meatSim posted at 6:14PM Sun, 03 February 2019 - #4345173

I have a question: How many subdivion levels deep do the HD morphs go? If that makes sense... Or to put it differently at what subdivision level is the maximum detail gained.

Seriously loving the HD morphs.

2, the default render subD level.

It jumps to around 100k polys on level 1 and 400k on level 2. 3 would be a pretty big jump to >1.5 million polys. I might try it just out of curiosity to test render speeds, but I don't think it would be worth it - Poser even starts popping up warnings at that density. That type of fine detail is for veins, tiny wrinkles, etc which would probably best be accomplished with a normal map/bump map.

DalekSupreme posted at 4:44PM Sun, 03 February 2019 - #4345163

I wish La Femme well.

For me she is overly complex with horrible plastic Barbi legs and feet. She takes far too long to do simple work with and is a nightmare to pose realistically... finding the bits through endless menu's and then having to fiddle with each lip or eyebrow end. If you want to spend hours and hours on a single image she is great and her level of minute movement detail amazing. I was really hoping for something that would blow me away. Well she does... but not in a good way for me personally. She is already in the "unusable box" and that's not good. This is one of the problems with new poser figures. They are totally over complex and not simple to use. The number of times I need to bend her little toe is once in a blue moon... what I need is a single dial to make her smile lopsided not freeky. This is what brings me back time and again to V4. I can do in 10 minutes what takes me 10 hours in other figures with no improvement in result.

For me its back to V4 as La Femme is totally unworkable in my workflow. :( I am genuinely sad about this.

The funny thing is, you don't have to even use the body handles, there are over 140 face morphs included in the base. You can turn the body handles off and completely ignore them and they don't 'hurt' you for being there. But being able to grab an eyebrow, a corner of a lip, a chin and just drag it around to do quick expressions is a lot easier than injecting morphs, looking for dials and spinning them. When doing poses you can just move the breast handle around to 'squish' it behind an arm, against the ground or chair, etc which makes realistic poses a lot easier.

Same goes for the toes. If you don't want to pose them individually then just... don't? There's no need to pose the toes individually, but they're there as an option for those that do.

Most people want more control and are embracing the body handles and extra articulated bits like the metatarsals/metacarpals, individual toes, etc. But if that's not your thing there are several different toespread, toecurl, grasp, fingerspread, etc morphs that you can use and you don't have to fuss with them.

As for the feet being too small, all I can say is that some people have been looking at V4 for too long and start to think that that represents an average normal human being. V4's feet are an abomination, they're the size of flippers. But guess what? SCALING WORKS - for the first time properly in a Poser figure. So if you don't like the size of her feet (or the size of her head, her ears, her shins, etc), click on them and scale them to whatever size you like and conforming clothing will scale automatically. You can give her V4's size 12 feet in two simple clicks.

For someone who 'wishes her well' you're going far out of your way to systematically bash her in at least two forums now. Virtually your entire post history consists of bashing new figures and extolling the virtues of V4. We get it, you like V4 and think that it's the pinnacle of Poser figure development: feel free to use her forever. Fortunately not everyone agrees.

Varnayrah posted at 8:11AM Sun, 03 February 2019 - #4345112

About the lips - the shape is nice, I think, and can be morphes easily to liking. What I don't like sometimes is when the lips asge appears to sharp on the texture without blurring or fading the edges a bit. But that's a matter of texturing, not the base figure.

I think that's often more a case of the lip material zone having a different shader, or the texturer making a sharp transition from the lip:face materials. I actually wanted to make the lip and face materials one continuous material zone and include a variety of lip masks (with proper edge transitions) in case someone wanted to do a different gloss lip shader, for example... but I was voted down and we went with the traditional separate Lip material zone. Imagine how many people would be complaining now if we went with my idea? ?

crowbar posted at 6:50AM Sun, 03 February 2019 - #4345101

Im really in two minds about this. Blackhearted's images do look good but for me the problem is not so much the corneas (though there is a weird curving off shape above the eye in a couple of the product renders). The mouth area in many of the renders is the elephant in the room. The default mouth shape just doesnt look realistic. Im not saying that the face cant look realistic if you work on more morphs, but you have to work against the basic nature of the figure

Its a base figure, there are 35 different mouth/lip morphs and 8 face chips included by default that you can combine to get mouth shapes/expressions easier than any other Poser figure.

