seahorse for Harry

[StudioMartillo]

Sorry that's not working for you.
Hope the DS export thing works.
I got the impression that you had done that with the fins but they would explode.
Poser really is pretty clunky. Whenever I need to rig something I cringe.
But compared to Lightwave rigging it's a breeze.
The legacy Lightwave rigging really sucks, and then they came out with 'Genoma' and that's ten times worse.
Anyway, there's no way to translate the rigging from Lightwave to Poser so it's Poser or nothing for me.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Hm... sounds interesting. Going to have a look at it. Since I have to make my way through the tutorials I will keep an eye on this, see if it pops up.

There used to be a function that I am often surprised is used less often than I would expect that allows you to specify "alternative geometry files" for a specific body part. IIRC this kind of thing was originally used to allow Team Poser to have male figures with or without whangdoodle in the groin area. Ah - here we go, a link to someone referencing it:

Alternate geometries

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[xyer0]

Maybe Sparky can help you. She has tons of cross species characters that work in Poser.

 

[Sparky]

I would be happy to help! Just let me know what needs doing. ;-)

 

[FreyrStrongart]

Is the tail a geograft or just a conforming item?

each element is geographted for the simple reason that the vertices follow much better. They could work as conforming items too but as they replace parts of the body geografting also saves me the necessity to use opacity maps on those parts that should be invisible.

 

[FreyrStrongart]

I would be happy to help! Just let me know what needs doing. ;-)

I need a way to transfere the add-ons into poser without having to redo the whole rigging process. If it's down to the rigging, I think I can handle that... with some frustration, but I REALLY would like to avoid all that hassle if there is an easier way. On the other hand I rather prefer to re-rig everything to have it work in poser the way I want it to work instead of going only half way. I want my poser things to have the same abilities as the DAZ stuff.

 

[tparo]

I need a way to transfere the add-ons into poser without having to redo the whole rigging process. If it's down to the rigging, I think I can handle that... with some frustration, but I REALLY would like to avoid all that hassle if there is an easier way. On the other hand I rather prefer to re-rig everything to have it work in poser the way I want it to work instead of going only half way. I want my poser things to have the same abilities as the DAZ stuff.

As far as I'm aware Poser can't do DS geografts, its one of the things that seperates the programs. The only thing I think that comes close is geometry switching. Weight mapped rigging is different in Poser and DS, this is why there are 2 versions of Hivewire products such as Dawn Dusk the Horse the cat etc, the poser version doesn't work in DS and vis a versa.

 

[StudioMartillo]

Well that doesn't sound encouraging, so why not go on dweeb-ing?
OK, when you had all your polygon groups right, and went into the fitting room and click, name, clickity click you're outa there,
you've got your rigging.
That's the slick part.
But, as I feared, if any geometry is not very near the horse's geometry the weight maps are blank or meaningless.
Only it's not as monstrous as it seems.
If you save the new mane figure, then put away the horse and load up the mane figure again, you can use the Joint Editor.
Well you just go to 'Windows' I think and open the Joint Editor window, and then go through each body part, and each coordinate, like bend, twist, side, or Xrot, Yrot, Zrot, and you see there is a section which shows you have a weight map, and click on delete for each one
You will be prompted to verify, click OK every time and alas the weight maps will all be gone.
So then you are left with the default include, exclude, angle functions, which, unfortunately won't be just right because the rigging is a bit unconventional.
So you could go through tweeking those angles, OR, you could use the capsule approach to setting the smoothing/falloff and the mane can come out working pretty nice.
Then if you want you can have those capsule zones automatically converted to weight maps if you want to do some finicky editing.
Only you say NO NO NO please, not that! So the capsule things will probably be OK.
Now, you're probably saying 'No wonder there's no seahorse for Harry, what a bother' and you would probably be right.
And you could always say 'Hey, I did a fantastic job in DS, if these crazy poser nuts want it, they can convert it themselves'
which might not be real nice, but not unreasonable.
Plus, there's other ways. Take a look at how the HiveWire Mane is done.
It has all the Harry rigging needed and no geometry to match, but all it's own geometry parented to the base geometry.
Now there's a monster of a task.

 

[FreyrStrongart]

There used to be a function that I am often surprised is used less often than I would expect that allows you to specify "alternative geometry files" for a specific body part. IIRC this kind of thing was originally used to allow Team Poser to have male figures with or without whangdoodle in the groin area. Ah - here we go, a link to someone referencing it:

Alternate geometries

Cheers,

Cliff

ohoh... thanks for pointing this out to me but at first glance I am pretty much overwhelmed. (facepalm) I think I will first deal with getting the whole thing into poser as conforming pieces... I might then consider geometry switching. (at a muuuuch later stage )

 

[Sparky]

You can pretty easily export figures from DS into poser using the Export>Export Cr2 feature of DS, from there it's just fine-tuning.

 

[Sparky]

If you want to send me your DS working files, I can see what I can do. ;-)

 

[FreyrStrongart]

You can pretty easily export figures from DS into poser using the Export>Export Cr2 feature of DS, from there it's just fine-tuning.

Well, I did the exporting, and that went ok as far as I can see, but afterwards it was impossible to conform the items. Maybe I made a mistake when exporting...

