the low-res version because there are fewer weights to paint, giving me more control.

I started with the elbow bend because of the joints that bothered me the most it is not exactly the worst but probably the easiest to redo. I first fixed the origin and joint orientation (which annoyingly is slightly off so that one always has to correct via side-side after bending the arm), then deleted the JCM, tweaked the inclusion-exclusion angles a bit, converted the zones to a weight-map, and finally started editing that. So far that looks like a decent workflow but I'll have to see. As you can probably see from the image, I'm trying to embrace creases because that's what real flesh does, but make them look as realistic and intersection free as I can manage. We'll also have to see how *that* goes.

Anyway, the forearm twist is next, which I think will be a relatively simple WM edit to get rid of the slight twisted tube look. Then on to the wrists, and after that I'll have a look at the fingers, but might save them for later if they turn out too tricky. Then collars and shoulders, which are also quite tricky, but I've actually managed to achieve some nice improvements for back when I was practicing.

Got back to editing some weight maps, this time on the collar. Her left is the original Antonia 1.2 joint with JCMs, her right my new JCM-free version. With a thousand thanks to JoePublic for explaining to me how bulges work.

Interesting.  I like what you're doing for her so far.  I been playing around with Antonia mostly.

Been following for ages, and am happy to see all the new progress, even though I don't normally post. Can we see a version of the last image with just a polygon view to get a better idea of the stretches?

GeneralNutt posted at 3:29 PM Sat, 21 May 2022 - #4438901

Been following for ages, and am happy to see all the new progress, even though I don't normally post. Can we see a version of the last image with just a polygon view to get a better idea of the stretches?

An important goal for me was to not deform the collar bone when posing the collar. I'm convinced that if one makes visible bones act like they're made of rubber, it'll end up looking weird eventually, even if it's not immediately obvious.

Also, allow some stretching and bunching up where the skin would normally do that, within reason.

Symmetry is off.

Looking good, looking VERY good!

And I'm glad I could help a little.

BTW, wait with the "mirroring" until the very last moment.

(Unless you are absolutely sure that her mesh is perfectly symmetrical. Which, as you created her yourself, probably are)

I say this because several "over the counter" DAZ/Poser meshes are not perfectly symmetrical (Perhaps intentionally?), and also I sometimes messed up symmetry myself by sculpting full bodymorphs which I later re-rigged as standalone figures.

(But sometimes it's just Poser's object import that can mess a mesh up.)

*

In any case, if you mirror a rig too early, and then have to adjust some joints because the mesh is not symmetric, and THEN need to mirror AGAIN because you found a better solution for a joint, the previous adjustments are of course gone!

That's why I use weightmapping "sparingly", because it is much more "unforgiving" than spheres are.

Also, back up often after every little step, so that you always can go back a step.(Poser 11 is quite stable, actually, but weightmapping takes a lot of computations, especially if you switch subdivision on and off inbetween steps to control the result.)

I lost quite a few great joints because I just wanted to do a few more strokes with the Morphbrush before backing up. Lol!

Again, looking good and I like the "squishy flesh" approach!

Thanks! I'll keep the possible mirroring issues in mind.

Here's another quick snapshot, this time combining the collar twist with the up-down. The weekend is almost over, so progress will probably slow down for a bit. :-)

I'm getting the distinct feeling that Antonia's joint rework will be a lengthy process with lots of trial and error, dead ends and retries, not unlike the original creation of Antonia's mesh. It'll be fun if I settle into it and give it its time, torture if I get impatient.

I actually went back and changed the orientation of the collar joint again. My first try - working from Antonia WM back then and really just playing around to explore the possibilities - was to have the axis go from the beginning to the end of the actual bone. That wasn't terrible but I felt it produced some issues with the twist, so when I set out to do a serious joint rework, this time with Antonia 1.2 as the basis, I kept the orientation aligned with the regular coordinate axes. Also not great because the twist was moving the shoulder up and down way too much. So now I'm going with the direction of the initial section of the collar bone, which is somewhere in between the two extremes and seems to produce the most natural looking results.

Anyway, here's another snapshot, this time comparing Antonia 1.2 on the left, Antonia WM in the middle, and my current WIP on the right. All three figure have a forward collar twist of 80 degrees, a neck turn of 60 degree, and an upward head bend (negative nod) of 20 degrees.

Umm, why would you need to twist the collar as much in the first place?

The collar goes up and down but I don't think I ever used more than 20° twist for any of my poses.

This is Antonia 1.2 Lo:

I reduced collar twist to 20° and compensated with shoulder twist 70° and swing -20°.

