Okay, basically the webbed hands would be conforming clothing. Each web area is divided into 6 objects and the are named whatever their closest finger is. For the Index, Middle, and Ring this means that each finger segment will get 2 webs. anyone confused yet? Anyone think it will work?

Les over at Sixus did webbed hands for his frog guy character.. I remembered him saying something like it was VERY hard to get everything to work properly...

the problem with webbed fingers is unfortunately a limit in poser, that no bodypart can have two parents (this is also a huge difficulty with creating skirts) so how would you have the web affected by both the index finger and the thumb? the way you discribe it I don't see how it could work. the only way it could work is if for example all of the finger tips were the same bodypart than all if the middle sections were one bodypart then all of the bases were one bodypart, but you can see if that happens you lose all of your individual finger movement, you would end up with a mitten. Im not sure there is a solution to this. I would be interested in knowing how Les got around this shortcoming.

Just thinking... in real life, webs do restrict individual movement. Couldn't you set up the groups in parallel as Wdupre says, then provide morphs for slight individual departures?

Well, like i said, the webs would be a conforming figure, okay?

If you look at the second picture i uploaded, you will see a better illustration of it. Take the Index finger for example. Figures have 3 objects for the index figure..and so shall the webbing, Index1 is the Cyan, Index2 is the Blue, and Index3 is the Green.

Make better sense?

Sorry im not very good at explainging things. If enough polygons are thrown into the model, it will deform with the figures, methinks.

Message edited on: 02/14/2005 11:40

...watches patiently.....because I tried to explain a similar idea to a modeller last year, but I got swamped under the technical aspects, and gave up when they said it could not be done.

The same happens with bat or dragon type wings. I ran into the skirt problem when I thought of making a surgical gown model. Any surgeons in my images will have to manage with a sterilized white boilersuit.

There have been suggestions (e.g. by Bloodsong) about cross-welding the fingers by text-editing extra Weld commands into the CR2 file. But in my Poser 4.0.3 that technique often makes the rendering act weird. What is needed in any forthcoming Poser 6 would be a way to tell Poser to insert twist and joint and smoothscale channels (or similar) (as well as extra Weld commands) between any two parts which are not direct parent and child.

yep Ron I recall I was involved in that conversation. Furyofaseraph yeah I understood what you were trying to get across, its just not currently possible in poser afaik. see Poser figures can only have blending with their parent joints if there is another joint connected to the parent the two child joints ignore each other. what you are wanting to do will not allow the web between say the fingertip and the thumb tip to join up and bend with each other. welding is only part of it, the falloff zones would totally ignore each other because neither joint is the parent of the other. and joint falloff zones only effect a single parent and child chain.

well, thats annoying...

Tell me about it ;) thats why you don't see a lot of great dresses on the market, there is no way for a long dress to conform to both legs all the way down and stay in one piece. the general solution is to make the skirt one or two bodyparts with no leg seperation that bend either on their own or with one leg, and a lot of morphs to make it do anything more complex generally requiring people to pose the dress than pose the legs to fit the dress.

Hey there... Effective webbed hands/feet are something I wanted in Poser for a very long time and went through more iterations of developing than I care to think about. The end result was actually a derivative of the solution to another problem: smooth deforming wings. For a very long time now we've released figures that had wings that had very smooth deformations, with tons of ERC/Easypose controls. The method we developed for this was simple and effective: the wing was kept as one single group, with a set of "dummy" bones inside that are all direct children of the "wing" in the hierarchy, yet have had thier origin/end points set as though they were actually chained to one another. From there, we setup the ERC/Easypose controls on them, with the dials on the wing part so that they are easily accessible, then spent a LOT of time working out the joint parameters of all those "dummy" bones. This worked out quite well for wings, and when adapted to utilitze the proper names and rotations for the fingers/toes, turned into the basis for the webbed rigging on the Phibian's hands and feet. This method is kind of a pain, but the results are worth it. It's actually far easier on a wing because that type of bodypart is much more forgiving than fingers with webbing where you expect the finger to appear rigid and the webbing to seem stretchy. The most important aspect of getting working webbing in the fingers is to make sure that the joint parameters are dead on and that you have really stroked those spherical falloff zones to the absolute best they can be. Rigs like this are, IMO, probably some of the most unforgiving developments that I've ran across in Poser yet and they take a ton of patience and practice to get through.

Attached Link: http://www.poserfreebies.com/freebies/category.php?category=4

For a sample of the wing rig in action, download the LoRes DraconisRex from PoserFreebies.com --Rebekah--