You just can't please everyone. If I made ultra-defined, stylized lips then people would be complaining about that. No matter what design decision you make there's always someone that's going to complain that it's not to their tastes. FFS my HD morphs are like a 140lb crossfit athlete and you have some chronic complainers using the 'anorexic' word again ?

I specifically had to hold back and keep the default body and face as 'neutral' and smooth as possible so that it would be easy to morph in any direction -- not just the direction I would go with it. Not everyone likes my style of figure, and believe me you wouldn't want that baked into the base since you'd have to de-morph that any time you wanted to morph the figure. With certain legacy figures the default shape is so distinctive and so baked-in that even after extreme morphing you can still 'see' it under the surface.

The ball is in the community's court now to create characters suited to different tastes. We even made the built-in morphs and textures fully redistributable so it's even easier to create characters. I'll definitely be making more morphs and characters, but those will be going in a direction I decide and I can guarantee those won't be to everyone's tastes either.

Varnayrah posted at 2:18PM Sat, 02 February 2019 - #4345042

Hmmm... I have a little problem, perhaps someone can help me: I have to use unusual high render settings to get rid of grain for LaFemme. But I'm not sure if it's due to the shader set (SSS with refracted eyes), the light (from blackheart's Superfly Studio) or something else.... but usually I have the following render settings: Pixel Samples 14 with branched Path tracing and diffuse samples 5, glossy samples 3, transmission, sub surface, volume and ao samples 2, Mesh light samples 15. That has been more than sufficient in most cases so far but not now. I've been going up to 24 pixel samples and more and still have slight grain on some skin areas (especially in the shadow). Seeing as this is a SSS skin shader would it perhaps be wiser to increase the subsurface samples instead of the whole pixel samples thing? Or anything else? I'm not using progressive refinement because that doesn't work well with branched path tracing and without it I have slightly different colours. Indeed I have seen many LaFemme images, even in promos, with grain so I thought perhaps her shader settings require different treating?

I don't render with CPU, ever, but I just tried a render with these settings and it came out glass smooth. I probably could have went down to 16-18 samples.

Keep in mind that the eyes with refraction needed to be Area-Rendered with transmission bumped up.

Some of your bounces - like diffuse - are way too high. The only time I've noticed needing more than 2 diffuse bounces was when I was specifically testing it in a small test scene with Red/Blue spheres right beside each other in a tiny room bouncing colored light all over the place, but this scenario is unlikely to happen in the typical Poser gallery render.

If you have the option to render with GPU you really should be taking advantage of that. I can't see any 'color' difference between the two - perhaps you had different settings set and that was influencing your result. My results were identical, but with GPU rendering being about 2-3x faster.

operaguy posted at 6:12AM Sat, 02 February 2019 - #4345025

Blackhearted, don't put the limits. Let us crazy people learn from errors.

You are correct, it was a second light emitter that was causing the problem. I am now using only area lights with no other emitters.

Optics: "Just leave it alone" Do you mean 'don't even inject the cornea prop(s)' or 'inject them, but set to zero'?

I mean leave the optics dial alone :)

operaguy posted at 4:02AM Sat, 02 February 2019 - #4344984

Hilarious. I have (I'm sure) over-worked the cornea morphs again. In this render, the lashes are reflecting as if floating in front of her eyes.

Iris flat: 2.40 Cornea left and right optics -.800

Blackhearted, can you give me some ideal settings, or tell me if you think this 'effect' is from something else?

::::: Opera :::::

I think you're getting hung up on the optics thing. It's just there for very fine adjustment of the shape in case anyone wants to mess with that and IOR. Just leave it alone :) Also IrisFlat 2.40 - sweet baby Jesus, at 1.0 it's as flat as a pancake. 2.4 would be bulging outwards like a goldfish. I hate dial limits but it seems I need to start putting limits in to protect you guys from yourselves ?