The shoulder "twist" orientation needs to be adjusted, but the collar deformation itself looks quite nice.

My suggestion:

Set collar twist limits between 20° and -20° and focus on the arm twist.

Maybe we don't need to, but I want to. Try twisting your upper arm in that position without twisting the collar joint or forearm. I surely can't. We can't always imitate life perfectly, but it can't hurt to give it our best shot. :-)

But most of the movement is in the shoulder actor, not the collar:

Shoulder:

Twist -26

Front-Back -65

Collar:

Twist 15

Front-Back -10

Up Down -14

Looks plenty flexible to me.  ;-)

Here is the collar rotation set to -90:

Sure, I could probably improve that. And if everything else fails, create a JCM.

But that might create problems in other poses.

And the first pose looks actually more natural to me, anyway?

*

OK, I play along.

The collar twist joint on my David WM was still using a sphere.

I turned it into a weightmap, but I cannot make it look good beyond a limit of -50°/+50°.

 Otherwise, something will break and I'd need a JCM:

I'm pretty sure there IS a reason that DAZ limited the collar twist to -20°/+20° by default. ;-P

*

But seriously, I'm just afraid you make life unnecessarilly hard for you.

And then maybe give up because everything turns out to be just a chore.

(Been there, done that. Got the T-Shirt) 

;-)

But seriously, I'm just afraid you make life unnecessarilly hard for you.

And then maybe give up because everything turns out to be just a chore.

(Been there, done that. Got the T-Shirt) 

;-)

Well, I can't promise that I won't lose interest at some point. But hard is usually good, it keeps me engaged. Like I said, as long as I don't have a deadline, too hard isn't really an issue because I (think I) am now wise enough to silently spit into my napkin if I realize I've bitten off more than I can chew. :-)

Back in the day, Antonia's expression turned into a chore because I was fed up with the tools and how long everything took, and I just wanted it to be over with, but I also didn't want to leave her incomplete. I think it shows. Especially her smile is not something that makes me very happy.

Poser's joint editing tools are actually quite pleasant to use now that I've wrapped my head around some of their quirks, so I don't see that kind of frustration happen any time soon.

I don't know if this is the place to post this, but since I'm working with Antonia, is it possible to use a plug-in that can work with poses (V4 for example) for Antonia?  Just wondering.

Do you mean using poses on Antonia that were made for V4, or the other way around? I'll assume the former.

I don't actually know if there is something like a pose converter that supports Antonia. If there wasn't one and I still wanted to use poses from another figure (say V4) on Antonia, I'd probably start by loading some of them into Antonia 1.0 and see if they seem useable with a reasonable amount of tweaking. This is because, as you may or may not remember, the root of the body part hierarchy was original called hip, but got renamed to waist in Antonia 1.2.

If this looks good, it should be easy to do a simple search-and-replace on the pose files to make them work with the Antonia 1.2/WM/SE gang. If the figure in question also has a waist actor (I honestly don't know which ones do) there's probably a better way to do the conversion, but this should get you started.

That’s cool.  I was working with Antonia on P12, and just got curious.  Still rooting for her.

Thanks for the reply.  I’ll investigate further.

I will say this. I have never liked Antonia's face. Particularly her nose. So while I did download her and give her a try, I'm afraid for me it was not in the cards.

Hmm...

Not a big fan of Antonia's schnoz either. (But in some renders, her face is actually growing on me.)

And as long as she isn't meant to be Poser's default figure, the only person she has to look appealing to, is odf himself, anyway.

And phantom3D did a great job weightmapping her.

So the only real reason I'm not using her is that I have so many custom figures already I'm constantly working on.

(And as I mentioned before, muscular edgeloops would widen her potential for me)

*

But back to a figure's face:

Any mesh with enough polygons can pretty much look however you want in Poser.

So a "pretty" face doesn't make a good figure, and a "less pretty" one not a bad one.

I made this out of the Poser 4 Dork: (It's actually DPHoadley's remapped "Duke")

(A WIP I started many years ago, so it still needs a lot of refinement.)

So I think putting Antonia "under the knife" for a nosejob shouldn't be a problem for those in favor of cute button noses.  ;-)

*

BTW, I tried to create a smile morph for her recently, but something with the expression JCM setup worked strange in Poser 11?

But that's probably the topic for another post.

Yeah, fair enough about the schnoz. For the longest time I had a "No, it's the kids who are wrong" attitude about it, but that doesn't lead anywhere. I like long noses and larger focal lengths, so Antonia's default face works quite well for me. It doesn't for everyone. Also, putting prominent features on a base figure isn't generally a good idea. So that's that.

