As far as UDIM goes, maybe down the road. At this point it would be highly invasive I think.

Why do you think it would be invasive? I don't see it. As a Blender user, it seems like a no-brainer. Five minutes of work in the UV editor, and much more fun texture painting after that. And Poser has been happy accepting UDIMs for many years. What am I missing?

I was thinking it would be difficult with the reliance on old textures. If it's an easy process than you won't have any arguments from me, I love UDIM. I only know UDIM from scratch though, as in mapping something with numbered tile use and painting textures to go with those UVs. And never more than 2 tiles at most. But moving forward no more stacked for me.

Change it NOW! Lol. But seriously, I wouldn't suggest you change her mapping if I wasn't sure it was an easy process. According to ADP it is ;)

Okay. As a pure end user, here is what I think.

1/ First of all, kudos on the anatomy! I was rendering when my husband who does physiotherapy came by and said to pass on his compliments on how well you captured a lighter, non-athletic female form. He especially was happy about the separation of pectorals and breast tissue. she also moves extremely well with the earlier poses for your prior versions. The arm and thigh bends are superb. And yeah, as a female, I am thrilled to see figures with realistic breasts (not meaning necessarily small, as you provide breast size morphs; but realistically formed, obeying gravity and again, that separation from pec muscles, yay!)

Thanks for all the praise, both yours and your husband's! Looks like years of live drawing have paid off.

2/ Which brings me to: it would be lovely to have some morphs contributed by those who can/ willing to make them. Face and body fat and muscles would be lovely.

3/ Egads, she needs clothes please. Those of us who'd like to render her not necessarily for Certain Purposes, probably would love to have some stuff for her. I shall try her in the Fitting Room momentarily and with some dynamics, but it'd be nice to have her a wardrobe.

I hear you. I'll package up what clothes I have made in MD so anyone who's comfortable in the fitting and/or cloth room can have a go with them. I'll try do make some conformers myself, too, and I'll definitely go back to making more clothes because even though it's not easy, I enjoy it a lot. Big caveat though at this time: she's not fully weight-mapped yet, so it probably does not make much sense to spend a lot of time optimizing the joints, other than the thigh joints, of any garments.

Thank you, again, for your meticulousness, attention to detail and perseverance!

BTW you can set ot up in Wings too. Not as precisely as in Blender but very easy.

I was thinking it would be difficult with the reliance on old textures. If it's an easy process than you won't have any arguments from me, I love UDIM. I only know UDIM from scratch though, as in mapping something with numbered tile use and painting textures to go with those UVs. And never more than 2 tiles at most. But moving forward no more stacked for me.

Change it NOW! Lol. But seriously, I wouldn't suggest you change her mapping if I wasn't sure it was an easy process. According to ADP it is ;)

Yes, it really is, at least in Blender. I've done it before, to prepare the mesh for my texture painting experiments. And since then, I've figured out an even easier way to do it.

I can only agree with Riha474. I've said it once or twice elsewhere: Antonia is fun to work with, to move the character (without breaking what you've painstakingly built up before), to morph or make morphs. Antonia's Geometry supports these efforts and doesn't sabotage them like many other figures.

primorge posted at 3:28 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445663

As far as UDIM goes, maybe down the road. At this point it would be highly invasive I think.

Why do you think it would be invasive? I don't see it. As a Blender user, it seems like a no-brainer. Five minutes of work in the UV editor, and much more fun texture painting after that. And Poser has been happy accepting UDIMs for many years. What am I missing?

I'm out. Good luck with Antonia odf.

I hear you. I'll package up what clothes I have made in MD so anyone who's comfortable in the fitting and/or cloth room can have a go with them.

And don't you forget to pack this cute beanie. Winter is coming ;)

odf posted at 6:18 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445675

I hear you. I'll package up what clothes I have made in MD so anyone who's comfortable in the fitting and/or cloth room can have a go with them.

And don't you forget to pack this cute beanie. Winter is coming ;)

Where I am, Winter is leaving. So, I guess I can spare a beanie.