Eyelashes are supposed to show up in the reflection, I think the reason you may have them all over the place is you seem to be using IBL or have light coming from below in addition to your big area light.

This is lit with just area lights similar to the scene I uploaded here.

duanemoody posted at 1:41PM Thu, 31 January 2019 - #4344873

Only looking to do a head morph here? If there's something obvious that Pro does better than my non-Pro experience take pity on me.

The body is only 12k verts. It's always 'safer' to use the base obj to create morphs. AFAIK Deecey is currently updating the user guide on morphs and how to create FBMs - more emphasis needs to be placed on the fact that the included base morphs and textures are a redistributable resource.

duanemoody posted at 12:29PM Thu, 31 January 2019 - #4344865

Stupid question time: I'm trying to export body parts as .obj for morphing in an external modeler. I get 0 byte files or just floating control chips with the actual figure, but I can export body parts normally from the dev rig. What's going on here, am I doing it wrong (again)? FWIW the morphs I make using that exported head from the dev rig can be used with the regular figure.

Why not just use the base .obj? Any morphing should be done from that anyway since there is 0% chance of any translations/incompatible vert counts/winding errors/etc. Once it's morphed, Figure - Load Full Body Morph and it'll spawn a control dial in the body (which can then be easily exported with File - Export - Morph Injection).

FreeBass posted at 10:55AM Thu, 31 January 2019 - #4344854

Blackhearted posted at 9:29AM Thu, 31 January 2019 - #4344852

What exactly did you expect it to do, morph her feet into rollerskates? ?

That would be absolutely BITCHIN'! Can ya make it do that? :D

No, I just thought it would pose (& unpose) the whole foot & not just the toes, as the posing dials do fer the arms (I guess my meanin' didn't come across clearly) as it's called HighHeel & not ToeFit.

Thanks fer the attention. Hopefully I won't find too many more nits to pick... but I'm lookin' ;)

At SubD level 5, maybe. Not sure Poser will go that high...

I rendered out a comparison of the high heel morph: not only does it squash in the toes but it reshapes the heel to be more suited for shoes, so you don't have to have such a bulbous back on them. And it has two bonus little wrinkles that may not be very visible but knowing they are there gives me a warm squishy feeling inside.

The prop heirarchy irked me too but we couldn't find a workaround, having nested props would have to be something SM-side. Although theres a little trick: props are listed under any figure, so instead of selecting LaFemme and going to Props>, select the hair, or a piece of her clothing, and then go to Props and you won't see all the body handles. Or you can use the heirarchy editor - which is a really quick way to parent and set the visibility of items in the scene.

FreeBass posted at 9:49AM Thu, 31 January 2019 - #4344836

Lookit everone goin' "Ooooohhhh!" & "Aaaaahhhh!" & "Shiny!"... Yeah, she shiny. But I'm not about to let Duane have all the fun of pickin' nits.

Well, if all you can complain about is a figure advertised as Poser 11 ONLY not working seamlessly in Poser 2014, and me forgetting to set the limits on a High Heel pose I included as a bonus body morph so we could get some standardized high heel poses, then I'll take your post as a compliment. I've just fixed the heel limits and made a REM for them and will update the .zip in a moment, thank you for pointing it out. Since the pose loads them in at 1.0 and is pretty obvious, I didn't consider that anyone would go in there and start cranking the dial. The thigh gap, as you said, is deliberate for clothing creation/fitting and nothing that posing her doesn't solve.

The high heel foot scrunches her toes together to fit into a typical pair of heels so you dont have to make heels with a hugeass bulbous nose that look like clown shoes, like most V4 shoes do. What exactly did you expect it to do, morph her feet into rollerskates? ?

Cool render btw!

Thats the thing - it's a base figure. The base shape is meant to be as flexible as possible.

