I was working on another face for victoria. This time without the collagen pumped lips and I think I came up with a pretty nice looking face as you can see. But everytime I try to make her smile with the default morphs, it doesn't look right. This is the closest I could come to a almost decent smile without making my own morphs. Was wondering if anyone else has been successful in making a nice smile for Victoria. Seems to me the cheeks need a little lifting and the lips need to be rotate upwards slightly around the middle of the top lip. If you have ever made a nice smile, post a pic and show us. I almost put this out as a challenge to you to make her smile naturally :)

here is the smiley version.

I can almost understand why victoria hardly ever smiles LOL just doesn't look right. Maybe I need to start making my own morphs for this, might start collecting reference smiley material :) oopps theres one! LOL

I've noticed this, if you morph Vicki2 with her dials too much from her original shape then alot of her expression dials don't work right anymore. 8(

I did this smiling face for Vicki once. I think it turned out okay. I had not changed a lot of her facial features though, so I don't know if that would have made a difference.

I've done some nice parted lip/closed mouth smiles .. I don't think the smile is so unnatural, as it is her teeth that look like their made outta' plastic ... I'd love to do more "open" smiles, but unless someone comes up with a natural looking tooth enamel material, I guess I'll either have to settle for closed smiles or learn how to paint them myself. Rhi

Here's one I did that I think turned out well ... although, as you can see ... no teeth. :-)

I agree, the teeth make open smiles look kind of unnatural. I wonder if the DAZ teeth are better in this respect? Meanwhile, I realized that there is a strong line under Vicki's right eye in my picture, so I corrected that and here's the newer version.

Rhi, that's a cute smile!

The Daz teeth do make a difference. I have also found that by playing with the frown in reverse I can get a decent smile...weird huh? Marque

I sometimes put a bit of Snarl Right and Snarl Left to a small value as well, especially if the smile is suposed to be a bit lopsided.

Way back when I was still using Poser 3, I found that adding a trace of frown to the smile, it tamed down the U-shaped effect the smile resulted in on its own. I sometimes still do that in P4. You might give that a try. If you're using P5, I can't say if that'll work, since I don't have it. Melanie

Yep, I use the frown dials too for small smiles.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Y&Artist=Eowyn

Eowyn makes good smiles on her characters. You can check out her gallery for some and I know she has an expressions pak in her store. It is possible for Vicky to have a cute smile but you gotta work at it lol. I guess she's mad from being nekkid so much.

Yes, I play with the frown dials, too, and also with the eye dials so it won't be just the mouth smiling but the eyes, too.

Play with the phenomes too. the "A" dial does a nice start on a smile. The "ch", and "sh" dials help with pouty type looks too. Don't forget the eye and nose crinkles either...but Ratteler, you're right. There should be a cheek raise morph. That's what's missing, I'll bet.

Here's a cute smile for you :)

Definately experiment with combining low settings on a combination of several morphs, including negative settings. These are some (very compressed) from my DAZ VictoriaXprssnMagic. For my Xprssn products I don't use any of the face-shaping morphs, so as not to change a character when applied. But if you spawn a morph of your character's face, then you can use touches of face-shaping morphs too. Anything to trick Poser into moving vertices where you want them, even if you have to back parts of it off by using other morphs. You're right that the lips should move over and around the underlying teeth. I'm having a much easier time making expressions for my P5JudyMagic, since I'm creating morphs with them in mind. (Thanks folks for the morph suggestions.) Elisa/gryffnn

Oh, I meant to mention asymmetry - real expressions seldom match perfectly on both sides. Elisa/gryffnn

And another one... Some characters smile beautifully... some are really difficult to get to smile :) This is Gigi by Papu and vapo, the previous one is Zahrah by LadyJaiven.

Attached Link: http://www.artcollection4.hpg.ig.com.br/jjbinks/avarg1.htm

That's odd. I just started a quest for smiles last night. I was particularly looking for "Alberto Vargas" smiles (samples at the link). If anyone has done something like these, send the link this way!

I agree you can get away with it when it is a closed smile, but for those beautiful (in real life anyway) big exhuberant smiles, vici is definately lacking. The cheecks and top lip doesn't move right. I think when you smile it raises slightly. With have to get a mirror out and take notice of what happens with different types of smiles. Thing is, I really like the lip shape I came up with (in top pic). I don't want to mess with the shape too much other than morphing it into expressions. I love the smiles that Stephen Stahlberg does, they look so nice, a little like Cameron diaz type of smile IMO.

hmmm, took a look in the mirror. Really when you smile big your whole face from the eyes down move. Cheeks go up, eyes squint a little, lips definately raise the bigger the smile and are pulled tighter, and the chin muscles contract among some of the more obvious things. so there is a lot going on there.

Well I gave it a shot just using just the morphs that come with Vic 2. She has a lot of morphs but it's still hard to get a nice smile. I used the Dark Whispers Candi texture and hair, but it's Pure Vic 2 for the face morphs.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=258861&Start=1801&Sectionid=1&WhatsNew=Yes

This is the best smile i think i have ever seen, i know there was some post applied, but i dont know how much.

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=258861&Start=1801&Sectionid=1&WhatsNew=Yes

You might try experimenting with the nose wrinkle and secondary eye wince (lower eyelid) dials for V2 to help get that "whole face" smile.

