I am working on creating a couple of figures, one male and one female. I already know how to rig the basic bones, but how you do create expressions?

You create morphs of each expression and save as obj. first ... just like if your create regular head morphs. Zbrush, Blender ... that's how I understand it.

Oh, ok. Thanks. I have a lot to chew on then.

Best/easiest to create them on a low poly mesh with strong loops throughout the dominant facial landmarks. Easier to manipulate and create strong feature interrelations this way. Learning how to use subtractive morphing and intermixing values of seperate constituent blendshapes is also useful. If you create a bunch of smaller morphs that when mixed together arrive at the full morph it makes working alot more flexible and you can better control how the final mixing of different expressions comes together. When you apply an open mouth morph, for instance, you want that morph to work well with the others. Blendshapes. Or... create an expression rig. Something that's entirely feasible at this point in Posers development... greatly aided by the in Poser addition of control props (handles) no doubt.

Just to clarify something. When I say create them on a low poly mesh It's very easy to apply those low poly morphs to the higher resolution final model. There's a couple/few ways of doing this. I personally create all my morphs on a grouped mannikin and transfer them over to the figure when I've got everything sorted/organized and tightened up. This allows me to be very organized and comfortably play around with "sketching" morphs. I save all my morphs out as morph targets to organized folders for archival purposes and just in case I want to make last minute alterations. I also save out iterations of loaded .cr2's of a couple of different LOD's. Probably some people would think this is way too time consuming but I don't do this stuff because I'm in any rush for a product, it's what I enjoy. I want my stuff to be like "WTF?, that's weird as shit." I like alot of the Japanese content creators because of that kind of "outsider" or left field aesthetic. You can export a mesh out of poser, subdivide it in a modeler, reimport and use without wrong vertex order occuring. Draw your own conclusions on that statement. Also, there's various 3rd party python utilities that make enmasse loading of MT's a snap. A word of advice learned the hard way though, always finalize your morph names on the .obj before loading. Don't just use any old name and change via the parameters settings function. There's an internal (derived from the .obj) name and external name for morphs, if those don't match you're bound to run into conflicts down the road when dealing with many morphs. Especially with the name sensitive FBM .pmd INJ. Poser is easily confused. :)

It's going to be a learning curve for sure. I've never been able to create a morph that worked in Poser. Well, if you don't try you can't succeed...

True that. To be honest almost all of my attempts at reaching our for help in regard to figure creation were either ignored or met with smart assed snobbery (I can link you to examples. I've got a long memory), and I'm sure many wonder why I'm so ascerbic at times. I learned by trial and error, researching old threads by the masters, and elbow grease. I've still got a ways to go but I love this stuff. Hopefully Poser sticks around for a few more years.

I am forced to go long stretches without internet access sometimes. During those times I will purposely ignore television also and concentrate on learning whatever it is that I am struggling with. My biggest problem outside of being a touch lazy is that I am like that dog in the movie 'Up'. Easily distracted by that squirrel. I need to change those aspects of my personality or I won't succeed.

Has anyone successfully created a morph in Wings?

Lol. Almost all of cthog and missus' morphs were created in wings, so yeah about 320 or so just in those two alone. Not including tons of unpublished/unfinished stuff I have. I only use a sculpting tool for higher res refinement. Mostly tweaking with the move brush in Zbrush.

Between Blender, wings, and Poser you have all the tools you need.

I'm pretty sure that Dr. Geep has a basic guideline tutorial for creating morphs in Wings. I'd be happy to lend any additional advice if needed, I have a weird workflow for that though.

I have a weird workflow for everything I do!

I will finish the tutorials I am going over for Blender. I want to start being able to model with it, so I have to bone up. I do have that Calcaran mesh ready to retopo, so maybe I will work with that. I need to model a mouth for him.

I will keep you in mind when I get there.

Oh, and just to clarify, I tried to make morphs a few different times. All I did was move a few verts around, but when I tried to apply it to the model, I got the order error. Every time.

Ok. Load figure. Zero figure. Take the morph brush. Move a couple of verts on the face of the figure. File export wavefront .obj, all options unchecked. Export just head. Load as morph target on head. Do you get a wrong # of vertices nag? If so you're probably exporting more than just the head group. Eyes, rigged jaws, and rigged tongues are not the head group, they're individual body parts. Just the head.

The order error is when the mesh basically turns into exploding mush. The wrong # error is accompanied by a nag. Wrong vertex order is usually brought about by welding, mirroring, or unusual paths through external apps where the meshes order is re written. Wrong number is caused usually by too many parts/groups being included in an export/import. These are all quick generalizations, Including my instructions above. Just for examples sake.

