Hello,

I have a character that I created in Poser for V4 and for some reason the neck morphs (bend, side to side, twist) don't seem to want to work anymore. The neck morphs in the Morphforms section under Body still work but they won't on the Neck Body part. And all of my other characters still seem to work fine. Any ideas on what might have happened and how to fix it? It is a character I made by combining morphs from many different characters and while I could probably re-build her transferring all of the shader tweaks that I did to the material nodes in the Materials room would be a pain.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

nabob21

If the shader is the concern for the character in terms of labor just create a material collection file from that shader and apply it to a new copy of the character. Be alot easier than trying to track down the morph issue. Have you tried creating a morph pose from those existing dials and applying it to a new v4 with those packs (whatever) loaded? The pose will just apply dial values to pre existing morphs, maybe it will resolve the morph corruption/conflict that's been propagated to the scene or .cr2.

As far as the why, I've encountered similar things happen when custom morphs I created conflicted with pbm/fbm due to naming conflicts, or at least that's my suspicion. Poser can be very picky about internal names of morph channels and dial naming. I've encountered such also when creating .pmd INJ's for myself and others too.

Thanks EldritchCellar for the replies. I have never made a materials collection file so I will have to read up on that. As far as the morphs go, I spawn a bunch of new morphs as I went along and tweaked things so re-building the character will be an adventure assuming I can remember all of the stuff that I did in the order that I did it. I really wish I could get the morphs to work again since it would save me a lot of time and effort but if I can't I guess I know what I will be doing for the foreseeable future.

Open your library while in the advanced material room, go to the materials catagory, with your character selected (doesn't matter which material group) click the + sign (add to library), select material collection, click select materials, select all or whatever you want included in the file, click ok to add to your materials library.

Are you generating a pmd file? Depending which Poser version you are running, the pmd could have become corrupted. If this is the case, you may need to save the morphs as part of the figure's cr2. Go to General Preferences and check whether Use external binary morph targets is checked under the Misc tab.

Hello hborre,

Thanks for your reply. Sorry I didn't respond sooner but I haven't been home to check Poser. But I have checked now and I do not have the Use External Binary Morph option checked so I guess it is back to the drawing board as far as recreating the character goes.

Don't start over just yet... :)

Sometimes, especially when you inject/install/whatever a lot of channels into a figure, channels can screwy or even get into conflict if the injections weren't done correctly. And, with heavy figures and lots of things getting added/injected, Poser can balk and channels can get out of whack. I've had this happen before.

First, do the simple thing and see if the Settings for the channel got blown out by something. Right-Click or Click (Depending on Version you're using, I think.) on one of the rigging controls for the Neck, "Twist", for instance, and then choose "Settings." Check the min and max settings to be sure they have [i]something[/i] set as a min/max value for each. Since they're rigging channels, the min/max won't be enforced unless you choose to Constrain the values by setting the Figure's Limits to "On" in the Figure menu. BUT, if they were set to zero or some stupid number or there is a zero sensitivity setting or something else screwy, then I don't know if they'd work or not. (If you see that these channels have either no numbers in the Settings parameters or absurd ones, then some pose/injection/script you used likely borked them up. Set them back to standard V4 values.)

Next, can you even see the channels? Bend, Side to Side, Twist? What version of Poser are you using? I'm not sure which first allows you to edit dependencies, but if you can right-click or click on the little dot next to the channel, choose Edit Dependencies, you can see if these rigging/movement channels have anything spurious in them. They're not morphs, so they won't appear to reference anything unless they are tied to a dependent morph. For instance, if you edit the dependencies for "Bend", you'll see that there is a BodyMorph "Body" with a bunch of gibberish with it. (+0 for naming conventions, DAZ...) That's fine. What would not be fine is to see really weird dependencies in there, suggesting that the channel is corrupted. Compare that channel with a standard V4 figure to be sure it has the same dependency references.

Lastly - If you feel you have to start over, you can either create an FBM by exporting the geometry, properly, and then loading it as an FBM for another V4 base figure so you can continue working on it. There are a number of scripts, depending on your version, either included with Poser or that you can download for free that will do everything from a true geometry export/import to a simple action of mirroring dial values on different figure, provided you've loaded that figure with the morphs you've used in your "broken" custom figure.

Well I seem to have found out what caused the problem and that was injecting a set of morphs and then using an injection file to remove them. That somehow caused the neck morphs to stop working. I checked all of the channel settings but couldn't see anything different from a working V4. I tried to create a full body morph and inject that into a fresh V4 but that also broke the neck morphs on the new V4. So I ended up making a material file for the textures and shaders and very carefully rebuilt the character. I now have a new version of my character that (so far) seems to work fine.

Many thanks for all of the help and suggestions that everyone provided. It is greatly appreciated.

nabob21