As I can have duplicated channels, I have a curious question:

"A bending figure/prop with only one body part?"

I have looked at it, but it is not what I wanted, the figure has no joints. What I want is move the center of the joint.

For moving the pivot point I can use some of the the "offsetN" k values. The interesting thing is that I can have more duplicated channels and this is very useful, for example I can have two rotation dials, one that rotates the object around itself and the other dial that rotates around the center of the scene (of course the object is not in the center).

To explain what I want, for example I have a tube with enough segments to have a good mesh definition, not body parts, each body part can have a lot of segments.

I can set the joint center in any place of a body part, not necessarly at the junction with the other body part, the center can be outside the mesh. This center will define the point of bending of the mesh.

If the tube is along the Y axis, normally the joint X,Z center is set at the center of the tube. When I bend the tube to the right as the bending angle increases the result become not good, I can use buldges to improve the bended shape.

Now, if I can move the joint center to the right, the bended mesh becomes much better and I can achieve greater angles (90 degrees or more) and the mesh still continue to look good. If I want to bend the tube to the left I move the joint center to the left. In either case the translation is proportional or some function of the bending angle.

Thank you, I shall experiment it.

Quote - > Quote - A fake body part ?

No, just extra channels.  This trick is really cool.  Les is quite clever.  :thumbupboth:  He used it with the cr2 base for the chain_maker script.

So, where is it ?

Quote - In Poser 9 / Pro2012 you have "Animatable Origin" as an option for each prop / body part...

The origin is not the center of rotation of a joint

Quote - You need to use extra translate channels

A fake body part ?

Quote - > Quote - Other mystery are the joint and twist channel dials, normally hidden. For what do they exist ?

The actual dials (keys values) of joint and twist channels don't do anything. However the joint twist and smoothScale channels do a lot, they are the "Joint Parameters" and control how the mesh deforms (bends) in response to joint rotation.

That is the problem, the key value do nothing, but why do they exist?

Imagine if it would be possible to control the center of rotation !!!

Other mystery are the joint and twist channel dials, normally hidden. For what do they exist ? Changing the value I never observed any effect, but it would be very nice if it worked in some way and I could modulate the effect or magnitude of the joints by some variable controlled by something.

Well, it were figures, it doesn't matter props can behave in the same way as figures.

Many very old props/figures have the curve dial, but no matter how much I moved the dial it never had any effect until I found one.

And it works fine, if the mesh has enough segments it produce a smooth curve. Curiously again, the curve only worked in some body parts.

In resume, curve works, but I don't know the rules and tricks when it works or do not.

Another mystery is the curve channel. I thought that it could be useful for bendings and it never worked and never produced any result.

I thought that is was a relic of some ancient Poser and in Poser 4 it didn't work anymore. Until a day with a downloaded prop the "curve" channel it was working!!!

So, it means that curve works in Poser 4, but why it works in one prop and doesn't work in many others ???

Quote - A fairly simple script could scan a cr2 file and correct the indexes listing to match the deltas count in each morph.

And remove all the useless deltas like d xxx 0 0 1e-12. Your morph the breast and get a foot morph with trash deltas as bonus

One day I shall do one....

Quote - > Quote - On this topic, does anyone know whether 'blendType' has any function?  The internal code of Poser.exe seems to indicate that it can be 0 or 1.  But when I change it to 1, the morphs don't seem to behave differently.

Maybe it's some old legacy listing which is deactivated?  They never seem to remove anything from the cr2 format.  :unsure:  Does anyone have a working copy of Poser 2, in which they could test toggling the values for blendType? 

It is not so old, Poser 4 had no blend parameter

The problem that I found was when the number of deltas was smaller than the value of "indexes" (some deltas were missing) and this produced an erratic behaviour of the body part.

The problem is how to fix it. To fix it you must count the number of deltas and then change the indexes value. For large morphs it only can be done by software. A morph checking-fixing program ?

Terrible things can happen when something is wrong with the delta table. Poser can crash, but there are worst thing that can happen.

You have a figure with one faulty morph, when the morph dial has a value 0 nothing happens and appear to be normal. You change the dial to 1 and strange things can happen, Poser crash or nothing happens, the figure is morphed and all is ok. You apply other morphs, pose your figure, move it and in some moment the figure has no more head or the eyes get out of orbit or who knows what else can happen. Or you save the scene that looked ok and when you load the pz3 again tragedy!

How do you find what/who is responsible for all the malfunctions?

As for the blend parameter I have no idea, the same for the joint dials !

The structure of the vertices tables is:

d n x y z

Where d is d, I don't know if some other letter is allowed or what it will do

n is the vertex umber and cannot be greater than numDeltas, if it is, terrible things can happen.

x y z is the difference between the morphed x yx z coordinates and x y z of the original mesh of vertex n