i am honored to be anyone's source of inspiration.

the werewolf is actually a buffed-up and reproportioned P6 James merged with the P4 Wolf's head and neck.

as you can see, the wolf's head had to be significantly reworked to match the appearance of the movie Lycans, and the entire figure had to be rerigged.

and as you have guessed, you won't be seeing these assets up for sale, since they do not belong to me.

Message edited on: 12/26/2005 22:34

a simple shortcut is to just rename the bones: if your skirt's cr2 already has ghost thighs, remove them first then replace all occurrences of rButtock with rThigh, and lButtock with lThigh

the only way to make tattoos or any other texture "crisper" is to increase its resolution by creating a larger texture map. if you know how big (in pixel dimensions) the texture will appear in your final render, you can calculate the size of the texture map necessary to produce a sharp image. you won't need to create your map any bigger than this.

the term for one or more border rows of polys that help control smoothing is coplanar polygons -- the trick is, as the name implies, that the coplanar polys must lie in the same plane as the face whose shading you're trying to control. in anthony's illustration the coplanar polys can be seen on both sides of the edge connecting the shaft to the top of the backpack. for a sharper edge, use narrower coplanars and use wider ones for a softer edge.

go to the last frame of the conversation and make a key for everything. this will lock everything down and minimize the effect her transition has on anything occuring before it, provided she makes no extreme movements during her exit. as mark notes, check the figure's curves in the graph window. unwanted movements usually show up as kinks in the curves.

as someone who does know how, i'm sorry to have to tell you that if you do not already know how, then you will have to spend days, likely weeks as a beginner, in making your belt poseable. there is no single simple way to accomplish the task, which also explains the hodgepodge of tutorials. if you don't wish to put in the time to learn, stop now.

the process of making a model poseable is arcane, has numerous pitfalls, and in the end boils down to much trial-and-error. the process is multidisciplinary, meaning that you need to master a number of different tasks at the same time. your image shows that you have already got the modeling and mapping tasks done, so that's two steps out of the way.

for now i can only give you a very basic and vague procedure. there are tutorials available on the specific steps. you now need to rig the belt by building a skeleton for it. the skeleton will be based on the polygon groups defined in the model. conceptually, rigging a poseable belt wouldn't be much different than rigging a snake or rope.

define a series of groups from head to tail, belt1, belt2, belt3, etc, etc; the more groups, the more flexible, but also the more awkward to handle. (you should look at poser's snake to study how it's constructed.)

next create a bone for each group, belt1, belt2, belt3, etc. (the bone name must match the group names.) now comes the fun part: joint parameters. define each bone's rotation order; in this case, each bone will have the same rotation order since each is oriented in the same direction. define each bone's falloff zones, which controls the influence each bone has on the polygon group it is assigned to as well as that of its neighbors (its parent bone and its children).

that describes the bare essentials of the process, but i've obviously left a lot out. i would suggest you get a copy of secrets of figure creation with poser for all the details.

all that being said, i don't believe that a poseable belt is in any way a practical figure, which is why no one makes them. making one probably has little value beyond the learning experience, which could be applied to making snakes and ropes.

for a beginner's project i would start very simple, with either a shirt or a pair of pants, focusing less on making the perfect shirt and more on learning all the necessary steps. you can always "borrow" the cr2 of another conforming shirt to practice with. and i can guarantee that you'll be able to find a helpful tutorial on making a conforming shirt and not one on making a poseable belt.

jumping in the water with this type of project, where you're starting from scratch with an unusual figure will guarantee you a lot of frustration. in any case, i wish you good luck!

you want to go to flay.com and get "merge trigons". i notice there's another one there that i haven't tried called "utriforth". they're both lscripts.

perhaps you might try googling for max plugins? i use lightwave and was looking for just this tool -- something that converted tris to quads -- and was fortunate enough to find a free plugin.

i'm several upgrades behind (last version was a:m 2000), but unless hash has expanded its import capabilities, a:m won't import polygonal meshes. afaik, it's strictly a spline modeler.

the materials dialog window has a checkbox called "animateable" , which allows you to set keyframes for all the various texture attributes except texture maps. you can't switch any external maps during an animation. you'd have to edit together separate clips to create that effect.

another issue that may be relevant is that poser and most other programs implement morphs in a linear fashion -- meaning that poser applies the interpolation between the position of point xyz in the base object and the same point's position in the morph target along a straight line. this is why morphs created using rotations, as you imply you did with your set of scales, behave unpredictably, unlike morphs created using linear xyz translations.

imagine a straight line between all the corresponding points in the base and the morph and you can somewhat imagine why the scales don't "tip" properly.

hope this helps.

Message edited on: 11/14/2004 04:06

when creating morph targets always work with a copy of the object's original base obj that normally resides in the geometries folder or directory. (it may in fact reside anywhere on your system; if it's not in the geometries folder, check the cr2 file -- or the pp2, hr2, etc -- for the obj's path name.) do not work with objs exported from poser. the main reason for working from the base file is that the cr2 itself may be applying any number of transformations to the obj, which can cause any number of morph-related problems, including the ones you describe.

actually, as far as i know, the leg ik stops with the foot, so the toes, or the lack thereof, are of no consequence.