By the way, the garment OBJs will be all-triangle. MD can do an automatic conversion to quads, but falls back to triangles at the seams, leading to rather messy results that the fitting room is not too happy with. I could retopo by hand and if I end up spending considerable time on conforming clothes, probably will eventually, but for now it's either find an easy automatic retopo workflow that produces clean results (and if you have one, please share) or leave it as triangles. I will make sure to produce clean UVs and shove the islands around a bit within MD to avoid wasting too much texture space. So, if that's good enough for you, you won't even need to touch the UVs, but of course you're always welcome to further optimize.

Oh, important question regarding clothing OBJs: what's people favorite skin-fabric distance? I generally try to keep it small, around 1mm, and deal with possible poke-through in other ways. But I'm happy to do 2 or 3 mm if that's preferred. One can always prefit and such in Poser, but that can mess up the shapes, so I prefer garment meshes that don't need it.

I have not yet worked with an MD mesh. I re-topo with tools in Blender (nothing automatic): https://docs.retopoflow.com/

I don't know nothing about how to work with what you describe, lol. Unless it's an actual clothing figure or prop, I have more idea what to do. I suspect most Poser users are that way, but then again, they probably don't even know Antonia exists. 

I don't mean ro appear ungrateful, just letting you know unless there is a how-to added to whatever you package, I will just stick to rearranging dynamic stuff made for other figures.

Low distance is good - at least for those users who have experience. For the others ... you have to find a middle ground with which they somehow get along. Dynamic clothes demand more from users than clumsy, unrealistic conforming clothes. There's no way around it. Not with Poser.

I have to say that I haven't done anything for typical Poser users for a long time and don't really know what is needed today to not overwhelm people.

Maybe "hybrid" is a way. At least for some things. This can also be automated with Python scripts. But not in two days :) (I have a few beginnings for it, but stopped some time ago).

I don't know nothing about how to work with what you describe, lol. Unless it's an actual clothing figure or prop, I have more idea what to do. I suspect most Poser users are that way, but then again, they probably don't even know Antonia exists. 

I don't mean ro appear ungrateful, just letting you know unless there is a how-to added to whatever you package, I will just stick to rearranging dynamic stuff made for other figures.

PS: That said, the basic process in the fitting room is quite easy. I'm happy to explain how I do it, although I assuming there are better tutorials around. It's the fine-tuning to make the garment bend nicely with the figure that is a bit trickier and, I presume, requires some skill. I also suspect that that's easier with a fully weight-mapped figure.

Incidentally, I have no idea how dynamic clothes are distributed. My guess would be that they're basically just props with dynamic group info and simulation parameters attached, and there's some way to export all that from within the cloth room. Am I close? And then hybrid clothes. How do those work?

Existing dynamic clothes work with her. I cheated and created the morphs on the old Antonia and copied it over to her.

As far as dynamic clothes, they can be saved as just a prop. You can't save the simulation setup, but if you set it up before saving the prop, the settings will save.The stuff with the red x won't save, but the blue circle will.

odf posted at 8:15 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445693

Incidentally, I have no idea how dynamic clothes are distributed. My guess would be that they're basically just props with dynamic group info and simulation parameters attached, and there's some way to export all that from within the cloth room. Am I close? And then hybrid clothes. How do those work?

This process is acceptable fast, even on an older dual core Intel 5 (Laptop). Most time is used to make copies from all materials for the copied mesh (to disk) and read them back.

Cool! Thanks for the info, RedPhantom and adp001!

odf posted at 7:09 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445688

Oh, important question regarding clothing OBJs: what's people favorite skin-fabric distance? I generally try to keep it small, around 1mm, and deal with possible poke-through in other ways. But I'm happy to do 2 or 3 mm if that's preferred. One can always prefit and such in Poser, but that can mess up the shapes, so I prefer garment meshes that don't need it.

When the turmoil has settled down I will work the figure into an avatar with morphs that make for sweaters etc.

odf posted at 7:09 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445688

Oh, important question regarding clothing OBJs: what's people favorite skin-fabric distance? I generally try to keep it small, around 1mm, and deal with possible poke-through in other ways. But I'm happy to do 2 or 3 mm if that's preferred. One can always prefit and such in Poser, but that can mess up the shapes, so I prefer garment meshes that don't need it.

