Deecey, MIKI and Koji were quite a secces because they were the first Poser meshes who actually looked like people of asian heritage.

People were sick and tired of the generic DAZ face morphs that looked like anything, but not a real asian.

If you morph a mesh too much, it'll break. The joints break, the morphs break. Even if you just morph the face.

For clothes a full body morph and a joint injection pose should do.
And if WW2 can go from the Freak to Matt, it should be able to get from "thin Vicky" to "fat Vicky", or from "Superman Mike"  to "Mild mannered alter ego Mike".

Winning NASCAR with a VW Bug only works in the movies.
In the real world you need a special car for a special job.

JoePublic,
Maybe you should look into making your own figures. That is the only way to ensure that your figures are 100% the way that you want them to be.
You seem to have a very clear idea of what a figure should be like; and it is not likely that someone else's work is going to entirely reflect your own ideas.

A nice example that both supports and contradicts JoePublic's statements: Ingenue Vicki by Jim Burton.
The mesh is V3, but the figure has been dramatically changed. Not the linebacker shape of the default V3, but a petite, almost anorexic 5'2" girl.
Yes, she has been completely rejointed. She's got the same bone hierarchy as V3, but each and every joint parameter has been changed, with the result that she bends pretty well (better than V3 anyway).
But the mesh is the same. The grouping is the same. So she can take all V3 morphs, and surprisingly, many of the V3 morphs look good on her, as long as you don't exaggerate the settings.

I'm with Joe on this one.

The thing is, thanks to XDresser and WW2, figures are not actually expensive anymore.

Buy a base figure for $20 add $40 for morphs and you are set.

Nothing would make me happer than to have a figure designed from the ground up as a particular ethnic group or as a heavy (or thin) set person, or a child.

Winning NASCAR with a VW Bug only works in the movies.
In the real world you need a special car for a special job.*

But you forget: this is the world of the virtual reality and everyone loves Herbie!

Bopper.

svdl: Actually it won't hurt if you keep the base mesh, though the males would end up with a lot more polygons in the chest than they actually need as well as in the crotch area.

But how many people actually used a V3 texture on Mike, or Maddies facemorphs with the freak ?
The Unimesh have a lot of compatibility that isn't actually needed.
M2 still has the better male body because he didn't had to share the same body with V2.
Same for the Millboys. They look way too "soft" because their meshes are based on V2 and not M2.

dvlenk6: I already do in a way by making my own custom morphs and also do my own rerigging.
But I don't whant meshes that I might "like", I just want meshes there you can see at first glance that they are based on a "real" person.

Ok, after IM's from a couple members, and after having read the thread, I'm officially letting it known that this thread is now being watched.  I wish I'd kept getting ebots for it, frankly.

There are a few of you who have very VERY much toed the "Personal Attack" line.  Please, back away from the line, and go on with the actual discussion at hand.  If you feel the need to post that snarky, hillarious comeback, post it in notepad, and save it to your desktop.  Also, apparently, a couple of you are lucky we have an edit feature on the forum, or there might have even been warnings/bannings issued.

We all get heated over these issues too much.  Can't we all just realize that we all have our own opinions on things?  I mean, there are people who love certain parts of Poser that I loathe with all the fires of hell.  Example?  The freaking cloth room.  There are times where it works magically for me.  Other times, it hates me, and doesn't do what I tell it to.  Other people can go in there and just make it sing. 

Anyway, I truly am sorry for not stepping into this thread sooner.  This issue is NOT important enough to get a warning over, guys.

The contradiction is not in using the same mesh, if the polygon flow and the edge loops are good, you can use the same base mesh for just about any male/female figure.
I agree about polygon redundancy in the chest (IMO it would be best to have a generic base male mesh and a generic base female mesh), but not about polygon redundancy between the legs - the Unimesh females have a definite lack of polygons and details there.

The contradiction lies with the morphs. The V3 morphs work - which is not surprising, since the vertex order and vertex count hasn't changed - but they work pretty good. "Morphs break" - this example shows that they don't have to.
If used within limits. Ingenue Vicki is already quite anorexic, applying "thin" or "skinny" morphs will reduce her to a skeleton. But the face morphs work on her just as well as on V3.

Quote - >> Well, did you expect everyone will welcome you with open arms after bashing a few regulars and people's friends in here, and now you're martyring around when people aren't enamored with you. Are you serious?

Just inprocess of taking down what little I have around here, but let me fill you in on just one of your "friends".

