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Dawn 2.0 Underway

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
I _have_ had a problem using MD in general (unlike everyone else).
I have to agree with you KK, and that's why I haven't upgraded since version 3, and back then they didn't have the option to convert from Tris to Quads, which is my preference. It's also why I got interested in ZBrush, as it's ZRemesher is a wonderful tool.
 

eclark1894

Visionary
Chris, think you can convince Paul to chime in and give us an idea about rigging? I fully admit that I'm sidling towards the sidelines with Blender, but I'm curious to know if he will be adopting any of the rigging that Chuck is using in La Femme?
 

Chris

HW3D President
Staff member
Co-Founder
Chris, think you can convince Paul to chime in and give us an idea about rigging? I fully admit that I'm sidling towards the sidelines with Blender, but I'm curious to know if he will be adopting any of the rigging that Chuck is using in La Femme?

Sure, I'll ask him tonight in our Skype meeting. But this I do know, Paul is very thorough, and a very smart techie person, and I don't know of anyone else in this market that knows both Poser and Studio the way he knows them. He has told me that he'll look at other figures and look at the pros and cons of their rigging. Know too that Paul is looking to provide the best experience with our figures, and will strive to provide an equal expectation for Poser and DS users.

We'll let Paul speak to details when he's ready. Right now he is working hard to get over our last hurdle with our Mule Deer Buck so we can get that bad boy released.

Back to working over Dawn's mesh for me.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
I want to use Dawn in an FBX Blender animation, but that requires some thought as to how.

I think it's easier to bring Dawn into iClone for animation than into Blender these days, especially because CC3 supports any of her existing morphs. CC3 also makes it easy to make clothing meant for the default figure to fit Dawn as well, featuring adjustment brushes to fix the occasional glitches. The brushes are still not as good as Poser's Morphing Tool, but CC3 is still rather new and things will get smoother over time. More recently iClone got I-ray support, and CC3 does a very good job converting Poser/DS materials to PBR with auto-generated roughness/metallic maps. I doubt Blemder can support Dawn as well as this, but I'd like to see someone try to see how the transition goes. :)
 

esha

Admirable
Contributing Artist
Those WIPs look very nice!

One of the advantages of the A pose is that textures on the shoulders are less stretched. Figures usually have their arms down, or at least halfway down. If skin or clothing is UVmapped and/or textured in the T pose the textures will always be stretched when the arms are in a natural pose. But of course you can have a figure in the T pose with UVmaps that were done in the A pose.
 

kobaltkween

Brilliant
Contributing Artist
I think it's easier to bring Dawn into iClone for animation than into Blender these days, especially because CC3 supports any of her existing morphs. CC3 also makes it easy to make clothing meant for the default figure to fit Dawn as well, featuring adjustment brushes to fix the occasional glitches. The brushes are still not as good as Poser's Morphing Tool, but CC3 is still rather new and things will get smoother over time. More recently iClone got I-ray support, and CC3 does a very good job converting Poser/DS materials to PBR with auto-generated roughness/metallic maps. I doubt Blemder can support Dawn as well as this, but I'd like to see someone try to see how the transition goes. :)
I can't speak for eclark1894, but going to CC3 wouldn't give me even a tenth of what going to Blender does, on top of costing a significant amount of money.

It probably is easier to go from DS to Blender. I know that there's some tools out there specifically to help with this (diffeomorphic and mcjTeleblender, for instance).

All of my experience and interest in going from Poser to Blender has been for stills. Basically, I've been looking at using Poser for just posing, and Blender for everything else. In my experience, it's pretty easy to get a posed figure into Blender. When you export from Poser with the option to collect the maps, the materials keep their maps even if the material OBJ import creates is wonky. Which it was the last time I checked, but that was before 2.8. OK, just checked, now it uses the Principled BSDF and works beautifully and simply. The materials it makes aren't but so useful, because they use the MTL standard, which is pretty limited, but with textures hooked up to the Principled BSDF, you mostly just have to tweak the specular, roughness, and maybe SSS values on the node. I'm seeing bump maps incorrectly fed into the Normal input instead of the Height input of a Bump node, which for some reason is deceptively named Normal/Map despite not being a Normal node, but that's not only easily fixed by hand, it should be easily fixed by script. I should be able to make a script for that if anyone wants it.

For gems, glass, or liquids, you'd have to mess with transmission, or maybe switch to a more complex shader depending on your usage, but that's rarer. Essentially, if you have a PBR metal or specular/roughness set of textures for a material, it should be a snap to go from Poser to Blender.

I've only just started researching Blender's FBX support, and all of that research has been towards leaving Blender, not going to it. So I would be very interested to hear more about going from Poser to Blender at the figure level.

I have been curious about into rigging, though. Blender has several different auto-rigging tools. To my very limited knowledge, there's Rigify, which comes built in, there's' BlenRig, which is a free add on, and there's AutoRigPro, which seems pretty comprehensive and is $20 for the light version (includes "lifetime updates") and $40 for all the bells and whistles.

Which gets back to the Dawn 2.0 issue. Just speaking personally, I think it might be kind of cool to play with rigging Dawn 2.0 in Blender for my own use. Then I'd a) learn to rig, and b) do it with my own goal and project in mind rather than rigging in general.
 

