One of the things I'm working on the V2 catsuit this weekend is some morphs to flatten out the wrinkles, primarily for Emaciated and some of the other morphs they are just too big and don't look right. I have the capability to generate morphs to pull the catsuit closer to the body. The problem is the probability of the skin poking through, especially at the joints, goes up. If you wanted to do just the chest, abdomen and hips and transmap out the rest for a swimsuit it might work. If a lot of people would like to see a tighter fitting catsuit I can see if I can get it included before release. Otherwise I could try and get it out later as a single standalone morph in the freestuff.

Way cool. I pulled the maps from the NASA JPL site and put them on a sphere and rendered in Poser. Looks like the same maps you used. I heard that somewhere there was DEM or DTED equivalent for the Mars and a couple of the other planets that have been well mapped. Anyone know where it went? The one site that I found that had a dead link. Wanted to try pulling them into Bryce or Poser.

Looks very nice. Does it have a rumble seat in the back? How about some running boards? Looks perfect for Capone, Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde.

Ah So...... Does your script account for the differences between mac and PC filepaths? I do believe that you have to code that in. Check out the writeMats.py script that came with the propack under the MaterialMods button. The scripts I was running did not do any file access so they wouldn't have run across that issue.

Attached Link: http://home.earthlink.net/~redink3d/V2ClothingPack1.html

Original plan was to have the scripts out in time for V2 and let everyone generate their own morphs. Development issues and an illness in the family pushed me way back so that I switched from releasing the scripts to releasing the clothing pack. I am hoping to get the scripts out on the street later this year sometime. I can't even to begin to guess at a date as I've had a fair number of surprises on this project and I expect a few more. For now I am using V2 and a couple of other projects as a means of testing and debugging the scripts as well as making them user friendly. And, yes, I will be holding onto the scripts to generate cash (didn't name it RedInk for nothing) while I finish their development. But the last thing anyone wants to do is pay good money for buggy software. I would rather lose money in sales to someone else than release a bunch of scripts that would have people cursing my name. Developing the basic core code was easy, user proofing it is tough. I hope that others will begin looking at what can be done with the ProPack and Python. Bushi and a few others have put together a few really neat things like the Face Randomizer but we've only just begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. And I do want to get the scripts out to the community because then users can make lots of new and different characters without having to spend so much time generating new clothing for them. Consider the possibililties of some of the nice period clothing that's available together with the Vicky 2 morph set. Be able to populate scenes with people that don't all look alike. With the morphs mapped over to the clothing it would be possible to make something like a body randomizer and still have the clothing fit. Neat stuff all the way around.

We did some testing of *.pyc files generated on a PC and they worked on a Mac. As far as I know the pyc files should be the same whether on Mac or PC. Have you found a difference?

Attached Link: http://home.earthlink.net/~redink3d/

FYI, I am the one working on the Vicky 2 clothing pack that will be brokered through Daz. Current goal at this time is to include all the items from the clothing pack with all applicable morphs from Vicky 2 mapped over to the clothing. The only dials which will definitely NOT be getting transfered to the clothing are the Stretch Neck, Stretch Arms and Stretch Legs as these are not morphs but are actually linked to the scale dials. At this time I have not found a way of bringing these over without messing up the JP setups. All the other morphs will be brought over. I am shooting for a release this month, hopefully in a week to ten days but we've had slips because of the way I am generating the morphs. Instead of using a mesh editor I have developed a set of Python scripts to mathematically map the morphs from the figure to the clothing. The upside is that I will be able to generate all the morphs in very little time, and thus at decreased cost, once everything's working. The downside is the time it's taking to get the code debugged especially as there is no debugger available in the current Poser-Python implementation. Once the scripts are working I will be able to generate clothing morphs for Figures like Vicky 2 (such as Mike 2, UMW, etc) in a fraction of the time it would take to do it with a mesh editor alone. I am hoping to get Betas of some of the items out to my testers later today or Monday. I will be updating my website, the link above, later today with some screen shots and information on the clothing. I've attached a quick test render made last week of the "Heavy" morph on the catsuit. If you look closely you can see a couple of the pokethroughs and artifacts that I'm trying to beat down today.

