I've been doing a lot of back-and-forthing between Poser and both 3DS and trueSpace, and in typical fashion the scaling values have been a real pain (for 3DS; trueSpace seems to handle the scaling a lot better and truePose helps tons. Alas, some stuff I just can't do in tS so gotta rely on 3DS now and then). One thing I worked out tonight regarding inerchange with 3DS really helped loads so I thought I'd share in case someone else didn't already know this. First, use Objaction scaler! Here's the cookbook: 1. Save Poser item as OBJ 2. Expand to 100000 (yep, one hundred thousand) 3. Import to 3DS (I use the Habware plug-ins) 4. Edit away, careful not to change center or scaling 5. Export to OBJ (again, Habware plug-in) 6. Reverse the Scaler, shrinking by 100000 7. Import to Poser, unchecking everything but place on floor and scale -- use 97% for the scale factor. The last bit, the 97% scaling, was the last piece of the puzzle for me. I tried several exports of entire characters, deleting some part in 3DS, and bringing it back into Poser superimposed over the original character for accuracy. Round-off errors made the new figure slightly larger than the original once all was said and done, and thus far the 97% change has resulted in almost perfect superimposition of the edited version. I kept everything else at defaults all the way around, and thus far that's worked fine. Hope this helps someone; I was having a heck of a time getting stuff back without needing manual scale tweaks until I ran this experiment. Enjoy! Mark

Thanks Mark...That has givin me headaches for ever too. Thats why I always used LW for morph targets, hey don't get all weird on you. I'll try this, and thanks again.

Thanks for the info.

ummm the habware plugs will do all the scaling for you...when you import the obj to max set the vertex scale to 100,when you export set vertex scale to .01,and make sure the "digits" thing[can't remember just now what the plugin calls this,it's the last option at the bottom] is set to ten.works like a charm for me everytime and max remembers the settings so you only have to set it once. this is how i do morphs in max,i just select the entire figure and select the part of the obj[head,chest whatever] i want to work on from the plugin's list of parts and then just import the one part in max,when i'm done i export the single part as obj...and load it as a MT in poser,so far i haven't noticed any problems

Cool, that sounds like it would be a more straightforward approach -- if. Since I seem to have scared up an expert, maybe I could get ya to share a couple of things:

1. I do a lot of searching and reading, but these sorts of procedures don't seem to be documented where the info is easily found. Any help there on sources so I (and others, it seems) don't spend as much time re-inventing technique?

2. I tried your procedure as indicated, here are a sequence of screenshots of the attempt. What went wrong?

Thanks in advance!

Mark

try unchecking Centred and Percent of standing figure size. In fact I would be inclided to uncheck everything in that poser import box. Worth a try anyway.

ok here's how mine is set... OBJ2MAX IMPORT SETTINGS["yes" means check the box,"no" means leave it unchecked] IMPORT OPTIONS- multiple[select the part you want] helper....no group....no GEOMETRY SETTINGS- rotate model....yes texture coordinates....yes normals....yes obj smooth groups....yes unify....no vertex scale....100 center pivot....no MATERIALS- use materials....no that will get your future morph target into max at a workable scale and turned right side up. [you can make it bigger if you want,you just need to take that into consideration when you export] MAX2OBJ EXPORT SETTINGS GROUP AND MATERIAL- group by....object use materials....yes create material library....no GEOMETRY- rotate model....yes[if you did on import then you need to rotate it back now] faces....quads texture coordinates....yes normals....yes smooth groups....yes vertex scale.... 0.01 [again this is directly proportionate to what you increased it by in the import plugin,if you set your import scale at 1000 set the export too 0.001 etc etc] FILE- # of digits....10 compress numbers....no relative vertex numbers....no this is how i do it and i've not yet noticed any scale problems with morphs done this way. you can skip the poser import plugin settings all together btw...when you get done playing with your vertices in max export your part[head,chest whatever]as an obj using the settings above,I usually export my MT obj's to a seperate folder[call it whatever you like,i usually create it in poser's geometry folder and name it similar to whatever the figure they are destined for is called...ex;p4 woman MT's] start poser load the figure you made the morph target for select the part of the body the morph is for[ex; head] go to the "object" menu and select "load morph target" a box will pop up click on "locate file" and go find and select the morph obj you just made in max,then after thats done type a name for your morph in the second box where it sez "shape1".press ok and if all is well,a second later you will have a new dial to twiddle with at the top of all the others. now if you don't want to have to load the new morphs everytime you want to use that character save it your figures library and your new morph[s] will load everytime you select that figure.... and that FINALLY is how i make morphs in 3dsmax :)I wish i could just post some screen grabs like you did,it would have been easier and clearer,but i have nowhere to host em.i could wite an even longer response about things to do and how to do them in max but that's a lot of typing, and kind of outside the subject :)