Dakorillon (IMArts)

Dances with Bees
Contributing Artist
One thing I'd like to see (and maybe it's there and I haven't found it yet), is morphs for the pupils. Smaller (like bright light) Bigger (Shadows and expressions of love), Slit sharp like a cat, oval (also like a cat), Side slit like a snake. These changes also stretch and compress the iris materials, which is why I think a morph rather than just textures is the way to go.

Also making the iris bigger (or smaller) without making the whole eye bigger.
 

sapat

Brilliant
QAV-BEE
I was wondering if her default lips be less 'distinctively' shaped out of the box? Unless the morph is extreme, somehow she always looks like her (to me). If her default lips could just have a generic 'blank face' appearance without the smaller curvy pre-shaped upper lip, the lower lip not rolled out and larger, and the corners of her mouth not pulled back like a tiny smile. It gives her a 'model' look because her mouth already looks posed. If both lips started out with a neutral, unshaped appearance, then it would be easier to make her less Dawn, and more versatile. You could include several different upper and lower lip shapes and different types of smiles, etc. This give users a place to start and get some variety, and not have to rely on ppl to model 3rd party lip morphs which may not be the case here. People from the get go could change her appearance by giving her lips (and mouth) dramatic shapes or more subtle ones if she started out 'blank'.

Also like someone said earlier, will we be able to dial in fingernail morphs? She doesn't have any options.

Will her face makeups be separated into lips, eye shadow and blush separately instead of the whole face?

Is there any remote possibility that she'll ever be able to use other figures clothing? I'm strictly a DS user and have a jillion clothes for the other figures, but they won't work with Dawn which makes it hard for me to use her because her hair and clothing options are limited. I realize the competitive nature of the business means 'no, never in a million years', but I thought I'd ask.

Edited to ask: Will her mesh be change at all? Some poses make her bend badly and get overly twisted. And can her morphs not be all Rt/Lt? Can they be like Miffed, not miffed Rt and then Miffed Lt, etc. Give us the option to use both together.

Sorry if this has been asked before but I've been sick and off the computer off and on and can't keep up with multi-page threads.
 

Hornet3d

Wise
One thing I'd like to see (and maybe it's there and I haven't found it yet), is morphs for the pupils. Smaller (like bright light) Bigger (Shadows and expressions of love), Slit sharp like a cat, oval (also like a cat), Side slit like a snake. These changes also stretch and compress the iris materials, which is why I think a morph rather than just textures is the way to go.

Also making the iris bigger (or smaller) without making the whole eye bigger.


I do have a morph that does that but it might be third party, I will have a look later, my computer is in the middle of a fairly long render at the moment.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
I don't have Oriana tho she is lovely but I do have Elisa and I do use her open lips option a fair bit (love that pose!)

I also use Elisa's relaxed lip a lot in my renders. I think Dawn 2.0 could include something like that. DawnSE has the "mouth parted", but that's not quite it. Maelwenn has the "ElisaLipsParted" for his Elisa, and I think it hits the mark perfectly.

ElisaLipsParted.jpg


Another suggestion is to move the nail length morphs from the Starter pack to the Base morphs. I think it's too essential to be absent in the base pack.

On topology, there is one little part of the breasts (red circled below) that have given me a few grievances when creating body morphs. When I smooth the mesh on that spot, it creates an shadow artifact on renders that can be hard to fix.

Topology.jpg


I also agree with placing the PMD binary morphs outside the library, so content creators can refer to them directly when creating morph injections in Poser.

I LOVE to know that the new mesh will include the tear line on the lower eyelids. This can make a WORLD of difference in close up portraits. I got used to having it in V4, and missed it with Dawn.

One more suggestion would be include controls for shrugging. Here again, I was used to having it in V4, and missed it in Dawn.

As for the bland ("marshmallow") default shape, I remember discussing this with Chris about Dusk. Way back then, I also thought that figures should be more generic to facilitate character creation. Then Chris told me that the figure needs to look great on the default shape, because that can be a selling point. I haven't thought about that, and I think there is a point there. Conversely, the original Dawn was released in a more bland default shape, making me wonder if the initial rejection couldn't be related to that. A "marshmallow" plain version could be included as a morph. Food for thought.
 
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Satira Capriccio

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
In Poser, the EyeIrisSize, EyePupilSize, and EyePupilVertical are under Actor / Head / Eyes.

One thing I'd like to see (and maybe it's there and I haven't found it yet), is morphs for the pupils. Smaller (like bright light) Bigger (Shadows and expressions of love), Slit sharp like a cat, oval (also like a cat), Side slit like a snake. These changes also stretch and compress the iris materials, which is why I think a morph rather than just textures is the way to go.

Also making the iris bigger (or smaller) without making the whole eye bigger.
 

Satira Capriccio

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
Renders have a way of doing that.

I usually use the EyeSize, EyeIrisSize, EyePupilSize, so I knew right where to look.
 

Hornet3d

Wise
Renders have a way of doing that.

I usually use the EyeSize, EyeIrisSize, EyePupilSize, so I knew right where to look.

I use it on a fairly regular basis when doing portrait renders, it helps to make the expressions look more convincing, trouble is I always have to go hunting for them.
 

Hornet3d

Wise
I swear I have looked and looked for that before! And yep, there it is in Daz, too.....I really have looked...I think it was invisible, yeah, I'm sticking with that....


They definitely go invisible as I often go hunting for morphs I know I have used in the past but just cannot find. I look for an age and then find the morph I am looking for in a place I am sure I have already looked. Mind you, at my age, it is not just Poser and morphs that do this but many things in general life as well.
 
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