Hi,
I made a tool that can subdivide a figure at selected places.
The .OBJ is subdivided as well as the morphs in the .CR2.
This means a figure works as before, but has a selective higher resolution.
This is useful for... I actually do not know ;(
Maybe higher geometry can be more easily handled than the creation of a displacement map?
Maybe someone here has an idea.
Anyone could need it for whatever?
Cheers,
col

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1790394&user_id=117649&member&np

I started to mess with this a while ago (attached) and soon hit the wall with Posers limits. Mostly I could subdivide V3 once which got some decent detail to stick on the figure. Detail that cannot be done with displacement without diving off the wag(wild assed guess) cliff.. Really. You need to see what is happening realtime. Not after a session in the matroom and a full render. See her kneecaps and pubic area fat? Mesh is too lean at 78K to do that..

I remember her joints and hip needed an additional subdivide though, and my machine could not open it at the time.
Problem with this,,, there's maybe a handful of people who would bother with all the work unless you made it really easy to do.  Maybe some new results to see might  help.

Quote -

This is useful for... I actually do not know ;(

I know ;) " shhhh "

This would be another must have tool .I am having so much fun with PML now - and work .That subdivder is another  tool, I wish to have for Poser for so long .It has allways been a problem, that you loose morphs after subdividing.

 I agree. Often it's easier to morph a lower resolution figure (less vertices to grab and pull) but then it looks blocky and useless.. So I'd be interested as well :)

I would more then welcome this tool.

Count me in, too

I would love to try a higher resolution Posette/Eve since I missed out on the Azura thing because I had a slow dial-up then. I love Posette but could use a tad more resolution in some places.

Quote - This is useful for... I actually do not know ;(

It's good for when you render in Vue and you need to get rid of those shaded triangles up and down their arms and legs.

Phantom3D could use it right now on the mil3 hip  ; )

He's modeled an excellent... ummm.... see the other thread about the request for the posable you-know-what.

cheers!  : D

Quote - Anyone could need it for whatever?

Whilst I don't have any use for it right at this moment, it sounds like a neat idea, and I'm sure it would come in handy sooner or later.

Sounds like a good tool to have, I would welcome it!

If it takes the original morphs and produce the new morphs for the subdivided figure then is excellent.

 That's a very nice tool.  Often when I buy dynamic clothes, the creators have too few polygons in certain areas that make them drape poorly, look like paper or cause pokethroughs.  Selecting the targeted areas will be very useful for this.

Ok, i'll try to make it a tool then :)
Thanks for the feedback.

I'd certainly be very interested in that kind of tool - many possible applications :) are you thinking of releasing it in the store here?

Quote - Ok, i'll try to make it a tool then :)
Thanks for the feedback.

:thumbupboth:

oh  i get it  - the key is  you  said... you  can subdivide a figure at  SELECTED  places - basically  meaning at  group  level -  so  therefore  a morph target  OBJ  can  be  subdived to  match  what  you  did to  the  "selected" area.

  sounds good.

the thing is though,   once you  subdivide  one  group   (or  body part)  user will prob have to  subdivide  all the rest.

for continuity.

the hope is that one does not have to subdivide everything. by splitting the quads into triangles at the border of the subdivide zone, the mesh stays connected

Btw, if someone would be willing to help testing, please drop me a sitemail.

Sounds interesting. I think this could be useful for doing detailed aging morphs for faces and necklines etc. I'm not good enough with displacement to rely on maps.

Forgive my ignorance... but if the figure is subdivided - that doesn't affect UVs, does it?

The UV is also subdivided.
So you can still use all the textures/materials.

Ah, thanks! that does sound intriguing.

Quote - The UV is also subdivided.
So you can still use all the textures/materials.

Ok. I´m hooked!  This could be very useful for detailed morphing!

Great tool and don't take my comments as a defeat, just answering your question about the render.

Yeah, you've got a real cluster-fu*k happen topology wise when you subdivide...not saying you did something wrong but it doesn't surprise me with your end result render.
Question, did you have smooth on for rendering?
You might be able to take the subdivided mesh into Zbrush and smooth out that area so it doesn't render like it is.
Usually it's best to keep you subdivided perimeter areas hidden on the body somewhere.

I don't know which subdivision metheod you are using, but with Catmull-Clark or loop subdivision the result is not good, the only method that preserves the mesh shape is middle-point subdivision.

Yes, I currently take the middle of the face and its edges, at the place where the subdivision area ends, I triangalize the faces taking the center point as one point of each triangle. If the same area is then subdivided again, some of the triangles that were created in the first run are split once more and this makes stretched triangles. Maybe this is the problem. I will try with another strategy to create better triangles at the border.

