HI all,

Sorry to trouble you all with this....I have read ALL the magnet/spawn type tutorials but it doesn't seem to work in this case. With Poser 4, I have a new V3 based character. No problems here. But I want to create a Pz2 file with Injection Pose Builder so as to adhere to Daz's copyrights. The problem is that the neck, shoulders and chest all have magnets to "soften" the upper body and are essential.

But how to incorporate these magnets in a pose file? Each magnet pulls different bits of flesh out, but ALSO acts upon other parts. For instance my Neck magnet also has chest and Left/Right Collar included as it's target in order to get smooth transitions, so the zones slightly overlap the chest in order not to have ugly borders between the morph and the next body part. Therefore each magnet is by necessity targeted to OTHER parts as well as the part it is aimed at, so I get smooth morphs.

But since Pose files don't seem to recognise magnets I have to spawn morph targets with each magnet function. So I spawned four seperate morphs: Neck, Chest, and Left and Right Collars. Still fine and they appear in the dials, but what is appearing is Magnet 1,2 & 3 AS WELL AS Neck, Chest, CollarL and CollarR (my designated names). OK, so I delete the magnets and now the new morph targets work,

BUT>>>>they work in different ways and setting them all to a value of 1 actually distorts the rest of the chest/neck and Collars and even influences the Breasts, which weren't at all affected when I first created the magnets.

I tried setting the morphs at far less than 1 and this helped but not much. Even assuming I can solve this, the next (seemingly impossible) task is getting Injection Pose Builder to recognise my morphs. I saved to a CR2 file and loaded it up in IPB then processed with all the right options ( I think) then generated a Pz2 file.

Then opened Poser, loaded V3 (then all morphs just in case) then loaded the pose. Result, the pose is perfect, EXCEPT my spawned morphs are missing!!!

Next attempt: I tried saving to a CR2 file by first going to heirachy and "create new body". Error message comes up saying heirachies are not correct. Obviously this is refering to the magnets, which are not appearing in a logical order. But HOW to order them? There are 3 different magnets, all with zones and bases. Which order does each come in, and what order should the magnets be in relation to the body or body parts?

Sorry to harp on but I needed to explain fully so anyone with a solution could understand precisely what I did and perhaps where I went wrong.

Next solution: I tried spawning a full body morph then deleting the magnets. Setting this to Value of 1 produced the correct body but now the face went competely wrong (some of the FBM's I use do affect the face). Is this some kind of "cross-talk" between morphs? Assuming I can solve this method, How can I then save my completed character with this Full Body Morph as a CR2 and then get IPB to recognise the new morph and incorporate it into a new Pz2?

Thanks for your patience in reading this....just one thing: Most of the tutorials say how "easy" spawning morphs is. Maybe so, but it's not so easy to get a 3rd party program to convert all this to a pose file that's useable.

Thanks so much for any help anyone can offer.

Kind Regards,

Leonardis

Message edited on: 10/03/2004 00:02

Here is my suggestion for something for you to try. First, with no magnets in use, but the body morphs set up as you want them for the figure, spawn a morph for each body part. After you have spawned a morph for all body part, remove all injected morphs. This will leave only the new morph for each body part. Now set this to 1 for each body part, and spawn a FBM. You now have a morph that is combo of the different injection morphs you used. Reset the body part morph(s) to 0 and leave the BODY FBM at 0. You have a blank V3. Inject the DAZ morphs, and make your character again. Add your magnets. NOW, you are going to spawn just a morph for the Magnets only. Remember, in order to do this, you must zero all other morph dials (including any FBM dials) that effect the body group you are spawning a new morph to. This is why I had you make the Character FBM. Leavy the DAZ morphs set as they are, however, set the FBM you made to -1. This basically zeros out all morphs in use, except for the magnets. Now, spawn a morph for each body part that has a magnet set up. These will be your custom morphs, not made using any of the DAZ morphs, but magnets. For any DAZ morphs you use, you need to make a pose injection file. For the custom morphs, you will need to extract these and also set them up to be morph injected using one of the free injection channels. Thus you will have a pose inject file that is made up of instructions to load any DAZ body/face pak morphs required for your character as well as load your custom morphs. I hope this helps.

HI Shadownet, Those are incredibly clear instructions. Thank you and I appreciate your articulate and extremely helpful reply. OK, I'm with you on all procedures and this looks like it's going to work! Just one thing I have been confused about, and again it is in not breaking DAZ's copyright. Obviously just using Injection Pose Builder results in a PZ2 whose script ONLY refers to DAZ's original Morph labels, not my custom morphs. I do not know how to generate my own custom morph PZ2's but I guess I have to save each custom morph as an Obj file and then somehow generate a custom Pz2 from this. My question is, how do I do this? I know it must be obvious to those who know, but I don't know yet I have searched in vain for a tutorial on this. Secondly in generating an Obj file, presumably this contains Poser 4 deltas which must be referenced by my custom PZ2 files. Looking at other 3rd parties and their work, it seems they have Obj files which somehow the POSE files refer to but looking at these files I'm confused as to how they do this, and whether again DAZ's terms of use are breached by this Obj file? Many thanks again! Leonardis

Basically, the morph info is simply lines of text stored in the cr2. This same info can be stored in a Pose file, though you have to specially edit the pose file to get it there as this is not a native Poser pose save feature. There are some utility programs that help you do this I believe. Perhaps someone else here can refer you to one. I tend to do all my hacks the old fashion way (by hand).

The way the DAZ injections files are set up are two fold. There is a master folder in the runtime:Libraries called !DAZ, with subfolders to whatever Figure the morphs are for. There is another pose (the actually injection pose) that is in the Poser library, and all it does is refer to the information in the Master folder (as needed) and loads what is asked for via that Pose. Technically, you could put a the poze files in your MASTER folder in your Pose library and load them that way, but this would mean doing only one pose for each morph at a time. By using the injection Pose, you can load more than one morph (obj in text format stored in that Master pose file - take a look at how it is written to better understand). Thus, to sum up. Loading the injection pose in the Pose library folder tells Poser to go look in the MASTER folder and load whatever "Deltas" (i.e. morphs) are stored in the specific pz2 files listed in the injection file for it to load.

To make the Master "Delta" file (morph pz2) you can copy the deltas for the custom morph from the cr2 and place them into the text folder, along with the other code required to make this a pz2 file Poser will load. Just look at the ones you have and reverse engineer the process.

All there is too it.

Message edited on: 10/03/2004 10:35

Hi again Shadownet, Again, you have explained very well what I have been unable to understand from some tutorials. You obviously have a talent for explaining things, and if you ever used this talent to write tutorials I feel sure the Poser community would benefit greatly. Many thanks again for your kind assistance! Leonardis

:O)