When I use Mike 4 (and some others) and I put his arm down, the shoulder of his shirt bulges out.

This has been a problem forever and I get tired of fixing it with the morph brush every time I pose him. Is there a way to adjust the rigging so it just doesn't happen?

You can create a JCM (joint controlled morph) and save it in the shirt.

Give me a bit and I'll post the steps how to create one, it's pretty simple.

That would be awesome

You can also use bulges in the Joint Editor to control that. If you convert the clothing to Weight mapping, it's gonna be even easier.

Sorry for the delay, I ran into some issues I was trying to sort out. I'll get to that in a bit.

Ohki is correct, you could create a bulge map with the joint editor and that could be easier for you.

So we can go over how to do that real quick.

You don't have a whole lot of control over basic (traditional) bulge maps because they're based on the joints of the rig. If you open the joint editor (window>joint editor) with the arm selected, at the top (2nd row) you'll see a down arrow. Select Up-Down from that menu.

In the 4th box down you'll see Bulge Settings.

You can adjust the dials under bulge settings (right neg, right pos, left pos, left neg) to make the mesh around the joint bulge in or out depending on the shape you're looking for. It can get a bit tricky trying to remember which direction to use based on what position you're adjusting so just experiment with them. For the shirt you can adjust the right pos dial in the negative direction to pull the shirt closer to the figure's shoulder (when the shoulder is in the down position). Just be sure you have the shirt's shoulder selected and not the figure's shoulder. You'll need to move the figure's shoulder up and down to test the changes and it's easy to forget that you have to re-select the shirt or you'll be changing the bulge maps on the figure instead. You don't need the shirt conformed to the figure in order to adjust the bulge settings but it helps so that you can see how far to turn the dials before they begin intersecting the figure's mesh.

If you convert the figure to unimesh then you'll be able to paint bulges using weight maps, which gives much more control over how much the mesh bulges and where. Figure>Skinning Method>Poser unimesh, But the figure (in this case the conforming shirt) has to be converted to unimesh in order for this to work. If you have a pen tablet it will be easier due to the pressure sensitivity but you don't have to have one, it might just take a little longer. It's similar to using the morph brush

Once you've converted the shirt to unimesh, open the joint editor (if it's not already open) and go back to the Bulge Settings. Each map has an option to use weightmaps. When you check that box the paintbrush icon to the right will light up. That's a button to bring up the weight painting tool. Click it. You'll get this menu.

It functions similarly to the morph brush but instead of seeing a cluster of green and red dots you'll see a light grey bulls eye for your mouse and the green-red dots (vertices) will be static on the mesh. Green is 90-100% strength, red is medium strength and purple/black is almost nothing (these values are approximate). Subtract, Add, Smooth and Weight are the brush types. It will be set to Add by default. The brush shapes are the row of black dots across the center of the menu. The small dot furthest to the left will affect vertices one at a time with no falloff. The largest solid dot all the way to the right is basically the same thing but affects a much larger area, with no falloff. The 3 in the middle range in falloff zones. You can also adjust the radius of the brush with the Radius dial and the Magnitude determines how fast and far the mesh is moved, same as with the morph brush. Poser will remember the settings you have for each of the 4 brush types, which is helpful because you don't always want the same magnitude on each brush. I usually start with a 0.1 on magnitude. With the arm bent, and Add selected you can paint over the shoulder area like you would if you were using the morph brush. The mesh will push down closer to the figure's shoulder. Keep in mind that the dials in the Bulge Settings on the Joint Editor will still influence the strength of the bulge map you're painting, which means that you don't always need to paint a bulge map into the green for it to have a strong enough affect for the results you're looking for. From there it's just a matter of trial and error. Paint some, test the bend, adjust the bulge dials, repeat until you're happy with the results. Once you're satisfied you can close the joint editor and save a new copy of the clothing with your improved bulge maps. 

Hope this was descriptive enough to get you started.

I can explain how to set up a jcm in another post - I ran into some issues with it for M4 as it doesn't behave the same as with other Poser figures for some reason and I was trying to figure out why.

"I can explain how to set up a jcm in another post - I ran into some issues with it for M4 as it doesn't behave the same as with other Poser figures for some reason and I was trying to figure out why."

Don't use Create New Master for the crosstalk empty master in M4's body, spawn an empty morph in the body to use as the crosstalk.

So, for instance, the JCMs in the shirt are named rShldrBend80JCM/lShldrBend-80JCM let's say (internal names)...

Do this, with the M4 figure completely 0 go to figure menu Spawn Full Body Morph. Name it anything unique, we'll change this in a bit.

Your Blank FBM will appear, every actor in M4 will now have a local empty (including parented props)... right click the FBM dial and Delete Morph. Select all and then deselect just the empty in the body. Delete. You're left with just an empty master in the Body.

This is a targetGeom rather than a valueParm generated by the Create New Master command.

Do some hidden cleaning up, in the Hierarchy select the goal center of mass props and delete those empties that are left hiding in there... remember I said it generates an empty across all, including parented props. The initial delete morph action doesn't include those empties in the props. This goes for controlHandleProps also.

