A few pages back I posted a link of a tutorial I did on pmd. Just follow the steps and it's as simple as that. This workflow hasn't failed me yet. There's also some useful info about morphs. All just basic stuff ( which is about all Im capable of ). but it works for me. I have no idea if it works in Dstudio but I imagine it would with the python script mentioned. I have no idea how to do inj/rem ( only pmd inject  ) but you can look at other pz2 inject/remove to get an idea of how it works.

Just a few tips about making morphs
**In other apps
**Always use the full obj even if your  only working on the head. I notice sometimes with other apps you can get some weird offset effects ( especially with head morphs ) when you dial the morph it jumps and basically ruins your work. So I always use the full obj and it has yet to fail me. Also make sure you have your export options just right for whatever app your using so you don't dive into alot of work only to realize later it was only practice. If you find you made a great
morph but messed up your export settings use that morpher program by Kaweki that ODF mentioned. I have used it on a few times to fix the dreaded "Target geometry has wrong # of verts" and re-ordering problems when I used the wrong export options.

**In Poser
**Always turn IK off, Zero figure and export with "As Morph Target ( No world Transformations )"
Magnets are always a great idea for general shaping ( nothing to complex unless your a pro ) but the great thing is you can use it with clothes.

ODF
Congrats on getting married. Shouldn't you still be honey mooning? What u still doin online? Hehe..just kidding but yeah take some time off you won't regret it.

Cheers
JB

Quote - PS Oh and also end points some times wreck havock. But glad to hear it's working as it should

Lol I noticed I spelled that wrong. My grammer is pretty bad. I goggled how I spelled it and came up with this.

“Reeking” means “smelling strongly,” so that can’t be right. Lol no her arms are not smelling strongly when posed high and in front. LMAO.

Quote - Okay, I fixed it. Joint channels that link to parents need to have certain internal names, unlike joint channels that link to children. I fixed that problem after I had introduced it, but forgot to do it for the hip because I hadn't realized the hip was not the root.

If you feel adventurous, you can apply the fix yourself by editing the .cr2 and changing 'hiphandle_jointx' to 'jointx', 'hiphandle_jointz' to 'jointz' and 'hiphandle_twisty' to 'twisty' in the hip channels. To be save, better work on a copy of the orginal file.

Yeah I did see it. Im not to adventurous when it comes to cr2 editing but this looks easy enough.

Quote - > Quote - Concerning the eye movement morphs could you guys include both with and without eyelid movement. I kind of like being able to move them without eye lid movement sometimes and it would add greater flexibiliy having both options.

I think the right way to do this is to have one set of controls for eye movement with the lids following the eyes and one for the lids opening and closing. The first set would control the direction the figure looks at and the second the state of alertness. I don't think moving the eyes on their own is generally a good idea.

I'm not going to be dogmatic about this, though. I'll add extra convenience dials if people ask for them, but I might hide them in a special group at the bottom of the list or maybe even make you load a pose file to get at them. :tongue2:

I'll have a look at the IK problem, but I can't promise anything. IK is pretty much a mystery to me. My instinct would be to only use IK when setting up the key frames, but turn it off for the actual animation. Is that a stupid idea?

I completely agree about the eye lids need to move with the eyes I just like having the option to move them independently as well for extra control.

Concerning the IK thing, I beg your pardon. I looked at it again and I was mistaken. I only noticed the jitter when moving the hip,  the shin ( where it meets the foot ) jitters/offsets slightly. Btw I just tested half a dozen other figures and the same thing happens. So the only thing now is the Hip2 offset problem phamtom posted about everything else is working as it should.

Hi Phantom and ODF

There is something a bit weird with the IK. Even with the IK update pose in ODF's locker
i.e. translate Hip X or Z axis to 1.0 at frame 30 and watch the animation
notice how the feet have a jerky jitter back and forth. Not good for animators.
I also noticed movement on the other leg when using twist, side to side and bending one leg. The other leg mostly the foot jitters slightly.

Rotation on the foot makes the other foot move but then it jumps right back into position when you release the dial. This could be related to the IK jitter I mentioned above but Im thinking this may be a bug with poser because I have seen this before with mat poses etc. that had nothing to do with rigging.