Wow. I did what you said, unchecked the tongue and eyes so only the head was left. I exported the head as a morph target, no translations, moved a few vertices on the normal. I brought it back into Poser and it worked. Now I am pretty sure what I did was export the whole head and that screwed it up. Thanks! I am going to try a little bit more movement a little later on and see if it works. Then I will be set.

I'm going to let you in on a peculiar secret about morphing in wings, and older versions of Zbrush without GoZ. The problem is the difference in universe scaling between apps, Poser's scale is tiny compared to other apps. So, when you import your .obj into wings and export it back to Poser a little discrepancy is introduced into the .obj's position in Poser. Not a big or even really noticeable problem when just making a prop with a couple of morphs. It's usually a very tiny translation along the Y and Z axis. When dealing with many dialed morphs it does become a serious issue though. You'll find that every morph you make results in a tiny scaling translation error. These will add up over time, and multiply by however many custom morphs you dial in. Pretty soon you'll have visible jagged edges at body part seams and eyes poking through lids and the like. Here's one way of dealing with this, and an example of subtractive morphing to boot. In this example we'll be using the head of a figure to create morphs in wings.

Import your figure's mesh into Poser from the geometries folder.

Open the grouping tool and select the head group. Click spawn prop. Delete the figure mesh. You're left with just the head geometry in zero pose.

Scale the head prop to 1000%. File export wavefront obj the prop and name that scale 1000.

Import the scale 1000 obj as morph target and apply to your head prop. Restore the head prop to 100%. You now have a morph on your head prop called "scale 1000". If you dial this to 1 the head will scale to 1000%.

Now for morphing. Import the scaled head prop that you exported from poser earlier into wings. Morph using magnet fall offs or whatever. Export your wings morph making sure that you give it a concise name (don't use untitled.obj!). Back in Poser load this morph into the head prop. Dial to 1. Dial scale 1000 morph to -1. The results will look pretty strange, that's ok. We'll deal with that. Export your head prop with both of those morphs dialed in with the same name as the morph you loaded, this will overwrite that old scaled morph. Delete the dialed to 1 morph from the palette, reset the scale 1000 morph to 0. Load that morph target you just exported and dial to 0.100. There's your morph with no translation errors, you can increase or decrease the strength of the morph to taste. A final export of that morph as .obj will result in a full strength morph when at 1. A lot of work for a single morph, but no errors. There's tools that can automate this process, I just do it manually. You can use subtractive morphing for a whole bunch of things, mixing morphs, fixing expressions and screw ups way after the fact, making last minute changes to default features positions (lids partially closed for remapping your .obj, etc.), subtracting proprietary morphs from custom to create legal INJ files, jcm's, etc. Told you I had a weird workflow when morphing with wings, these are things that I discovered by experimenting, dealing with limited resources being a mac user, and agonizing over Poser's ridiculous scaling issues. Of course you can ignore my bizarre hoop jumping method and just use PML or some such, or nothing at all. Just remember that when you start seeing your figure's eyes popping out of its head when you dial in a few of your morphs that I toldya so. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen translation errors in custom morphs in commercial products. Especially before GoZ or PML. Just a few months ago I helped a really nice guy over at the RDNA forum create a .pmd INJ (ended up he was having naming problems with his morph targets that conflicted with internal dial naming, remember what I said about morph target naming?). Anyway, it was a FBM .pmd INJ, and I mean every single body part on v4 was included, I got the INJ working for him but the morph was so mutilated with translation errors that I wouldn't call it distributable by any stretch. A real shame as it was a decent FBM otherwise. Scaling. ;)

Christ, they really need to increase the edit time for posts. Or I need to pay more attention to paragraphs in my ramblings. Sorry about all that dense text.

There's also (yeah, I'm in the middle of a long shadow pass render so I'm killing time) the problem with wings breaking up welded meshes into seperate objects by groups. You'll run into this problem when you try to create full body morphs in wings. There's also a rather easy workaround for that. Apparently the guy I mentioned above had this problem in Zbrush on top of the scaling issue, probably because he used an export from poser rather than the .obj from geometries. Cross body part morphs trash the seams between groups during in poser .cr2 weld when you attempt to morph an unwelded mesh. The fix for wings is oddly almost the opposite. Let me know if you want the workaround.

I may need it when I start working on my Calcaran. Right now I am just doing basic stuff playing with a few Poser natives trying things on different partial body morphs.

Is the workaround to uncheck the "Include body part names in polygon groups" option?