That depends on: 1 the thickness of the fabric and liners/filler layers. 2- the thickness of garments usually worn under the garment.

When the turmoil has settled down I will work the figure into an avatar with morphs that make for sweaters etc.

The garment OBJs exported from MD are here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vf42hWCV4XVyLFyQpxBYQmTsFl_lDwts/view?usp=sharing

As a reminder, these are meant for developers. Anyone is of course welcome to play with them, but the plan is to eventually have them in a more end-user friendly form.

Some look quite nice right out of the fitting room, like the ones below. Others may need a bit more work, and then are of course the one that need to by dynamic.

(Warning, techno-babble ahead. If you don't understand what it means or why it's relevant, you most likely don't need to.)

So, replacing the Antonia 1.3 source OBJ with a welded version exported from Poser seems to have worked nicely. Will do the UDIM conversion next. Slightly inconvenient that Blender still doesn't seem to have face group support, but I can work around that.

Cycles is, as we know, a render engine that tries to take physical conditions into account as much as possible (PBR = Pysical Based Renderer). This was not the case with previous render engines in Poser. Which means that the usual materials from the "good old days" have to be reworked.
An important aspect to consider today is the skin structure (the physical: roughness, unevenness). First and foremost: pores. For young people, these are very small, sometimes barely visible. With increasing age, this changes massively. These pores change how light is reflected from the skin. And not a little.
The Voronoi shader can help to simulate this (it breaks the highlights, even if the pores themselves are too small to be noticeable). This gives skin its typical character.

Even a simple implementation can do wonders for an image. Two images will illustrate this: First the original material of Antonia:

Here with the material supplemented with a Voronoi shader (same light condition):

First, I took the liberty of converting the original bump map to a normal map using a Cycles shader. This frees the port for the bumpmap in "PhysicalSurface" to directly link the Voronoi shader there. The latter has a negative scale value to invert the effect. Last but not least I changed the original bumpmap intensity from 0.0025 to 0.00125. In addition, it may make sense to reduce the "Roughness" intensity (0.4 for example).

Noch eine Ergänzung: Man sollte wirklich Grayscale-Maps nutzen um die "Poren" unterschiedlich einzublenden.

Briefly about your MD garments: I used Blender's "Tris To Quad" feature. Poser seems pretty happy with it (only tried two pieces though).

What is definitely needed are maps for the different areas. I've had very good experiences in the past with seams being at least marked as less stretchy, and a bit more sticky if necessary.

I had once started to make a script that assigns marked areas from image files to cloth parameters (UV map). This works, but would need an appropriate user interface for the normal user. And that's a lot of stupid typing just to get some widgets on the screen - I don't really like that much; although - or just because - I know wxPython inside out :)

Last point: "bodice-dress.obj" has no content (0 vertices)

adp001 posted at 8:24 AM Mon, 3 October 2022 - #4445756

Noch eine Ergänzung: Man sollte wirklich Grayscale-Maps nutzen um die "Poren" unterschiedlich einzublenden.

One more addition: You should really use grayscale maps to fade in the "pores" differently.

Younger skin is also more translucent (aka "wax effect"). Increasing the SSS values automatically leads to "blurring". Which mitigates the bump effect. Here with SSS: R=2.2, G=2.1, B=1.9

Do you see what effect this has on the problem with the mouth being too rimmed?

Is there much change in SSS with higher RGB values?  The RGB values suggested return a combined color of white; if all values for those channels exceed 1, you will get white as a SSS tint.  I agree with the higher values enhancing translucency but those arbitrary values are unnecessary because the channel range only goes from 0 to 1.  As I stated, any value above 1 across all the channels just gives you a white tint.

hborre posted at 10:02 AM Mon, 3 October 2022 - #4445765

Is there much change in SSS with higher RGB values?  The RGB values suggested return a combined color of white; if all values for those channels exceed 1, you will get white as a SSS tint.  I agree with the higher values enhancing translucency but those arbitrary values are unnecessary because the channel range only goes from 0 to 1.  As I stated, any value above 1 across all the channels just gives you a white tint.

