Is there a simple trick to make poser anime figures? Can you do so just by modifying the figure face?

Some people have been able to morph the head to anime proportions, but it's not exactly simple. More commonly, anime versions of popular figures are released. Like Aiko for DAZ's Victoria, or Sora for Dawn. Or the figure is designed as anime from the beginning, like NearMe.

Someone at Hivewire is selling anime heads that you can stick on any body. There's an anime head and a chibi head.

Depending on what kind anime style you want, the entire Aiko/Hiro series was made as an anime/manga style (Aiko, Hiro, AikoToon, HiroToon, Aiko4 Hiro4 etc,) plus NearMe, AnimeDoll and AnimeAlice. There have been a LOT of anime figures made for Poser. I still think the 3rd gen Aiko3/Hiro3/AikoToon/HiroToon are the closes in style and expression to anime (a lot of anime video series were made with them).

If you have the Capsces morph sets for any of the Poser figures you can make them look a lot more anime ish.

KEN1171 does the anime stuff over at Hivewire 3D https://hivewire3d.com/shop/shop-by-artist/ken1171-designs/universal-chibi-head.html

You might want to try out some of the older Japanese figures that were designed for anime and are still available for free. My favorites are Sera (by futepen) and Kururu (by Mato). I downloaded both of them a few years ago and managed to gather an impressive collection of free stuff for them (clothes, hair, skin, etc.) I also have the Wardrobe Wizard module for them, so I can convert clothes from other figures.

There's also Deco (woman), Decocco (girl), and Maybe (man), all by Akatora, and they also have some free clothes and hair. They're set up to be used with Poser's OpenGL Cartoon mode, so their coloring will look a bit weird in the more standard Texture Shading mode. But you can apply other kinds of materials to them if you'd prefer to get the anime look another way.

If you google Motsura Manga, there are quite a few images of Motsura's Manga Character for Posette.

Here's my take on the 1998 classic artwork iMac Girl, using Motsura's Manga kit.

and the original:

Looking at my Poser 4 Runtime, I see that my iMac Girl was 19 in March this year ? The file was so old I had to convert some pict format images to png before Poser Pro 11 on macOS 10.12.6 could render or even preview them. Wow!

There's lots of (older but damned useful) Anime freebies out there as well... look up AnimeDoll, Decoco, Sera, Kururu, AnimeGirl Kristin (for starters.) There's also, as mentioned, pay-for items like NearMe, the Aiko series from DAZ, and suchlike. (I think the NearMe figure isn't available anymore, but it may re-surface here in Renderosity's marketplace.)

There is also a massive group of folks in and around Japan who make not only these figures, but a metric ton of freebies around them. Just note that it's hit-or-miss... some figures have tons of support, others have pretty much none.

Start here if you really want to poke around: https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Category:Anime (just be careful - it's kinda addictive to poke around in there.)

I realised in my earlier post that I couldn't find any of the Poser 4 scene files I must have saved two decades ago, since they were never kept in the Runtime itself. I can't even find any renders older than 2002/2003, and I had a lot. They must all be on an old HD somewhere. Probably SCSI, which I'll have trouble accessing now, since my old dual 2GHz Power Mac doesn't want to power up anymore.

I couldn't find the poses that I know I must have done for Posette, so I just made a new one (in previous post) and RayTrace Previewed it. Now I've fixed the pose to better match the source (the feet poses aren't symmetrical, or you'd see the right foot poke above the thigh). Anyway, iMac Girl pose v2 full render.

Posette and the catsuit with my 20 year old crappy texturing skills, converted to unimesh and 1 level of subdivision. The Manga head and hair have 2 levels of subd. As mentioned, I had to convert the eye textures (I modelled new eyes with an inset pupil and cornea) from PICT to PNG before I could preview or render them. Poser Pro 11 also made it trivially simple to split the smiling eyes expression so I could blink just the one eye.

Alas! Poor knees, I knew them, Horatio! This is why we use weight mapped figures nowadays. I sometimes think, and others have mentioned, that Posette could do with being weight mapped. But then I listen to other opinions and have come to the conclusion that it's probably better to go with a figure designed for weight mapping from the outset. Posette certainly is a much lighter vertex load than V4, I cannot deny.

Ah, the time I spent trawling the Japanese Poser Enthusiasts' web sites. Kozaburo, Yamato, Maya, Bat, Motsura and many, many others. Good times

[ETA] Oh, forgot the most important attribution: Jura11's Classic Bedroom! [E2TA] D'Oh! And the flag for NSFW!

OK, last one, I promise. Since the original question was about making anime figures, it seemed appropriate to contrast the iMac Girl, which is a replacement anime head and limb scaling of Posette, against a weight mapped V4 with anime facial features modelled on the live-action CGI fusion movie Alita, Battle Angel (Figure scale is 81% giving about 1.5m height).

"What am I supposed to do with this blown-up doll?" "Well, you're a cyborg with a human brain, I'm sure you'll think of something"

For me I've found that Aiko 3 and other Aiko versions do a good job for female anime characters. I just takes some patience to get the look that you want. I haven't tried yet, but I think the Girl will work for creating anime characters.

I have a bunch of examples in my Renderosity gallery There is also an Everything Aiko thread that has examples from other people as well https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2890742

This is Aiko 3. She's an older character, but still has a lot of use.

FightingWolf posted at 4:46AM Sun, 28 July 2019 - #4356929

For me I've found that Aiko 3 and other Aiko versions do a good job for female anime characters. I just takes some patience to get the look that you want. I haven't tried yet, but I think the Girl will work for creating anime characters.

I have a bunch of examples in my Renderosity gallery There is also an Everything Aiko thread that has examples from other people as well https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2890742

Totally agree, it's like Daz hit comic illustration gold with gen 3 figures. Add Capsces morph sets to each of them and you're set. I think the overall mesh shape and the expressions were just far better for comic illustration than prior generations and gen 4 onward. It's as if Gen 4 and on seem to be tailored to... well.... the nsfw industry.

GhengisFarb posted at 7:41PM Mon, 29 July 2019 - #4358215

Totally agree, it's like Daz hit comic illustration gold with gen 3 figures. Add Capsces morph sets to each of them and you're set. I think the overall mesh shape and the expressions were just far better for comic illustration than prior generations and gen 4 onward. It's as if Gen 4 and on seem to be tailored to... well.... the nsfw industry.

I can grok that, but to be fair, the original Aiko '1' was adultish in body shape as well (worse, actually - wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped...)

If you can still find them, Thorne's works with Aiko 3, or the Chibibel mod, or similar? Well worth it. My favorite was Aiko 3 with a modified-all-to-hell "Kabuki" texture from the Momiji product... the results were cute as hell. I'll have to do a bit of archaeology to drag up some of the stuff I did back then.

Ah - found the texture... and then, I, umm, converted it from Vicky 3 to Vicky 4, then converted it from Vicky 4 to Genesis 3, tweaked bits of it yesterday, then whomped out a quickie Genesis 8 character, and poof - it now works on Genesis 8.

(and yeah, I meant a character for Victoria 3. It's long since gone now... the rest of the set was nice for its time, but that one Kabuki texture set is one for the ages, IMHO.)