The bending/deformations are Outstanding!!! I noticed when looking at brad you had some problems with rot twisting particularly the arms had tearing but on Antonia they are really very good. Im not a big fan of JCM but these were done really well also. There very subtle which is good.  I know ODF said the scaling is not finished yet but it looks impressive already. CTLHeadgrow is hilarious and very cool. Im probably most impressed that the arms can move up and forward without reaking havok on shoulder deformations. I noticed this on brad too. Every figure I have seen to date has big problems with this but your rig excels at it.

Concerning the eye movement morphs could you guys include both with and without eyelid movement. I kind of like being able to move them without eye lid movement sometimes and it would add greater flexibiliy having both options.

Pretty inspiring thread people already making clothes,textures,shaders,morphs. I think she will get alot of support :)

Cheers
JB 

Quote - > Quote - I belive it's Binary morph files that you can use without clutering up your CR2 with chanells.  I was reading about it with the info that came with Dimension3D's tools, I will look it up again to be sure.

Yep, that seems to be the way the cool kids are doing it these days. I found a Nerd3D tutorial that explains how it's done.

So I'll educate myself on that technique, and if anyone wants to provide free morphs for Antonia, I'll be happy to take the obj files and convert them into hot-pluggable morph poses.

The only drawback is that PMD's were introduced in Poser 6, so that technique will not work for people who still use older versions. I know I sometimes went back to rendering in P5 because of the infamous refraction bug in P6. But I imagine injecting the morph in P6, saving the figure and loading it in P5 would still work for these situations.

Great I just downloded her and will check her out. I think Pmd is the way to go. I do all my morphs like this. It's very easy and resource friendly. Glad you called dibs on expression morphs. Im pretty decent at generic body and face morphs but lousy at phonomes and expressions. I want to build up a fairly extensive collection of FBM's and head morphs but it will take some time because I want to get them working well together. Im thinking of doing them with some sort of tagging system at the end of a morph name so people will automatically know which morphs work well together and which ones are for more specific looks that don't really play nice at higher positive/negative values. I will not set limits that's up to the user.

i.e..
O at the end of a morph name=Only plays nice by itself.
D at the end of a morph name=Does play well with other morphs but at a limited range.
F at the end of a morph name=Fully reversible or atleast close to fully reversible.

PS
I did a small tutorial on how to do Pmd a while back @CP. It's for Apollo but still applies to any figure. Scroll down to post # 33 on page 4 is the step-by-step
http://www.contentparadise.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10184&page=4
 

Quote - That's pretty cool, very nice job :) the proportions in particular look very good, and the hands.

Hehe,  I never touched the hands at all. Atleast not on the morph itself. Maybe some of the ADS poses I did but those are 100% Anton's hands. All I did with the hands on the ADS poses was turn some dials :)

I hope to see a few renders, I have only seen one so far ;)...pretty please...Lol
TBH I haven't done one myself ( Yet ) other than the thumbnail.

Quote - I don't mind V4's prettiness. It's the fact that most people make her look to be the same woman over and over that gets a little old.

But I like to sculpt rather than playing with distributed morphs, especially when it comes to the head. I'm looking forward to seeing how Antonia functions as clay. :)

I think you will find she is fun to sculpt with. I've played around with some sculpts just to get aquainted with the mesh ( from ODF's file locker ) and I must say the way her topology is layed out and her default shape she's really fun to sculpt on. I see lots of possibilites with her. I love the fact that she doesn't have too much detail which can be hard to get rid of sometimes. I also like that she's not very poly heavy. I find that on models with high poly count It's much harder to mix shapes without getting strange pinching or odd shapes that just don't work to well together at high positive and negative morph values.

Lol. Ok I just checked Antonia in Orthoginal views and it appears she's about 8.5 heads tall. I checked a few other figures and most of them ranged between 9 to 10 heads tall. Strange 8.5 is too tall but she looks right. 9 to 10 is definitely too tall.

Quote - My wife claims that most people are as tall as the distance from finger tip to finger tip when they stand with their arms stretched straight out. If that is true you could place a figure in a square template to check proportion for arm length. I have noticed that for the most part head and trunk size is the same person to person and people are taller or shorter based on the length of their thighs and shins. I have not figured out how arm length fits into it but it does seem to me that most people's arm length is such that when they put their arms down straight their wrist or palm is in line with their groin...