The Millennium Teeth do make a difference, insofar as they were digitally scanned from a plaster cast of real teeth, whereas V/S/M's choppers are essentially nearly identical Chiclets by comparison. The only trouble with them is that because they're parented to your figure's eyeballs, they sometimes pop through lips because P4 doesn't have collision detection to know when the lips are moving inward. DAZ seems to be aware of this, because often after changing head position or the camera position, the teeth adjust their position to hide better. As far as decent smiles go, I can't add much to the above. Try experimenting with the A phoneme dial as the basis for a smile and then closing the mouth THEN gently adding smile and negative value frowns.

ok, this one is my latest effort with the base morph being A , then adjusting the smile morphs. I raised the mouth slightly and I think I messed with the chin a bit too cant remember if I did it was only very slightly. I also tried to tone down the dimples a bit. Oh and using the part lips will lift the top lip a little too. I think I like this one better than the top smiley one. I did save it just in case.

Taura, I love her eyes in your last picture! Even if you cover the rest of the face you can see that her eyes are laughing. I think that the teeth are the biggest problem with open smiles. Does anybody have or has seen an image of a laughing or smiling Vicki with the Millennium teeth?

The problem as I see it is that all the Poser figures are made to smile by simply raising the corners of the mouth upwards, but if you look at real people smile, the mouth doesn't really curve up as in a U or V, the mouth really just stretches back and outwards. It's the rest of the face (the cheeks, eyes, nose, etc.) that gives the appearance of an "upward" effect. I've sometimes added just a trace (one or two notches on the dial) of snarl to the mouth as well. Ratteler, I love those two bottom ones. Those are more open. That's the way it should look. The main problem is that the meshes don't have an actual muscle structure in them as a live person does, so the muscles and flesh can't all move in conjunction with each other. This is a great thread. The topic was raised a few times way back in P3 days, when everyone had only Dork and Dorkette to work with, which, as everyone can imagine, the morph possibilities were badly limited. Maybe someone can offer a good morph for all the Millennium figures that will give us a natural, life-like smile. Melanie

I agree, the mouth needs to stretch back. But I also think that the teeth are too big and wide.

LOL, don't let Tiger Woods hear you say that. :) Melanie

lol@melanie. Rattler, while your real smiles do look better, there is still something wrong with the teeth. Maybe if we texture in a gum line above the teeth it will look better. I might try that.

OK, now I made a quickie map for the teeth with a gum line and this is the result. While I had saved the last smile,in my face library it doesn't seem to want to load so I had to start the smile from scratch again, trying to following the steps I did earlier. Its not as big as the last one. I think I put too much blink on aswell. I think that a small amount of gum showing with those big smiles makes the teeth look a little better, still not perfect but I think its one step closer.

ok, that last one wasnt so good This is where I am at now. I think I am satisfied with it now without doing extra morphs myself. I think the gum-line makes a difference too now. I will clean up the map I used and make it available for download. In the future I might look at doing a nice smile morph if my limited abilities will allow me. In the meantime I am going to collect as much reference smiley pics. I found a really good way to find them is do a celebrity image search, you can almost always catch your fav celeb smiling for the camera hehehe.

Wow! The gumline REALLY makes a difference. How did you do it?

Attached Link: http://www.digitalskinz.com/downloads/Dposer.htm

ok, download is ready. Remember if there is too much gum showing you can raise the teeth accordingly or lower to show more. I can't remember the name of the dial. Teeth height or something like that. Lets see if I can remember to include the link this time LOL

Cool! Thanks so much >^_^

Taura Noxx, thank you so much. that is a really cool idea and really adds to vicky's realism. (No way i'm gonna cough up for the Mill teeth. :))

no problem guys, this was a really great thread. I think we have just about dis-assembled a smile and got a new texture to boot!

BTW, Rattler are you gonna make that smile morph available? it looks great.

BTW, if you're talking natural, unslant those eyes. DAZ in all likelihood based Vicky's eyes on Victoria's Secret model Jill Goodacre, whose eyes do slant like that but most women's don't. A negative value on EyeSlant should do it.

Rattler, I think its ok to distribute obj's as long as you squish it. I did this once with Stephanie Eye Morphs, cant remember which lines exactly to remove, I think from memory I just left v-lines. Maybe someone else can jump in here and clear up which lines to remove?

I have the Mil Teeth, but I keep forgetting about them. I'll have to experiment with them. I never thought about using them. I think the 30% sale is still on through today, BTW. Now, how about Michael's smile! :) Melanie

Attached Link: http://www.geocities.com/duane_moody/morphs.html

Taura: You're right about V1 morphs being OK if they're squished, but distributing morphs based off V2 is prohibited by DAZ, squished or not. [DAZ's recommendation is to do as much hackwork on V1 as you can, export a morph target, then apply it to a V2 figure and do the rest with the new V2 head dials, then save the final creation as a face pose. This allows you to distribute the .obj and the .fc2 together; it won't be fully usable to V1-only users.] OTOH, if you just need to unslant Vicky's eyes, I created a morph for that (pre-V2's release) which is completely free for use commercial or otherwise (plug! plug! plug!).

Oh, and you're right about which lines to delete in order to squish a morph. I usually just set my text editor to find the first occurrence of "vt", then I delete everything from that line down.