Just wondering about the best/easiest ways to do certain things again...

Current Antonia has no functional jaw movements except the x-rotation, a.k.a. MouthOpen, which is implemented via a head morphs. I'd like to have a go at creating weights maps for the relevant jaw movements, which I guess are all except the z-rotation, even though the y-shift might not be used much except for monster-type characters. :-)

Anyway, since weight-mapping the lips and the areas around and inside the mouth is a tad tricky, I'd like to reuse as much of them as I can, so start with the x-rotation, copy to the other channels and tweak as necessary.

First question, are there any particular gotchas for that kind of thing? Since all the same actors are involved, there shouldn't be vertex-number-related problems. But are the weights treated similarly enough in different rotation types?

Second question, is there an easier way to achieve this than cutting and pasting the relevant portions of the cr2?

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.

Extra question: would anything prevent me from changing joint settings via an injection pose?

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.

It's entirely possible to do side to side and forward back morphs for the jaw very convincingly. It's such a small transformation that the problem with morphs mimicking rotations problem doesn't become apparent. I'm too tired from work to show you example animations at the moment. This can easily include rigged mouth actors such as the tongue by using the match centers command.

That being said, I feel it's better to have a rigged jaw. I only know the above from creating mouth morphs for figures that don't have a rigged jaw.

As far as your actual queries go, why not try the Poser 11 technical forum? Nerd is a mod there, this sounds like something he'd be able to answer. He's managed to create weight map injections and knows a ton of related things.

primorge posted at 5:25 PM Wed, 3 August 2022 - #4442260

As far as your actual queries go, why not try the Poser 11 technical forum? Nerd is a mod there, this sounds like something he'd be able to answer. He's managed to create weight map injections and knows a ton of related things.

I'll do that then.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.

Here's a rather poorly executed, clunky animation of what I was talking about earlier. Obviously a toon figure so there's some latitude for realism. All of the mouth motions are custom morphs and the tongue is a conformer I made. There's a lot of cross talk between the figure morphs and the conformer, including translations. Basically jaw side side forward back mouth open tongue out.

Much easier to do these things with a rigged jaw, and better results but not impossible via morphs...

Yep, that's a pretty neat animation. I think I've seen it or a similar one before in other forums. Sure, if the mouth can be opened with a morph, why should the same not be possible for other jaw movements? When I made Antonia's expressions, using morphs seemed like the easiest solution because Poser did not support weight-mapping yet and rigging via zones would have at the very least required for the base shape to have the mouth open. Now that's changed so I might as well have a go at rigging the jaw.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.

odf posted at 7:47 PM Wed, 3 August 2022 - #4442266

Yep, that's a pretty neat animation. I think I've seen it or a similar one before in other forums. Sure, if the mouth can be opened with a morph, why should the same not be possible for other jaw movements? When I made Antonia's expressions, using morphs seemed like the easiest solution because Poser did not support weight-mapping yet and rigging via zones would have at the very least required for the base shape to have the mouth open. Now that's changed so I might as well have a go at rigging the jaw.

Oh definitely. She should have a rigged jaw. I'm sorry I can't offer any advice on weight mapping a jaw, haven't tried it yet. Ask nerd, he's sure to respond. You're a respected Poser fixture.

:thumbsup:

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.

Had some time to ponder your questions, which I wasn't initially understanding. It's been a while since I looked at Antonia's rig. I was assuming the jaw wasn't rigged at all. I'm assuming that the jaw rotation only effects the inner mouth parts (tongue, and lower teeth) and that the other rotations are locked. I'm at work so I can't look right now.

You can add a weight map to those rotations via the joint editor, create new map with that rotation selected in the editor and set it to replace. This will create a map that overwrites the traditional sphere deformer. From there you can paint tweak the rotations. This is how I do it, I rig with traditional spheres and then use the merge to weight maps command (figure menu) which creates maps for all the rotations set as replace. But this is global, you can selectively replace.

As far as the weight map injector goes, nerd has a tutorial for that somewhere on the site. Can't look for it now. Probably he'll respond to your query on the 11 tech forum. If he doesn't I'll track it down when I get home from work and link it here.

This is all off the top of my head, not looking at Poser. If still no response I'll expound further with some images later tonight.

"create new map with that rotation selected in the editor and set it to replace."

Small correction. With that actor selected.

https://www.posersoftware.com/article/551/weight-map-injection

Thanks for the link! I had a quick look just now, pretty much like what I figured. But the details can be hairy, so it's nice to have the document to go by.

I know how to set up weigh-mapping via the joint editor, and I agree that starting with spheres and then use that function that bakes all existing deformers into a weight-map is the best way.

My question was specifically about copying an existing weight map to a different channel, say from x-rotate to y-rotate. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure the weight-map editor actually has copy/paste functionality (it does in P12, anyway), which I've used before. So I could have just asked my past self. :-)

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.