If I ever end up releasing an Antonia 2, I promise I'll do my best to make her default shape more appealing.

Like JoePublic, her face is doable with a few tweaks with some morphs and morphs I did in Blender.  The thing I like about her is it's weight I can go along with, not a tall, super-model height just reasonable.

Some of my attempts, it's all done via P12.

No, odf, please don't.

She's "your" girl, so she only needs to look exactly like "you" want her to.

Like "my" figures only need to look exactly like "I" want them to.

And definitely not all my morphs are of the cutesy cute variety.

Meet Elke and Hana, for example:

It's just polygons, after all.

Only if you "need / want" to appeal to the largest number of people / customers possible, then, yes, "cute" will almost always win, so it should be the "default" look.

Human brains are pretty much hardwired that way.

But as I said, with enough polygons to work with, any look is possible, anyway.

That's looking amazing, jartz.

(I like JoePublic's morphs, too, but I don't think they're Antonias. )

Nope, that's my trusted 3rd Gen meshes.

But here's an old attempt to "de-Antonia" Antonia:

A "Teen" morph for her, but trying to preserve her original features:

Your teenage Antonia looks great. Looking like an actual kid, too, not one of those "teenagers" on U.S. TV that are played by twenty-somethings.

Your teenage Antonia looks great. Looking like an actual kid, too, not one of those "teenagers" on U.S. TV that are played by twenty-somethings.

Actually, no.  Teenage girls - or boys, for that matter, do not generally have large, prominent noses.  I know this from having been a teenager myself and having two almost teen children, plus functioning eyes that have allowed me to see a number of teenage kids in my family and peer group over the years.  It's a thing that grows over the years but, by and large, teens do not have can opener beaks.

Noses and ears get bigger with age, for sure but I can't think of anyone I ever saw in their teens with a huge conk.

Okay, just to add:

1. Not everyone is gifted with the morphing tool. So, at the very least, I would need some morphs already included or, at least, as an add-on pack.

2. No, ODF doesn't have to just please himself. Antonia has to please everyone who uses her, or wants to.

IMO that solely depend on her intended use:

If she's meant to be "just" a freebie vanity project, then she only has to please her creator and everything else is just a bonus.

I always say, if I share something and at least one other person enjoys my stuff, then everything's OK.

*

But if she would have been intentionally created (or choosen) as "THE FACE OF POSER" , (Like what Vicky/G8 is to Studio), then the expectations would be of course (rightfully) a lot higher.

(And THAT is why I get so riled up over La Femme's shortcomings. If she'd just stayed any other freebie, I wouldn't have said a peep. But as long as people peddle her as exemplary for what Poser is capeable of, I feel oblidged to say, No, Poser can do a lot better than that.)

*

But of course, it is always nice if your own creations are also liked by others, and if you want that, then "generic beauty" is usually king.

Lots of pre-made morphs are of course also great. (That's exactly why I chose the DAZ Gen3 figures as my "base". And why I prefer edgeloops. It is much easier for the "Average Joe" to spin a dial than to create your own HD morphs)

*

ANYWAY...

Here's a cute "button nose" variation of my teen morph:

This is of course just "eyeballing" it, trying not to loose the "Antonia-ness" completely.

Speaking of morphs, to get that expression I had to dial some of here expression morphs to negative values.

Unfortunately negative values are all set to 0 by default. (Probably to keep users from getting confused)

Still, it would be helpfull in future iterations to at least allow some negative values)

Speaking of morphs, to get that expression I had to dial some of here expression morphs to negative values.

Unfortunately negative values are all set to 0 by default. (Probably to keep users from being confused)

Still, it would be helpfull in future iterations to at least allow some negative values)

Noses and ears get bigger with age, for sure but I can't think of anyone I ever saw in their teens with a huge conk.

EClark1894 posted at 10:56 AM Sat, 18 June 2022 - #4440091

2. No, ODF doesn't have to just please himself. Antonia has to please everyone who uses her, or wants to.

How so?

In the meantime, I've found some photos of Barbra Streisand as a kid, but I have no way of verifying that they are authentic.

Honestly, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to move this thread to Character Creators or some other appropriate forum. Having it in Poser Official seems to be giving my occasional rambles about things I tried to improve on an old fringe figure way more weight (no pun intended) than they should have.

In the meantime, I've found some photos of Barbra Streisand as a kid, but I have no way of verifying that they are authentic.

Antonia always reminds me of Mary Steenburgen - Wikipedia
Best knows as Clara Clayton in "Back To The Future III"

Things could be worse

Is that supposed to be Everything Everywhere All At Once cosplay?