Sean, before you carry on any more, take a deep breath and take a very VERY careful and very detailed look at my 'friends list' around here. Those things are public after all. Note whom is and isn't there.

Now, if someone is throwing outrageous claims or personal attacks at you, the forums here are moderated. Report the offending post to the moderator. It works. Don't go attacking everyone because one or two goofballs got on your nerves.

"Morphs break"
Then again, that happens all too often, even if you're not doing anything extreme. The sad example here is the G2 female line. An unmorphed G2 Sydney is more or less okay, but if you try to make her even slightly taller/shorter/skinnier, or if you try to give her a little bit of definition, the results are bad.

I think you're basically right when it comes to more specialized figures for the different body/head types. In my opinion the G2 people represent one end of the spectrum (virtually unchangeable), while V3/V4 represent the other end - an attempt to a "one size fits all" solution.
The best solution would be somewhere in between IMO.
Trouble is, one would still need quite a lot of semi-specialized figures. What parameters do we have? Thin - normal - fat; Caucasian - Asian - African; smooth - normal - muscular; and I'm probably forgetting quite a few parameters. If you use three base types per parameter, and you have N parameters, you'd need 2*3"N different base figures (male and female). That amounts to an awful lot of figures!

Joe can make a figure. You can give him any mesh and he can make anything from it and rig it and light it. He just keeps his work close. His opinions concern what he thinks is best for the community. His runtime is plum full of all custom work.

M2 made a pretty def chick by DAZ who a 3rd party actually shaped and rigged to wear V3 clothes. I use V2 and V3 with Mike textures all the time. The ladies make better male figures than the male figures do in a lot of cases.

Mesh can do a lot if it is modeled and re-rigged. The V2 mesh makes a good man, a good teen, a good kid, and a good ogre. Personally I could stand a base mesh at V3RR resolution shaped every different way with tailor rigs by injection. Any new figure could be distributed as just a FBM and a new rig injection. With morph injection you just have to put in the appropriate morphs. One texture UV for all skins, a mag set to fit the clothes to the re-rig. Not bad. Just need a good flexible groupping and base rig, good poly flow.

Hi JoePublic and ssgbryan

Would you like a custom made figure?

Hi JenX

Is there any common ground between Daz Studio and Poser? 

Hi svdl

Did Jim keep the original uv mapping or did he remap Ingenue Vicki

The picture above shows my fat M3RR.
It's not a hybrid.
I just remorphed M3RR's body to look like Rikishi's and then re-rigged him.
He now takes Rikishi's poses and can wear Rikishi's clothing.

The default DAZ face morphs are mostly broken due to the new face shape, but I'm used to making my own anyway, so no big deal.

Body and face were morphed In Poser 7 with magnets and especially the MorphBrush. The grouping is still M3RR except for the leg/buttocks.

It's way from perfect, but I still doubt you could get a similar results with even the most elaborate "morphforms".

He reminds me of a "house" episode I saw last week! Nice work!

Bopper.

Quote -

Hi JenX

Is there any common ground between Daz Studio and Poser? 

Absolutely.  However, there is more compatibility on Poser's end than on D|S's end, as in, you can use Poser files in DS with little/no adjustment...there still, to my knowledge isn't a way to use DS Native files directly in Poser.

There is something like  Poser exporter, but I still have to figure out how that works, untill that D|S isn't very usefull to me.

-B.

Hi JenX

Thanks.  I've got another question.  Is lipsync part of Poser?

Cheers

Pat

Seems to me Poser as it is now can only get so much detail out of any kind of an image map regardless of resolution, particularly bump maps.

@patorak: Ingenue Vicki has not been remapped, she takes any and all V3 textures.

And Poser 7 has a TalkDesigner module, I'd read that as lipsyncing. Poser 6 and earlier don't have it.

Hi bopperthijs

Is Poser Exporter a plugin?  I didn't find it in Studio 2.0.

Hi svdl

That's a lot work,  to redo the mesh and stay true to the uv mapping.

I think Jim Burton took the V3 mesh and deformed it in a modeling program. That way you don't have to do anything about the UV mapping. Ingenue Vicki is RTE encoded against the V3 .obj file.

Hi svdl

Do you have a list of the phenomes that are needed for TalkDesigner?

Hi MikeJ

You know that's going to be a problem too with HDTV and 3D scenes.

