Richard60 posted at 10:24 AM Sat, 4 March 2023 - #4457608

First let's get it straight that the figure will be Uni-Mesh in its object state.  That is prior to import into Poser.  The Uni-Mesh that everyone is talking about is some mythical way for Poser to handle the mesh inside of the program that no one here is ever going to see.  The Mythical Uni-Mesh is something a small number of people have demanded over the years and to make Poser do that means a total rewrite of the program.  Which a side effect would be that all the old content won't work since it is no longer split.  What everyone really wants is a way to export the figure they imported and have it remain in the same order for the vertexes and faces that it came in with that way you could take it over to another program and work with it there then bring it back to Poser and not have it explode.  Also using the built in tools to smooth between body parts without spiking.  If it does those two things what do you care about how Poser does its thing inside teh program?

It would be truly trivial to do this.  I currently do this with a Blender plugin I wrote and it takes about a split second to map Dawn's verts back to original order.  Then I can play with the Dawn mesh in Blender (effective sculpting requires unimesh) and just export the sculpted mesh from Blender and Poser loads it as a morph just fine.  I was going to have the vert map saved but the Blender Python API is so fast it takes just as long to read and write the map as calculate it (in a vert count like Dawn).

The plugin even allows for a kind of "nudge"  That is, a split mesh that's ever so slightly distorted from the original unimesh.  That takes minutes rather than split seconds since it has to calculate the mots likely target vert for each source vert.

For Poser to do it would be even easier.  When the figure is created (split), Poser obviously reorders the verts.  Since it's importing the OBJ it knows the vert index from he OBJ.  And Poser can easily handle additional meta-data to save that index (etc.) in the figure data file.  All it has to do is save the vert map when creating the split mesh figure from the source OBJ.  Then use that map if you have an "export in original mesh order".

I really don't understand why they don't.  They have the data and the logic is simple.  Maybe a day or two to write, for someone familiar with Poser's source code.

Oh well.  I would have put that feature in years ago.