Lately I've come to believe that the face is an essential area for our characters. I recently created a character for my Marlin comic strip. I spent the better part of a day creating his face, and much less time on the body. Do we have many "face pose" collections, versus whole new faces? I often have difficulty getting a face just the way I'd like because there are just so many dials, and the labels on the dials are hard to read. Help?! ron

My sympathies Ron, know where you are coming from!,Poser manual suggests ethnicity for its character library but uses christian names that mean nothing excepting perhaps "Max" or "Pablo", and in Female characters a dark skinned woman is named "Mercedes" which is a traditional German name. Obviously they fear racist flaming from us! My greatest challenge is when trying to create senior and elderly citizen features with only standard P4 figures, sure as hell wish someone would create some morphs and textures for those of us not rich enough to lash out for Vicky and Michael. Old art and photography books from charity stores and garage sales are a good scource of ideas and even cheaper is your local public library. Tommy.

Tommy, believe me I understand what you are saying. However, I have a wealth of "ethnic characters," that I will get off my duff and finally use. My problem is how to handle the "facial expressions." I look at all those dials, and don't even see the labels I am looking for. I can't remember the exact descriptions, but it came up once. So I'm looking for some good "facial pose" libraries to help me out of this confusion. Ron

Dial Magic from Daz has been a godsend to me when working with the Millenium 2 figures. You apply it like a pose and it will show only certain sets of the dials, such as, speech, pose only, eyes & brows and so on, it would be possible to make your own with CR2 editor but very time consuming!

...and it wouldn't hurt if they would EXPLAIN, in a readme file, what those dials are supposed to do either. Clunkin' thru every dial isn't exactly the most efficient way. Believe me Ron, I feel your pain almost everytime I load a character.

What would are looking for in this "facial pose" library. Are looking full faces, or parts of faces (lips, noses, eyes,etc.).

Gosh, friends, I can't believe all the products that don't have any sort of manual at all. Heck, I've installed so many things that I can't find because they're not put anywhere logical. If you're lucky you get a readme file that you may or may not print. If I print them, they get lost in a pile of papers. **** As for the face thing, I'm looking for a "face pose" library, as I'd said earlier. You know: vicky smiles, etc.

Clunking each of the dials is the only real way to develop your skills. How can you know what smile2 does unless you turn it and see. One trick is to d/c a dial and set the limits and rate to something reasonable.e.g. min -2 max +2 rate 0.01, If the morph cracks at the extremes set them lower. By making the rate a higher number, you do not get carpel tunnel by turning them.
If you are going to save your own facial expression poses, you need to do one of two things:
1)Make yourself a version of the figure with only expression morphs on the head, and save the poses from this.
2)Open the Select Subsets and uncheck a couple of hundred shape morph boxes for every face pose you do..
Otherwise, the expression poses will erase character poses.

Jaager, thanks for the explanation. Unfortunately the remedy is way beyond anything I'm willing to do.

Ron Did you check out the DAZ tech tips. They go over Vicki facial morph dails and how they're arranged. What they say about Vicki dials is true about Mike's dials also.

Hey, I'll check that out tomorrow, probably. Thanks!!!

Not saving your own expression poses - your choice. Not changing the dial limits from the absurd +/- 10000 and a rate so low that it could control a microtome - your choice. Not being willing to twist the dials to see the effect? - This kinda brings up the question - Why have the models to begin with?

"in Female characters a dark skinned woman is named "Mercedes" which is a traditional German name" Naaaa, Merzedes is a traditional german CAR ... LOL. I think Mercedes is a spanish name but not german.

What exactly do you mean when you say "face poses", Ron? Just the expressions? There's a dual problem there. As you know I used face pose files in my Jewels of the Orient package, as part of the character creation. This meant it was difficult to include expressions as well, because I would have had to do so for all of the eight characters individually. (Yes, I know I could edit the .fc2 to eliminate the morph dials, but there are other considerations, IMHO.) In theory, the expression dials on V2 and M2 are at the bottom of the list: if you look up the DAZ tech tip that describes them it sounds very logical: the "head" dials come first, followed by the dials that change the shape of the face, in a more-or-less logical order, followed by the dials intended to create facial expressions, and lastly the pbm morphs, which no one is meant to use. Again, in theory, to save an expression .fc2 file you'd click on 'select subset' and select only those expression morphs (or save the file and edit out the rest later). Where the theory falls down is when you try to apply the theory to several different character faces. Some use the expression morphs as part of the character face (Stormi and dalinise's girls often use the eyeblink morphs, for example). Others will have features that make an expression that looks fine on one character look ridiculous on them: eg. choose a character with relatively thin lips, put him or her beside an ethnic character with full lips and try the exact same smile. Doesn't work. Realisticly, it shouldn't. No two people move exactly the same facial muscles when they smile or frown or whatever. I guess what I'm really saying is I find a library of expressions mostly useless. The ones I've seen for sale nearly always exaggerate the expression to the point of charicature - it's quicker for me to do it myself than it is to fix someone else's exaggerations. Expressions that come with characters - wonderful! Love 'em! Expressions on their own...often a waste of time. JMHO, of course. But if you want them...there are some out there. DAZ has a set for Mike, and there are a few expressions sets in the marketplace here. If the morph dials have been taken out, .fc2 expressions for one of the millennium characters should work for all the others, too: the dials are mostly named the same for Vicky, Mike and the kids.