That's great stuff, and thanks! One thing I noticed, I'm not making morphs. Rather, I'm editing actual mesh shapes into items to import as new body parts, props, completely new characters, etc. Could that have any impact on how tractable these settings are? Thanks again! Mark

no it shouldn't have any effect on the "max" end of things,just on how you bring them in to poser,the settings you have in your screenshot for the poser import plug are probably fine except that i would disable the "percent of standard figure" option,this will scale everything to approx six feet tall....unless it's a full figure this will create extra work for you rescaling it, and your original scale will likely be lost.

A minor note - the Max2Obj plugin often messes up the math if you scale more than one group. Works fine at 1:1, or for sacaling morphs (one group). It also sometimes messes up the edges, the polygons are cut differently. I'm under th eimpression that Objaction scaler looses UV mapping, incidently. While we shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I'm on record as willing to pay for a GOOD Max object file plugin. The Habaware one is almost a good one, but it's problems waste a lot of my time. The HAbaware guy is aware of th escaling problem, he answer was something like "But Poser stuff is so small"!

LOL @ "But Poser stuff is so small"! He's not wrong! I still have a few problems with the habware plugin too, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Just for curiosity, what OS do you run Jim?

Heh. I can understand his answer, though. Digital math is really a klunker; the more powers of two you scale a floating-point value by, the fewer binary digits you have left over to carry the decimal places for accuracy. In the experiment I described at the top of this thread my goal was to recognize the round-off problem, find a consistent scaling magnitude that gave me comfortably-large objects to work with in 3DS, and then counteract the round-off with the Poser's global scaling import. It just so happened that five orders of magnitude came out to about 3% round-off in Poser, hence the 97% final tweak. I didn't play with the Habware scalings, but I'm betting the rounding will be similar when all's said and done, just gotta find the time to run some values and see what happens. ObjScalar losing UV maps was something I hadn't considered; it's no big deal when I plan to re-map parts from scratch to fit a new role anyway, but getting them back to Poser makes for issues. Hmm. Morph targets have never been a problem for me, but since deciding to learn to make new objects these scaling issues have really become a pain. I thought I couldn't wait to ditch my "day job" in engineering, and here I am rarin' to crunch more numbers. Sheesh! LOL! Cheers! Mark

Now it is Win 2000 Pro, but I had the same problems with Win 98. My latest plan (which was suggested here, I forget by who) is to bring it into MAX at 1:1, set the pivots to 0:0:0 and use Max's scaling to scale up and down. I type in the numbers for scaling, I've never seen any round-off errors, incidently. Previous to that I used to move everthing back to a "reference" 1:1 figure, sort of a royal pain! BTW, you actually only need 6 on the number of digits, that I am sure of, some original Poser figures use only 5, I think UV Mapper uses 8 now, but it used 4 (or maybe it was 5) at one time. Maybe use 8 if you are afraid, but I use 6 on everything I do, makes for smaller files.

Ya know, I'm embarrassed to admit I hadn't caught on to the number/digits field for numeric precision. It is to blush. Thanks for all the insights! Cheers! Mark