Here is with a PrincipledBSDF shader (all a bit overdone to see the effect more clearly):

Original bumpmap konverted to Normalmap by a shader (because PrincipledBSDF can't handle bumpmaps), Voronoi-Shader linked to Roughness.

It's really easy to get started.

Very nice.  I like this setup.  I'll definitely incorporate this into some skin shaders and tweak it.  Thanks.

Is there much change in SSS with higher RGB values?  The RGB values suggested return a combined color of white; if all values for those channels exceed 1, you will get white as a SSS tint.  I agree with the higher values enhancing translucency but those arbitrary values are unnecessary because the channel range only goes from 0 to 1.  As I stated, any value above 1 across all the channels just gives you a white tint.

There is much more control over SSS with PrincipledBSDF. In the above example I've set  Subsurface Radius to "0.75 0.071 0.071".

In the Blender manual you can find interesting things about PrincipledBSDF and SSS, but nothing really precise about the value for the radius:
"Average distance that light scatters below the surface. Higher radius gives a softer appearance, as light bleeds into shadows and through the object. The scattering distance is specified separately for the RGB channels, to render materials such as skin where red light scatters deeper. The X, Y and Z values are mapped to the R, G and B values, respectively."

Following Blender's logic, however, it will actually rather be a matter of values between 0.0 and 1.0. If you look at PhysicalSurface, values between 0.0 and 1.0 should be appropriate here as well (but not color values). You are probably right that values greater than 1.0 do not make sense. Thumbs up!

On the PrincipledBsdf, the driving factor for SSS is the Subsurface channel value; this is also known as scaling, either increasing or decreasing the translucency effect of the model's material.  The size of the model governs how high or low the value is needed to obtain that translucency, for Poser figures, you are looking at an approximate value between 0.01 to 0.05.  The higher you set that value, the waxier the skin appears like your image above.  I have misgivings about how the PhysicalSurface is set up for SSS, I assume that the scaling factor value for that node is internally set at 1, leaving it up to you to modulate SSS through the individual RGB settings to attain the 'right' look for your model.

hborre posted at 2:38 PM Mon, 3 October 2022 - #4445785

...The size of the model governs how high or low the value is needed to obtain that translucency,...

Thank you for the explanations, by the way.

I tried to copy DieTrying's morphs into Antonia1.3. It worked in the end, but Poser12 ran into some problems on some of the existing body dials: EyesOpen-close, Tongue Out, Sneer and  Mouth Open. When the copy action ran to the end, these body dials were stuck on value 1.0 and it was not possible to  change that. In other attempts memory overrun was reported or Poser just disappeared.
So, best delete these (or all) body dials from Antonia 1.3 before you copy the morphs, and then make an injection file from that instance. It also makes sure you have a clean injection file.   

So that's work around where DieTrying is concerned.  Good to know. Thank you.

adp001 posted at 8:42 AM Mon, 3 October 2022 - #4445758

Briefly about your MD garments: I used Blender's "Tris To Quad" feature. Poser seems pretty happy with it (only tried two pieces though).

I'll give that a try. Could be quite useful for hems and such that effectively look like sequences of subdivided rectangles at reasonable particle distances. Not sure about surface interiors, though. These are irregular triangulations in MD on purpose, and just randomly removing some edge would not help too much, I imagine.

What is definitely needed are maps for the different areas. I've had very good experiences in the past with seams being at least marked as less stretchy, and a bit more sticky if necessary.

This sounds like you tried dynamic, not conforming? I don't know either very well, so it's a bit hard for me to guess.

Potentially I could cut and sew a narrow strip of fabric at each seam and give it a different material, which can then be turned into a dynamic group in Poser (at least I hope it can). In MD I can assign properties to the seam itself, but I think Poser wants a group of polys.

I had once started to make a script that assigns marked areas from image files to cloth parameters (UV map). This works, but would need an appropriate user interface for the normal user. And that's a lot of stupid typing just to get some widgets on the screen - I don't really like that much; although - or just because - I know wxPython inside out :)

One could indeed use the UV map for this because in MD, fabric seams translate into UV seams, and UVs are perfectly flat on each fabric piece (which you might already know, but just in case).

