I have an issue with V4. When the simple smile morph is used her mouth migrates up her face. This breaks some character morphs in the process and is completely unnatural. I've checked in the mirror and my mouth does not move up my face when I smile. To get around this I have to use the Mouth Height morph to compensate but this is clunky and I have to remember where that dial is set to for a particular character morph otherwise removing the smile breaks the character in the other direction. When I say "break the character" I mean that V4 no longer looks like the character that you've loaded in. Is there a way to make a dial that auto compensates for this mistake? Positive direction with the MouthSmileSimple dial activates the MouthHeight dial in a negative way?

On a zero head V4, I set the simple smile to 1 and mouth height to -2.38. I then did Object/Spawn Morph Target. I guess you could export this morph and then load it to your character. Or do a Figure/Copy Morphs from this V4 to your character V4.

That would probably do the trick for a default V4 and custom morphed characters. Probably not work so well on dial spun Morph++ characters. It's so frustrating.

I tried it on a dial spun Morph++ character. I made the morph on a zero V4 and did the figure copy morph to the modified V4. It worked, but I guess it really depends on the design of the target character. V4's high smile always bugged me, too. BTW, I laughed out loud when you wrote how you checked your smile in the mirror. Good luck with this.

thanks for getting back to me. I'm going to have to give it much thought.

Here they are with the default Simple Smile morph.

Here they are with my spawned Low Smile morph.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I should have thought to use Mouth Height to fix the goofy smile.

Yes, that looks 100x better than the default smile on your character. The chin just gets bigger and bigger without the compensation.

Aslo using a full amount of the smile morph or any of the expression morphs can sometimes be too much and make the character look too extreme or cartoonish. I had to dial it back and only use .5 of the smile and half of the compensation on this character.

I usually apply the expressions on another frame like 20 or so and then go somewhere in between frames to get a subtler version. But I'm also going to try VedaDalsette's suggestion and export a combination of morphs, thanks for the idea!

@Kalypso you are using the animation features because of dynamic cloth?

You can create a master parameter dial that controls any combination of dials you need via the parameters pallet.

At the top of the parameters pallet look for the arrow pointing to the right of the screen. Click it and a menu will drop down. Choose 'Create new master parameter'. Give it a name.

It should show up in the Morphs list of your figure. Then click the arrow to the right of it. Choose Edit Dependencies. The dependencies editor window will pop up.

There's a button at the top of the menu that says Start Teaching, with a dial next to it and a value of 0. Click that button, then find the morph(s) you want to control and put a value in them, any value at all will add that parameter to the list of dependencies. Set the value of the master dial to 1.0 (or whatever value you want that makes sense for you, I generally always use 1.0 for 100% and 0.0 for 0%), then set the value of the morph to whatever value you need it to be when the master dial is at 100%. Then reverse it, set master dial back to 0 and your morph dials to zero. Then click Stop Teaching. Your master parameter should now control the morphs and scaling that you need.

You can generate a new injection morph from this dial to inject into any other figure that has those morphs.

Any parameter in the parameters pallet can become a master parameter.

@AmbientShade Thanks dude! That is really handy. Maybe I should RTFM next time. lol

@ghostship2 Actually I've been using the animation controls for years now to tweak morphed characters and even add variety to poses. See this for tweaking a morphed character from a very old product I had at RDNA.

When I want to make some subtle changes to a figure's morph/expression/pose but don't want to lose the one I already have I just go to another frame and adjust what I want. You can always add more frames even after you've finished a cloth simulation. Everything is saved in the .pz3 so for the final render I can choose which version I want.

Here are the tips for posing:

@Kalypso That's cool! I'll have to look into that for poses.

I'm having issues with exporting this new morph. I've made morphs before with the morph brush and exported them into my pose library and they work fine but this new morph spawned from two other morphs doesn't load after I've made it. I'm making the new morph and it works then export it to my library and then I close and re-start Poser. The morph is in the folder I placed it but when I load it either nothing happens or it is in a place I'm not aware of and I can't find it on my figure.

Do you have 'Use external binary morphs' checked in the misc. tab in general preferences? iirc this is required in order for the inj script that poser generates to work correctly because it creates a pmd file. The daz figures morphs do things differently and don't use pmd so I'm not sure if the setup would be exactly the same. It's been too long since I worked with those figures to remember, but I do know you can convert all their morphs to a single pmd and use that instead of injecting all of them directly (makes the cr2 much lighter).

AmbientShade posted at 9:09PM Mon, 29 March 2021 - #4415840

Do you have 'Use external binary morphs' checked in the misc. tab in general preferences? iirc this is required in order for the inj script that poser generates to work correctly because it creates a pmd file. The daz figures morphs do things differently and don't use pmd so I'm not sure if the setup would be exactly the same. It's been too long since I worked with those figures to remember, but I do know you can convert all their morphs to a single pmd and use that instead of injecting all of them directly (makes the cr2 much lighter).

I normally have UEBM off. With them on it still doesn't do anything for adding the morph...unless I need that on when I create the morph? What does happen is the "Mouth Height" morph gets loaded and works, the MouthSmileSimple morph is loaded by default with V4 but my custom morph is nowhere to be found. More testing is needed I guess.

reading the section in the manual about master parameter dials. it seems that this is meant just for changing parameters and does not actually contain morph data and there is also no mention of any way to save these master parameters into a library. Bummer.

ghostship2, I did the following and exported a LowSmile morph injection (made from SimpleSmile and MouthHeight). (1) loaded default V4; injected her base morphs and morphs++; (2) set MouthHeight to -1.238 and MouthSmileSimple to 1.0; (3) Object/Spawn Morph Target (I called it LowSmile); (4) File/Export/Morph Injection; saved V4LowSmile as pz2; (5) loaded another V4 and injected the base morphs and morphs++; (6) injected the V4LowSmile to her; it worked fine; I also made sure I could open her mouth while the new morph was loaded; (7) loaded a third default V4, this time without the base morphs and morphs++; (8) injected the V4LowSmile to her; it also worked! (couldn't open her mouth, because I never loaded the base morphs).

I never played with the Teach stuff in Edit Dependencies or used CombineMorph. I'll have to play with them someday.