Hi Patorak,

These are the morphs used in the Poser 7 viseme maps:
mouthA
mouthO
mouthM
mouthCH
mouthTH
mouthF
mouthW
mouthM
mouthE
mouthR
mouthU
mouthP
tongueL

Poser 7 uses viseme maps, which are XML files that map phonemes to morphs. If you provide the morphs listed above, the standard Poser 7 viseme maps will work on your figure

Quote - Hi MikeJ

You know that's going to be a problem too with HDTV and 3D scenes.

This is true. I would think something like that should be high on their list to fix. It's not so terribly evident in image maps, although large screen hi-def closeups would be a problem, but even for medium sized still renders, the lack of ability to get really detailed bump from an image map is severely limited.
Seems to me also that The OpenGL preview is capable of delivering more detail in an image map than the actual render is.

Hi MikeJ

There's a work around in post-processing.  http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=5&t=617417  and http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=5&t=587607  I'm sure a color management system could be worked out for Poser as well.  (  Side note:  that's why I've always said no matter what the app everything ends up in Photoshop for post-processing.lol )

Hi svdl

Thanks!  You're a life saver!  I've added you to the list for a free copy.  Found some good references on phenomes as well.  http://www.garycmartin.com/mouth_shapes.html  and  http://www.garycmartin.com/phoneme_examples.html

That's pretty interesting, patorak. Thanks. :-)

The problem with current versions of Poser is that it is stuck with 8-bits per channel on image maps, although I am led to understand that Poser 7 isn't so limited on image sizes. There are ways of splitting 16-bit data into 8-bit image-maps, and reassembling them in the Materials Room using math nodes. Similarly, the Scale and Offset settings on image-map nodes would let you assemble a huge bitmap. According to the manual, we should have alpha-channel masking, but I've never seen it working. I reckon the render engine is being held back by the Poser interface layer.

Quote - Well a complete rewrite (at least for OSX) is coming.....

Apple is dropping support for the Carbon 64 libraries.  So everybody that didn't do what Stevie told them to start 8 years ago are going to be hosed.

"At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe & other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we'll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa."

Yeah - there was a kerfuffle this past week ab't CS4 being Windows only for the 64-bit version... but hey - world+dog saw this one coming back in 2001.

(OTOH, Apple promised 64-bit Carbon in 2006's WWDC, then turned around and said no way in 2007 - that was bound to confuse some folks...)

--

Quote - Ask Tommy the Troll aka Pengie about the post he wrote in which he decided I was a little too fond of little boys, {...}

Sean, I really don't know how else to say this: you're not quite in control of your faculties here. I said that you had a demonstrable history of decrying "T&A" (which you do have). So does Jerry Falwell, but I doubt his reasons have anything to do with sexual orientation or whatever.

Also, I said nothing of "little boys", so kindly cease and desist these accusations that I somehow declared you a pedophile.

Quote - ...so he can run off to RFI or Rotica... oh wait, he's been banned from there, right?

RFI shut down of its own accord and I've freely posted there until its bitter end (I suspect that you have me confused with Mike), and, well, how do I say this? I'm the frackin' sysadmin @ Renderotica.

Quote - For myself, I have zero need of this place...

Dunno what your issue is, but honestly - go get it seen to. And take care of yourself, please.

--

Quote - Is Poser Exporter a plugin?  I didn't find it in Studio 2.0.

It's a script - still lurking in DAZ' Freebie section, I believe. I use it to export poses :)

--

/P

Tom, can we please keep to the ORIGINAL topic, and not continue the clever banter back and forth?  I'd like to keep this discussion open, but it's stuff like this that makes it hard to.

Hi MikeJ

You're welcome!  I hope though that the render purists haven't been offfended. lol.

Hi Penguinisto

Thanks!  I'll head over there and hunt it down.  Problem is at the foundation though.  I'm a sub-d modeler and except for a few buildings,  all my models are sub-d.  I can't guarentee they will work in Poser.

Quote - Tom, can we please keep to the ORIGINAL topic, and not continue the clever banter back and forth?  I'd like to keep this discussion open, but it's stuff like this that makes it hard to.

No worries - I've said my peace.

--

Pastorak:

I suspect you may have to convert from primarily Sub-D to something meshed-up enough that it would pass muster in Poser. I do know that modelers like Rhino can do it, and any competent app will have a smoothing function built into it. 'course, this does mean that rigging and (maybe) things like UV Maps go right out the window, but it may be the best option in an otherwise bad situation.

/P