bragger ;)

Most of the models you are interested in are probably from DAZ3D (Victoria, Posette, Michael, Dork) and DAZ has an agreement with Zygote saying that they will not develop Lightwave content. So that's out. It's not really that hard to do weight maps and there are some good tutorials on newtek's site. You'll be able to do it in a few days. Another alternative is to do one and get a group of LWers to do one each and everyone swap :) Also check out the free stuff at DAZ3D.com they have some excellent plugins for getting your MorphTargets into LW.

No disrespect to Anthony intended. Books are notoriously limited in the # of pages allowed, and ususally the scope of each section is carefully thought out. Poser manuals after all are written for poser users not devious hackers of the Poser space time continnum.

I checked the docs. Anthony's attempt to shed some light is just great for the average Poser user who has a passing interest in what's going on under the hood. But it is a far cry from what a programmer needs to sort out all the file structure in the PZ# files. Nothing at all like katman's CR2 autopsy. So I guess the answer is no. No one has done a thorough job of documenting on the PZ# I contacted CL tech support and haven't received a reply yet.

KattMan I have your 4 parts of the CR2 autopsy in a single PDF doc if you want it. Makes it easy to do keyword searches (binocular icon in Adobe Acrobat) within Acrobat. Having written a few tutorials I know it takes effort to perfect a document like that.

so you're the guy who wrote the cr2 autopsy. i have that archived on my HDD in a treasured place... no kidding. PZ2 will have stuff in it though about keyframe locations etc. that won't show up in CR2s. I hadn't thought to look at similarities though. thanks.

I'm not looking to document anything... I'm in search of docs! Since the PZ2 is a subset of PZ3 fine. Givme the PZ3 docs already :). Thanks.

Attached Link: http://crazytalk.reallusion.com/

thanks LD, i think that deserves a whole paragraph in the FAQ. I'll be sure to source you :)

Attached Link: http://www.datamike.com/nuutti.htm

yeah LW is my main 3D tool and I'm interested as well. i'm going to be going through the manual until my P5 arrives. i have pro pack for P4 and it makes for a long production pipeline. doable but a lot of work. Also LW makes a fair amount of demands on your hardware add to that that P4 Pro Pack has to be running and you have a few system seizures from time to time. you save often and curse often.

some things will never be answered by a manual. i just hadn't seen it posted yet so thought it may be of more help than the product description from CL.

I posted this elsewhere but thought it needed to be here. Blink rates, grouping, and group frequency need to be addressed: rates: duration of each blink grouping: average number of blinks grouped closely together in time. group frequency: mean time between blink groups.

Charlie T It's the head that's the problem not the body :P so the P4 body isn't germain....but nice try. The whole lipsinc thing is very new and there are very few commercially successful implementations that cost under $50. So as far as I am concerned I'm happy. I look for improvements but hey this is going to take a while to work out.

the only problems i see i text puppet is that it misses some phonemes. the list of supported phonemes in MIMIC is greater. I wish that mimic had more variations for blinking: Barney Rubble, fast, sluggish, and medium. Also some control over grouping (how many blinks on average are grouped together) and frequency between groups of blinks. If you want auto computer read robot talk just do a Google search on text readers. There are several in any variety of voices. Record the voice from your text file then dump the .wav into MIMIC. IMHO any attempt to do emotions is a waste of time unless you also include the use of cameras so that you have a face station scenario. Face Station lovers should check the price though. Face Station is 20X the price of MIMIC. For 16 dollars you can do nearly the same thing with the facial expression libraries for Vicky and Michael from DAZ. just my 2 cents. jamball