I was also speculating another reason could be that the subdivided area is not properly welded with the unsubdivided one, but when I removed the groups from the .OBJ and imported that in hexagon, I could move the verts and all the adjacent faces followed correctly. Mh!
Sculptris had some problems with smoothing my structure too, so maybe my generated mesh has still has a flaw...

 wow maybe posette could be turned into a high poly figure, and then with some DAZ figure textures on a DPH remap she would look awesome.
Love esther

 wow!  that look smooth!

The .cr2 is the more tricky part.
Will you release kawecki? I'll spend my time on other things then and avoid double work :)

I cannot say that is in a beta stage because tonight will be full working and stable, but is not complete and nothing user friendly.
I can explain what I am doing:

For some time I was wanting to increase the number of polygons of some areas of some body parts and was thinking and thinking and thinking how to do it because a lot of problems must be solved.
The problem is not the subdiivion, the problem is that subdivision will change the number of vertices and the vertices order destroying all the existent morphs of the figure.
After a lot of thinking I decided to do something simple and only subdivide one body part, this body part will have the morphs destroyed, but the other body part morphs must be preserved, so I cannot change the position of the common vertices in the whole obj.
What I did was:
1- Import from the geometry folder the full vicky4 geometry with all import options not set to preserve the vertices order.
2- With the group editor extracted the chest.
3- As I didn't want to subdivide all the chest and cannot subdivide at the body part boundaries, it would destroy the abdomen and other body parts morphs, with the group editor I created two groups, one with the parat that I wanted to subdivide and the other part included the faces that are at the border. I didn't want to subdivide the nipples, it already has enough polygons, so I added it to the second group.
4- I spawned ths two parts of the chest.
5- The part that wanted to subdivide I exported as obj.
6- I subdivided this part with MeshLab.
7- Imported the subdivided part and exported again both parts (the subdivided and the surrounding)
8- With other app I welded the common vertices and joined one by one the new not connected vertices.
9- Now I have a subdived chest body part.
10- I experimented to use this new chest with "replace body part with a prop", it worked but the mesh was not so continuous at the boder with the abdomen with morphs applied.
11- So I have to create a new whole welded figure geometry, for this
12- With a text editor I deleted all the faces belonging to the chest, only the chest faces without touching any vertices belonging to the chest.
13- Imported this new geometry and then imported the subdivided chest, the order of importing is very important, if I import first the chest and then the figure the result will not work.
14- Exported the new figure and the chest.
15- With other app I welded I welded the mesh. The vertices of the chest that already exist in the mofified figure are kept where they are and the new vertices were added at the end of the vertices list.
16- This new geometry preserve the vertices order of the original figure, so all the morphs with exception the chest will continue to work.
17- Created a cr2 file pointing to the new geometry with all the chest morphs deleted.
18- The new cr2 worked fine without problems, but I had no chest morphs at all. I started to create new chest morphs with magnets, but it was a pity that all the morphs that I had are lost, start to to all from zero!
19- I broke my head to find a way to convert the existent chest morphs to a new morphs for a chest with different number of vertices (bigger).
20- In the end I find how to do it and this was the next step.

A little later I shall come back again with the second part on how convert the morphs.

Second part.

The new subdivided "chest" has more vertices than the original, many vertices have the same value as the original, the vertices of faces that has not been subdivided and the vertices of the original face that was subdivided, but the order of this vertices can be not same order as in the original figure.
There are also new vertices that of course doesn't exist in the original figure.
To convert the existen morphs I have to:
1- I have to find the new location of the same vertice that exist in the original figure. I have to create a table that tells for example, the delta number 1234 of the original figure now is 1678 and so on with all the deltas in the cr2's target geom.
2- The new created vertices do not exist in the original figure, so I don't know the x,y,z delta value.
3- As the subdivision is middle point, the dx,y,z delta value will be the middle point of the x,y,z delta value of the extremes.
4- And I have to find where this new vertices is located.

I divided the problem in two parts and yesterday created two apps.
The first app takes the original and new obj file and searches for the location of the old and new vertices in the new mesh and it creates a text file that is a table that points
vertice 1 is located in the 345 position in the original mesh
vertice 2 is, blah, blah
Is a transnaltion table that also tell the new vertices from which pair of vertices the morph has to be interpolated;

The other part will take the cr2 file and the translation table created by the first app, parse the cr2 and replace the deltas of the tragetGeom with the new deltas.
This part has not yet finished, but is almost done.
Tonight I shall know what happens....

Ah okay. These steps work for me already.
I have now a bit the smoothness issue, and Poser messes the figure if I change it again after subdivision with the group tool. If I save to the library then, the figure explodes. Weird :-)
But otherwise its working very well.