Go to that empty targetGeom you have and activate the dials settings. Rename as desired insuring that the internal name matches the internal name of the target JCM in the shirt, so in this instance it would be rShldrBend80JCM. You can rename internal names by clicking the internal name field. Set the limits min 0/max 1. Note that when you rename internally when you close the settings it will plop that dial down to the morph group, so if you had it in any other dial group you'll have to move it back there.

Ok, so now we have this empty targetGeom master sitting in the M4 body, named internally to match the internal name of the target JCM in the shirt.

Go to the zRotate dial of M4 rShoulder (Up-Down). Edit dependencies. Start teaching. Set the shoulder z rotation to 80, set the targetGeom dial to 1. Set the z rotation to 0, set the targetGeom dial to 0. Stop teaching. You now have an empty targetGeom dial in M4 that sets to 1 when the shoulder is set to 80 degrees. Being that this is internally named to match a morph in the shirt, when M4's shoulder is bent to 80 degrees the named dial will be set to 1 (thats all it does, sets a dial value to 1, no other action in M4) consequently the liked named morph in the shirt will be set to value 1. That is if you have include morphs when conforming checked in the conformer's properties.

Repeat for the left target JCM.

This should solve the problem.

All that needs to be done to set up the JCMs in the shirt is basically split morph and reverse deformations for the rotations. No need to set up a dependency to the rotation, the crosstalk in M4 handles that.

"All that needs to be done to set up the JCMs in the shirt is basically split morph and reverse deformations for the rotations. No need to set up a dependency to the rotation, the crosstalk in M4 handles that."

I meant subtract here, Poser semantics.

Basically you want to subtract just the deformations derived from the rotations leaving just the changes from the actual morph fix itself. I suppose you can use convert to post/pre transform, I've always found it to be a bit confusing and wonky. I subtract by zeroing the rotations, leaving the morph fix active, and exporting that result as FBM. Reapplied it will just be the fix itself, the rotation deformations are subtracted

Wow, it's no wonder there weren't many jcms added to clothing back in the day. Reminds me of a saying my papaw had about elbows and orifices.

The simple way I had it set up (like with most poser native figures) was working fine but it wasn't displaying the graph for the keyed dependencies so there was no way to control the strength through the bend that I could find.

It's been a long time since I made anything for M4 and I'd forgotten how convoluted it can get.

Thanks for describing all that.

It's not this complicated to set up a simple jcm for a normal Poser figure (which is why I said in my initial reply that it's simple). You just create the morph, go to the figure's limb you want to control the morph, edit dependencies, start teaching, set limb at max angle, morph at 1, limb at 0, morph at 0, stop teaching, done.

Here's a couple of complex crosstalk examples, in this instance with MCM/JCM...

The Toon Brows are a conformer that crosstalks and matches the morphs that deform the figure's mesh to create brow expressions. The figure is mine. The crosstalk also connects to dependencies linked to a ghost bone that drives a control prop that allows direct manipulation of both eyes simultaneously... It controls the brow and eye controllers in the figure, and the lid morphs.

It's the same principle as a simple clothing JCM just a bit more convoluted, and in this instance not via an empty, same principle though. Utilizing an empty in M4 is less invasive and you're not trying to match any pre existing morph in M4, simply drive a morph value in the conformer via a rotation in M4.

The parms crosstalk in the conformer and the target figure...

The conformer Brows...

The Brow expression Parms in the target figure...

As far as "how convoluted it can get", that's just my process. I like to use targetGeom because it's an actual morph parm, in the body. I've encountered some snafus related to valueParm and pmd injection etc in the past. It's just my workflow that I've developed that seems to be reliable across various scenarios. If it works as they say. I'm sure someone like Nerd could clarify and correct my assumptions. Because 9 times out of 10 that's all you'll ever get are assumptions in relation to this stuff. It's not really documented and you're at the mercy of a handful who might actually know. My method has become experiment until it works reliably across various scenerios. There's some really strange bugs that I've discovered recently about unimesh as opposed to classic, figure construction, and rendering the same in Firefly and Superfly and wildly different results therein that are quite mysterious, and very situational... but that's a story for another time.

Sorry for the hijack.

It's not hijacking, this info needs to be made available for people who want to create for Poser, regardless of how unconventional it might be.

I haven't gone to that level of experimenting yet but it's always interesting to learn other ways of doing things.

For this instance the goal was to create a simple jcm. For a standard Poser figure the channel doesn't need to exist in the figure, just in the clothing. If the clothing isn't there then there's no sign of the jcm in the figure. So if you want to create a jcm in a shirt sleeve that may not exist in other shirt sleeves for the same figure, just create it in that shirt, and when it is conformed to the figure that figure's arm will control it. It is most likely better to have the name of the jcm in the clothing correspond to the name of the jcm in the figure but I don't think this is mandatory outside of daz figures. So far I haven't found any issues with doing it this way but I won't say there aren't any, I just know it's the most basic way to get started down the rabbit hole of jcms.

Maybe with threads like this more folks who know more advanced methods will contribute.

Bookmarked this page. Thanks guys, this is exactly the kind of discussions this forum needs!

M4's shoulders have always been a #@%& in the butt to work with..

Thanks so much. I chose to adjust the bulges rather than create the JMCs since those seem to be problematic. Maybe I'll try that with another figure first. Dath thanks you too. As the chauffeur for one of the most powerful men on his planet, he always wants to look his best.

It looks great, indeed