 

[Cliff Bowman]

Well, I did the exporting, and that went ok as far as I can see, but afterwards it was impossible to conform the items. Maybe I made a mistake when exporting...

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that's true. I have a tendency to extend that to say that an animation is worth a thousand pictures. In your instance I suspect that the actual DS files would be worth a thousand animations - I would take up Sparky's offer to take a look at the DS files and see how well/easily the work with Poser.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[FreyrStrongart]

I've now figured out that it was my own stupidity that messed things up . Obvious... as I didn't export it as conforming item. But one problem solved isn't all of it. Now it turns out that it doesn't export all geometry. Happend to me before and then I figured out that it did not export geometry that wasn't assigned to a group of an existing bone. But that can't be the problem here, I controlled that all the faces are assigned, and to the proper bone. The bones themselves got exported to Poser but not the geometry belonging to them. or only half of them. So I checked the names... and found some mistakes there. But the kelpmane is giving me gip. I can't figure out what names are not working. I tried to change them around any which way and still the groups don't assign to the bones. Is it possible, that poser doesn't read spaces? I figured out a lot but here I seem to hit a wall.

 

[Pendraia]

Yay! So pleased to see this...I've been wanting this for Harry for a while.

As far as I'm aware Poser can't do DS geografts, its one of the things that seperates the programs. The only thing I think that comes close is geometry switching. Weight mapped rigging is different in Poser and DS, this is why there are 2 versions of Hivewire products such as Dawn Dusk the Horse the cat etc, the poser version doesn't work in DS and vis a versa.

This is correct, I think geometry switching is another name for alternate geometry that someone mentioned earlier.

Also on the weightmapping, both programs have weightmapping but they are different types of weight mapping.

DS has two versions triax and Dual Quaternion IIRC...triax has maps for each axis and is used on the Genesis and Genesis 2 plus the Hivewire Famly and the Dual Qaternion has been used on Genesis 3 up.

 

[Carrie58]

I don't think Poser reads spaces all the oldr stuff always had an underscore as a space _ that thingy

 

[StudioMartillo]

Poser can read spaces, but it removes spaces from the internal names of the poly groups, which would be the group name in the obj file.
So, if in the obj there are spaces in the group names, they will be gone once the obj is imported.
So the bones will need to have the exact same name as the internal name of the geometry.
No spaces allowed. Poser doesn't want to get too spaced out.

 

[Cliff Bowman]

This is correct, I think geometry switching is another name for alternate geometry that someone mentioned earlier.

Geometry Switching and Alternate Geometry are indeed the same thing.

Geografts are IMO DAZ's own version of Geometry Switching. With the benefit of hindsight they have looked at the limitations of Geometry Switching and come up with their own solution such that Geografts are IMO better. The fact that Geografts can do things that Geometry Switching cannot is why it's harder to make a 100% cast-iron guarantee about transferring Geografts to Poser. However, I believe this was achieved via conforming in some early trials. I could be wrong. I REALLY wish I had the spare time to offer to do some trials, as this is one of the many types of things that pushes my buttons - making things WORK!

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Cliff Bowman]

I don't think Poser reads spaces all the oldr stuff always had an underscore as a space _ that thingy

Poser is not alone in not liking spaces, or indeed various other characters. I remember the character '#' causing me all sorts of grief back in the 80's.

Old people - like me - tend to avoid spaces where we can simply to avoid this kind of problem from arising in the first place. This is why you'll find examples of "how to do things" that inexplicably have NamesForThingsThatHave no_spaces_whatsover_under_any_circumstances.

And other, similar, patterns used to avoid conflicts with computers, both in Poser any... well, a lot of programming situations. The full stop is a good one to avoid too - in some countries the comma is used where I would use a decimal point (changing the value by a factor of a thousand).

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[StudioMartillo]

Without knowing how the fish tail is actually designed I just had to guess at this stuff.
Maybe this will work out, maybe not but it's a start on a general idea for the poser version.

There are comments (lines starting with #) in the python script to suggest changes that will likely be needed.
When you have the tail part rigged for Poser and saved as a figure in your library directory for the SeaHorse,
then you can copy the actual path to use in the loadFishTail() function.
If you run the script and an exception window pops up, look carefully at the description.
It will tell you exactly what's wrong with the script and where.
I've tested this, but with a substitute figure and it works just fine.
But when editing python scripts you need to be real careful because just getting an extra space or
misplaced character will cause the script to fail.

Add a directory in the Runtime\Python\posersScripts directory and add the GraftFishTail.py script there.

Then you can add the GraftFishTail prop to your props directory.
It just loads the tail figure and parents it to the horse's hip and makes all the back end of the horse invisible.

In the GraftFishTail.pp2 prop file, at the very end is a call to run the script.
You will probably need to change the path to the script.
It looks like the lines below. It's a very short file so you can probably make the edits with notepad.

}
}
doc

{

addActor GraftFishTail

}

runPythonScript "\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\StrongArt\SeaHorse\GraftFishTail.py"

}


Replacing the geometry is pretty far fetched since a fish tail is so different from a horse's hind quarters.
There's not much chance that the horse's rigging will be of any use for the tail fins.
I could right a script to do that, but it would surely be a disaster.