Mission complete, what I wanted is done and working.
Now I am able to subdivide any part of a body part, cut, split, join and do any mess with the vertices number and order and then convert the morphs to new morphs for the new geometry.
The only thing that cannot do is to subdivide an edge of a polygon that is shared by two body parts.
The next thing to do is automate the process involving several body parts.
There are some more things that I have to think a lot to find a way how to do it:

1- An intelligent subdivision.
In a mesh you have small and big polygons. If you subdivide a big polygon you will have smaller polygons, but if you subdivide a small polygon you will have tiny polygons. For what I want to subdivide something that is already small?
The idea is only subdivide what is large and not what is small and achieve a mesh that is more or less has uniform polygon areas.

2- Subdivide two or more body parts at the same time, the shared edges can be subdivided.

3- Change the body part boundaries, for example some polygons that today belong to the abdomen will belong to the chest in the new mesh.

And the old morphs must be able to work with the new geometry after an automatic conversion.

To make the code is very ease and fast, but the idea on how to do it can take a long time.

Can show a screenshot of the figure in poser with a strong subdivided body part? What happens at the edges of the subdivided zone? What happens if you apply the smoothing brush?

What is "smoothing brush" ?

 Interesting, Kawecki. But the render doesn't look like a render, for one thing, there's no polygon smoothing applied, and that always pretties things up considerably (unless they're furniture, then it just balloons L)
Which Poser version do you use? The morphing brush originated in Poser 7 and has been considerably improved in Poser 8 / PP2010

Watching with interest

Quote - Which Poser version do you use?

Poser 4, I have Poser 6 that seldom use, almost only for creating dynamic clothes. For other things I prefer other apps.

There is a problem with the subdivision, the middle point subdivision algorithm, no matter how much you subdivide, will not make a sphere or cylinder's contour more round, it will render the same as it was before the subdivision.
It is useful only for improving the deformers' (magnets) amd bending precision.
The explanation is that a quad or polygon is a flat surface, if you subdivide a quad you will have four smaller quads that all are flat and belonging to the same plane. If you subdivide again you will have 16 quads, but these 16 quads will be in the same plane and so, the original polygon will continue to be flat no matter how much you subdivide.

Catmull-Clark or loop subdivision produces rounder objects, but it destroys the original curvature.
I experimented it and the result was horrible, I think that for toons it will work fine.
Something else must be used, something like a modified middle-point subdivision that takes into account local curvatures and its continuity. I don't know what can be.

*" the thing is though,   once you  subdivide  one  group   (or  body part)  user will prob have to  subdivide  all the rest."  - Santicor

...." the hope is that one does not have to subdivide everything. by splitting the quads into triangles at the border of the subdivide zone, the mesh stays connected* "

I did not say  you  would  HAVE to  subdivide the adjoining parts,

I said you  would  *WANT * to ......

The smoothing issue is not visible in wireframe mode, because the lines are drawn over the problematic places.

Neither you see it if your texture is so rough.

If you subdivide only once, the effect is almost invisible.

Subdivide your figure part twice or three times even. Then use the smoothing brush over the subdivided figure. My personal observation was that at the border of the subdivided area, the subdivided polys are weighted differently by the smoothing algorithms than the unsubdivided ones. In fact, the smoothing brush seems to make the problem worse.  Most interestingly, it was the same for poser's built-in brush than for sculptris.
It might be because of the shape/size of the triangles/quads, or be a question of the degree of the intersection points, or because of welding properties of the underlying object, really hard to say.

One can milden the effect by chosing a smaller subsubdivision zone. But the effect is still there.

I am pretty curious if kaweckis subdivision scheme does not suffer from the effect. It might be as simple as a programming error on my side, but might well be it is an inherent problem.

Either way, we will have subdividers :-).

If anyone is interested in trying my tool, drop me a mail.  Its ready and working, with the restriction that you cannot use the group tool any more in poser ;)
The smoothing issue is not so appearent if you use a common texture.

I have subdivided only once because I needn't to subdivide more.
I don't see why subdiving a lot can cause strange problems, maybe Poser has problems with very small polygons?
Another important question is if the problem happens with the mesh without morphs applied, maybe it can be a problem of morph conversion.

Any updates here? Is there still interest in it =) ?

Interest- YES

For the moment I did nothing more, I am doing now other things.

What I found is that middle point subdivision works fine preserving the shape and a new vertices conversion table (for the morphs) can be easily generated, but middle-point subdivision only increases the mesh density and not makes it more smooth, the rendering of the subdivided mesh looks exactly the same as it was before the subdivision.To solve this problem I found a two steps solution:

Step 1- Subdivide the mesh with middle-point subdivision and create the new morphs.

Step 2- Smooth the subdivided mesh using Taubin smoothing (Laplacian smotthing with shape preservation)