As of right now we were planning on releasing the Vicky 2 clothes pack as a new set of CR2's to go with the Vicky Clothes Pack 1 CR2 and obj's. We had not discussed bundling it but I will pass that along to them as a suggestion.

Update for everybody. I've been working this weekend to get it done. Here's an older test render of the catsuit with the "Heavy" morph. You will see some cracks and artifacts if you look closely. Those are primarily at the boundaries between the various body parts. I'm working to fix that today. I have a couple of other issues with the dress, skirt ,bikini top and the "Stretch" morphs to beat into submission but they're all coming along. My goal is to have all or almost all of the Vicky 2 morphs present in her clothing. What is taking so long is that I am not doing this with a mesh editor. Everything is being done with a set of Python scripts running under the ProPack. Thus I am more in a software development mode than a mesh editing mode, and we all know how new software release dates go :-) The upside is that once I get this up and running the code should be applicable to most other figures and their clothing so that adding a morph to a figure doesn't mean that they can no longer wear the clothing or having to generate custom clothes by hand for each morph. I do want to thank everyone for their patience. Daz and I were originally hoping to have this done in time for the Vicky 2 release but real life intruded on me this spring and I fell behind.

I thought that I had copied all the dials settings over via a script. The channel and valueOpDeltaAdd settings SHOULD be the same. It looks to be something more related to the conforming. I haven't been able to find anyone who's done a stretch (==xScale) like this and then have conforming clothing match up.

Other way to get around sharp angles is to break the polygons off into separate groups or break the spline before lathing/extruding. Check out the box that comes with poser. If you do a vertex count you'll see that the box is actually 6 separate polys. I think everyone's found breaking gets you there with a lower poly count unless you want to bevel the corners for appearance/artistic reasons.

On card memory gets to be important due to this simple calculation. If you're using a 1024x1024 texture that's 1 million pixels. Times 16, 24 or 32 bits of color per pixel gives 16, 24 or 32 MB of texture. As long as your textures fit on the card you'll tend to get faster rendering (if your hardware and software setup can take full advantage of the card). If the textures are larger than available memory the card will swap as needed but it will slow it down some. Can't lose by getting the most memory possible on the card. If you're going to be doing large scenes with a lot of texturing then go for more system RAM, especially now that it's dirt cheap, and then go for CPU speed. Check out the newsgroups on motherboards and videocards and search on your combinations. Helped me decide which CPU, motherboard and card combination to go with my last upgrade.

IMHO the GeForce cards are the best out there for graphics in that price range ( <=$300 ) . I moved up from a TNT card to a GeForce2 64MB and I saw a big difference in rendering speed and quality. It was much faster and I thought the graphics looked crisper. If you like dual monitor there's a version of the GeForce, MT or MTS or something like that, that is double headed. I've evaluated one of the older oxygen cards at work and I thought the GeForce was better. Matrox cards were ok for 2D but lagged in 3D when the texture load got high although they were doubled headed. Although there is truth in that is primarily a "gaming" card, it is much faster for general rendering. Get as much memory on card as you can. It's cheap now and makes a big difference. If you got big bucks ( > $2000) go for a Wildcat.

Just a thought, but it might be easier to write something in the ProPack to export the data into a file (perhaps even simple ascii text) that is either importable into Max or could be brought into Max via a simple MaxScript.

For the two models I've done I tried to follow Daz's guidelines which are try to keep it under 30,000 polys. My thought was that if someone, like myself, is going to pay for an item they don't want 200 polys and a cheesy texture that is going to clash with the lighting effect on the figure. The glint on the barrel of the gun should match the highlights on the manical smile :-)) How about putting the polygon count(s) for the model(s) in the product description in the Store? A lot of other model sellers, like viewpoint, do that and you can choose between high and low polys depending on your needs. Texture sizes would also be nice.