Someone commented elsewhere that they don't understand why my HD morphs weren't the base shape: not everyone has the same preferences, and it's much easier to morph a smoother base shape than it would be to have to de-morph anything I've done and work from there. We discussed this at length and specifically avoided 'baking' any very strong features or styles into it so that it would be easier to shape, that's why the base face is smooth and devoid of any very strong, chiseled features. Think of it as a blank canvas.

I'll never understand Miki 4, for example: with everyone begging for a good base Poser figure, dev time was (IMO) squandered on a baked Asian 4' tall figure instead of just making a more flexible base and including a quality Asian morph. There's an Asian eye morph I did in LaFemme with a proper epicanthic fold that people can use as a starting point for Asian characters, instead of baking it into the base shape and making it difficult/impossible to morph from. This is why the "yet another white female" comments are absolutely absurd. It's a base shape/texture: there is nothing on earth preventing anyone from morphing and texturing it into any ethnicity or shape that they like. In fact there are many specific ethnic face morphs included in the base figure that make it relatively easy - and the textures and base morphs in the figure are redistributable!

While I'm willing to add content like extra utility morphs, improvements like the corneas, etc that will eventually be added into the base package -- people need to understand that there are months of rigging work on this figure, and dozens of add-on products already that are all based on the base .obj and rig. Unless a major bug is found, there is absolutely 0% chance that the base mesh or rig are going to be changed after the release of a figure. But with morphs, HD morphs, body handles, fully working figure/body part scaling, Match Centers to Morph, an awesome built-in Morphing Tool and a very liberal license there is nothing stopping anyone from customizing her however they like for either the store, freestuff, or just for their own personal use.

KarinaKiev posted at 7:19PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344803

If this is true, then SM is even dumber than I always feared: Instead of making it easier for former V4 users to migrate to "La Femme", they forbid any one-click solutions. So the potential buyer has to resort to crutches like spinning scales, translation etc. dials.

Stupid is as stupid does. I wonder whether this is a mandatory requirement for SM staff...

K

I totally understand SM's reasoning.

But we're talking about approximating about 3% of a figure's shape via a morph for a completely different mesh topology for the purposes of fitting third-party add-ons, for which there are already a dozen automated solutions available. With that reasoning anyone using the cloth room to drape something on V4 is infringing ?

If they have a problem with it they can contact me, and while we're on the topic we can discuss the V4 Elite 'Utopian' morph and how it turned out so uncannily similar to GND4, a couple weeks after I declined to sell GND4 at Daz.

duanemoody posted at 5:30PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344794

I'm a dum-dum, where's the dial/morph/pose that reshapes the skull to take V4 hair?

In my HD Morphs pack, SkullV4Fit, in the 'head' group.

I originally wanted it in the base but SM said no.

RobZhena posted at 4:25PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344791

Blackhearted posted at 5:15PM Wed, 30 January 2019 - #4344750

As for the HD Morphs - I never actually considered this until a few people asked me in PMs about it: there's no 'preset' character included because I figured that this time around I'd give everyone the flexibility to create something to their own tastes. So if you don't like the muscular quadriceps, for example, then simply don't load them or turn the dial down to a lower strength. So for anyone wondering, virtually all of my renders are all of the HD Morphs set to 1.0, and usually the MegaLashes and BreastsFlat morphs as well. Ladies with small boobs need representation too ?

I just loaded the HD morphs, and it's a vast array of dials. A pre-set file to value 1 for all the morphs in your "character" images would sure be nice. I'll also point out that an FBM would be nice, too, but I guess you can't provide one as a freebie. I can make one because I have Pro, but poor folks without have a lot of dial spinning to do. I'll need the FBM to copy to clothing I convert, for example.

Interesting - I had no idea non-Pro users couldn't make FBMs. In that case it's something I'll consider for an update.

The reason I didn't just make an "All HD Morphs ON" FBM was a conscious decision. While it may be great for a 'let me load this figure in in 1 click', the problem is that many users would just use that dial and nothing else. Some of those morph dials are context-sensitive, like for example the 'KneesExtended' (hint is in the name) morph that adds a ton of detail to the knee but is really not designed for bent-knee poses. Besides, this way there may be more variety in character renders, the SD morphs are there to combine too!!