It had been a long time since I loaded up Michael. The overall impressions lingered in my mind from my first experiences. Foremost, the impression one gets after a few short moments of using him that the time spent on him was a lot shorter then the time spent on Vicky in production. Moving his parts around, Mike feels "Cheap". Limited Morphs for the face hampers the ability to shape him into anything but Mike. Nose Morphs too easily distort the shape into something unreal. This, I suspect is due to the default shape being rather rigid. Furthermore, the eyes will NOT move with magnets. In order to move his eyes around, one must use trans settings, which constantly reset themselves. To me, it seems, that unless you're fine with the way Mike looks by default (or just slightly morphed out of default) Mike is useless. He takes up a lot of memory for very limited purpose. Vicky, at least, has always justified her memory requirements. Mike 2, to be useful, should have completely reworked joint paramaters. Dozens more facial morphs that actually work. The ability to use magnets on the eyes and/or morphs to reposition them independantly in conjunction with face morphs, like on V2. Full Body Morphs should give true options to radically alter his default body shape. All of these new features should actually have the feel of quality time spent on them, as they feel on V2. If none or few of these things are possible and nothing more, perhaps Mike 2 should be scrapped in favor of a new High-res male. Else, maybe DSI will learn their lesson from Dina and make an attractive male model along the same lines. -WTB

I know that they are working on him at Daz. I will say this though, compared to the Dork Mike is incredibly useful, and I have never had any regrets about getting him. I'm hoping they will do the same with the new Mike that they did with Vickie, have a version for the P4 clothing as well. I would love to see DSI come out with a new male, but I will still get the new Mike as well, because variety is the spice of life. I'm still waiting for the shoulder fix on Dina though before I buy any more characters from DSI. Marque

Yes, after a nice while of using V2, going to Mike or V1 feels like a huge step backward. i wouldn't say Mike is useless, exactly, just a lot of work to get to look non-Mike-like, as was Vicki 1, as are all the regular P4 people. i suspect DAZ is taking their time getting M2 out the door because they know they raised their own bar with V2! By the bye, why would one want to move his (or anyone's) eyes with magnets? i think i'm missing something there. While i have respect for DSI and the amount of effort involved, given that the bar has been raised with V2, Dina just doesn't seem to go far enough, and is another doll-like character rather than a morphable digital human; i find her proportions...er, not to my taste, and a bit jarring to the eye. But this isn't a Dina thread. :^) Other thoughts?

When you morph the head with magnets, you sometimes do so in hopes to move the eye area around a bit. Well, if you're going to move the eye area, you've got to be able to move the eyes too. Doing so with magnets insures that they are in exactly the same relative space as they should be, whereas using the trans dials is guesswork and can lead to bad "Point at" results not to mention that they get reset everytime you apply a pose or what not. -WTB

If Mike 2 has good ethnic morphs like Vicki 2 has, I'll be ecstatic! (Mike's Asian morph is horrible.) Now, if only we could get some decent Asian textures for him ... hint, hint, hint to all the texture vendors out there.

Michael does have very distinctive features. I have spent LOTS of time morphing him so all my projects don't look like I'm running a clone lab. Put the best of the morphs, MAT pose files, etc into my MikePlusPack and MikeMagicEyes. People seem to find them useful and well-priced. The problem I ran into when fitting his eyes to morphs was that you can set fourth decimal place settings, but they won't show up on the dials, which round off to three places, and are easily erased (-0.0004 shows as -0.000). Pose files let you set precise values. MikeMagicEyes has a good selection of poses that instantly set both the morph and eye positions. Got the name because once I got them all set up, it feels like magic to use them. If you have made custom morphs, you can figure out the eye positions, then duplicate one of my pose files, open it in a text editor and just replace the settings with yours. Detailed directions in the included illustrated Acrobat user's guide. HTH, Elisa/gryffnn

I think Mike-01 is a tremendus leap above the regular Poser 4 male. I find the face is very morphable for creating different characters. My main art interest leans towards fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror, so, I would have prefered a more morphable body, but addons like Massive Mike and Muscle Mike fill that void pretty well for me. I've also seen some amazing faces created with the orignal Poser 4 Male utilizing morph targets but the body, no matter what you do never seems to look right. Of coarse if your character id fully clothed, thats not an issue. Just my two cents, Thorgrim

heyas; well, from what i heard, vicky 1 wasn't so great, either. didnt have all the super head morphs, new character faces, body morphs, etc etc. i expect michael 2 will fix that, the same way v2 fixed v1. oh, if the eyes dont move with magnets, turn their bend properties on. magnets will not affect body parts that dont bend. (dont ask me why, they just made it that way.) once you spawn the morphs, turn the bend back off; the morphs will work as normal, of course.

I heard a great qoute this weekend that I think applies to mike and all past and future poserprojects... "concentrate on progress rather than perfection" Basically it means every step forward is a good step. Imagine if we had all dismissed poser based on the first models we had to work with. What I really want rather than another model is better rendering, the ability to select an area for test rendering and specularity. After I have all that then I'll start asking for a better Mike and real hair and colistion detection and radiosity and motion capture .... etc.

otaku, that's for the "Another Poser Five Thread" thread, not the Michael 2 thread. -WTB

otaku, that's for the "Another Poser Five Thread" thread, not the Michael 2 thread. -WTB

My meaning was not so much about poser as we need to concentrate on new areas rather than going back and redoing the same project over and over. Kind of like replacing all my lps with cds and vhs with dvds.While I'm very happy with V2 I was a little disappointed in the fact that I had to go back and rebuy the clothing to truly use her new features for anything other than pin-ups. I feel the same way about a redo of mike. I would prefer they concentrate on clothing, hair and plug-ins as well as highly detailed props rather than another male model. I could see a morph pack that added to mikes facial versatility. Granted the poser stores are providing alot of these items I just feel zygote has a lot of models from their they could be converting to poser. I just feel like I'm upgrading the models I originaly got with poser as much as I'm upgrading computers. I guess what I'm trying to express is that with each of these upgrades I get a feeling of 3 steps forward 2 steps back kind of thing. Which my be an arguement for what your saying about a brand new model I just want it to be able to where old mike stuff.

Well, that did it, didn't it? All that time and the solution was right under my nose! The eyes now morph properly with magnets, this is so cool, this could really change how I feel about MIke. Thank you so much! -WTB

What I really want for mike is a jacket that bend at the shoulder like a real jacket does without looking like a bent tube. It looks correct when the arms are straight out but looks weird when you move them to his side.

Attached Link: http://poser.3dgladiators.com/