Acadia, good to hear from you. You have been an important and active member of the community for a long time. You were the one who always had the links to what we were trying to find, be it a tutorial, a post in the forum, or content.  And you always went out of your way to help the newbies. All this will be remembered, even if you are now turning to other interests. I hope you will post in this forum from time to time, to let us know how you are getting on.

Best wishes for your new endeavours,

Les.

On the subject of eye translation, the default tracking scale (dial sensitivity) is much too course for the eyes, which need very fine degrees of adjustment. In early Poser versions, the only way to get a finer gradation for translations is to type the desired value into the numeric field, but in later versions (P8 and up, I think) you can use the code below to get a finer tracking scale for the dial. In earlier versions, code that is not recognised is ignored, but does no harm.

        translateZ ztran
            {
            name ztran
            initValue 0
            hidden 0
            enabled 1
            forceLimits 0
            min -100000
            max 100000
            trackingScale 1e-005
            keys
                {
                static  0
                k  0  0
                }
            interpStyleLocked 0
            trackingScaleMult 0.010000
            }

You can also set the tracking scale in the Poser interface, via the 'Sensitivity' filed of the dial's properties.

Quote - if there's any reason to leave the X,Y and Z translation dials active/visible

The translation channels in most actors should be hidden.

Exceptions are: The eyes need translation dials so that you can move the eyes to accommodate head morphs that may change the location of the eye sockets. Mostly translation of the eyes can be handled by slaving the eye translation to the head morph, and in that case a dial is not needed, but some times you want to do a quick job without bothering to set up the ERC slaving, and for that, you need the dials. It can be good to leave the dials visible in the tongue, as this gives it extra dexterity. Same may apply to the jaw if there is a separate jaw actor.

If the figure is to load with leg IK turned on, then the translation dials for the feet should not be hidden, you need to be able to drag the feet with the cursor when IK is on. If it loads with leg IK off by default, then the translation dials for the feet should be hidden (they will be automatically made visible on when IK is turned on).

Let's consider setting the limits to zero. What would this achieve? Not much as far as I can see! No figure that I have seen, zeros the translation limits. So long as the dials are hidden the actor can't be translated via the cursor, and if someone wants to unhide the dials, for what ever reason, I don't see any point in making them do the extra step of changing the limits. Also as noted above, some actors need to be capable of translation.

I feel that the dev cr2 should be the same as the regular cr2 in this regard.

Quote - Locking all of them seems to help with taking poses, when it's a pose not originally designed for that figure.

In most figures, the hip is immediately below the BODY in the hierarchy, but in some figures it is a different actor, for example in Antonia-1.2 it is the waist. In such figures pose compatibility may be a problem, but personally, I don't see this as sufficient justification for zeroing the limits, but in the end it's you call. Apart from this hip/waist type problem, I don't think that zero limits would make any positive difference 99.9% of the time.

Personally when applying such incompatible poses, I tend to lock the offending actor (hip, waist, or whatever) before applying the pose, then unlock it after the pose has been applied.

Quote - Okay how do you collapse the stack?

In the cr2 it's:

        groups
            {
            groupNode General
                {
                collapsed 0
                groupNode Transforms
                    {
                    collapsed 0
                    groupNode Translation
                        {
                        collapsed 1
                        parmNode xtran
                        parmNode ytran
                        parmNode ztran
                        }[etc]
I think this only works in P6 or above, in previous versions the 'collapsed' statement is ignored.

For figures that have PBMCC channels, get SceneFixer. In Poser, express the morph in question, use SceneFixer to make a delta injection file.

Alternatively read the tutorial on PMD Injection at Nerd3D's site.

They say they miss you, but are you sure that they are not cooing the same sweet words into someone elses ear when your back is turned? And they say they will pay you? Sounds to me like they are feeling guilty about something, but then I'm the suspicious type.

Regarding D3D's Morphing Clothes, when used to transfer morphs from a character to clothing, as the base geometries will be different, it does not, and can't actually transfer the morph deltas, it creates new morph deltas that result in a similar shape to the original morphs. I suppose it could be argued that such morphs are in a sense derivative. I don't know the legal ins and outs of distributing such morphs, but get the sense that no one has been objecting so far, but I'm not really knowledgeable on that subject, and could be wrong.

Quote - I'd be wary of using Morph Manager since it's so out of date, and I know it can break PMD morphs. Caveat emptor.

Bob, the point of using Morph Manager in this particular situation is to create a blank cr2 with no morphs. If there are no morphs in the cr2, then they can't be broken, as they don't exist. My process does not remove any valueParm (FBM) channels in the BODY, but for the purpose of creating a pmd, this should not matter. The custom morphs should be added after the blank has been created. If someone wanted they could delete the valueParm channels in MM4 as well, but as I said it does not seem necessary for the current purpose. The custom morphs can be developed and tested in the standard version of the figure so that their interaction with JCM can be checked, then transferred to the blank cr2, which is only used for the purpose of creating the pmd file. As primorge has provided a link for the V4BLANK, in this case it would be easier for bevans84 to use that than to make his own. But it's handy to know you can create your own blank for any figure if needed.

Quote - However I'm unclear how you would prevent other morphs being written into the PMD, and hopefully someone else will know. Set them all to zero before saving, at least.

All the morphs in the figure will end up in the pmd, irrespective of whether they are set to zero or not.

A solution, as TrekkieGrrrl pointed out, is to load your morphs into a blank (morph stripped) version of the figure, then create the pmd from that figure.

You can create a morph stripped version of any figure using 'Morph Manager 4' (MM4). * Save a copy of the target figure to the library from within Poser (to resolve any 'readScript'). Make sure that 'Use File Compression' is turned off in General Preferences, before saving the figure.

• Start MM4, and load any pz2 file into one MM4 window (this forces MM4 to display more options).
• Load the  copy of the target cr2 into the same MM4 window.
• Click the 'More Options' button.
• Select 'Delete all morph targets from file'.
• Save the modified cr2 back to disk with a new name, eg "V4-Stripped.cr2".

Or, as EnglishBob pointed out, there were blank versions of V4 and M4 posted on the old DAZ forum, but I don't have a link. Many figures come with development versions, and I assume it os OK to use these to create your pmd files from, but you should check the EULA to be sure. Or there is the D3D Binary Morph Editor as another option, but starting with a blank cr2 is probably the safest way.

As to what copyright law allows you to include, it is generally believed that that the morph must be entirely your own work, and not derivative of any copyrighted morphs. You can't remix other peoples morphs and call that an "original morph".

P.S.
I have never used MM4 on a weight mapped figure, but see no obvious reason why it would not work on such figures.

I have done this a few times with standard Poser magnets. You may need more than one magnet, and it can be a bit fiddley, but it is usually doable. What type of hair is it?

You can tile a texture map over a surface in Poser by adjusting the values of the U_Scale and V_Scale in an Image_Map (see image above), but the result will only show in the rendered image, not in preview. Alternatively you can edit the UV map of the obj file itself. English Bob has a tutorial on "Tiling Texture Maps in Poser" which explains one way to tile the UV map of an obj.

I realized just after I posted, that I had shadows turned off in the manual settings.

Two small boxes close together in the scene render black, but render normally if moved far apart. This makes me think that the shadow cameras may be implicated in some way.

In P6 with a Poser box prop scaled to 10%, then imported as an obj, I found that if I had 'Auto Settings' selected in the Render settings, the box rendered black, but if I had 'Manual Settings' selected, the box rendered correctly. I have no idea what significance this may have, but thought it worth passing on. This may be why some people don't get the problem, they may be using 'Manual Settings'.