romangirl opened this issue on Oct 24, 2010 · 3 posts
romangirl posted Sun, 24 October 2010 at 11:01 AM
I have bought several V4 ( and a few V3) Expression products with very little luck. The vendors have often stated that the expressions would not change the facial features, even in my own created characters. Scream for V4 is very good, and I can use it with confidence. But it's only for in- peril expressions. Some of the expression morphs distort the face badly, opening the mouth too much, etc. Can any of you tell me what expression morphs you use that are realistic, without changing the face back to the basic V4? I often use the morphs that come with the V4 head, but I find them limited.
EnglishBob posted Sun, 24 October 2010 at 11:30 AM
Attached Link: V4 Expressions (DAZ)
There are two (or maybe three) sides to this. Firstly, there's the basic technical requirement that the expression pose shouldn't alter any of the morphs that the character maker has used to create the facial characteristics. As you know, saving a so-called expression to the face library within Poser, if you take no further steps, will include channels for all the face morphs so some care is needed.However, added to that is the unfortunate fact that some character creators will use morphs which are traditionally thought to be part of the expression (smile, blink etc.) as part of their face shape. Obviously even the most carefully crafted expression pose is going to interfere with those if it uses the same morph channels.
Second (or third), the morphs for any figure are created around the basic head shape. There's an art to making morphs that will sit well with a wide range of head shapes, but even so, there are going to be some characters where a preset expression isn't going to work as well as it does on the stock figure. Some tweaking is only to be expected and I believe some vendors even supply modified expression presets for this reason.
One of my favourite expression packs for V4 is Joelegecko's, at DAZ. They're mostly quite subtle and don't interfere with a character's face too much, but even so I generally tweak some aspect of them after application.
romangirl posted Sun, 24 October 2010 at 12:02 PM
Thanks, EnglishBob! I'll check out Joelegecko.