Last point: "bodice-dress.obj" has no content (0 vertices)

As I kind of mentioned before, I'd be happy to collaborate on some pieces with Poser fitting and/or cloth room experts who don't use/know MD. The ones I've put online were not made with Poser in mind, so if they're not ideal for it, I'd not be surprised.

Also, some interesting work with the Voronoi pores. I have some thoughts, but this is getting a bit too specific, so I'll hold back for now. The current materials are very simple on purpose and meant to work reasonably well in P11 and P12 with both FireFly and SuperFly. I have somewhat more optimized P12/SuperFly materials that I've been using in my renders for a while now, and at some point, I'd like to work on those some more and maybe release them as an addon.

FVerbaas posted at 3:17 PM Mon, 3 October 2022 - #4445787

I tried to copy DieTrying's morphs into Antonia1.3. It worked in the end, but Poser12 ran into some problems on some of the existing body dials: EyesOpen-close, Tongue Out, Sneer and  Mouth Open. When the copy action ran to the end, these body dials were stuck on value 1.0 and it was not possible to  change that. In other attempts memory overrun was reported or Poser just disappeared.
So, best delete these (or all) body dials from Antonia 1.3 before you copy the morphs, and then make an injection file from that instance. It also makes sure you have a clean injection file.   

That said, I'd be interested to see what exactly might have gone wrong with the DieTrying morphs. Which morphs set(s) did you try to copy, and did you use the copy morph function under "Figure" or under "Object"? Any other specifics I should know about?

Incidentally, I've noticed that for some FBMs, one gets better results by copying the morphs on the individual actors, then dialing in the desired morph on all the actors it affects and spawning an FBM from that. Not sure how the copy morphs function of the figure messes this up, but at least for the morphs that I tried it on it did.

I just went the plain and simple route: loaded an Antonia 1.2, injected DieTrying's morphs, loaded an Antonia1.3 and did a copy all. It worked but with the odd result I described.

My main reason for posting was to advise others they best take the longer route and do some dial weeding. I used the copy morphs in the figure menu.

I just went the plain and simple route: loaded an Antonia 1.2, injected DieTrying's morphs, loaded an Antonia1.3 and did a copy all. It worked but with the odd result I described.

My main reason for posting was to advise others they best take the longer route and do some dial weeding. I used the copy morphs in the figure menu.

odf posted at 6:21 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445677

primorge posted at 6:11 PM Sat, 1 October 2022 - #4445674

I was thinking it would be difficult with the reliance on old textures. If it's an easy process than you won't have any arguments from me, I love UDIM. I only know UDIM from scratch though, as in mapping something with numbered tile use and painting textures to go with those UVs. And never more than 2 tiles at most. But moving forward no more stacked for me.

Change it NOW! Lol. But seriously, I wouldn't suggest you change her mapping if I wasn't sure it was an easy process. According to ADP it is ;)

Yes, it really is, at least in Blender. I've done it before, to prepare the mesh for my texture painting experiments. And since then, I've figured out an even easier way to do it.

Converting to UDIM in Blender is indeed easy, but since Blender destroys the poly group info *and* changes the order of texture vertices (even though the new importer thankfully preserves the order of mesh vertices), getting the new UV info into an OBJ file that Poser can use will require a bit of programming. Still no rocket science, but annoyingly non-straightforward. :-/

Computers never fail at making things that should be easy complicated.

The issue emerged when I copied from an Antonia1.2 that had only the morphs pack loaded.

I see now there was also a 'clean morphs' version. I will retry with that. It came with Okhi's morph set.

I'm here on the sides checking here every now and then LOL

Very cool things seen here.

I wanna make an announcement - I don't think I'll be coming back to Antonia any time soon, but on my morph set: it's been a freebie at Fantasy Realms for a while, I now release it for anyone wanting to create over it / with it. Make an updated version, use it for custom morphs, whatever, just drop me a bit of credit in the readme of whatever you make.

And have fun :)

Okhi just advised me the name of the site is fantasiesrealm.com