heyas; once again, i am proven wrong when i believe that something that logically has no reason NOT to work... doesn't work. Conundrum One: Anton's Egyptians Reverse Hierarchy Affectors Conformation. okay, the long skirts from anton's egyptians work perfectly when you apply the same pose from the figure to them. ergo, the automatic application of the same pose (via conforming) should work fine. it doesn't. i put the limbs in the usual hierarchy order (it doesn't mess up the reverse order affectors that i can see), i changed the joint centers to match the target's centers, and i added feet phantom body parts. yet the shin still shoots off when the thigh is posed. why? my theory is this: the standard (conformee) figure is using the thigh rotations/positions to calculate the shin position -- you know, that offseta, offsetb nonsense. thus, the conformee says the shin is moving, when the reverse-hierarchy deal should believe the shin is NOT moving. this is NOT fixed by: deleting the offseta/b channels from the conformer shin. deleting the joint channels from the conformer shin. deleting the conformer shin. (well, you know, if the affectors are still in the hip, whaddya need a shin for??) Conundrum B: Limb Scaling Conformers when bishonen came out, using the m2 arm and leg stretch dials became fashionable. reasonably, the stretches could be applied to conforming clothing, and things should work. (well, why not? body scaling on conformers works.) it doesn't. it *almost* does, though. the test: i inserted the neck/arm/leg stretch master dials and slave channels into the adventurer's outfit for michael. i was going to do an internal name change to prevent cross talk, but then i realized, duh: if you change the first figure's dials, you WANT the clothing to follow it. seemingly, all goes well. until you try to pose the sucker. see above. although the stretched outfit poses perfectly by itself, it just wigs out when you conform it and try to pose the conformee. why? i dunno. except that poser's scaling is screwy. note: there's a simple workaround... you can just parent the clothing to the figure's BODY, and then do the 'apply the same pose' intead of conforming trick, as with the egyptians.

yeah, i agree, conforming is an in inexact science and that is a conundrum ... many factors must come together first and then you only get an approximation ... 1) the master obj figures must fit 2) figure hierarchy n continuity must match 3) figure jointing must match - both centers and axis rotations 4) figure scaling and taper must match ik must then be used to fit peripheral parts ... somehow simply matching transforms don't work ... a conondrum i noticed that in conforming, the clothing transforms reset to the 'initial' values that can be seen when you open up the clothing cr2 file ... if you manually match the 'initial' scale values to the master figure, the clothing will automatically fit the rescaled figure during conforming ... i'm finishing an app for poser 4 that might solve most of these problems ... would you be interested in testing it ... filesize ~ 8 MB prezipped ... if you are interested, please indicate the platform you're using, pc or mac and i'll e-mail you a copy .

Conundrum One - I've thoroughly tested this technique. Conclusion: It doesn't work in the conforming case, even though it does work in the non-conforming case, for one simple reason [that WE can do nothing about, but a programmer at CL could] - the order in which channels are applied. When conforming, the channels are applied from each part in their hierarchy order. rThigh channels applied before rShin channels. When not conforming, you can force any order you want, by placing the channels in that order. Tease: check www.shawstudio.com. You'll see that I'm claiming to have a work-around to this, as well as other Poser limitations. I'll explain all the gory details next month, when my utility is on the market. ;-) - - - - - Conundrum B: Limb Scaling Conformers This is a harder problem. It is best to abandon scaling completely - make a MORPH instead.

heyas; morphing limb length doesn't move the limb center. scaling the limb does (to some extent). so when you morph the knee down, the leg still bends at where the knee used to be. :/