So far it was only good test results.
Restricted presale is planned for $19, 3 copies. Hopefully as early as beginning of next week.
In case anyone is interested, please drop me a mail (e-mail or site-mail).

Arcebus was so kind to write a tutorial for usage with hexagon.
http://cgscripts.colorcurvature.com/PML4Hex_arc.pdf

If no more major problems  come up now, restricted sale can begin.
I will sell a handful of copies directly, not over rendo, because I want to provide the best possible support for the early users ;). And it will be cheaper then on rendo, cause there is no split.

pleasepleasenomoreproblems
:-)

Now its two confirmed successes in hexagon. Hopefully this is now stable.
Wings3d i didnt manage to get work though. Its a bit hard to use, and seemed to change really everything in the .OBJ that is changeable ;). So I think it will be restricted to zbrush, blender, and hexagon for the first release.

Yes, this indeed could be the solution. We succeeded with replace operations in the text editor =).
I will try to add a helper to the posemorphloader so that it works (almost) out-of-the-box for hexagon/wings3d as well.

If you manage to keep the groups alive (to material, from material trick), then this is sufficient.
Maybe can be applied to hexagon as well?
How is this done?
Texteditor sufficient?

Urg. Wings3d :( Another thing in the game. Is it a free tool?

To clarify: PoseMorphLoader works on welded geometry.

To explain it a bit more what we tried and failed at:
 - PoseMorphLoader requires the group information to find out which vertex in the .OBJ belongs to which body part.

• Hexagon cannot deal with the group information, at least in the default import settings.
• So we exported a second file from Poser without group information, that can be edited in Hexa.
• The idea was to use the vertex information from the deformed .OBJ, and the group information from the first exported file including the groups.
• When you export something welded from Poser, then you have the same number of vertices in the .OBJ then if you would export unwelded. And I think, in consequence some of the verts of a welded export are unused. When we saved in Hexagon, these unused vertices were not saved in the .OBJ
• This means the vertex count changed, and the "cross-transplant" of the group information did not work any more.

I really search for hexagon import/export options that change nothing but the vertex positions.

Yes, when

• Hexagon is also working without day-long workarounds. We did not make the final beta work with Hexagon. It is stealing vertices.

(A) If we export from Poser with [x] include body part names, hexagon imports this as a set of split objects which is unwanted.
(B) If we export from Poser with [ ]include body part names and [x]weld, then the figure stays as a whole, but on saving, hexagon removes some of the vertices and adds a DEFAULT group, my main theory is that they are unused in the polygons because of [x] weld.

To the hexagon experts:
What happens if you import an export like (A) into hex with "merge groups" activated. If you export it from hexa, are the original groups still available or are they lost? Is there no way in Hexa to either strictly preserve the groups or the verts?

It would be really good if we could find proper import/export settings for Hexa. Its difficult for me to programmatically dodge the behaviour of programs I do not understand or own.

Yes, I will put some deformer-specific tuts on the homepage.
Its basicall easy. Export, Deform, Import.
Mostly, the import/export settings in the deformer have to be set correctly.

I am about done.

A fresh version of the manual is now available at
http://cgscripts.colorcurvature.com/PoseMorphLoader_Manual.pdf

If there is anyone here that is using hexagon and could help me with a test, please drop me a mail. That would be superb. Other ones are also welcome ;)

I have reached a point of no return. Its now either good enough for a release or is dead. I have been trying to find a recipe for optimal morph deltas for smooth shading at the body part welds, but this is something that exceeds my small talent. Each morph delta affects the normals not only on the local vertex, but also on the verts nearby, making it extremly hard to solve problem.
But I think its mostly very good results coming out.

It will take a few more time to offer it for sale here, because of legal issues in my country. They make it not easy to sell things. And also not cheap. If it wont sell, I'll be on a big loss, hehe :(

With "in harmony", i meant that both vertices that are joined in the weld have the same morph target delta. I tried a bit more with the Poser-8 smooth-morph-brush, and I managed to let it set different values at the involved vertices. So there seems to not be a best solution. I guess its pose-dependent, and one has to find settings that work good in most cases.

And yes I agree, this will hardly count as a bug in the eyes of the support ;).

I will try another experiment. Maybe WorldNormals() can be used to study the effect of morph target deltas on the normals. With lots of luck I can apply my algorithm to the normals in a similar way as to the vertex movement in the morph. If that work, I could develop a script that generates a smoothing morph, which does not move any vertex taking activly part in the geometry deformation but contains just the morph deltas required to repair the shading dependend on the current pose.

Yea, I thought with the zones, if the original mesh was welded, the effect of the joint would be "in harmony" ;-) an everything affected the same way.

In the meanwhile, I checked the morphs the P8 morph brush creates: And they also seem to maintain identical values at the welded verts.

The funny thing is, I often have situations where letting my program move each vertex on its own, welded or not, makes morphs that are not "in harmony" at welding points but produce a much better shading. However, in other situations, the contrary is true.

Also, I have trouble telling the poser support what my problem is.
I assume, the "default" way is to have a morph that has identical values for welded verts, and the shading errors that seem to occur in extreme poses are, well, bad luck. But they seem to not want to tell me a clear statement.

Hm... back to the original topic:

It seems to me that while welded child vertexes respect the parents position, they still have their own normal vector.

My assumption is, if the parent and childs normal vector are different, there are shading artefacts created.

Can one create joints that affect only one of two connected body parts? If the original mesh is welded, and poser splits the weld internally, is it possible to make joints that move just the vertex that is belonging to either the parent/child? I thought for scaling this might be possible, wasnt sure though.