Alexa Character Morph
by unrealblue
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Description
A portrait of a La Femme based character morph I've made. It's actually a variation on another character I've made. I'll likely release them both as freebies. Facial, mostly. There's a "body" to go with it, but to keep clothing easier to fit, the body is really just a master that links a bunch of actor scales together. That way, the clothing all fits :)
The character was about *me* learning how to make characters using La Femme. I start getting the approximate shape I want using the built-in morphs (merchant resources). Reasoning for this is that those morphs all move the facial chips as well. And I want those chips moved so they're still easily usable. Then I export the OBJ and edit (tuning) it further in Blender 2.8 (which is an amazing bit of software. OMG, A Poser->Blender bridge would kick booty AND take names :p ) Then I make sure things are smooth and mirrored, back in Poser. The tuning I do in blender does not move things much, as far as face chips are concerned. I spawn a Full Body morph, which gives me a PMD file and a PZ2. I remove everything except the head and eyes from the PZ2 using Sublime text (good for folding and really big files) and PMDEdit (winebottled, as I use MacOX). I change the head morph to being master rather than the body. Now I have a character morph in the head actor that also morphs the eyes so when they're moved, they're centered correctly (the La Femme morphs handle that). The last thing I do is run a script I wrote that dumps the the chip injections necessary to move the facial chips (their position are NOT saved when poser makes a morph injection). In essence, I "close the gap" on that functional oversight. I parent those chip movements to the same head morph. I also (depending on extent of whole morph) move the tongue and teeth rather than morph them. I just parent those to the character morph as well. So there's a PMD containing head and eye morphs (parented to head) and chip positions also parented to that head morph. Self contained and minimal files needed to add the morph.
The result seems to work with the built-in morphs, expressions, etc. The body "morph" being nothing more than scales on body parts, clothing fits as well as it does a base La Femme. I figure, for the most part, fully clothed figures don't need a bunch of detail morphs. The body doesn't use a single morph, so as long as the clothes fit and work with base La Femme, no transfer of morphs is needed. And people make whatever bodies they want :D
Anyway, the style is what I think of as thorne/sarsa sabby/7 stylized-ish. Not quite entirely realistic. Eyes are a bit big and mouth is a bit small. The eyes "tweaked" for a simplified "asian" look. The eye lashes were tweaked as well, so they line up with the eyes better. The built-in eye morphs don't really do a perfect job with the lashes.
The skin texture is actually CHK2033's Eve. Run through ezskin3, which does a great job of subtly enhancing the realism. I tried to use various hair shaders for the hair but could get no good effect. BB's hair shader is cool but can brutalize even 36 cores. Plus, the textures need to be all one direction. I tired Obviously, my lack of ability :)
In this image (but not in the morph) are blackhearted's HD morphs. The neck is obvious. The ears, not so much. A tiny bit added to the lips, nose, and jaw.
Anyway, this is my first time making a "releasable" character morph, my first time making morph injections (indeed, hand editing the files), my first time editing anything in blender, and my first time messing with a figure (a person, that is) outside of Poser.
Comments (6)
zaqxsw
She's beautiful!
unrealblue
thank you ^.^
rajib
Nice morphing. Having bridges between application indeed is very useful. I myself use Daz Studio to ZBrush bridge every time I render to create any custom morph I need for elements on the scene. It saves so much time.
unrealblue
Thank you ^.^
I love your gallery, btw. The camera work is especially captivating. I mean, the objects in the scene and the composition are super but the cool camera angles really give it an interesting "pop" :)
For Poser it would be great to have a "gob" assuming it was like zbrush's bridge... in Poser, it's not possible (afaik) to export a subd'd mesh, modify that, then import it at the specific subd level. So for high subd>0 I either have to use zbrush or do the morphs in Poser. Of course, I'd settle for them fixing that.
And I've decided that Blender is where I'm going to spend my time becoming comfy with a new GUI. 2.8, specifically. Previous versions were just too different than any other graphics/CAD software I had used. 2.8 fixes that. And way more. EEVEE is something. The sculpt tools are nice. But that's really the thing with all graphics apps; it's the GUI. They all do pretty much the same thing, more or less, and to varrying degrees of quality and capability. But learning a GUI that can control that complexity takes a lot.
The Poser morph tool is nice enough but you can't get single vertex precision (nor change brush shapes). Well, you can change the brush to no feathering and tiny. But there's no on screen "gizmo" for easy movement. Moreover, there seems to be a bug when you morph at high subd and bake down; things can go completely wonky.
For this morph, I exported at subd=0 and modified the base mesh. which is tricky especially around the eyes and lips, since it lacks real resolution, and I can't easily see what the result will be until I import the morph and kick the subd back up to render quality.
Glitterati3D
Beautiful!
unrealblue
Thank you ^.^
I'm kind of "a learn something because there's something else interesting I want to do with it" person and La Femme gave me that. She got me to open Poser again, works beautifully, is easy to use, and uses features in Poser that have been unused. She renewed my whole interest in CGI, nicely, right at the time Blender 2.8 is stable enough to use. And Rendo taking Poser... Good times!