OK, sometimes I don't realize just how difficult a term or question might be. In my book, if we're talking about a face pose, we're talking about "posing the face." We have a Poser Face library just like we have a Pose Library, Characters, etc. Why would we "pose a face?!" To illustrate expressions. I'm working with the Millennium Kids now in an attempt to illustrate my book of children's poetry. A good friend suggested I concentrate more on closeups of the characters, which will mean the faces will be more prominent. I need a child to be gloriously happy, terribly sad, dreaming, etc. All these emotions need to be reflected in the face, eyes, every part that comes in to play. And yes, I still need to have the body involved as well. Eirian, if I understand you right, each expression is really individual for each character. If I use a "canned expression," I could mess up my character. Jagger, you talk about removing a couple hundred check boxes. That is a tremendous amount of work. The whole concept of computers and software is to spare us that kind of drudgery. There has to be an easier way. Ron

Attached Link: http://www.schlabber.org/piaa21/face/faces1.htm

Try rax's store in the marketplace, Ron. I'm sure there was an expression set for the kids. I didn't mean a 'canned' expression would mess things up. Just that they're not as useful as you'd think. If you're working with a specific character, there is a way round the possible problems. Spawn a morph target for the character's face. Then zero everything else and use the spawned morph for the character. That way, when you apply a facial expression, you can see which dials have been changed by it. It's easier to correct any unforseen distortions then.

Thanks my friend. I don't know why I had never seen that area before. As for your CD, it is on my ever growing wishlist. However it looks like the next computer-related purchase will be a 19" (or larger if we can afford it) monitor for my birthday present next month. Wow! I will be able to see all this Poser art in it's full glory! Ron

Eirian, thanks for your suggestion. I think I need to stop, reflect, and figure out my plan of attack. I just get a bit antsy. It's been several years since I wrote that book and I feel so close to realizing the dream of putting art with the poems. Ron

Men's faces are a big problem due to a wider range of face types than we like to use for females. If I make an interesting Mike face, then apply a typical "canned" Mike expression, I get a reversion to the basic Mike face and my nifty creation disappears. I find it necessary to create a basic library of expressions for each type face I create with the default face as the first face in that directory. I'm not sure there's an easy answer for this.

Huolong, I do believe you and others have clarified things greatly here. If I am working with the Millennium Girls and Boys, I need to find or create a library of facial expressions customized for them. Of course, those facial expressions should also have "body poses" that match. Wow, what a project. Now if I could only figure where to begin, and have the knowledge and skill to pursue it. Ron

What I do when I make a new character is to first, save the face as a face file. THEN I spawn a morph target and use THAT as the starting point. That way, no matter what expression I apply, no matter who made it, I don't lose my original character face. Sure, I sometimes have to make adjustments to the dials to get the expression EXACTLY the way I wanted it, but that's a lot less work than trying to do it without the spawned morph target. And the reason I save the face file first is just in case I want to share that character with others - I can send them the fc2 file and they can spawn their own MT from that.

Yes, saving the face makes perfect sense.

My option #2 while true is meant to show the logic of option #1. The single spawned character face morph has been mentioned here. If you use this in a V2 cr2, it is asking for problems. Poser seems to work by keeping a complete copy of a CR2 in dynamic memory. If this cr2 has 15 megs of head morphs that are not being used, it can help overload the system. If you have a version of each figure that only has head expression morphs, you can copy the single morph to it. You can also make and save facial expression poses from this figure - if it has no construction morphs, it cannot change them. If you apply outside expression poses to it and resave the poses, it will strip the extra morph channel settings from it and make a pure facial expression pose. The process of making a figure cr2 with the construction morphs removed ( Hierarchy Editor, MM4 ) takes about as long to do as unchecking to boxes for these morphs on a pose save. You then have a tool you can use repeatedly.