Yep your wife is right. If you've ever studied Leonardo Davinci's drawings ( who studied human cadavers, so he knew a thing or two about proportions of the human body ) the "wing span" ( finger tip to finger tip in a t-pose) of a person is generally identical or very close to to a persons height. Not always because it can vary from person to person but generally it's a good guide. In some art books I have looked at a typical male is 7.5 to 8  heads tall. and the typical female is 7 to 7.5  heads tall. But for some reason it looks strange in 3d.  Personally I think 7 heads for males and 6.5 for females "looks" more accurate. A lot of 3d figures ( female figures in particular ) exaggerate this by making the hips too high and the shoulders too narrow. It has the effect of making the limbs look much longer than they should be. There's an interesting study by ( IIRC ) some german researchers I stumbled across about human proportions and beauty. The ideal female that most people choose was in between barbie like proportions and the classic 50's era hourglass. The article went on to explain that the ideal woman in medieval time was pretty much the opposite of the 21st century ideal. You can compare Botticelli's birth of Venus to todays Playboy bunnies and supermodels to get the idea. I think marketing has alot to do with what is considered beautiful nowadays.

Anyway I think OFD's proportions for Antonia are spot on and it's nice to see a figure moving away from your typical barbie look. The barbie look can be achieved easier if you want that look through morphs and or scaling and IMO is easier achieved if the proportions are correct in the first place.

Quote - > Quote - Hi ODF

Nice progress on Antonia. Will the toecaps be parts that can be switched off? and perhaps the brow as well.

Actually, I might leave that one as an exercise for the beta testers. :biggrin:

More seriously, at least two ways of hiding these parts come to mind.

The brows and the toecaps each have their own material group, which can be made completely transparent and hence invisible in renders. I imagine the final figure will come with a default material setup file that will make the toecaps invisible and use either a procedural or a hand-painted transmap on the brows.

If that's not enough, there's always the possibility to make some quick morphs to hide the brows within the head and the toecaps within the foot. The way this interacts with custom morphs will not be completely foolproof. If someone comes up with, say, a morph that turns the feet into hooves, there's a chance the hidden toecap geometry will resurface. But I guess that's not too serious a problem.

Speaking of caps: it just occurred to me that I could make a genital cap in much the same way as the toecaps. That could work well with - possibly see-through - second skin underwear and have the additional advantage of providing a slightly more modest default presentation of the base mesh. Anyone interested?

Thanks. Just wondering. I think it would be cool to have them as parts you could tick invisible/visible. I don't think the Transparency will make that much a difference to render time.
I think you only see a big jump when you introduce transmaps for things such as layered hair.
Also even the high-rez Antonia is fairly low poly so I don't think it will be an issue at all. My main concern there would be for making morphs as you suggested. Could you make the toecaps conforming? I don't really see any reason why not to but I guess there is one.

Hi ODF

Nice progress on Antonia. Will the toecaps be parts that can be switched off? and perhaps the brow as well.

Quote - Detail crop of the skin under my eye. Click for full size. Observe that at this magnification, the skin is not the least bit smooth.

CG renders look fake because we don't have this in the texture. You can't get this kind of resolution in a texture. But I think I can with a procedural driven by a low-res map that tells me where to put different styles of procedural bump on the figure.

We haven't even gottten to that yet, but we will.

Hi Baggins Bill
I posted this link some time ago in your VSS thread and wanted to know it you checked it out.
scroll down to 2005 Technical report pdf on "The Appearance of Human Skin"
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/publications/

Some very interesting stuff about skin in that paper although you probably know most of this from your own research. Anyway you brought up mask maps for fine wrinkle detail etc.

Micro scale as defined in that paper is on a cellular level so you wouldn't see that, but you would notice Meso scale and Macro scale. Meso scale is defined there as fine wrinkes, pores etc. while Macro is regional areas such as face, arms, etc.

 Im thinking maybe a bump map for larger wrinkles such as skin folds..knuckles, palm creases etc. and a procedural bump shader for really fine wrinkle detail and a mask map to control the regional scale of that fine detail.

BTW that skin is looking awesome and fantastic! :)

Cheers,
JB

Cheers,
JB

I just tried it and it worked!!! Yeahhhhh! Thank you very much. This problem has plagued me for the past six months. You saved me about half a dozen stunning light sets I made that I just  couldn't figure out why the spots kept showing up except that when I used raytracing. I played with bias settings many times but could never figure it out. Now they have completely gone away or at the most one or two tiny spots here and there. I can just post work those. It'll take longer for photoshop to open then it would take me to fix 1 or 2 tiny spots. Again thank you very much Stewer you are my hero and a big headache saver. You too Baggins Bill :)

Cheers,
JB