this thread is for vendors to state the fundamental flaws of various characters in poser, these characters can be

Dawn, miki, roxie, rex,or whatever

hopefully we can build a list of things needing changing on the various characters.

what irks you about what character ?

let it all out and maybe we can get the creators attention to fix them :)

The only problem with fixing them, is that you will probably break everything made for them.

It is far easier to deal with an issue in a character, than fix all the content that breaks.

Chances are more than good, that this thread will get deleted or locked before page 2....

My 2 biggest issues are :

• Not fully welded obj files
• Not fully symmetrical obj files

Secondary :

• a lack of textures for the default Poser figures
• rigging problems

As stated above : Fixing is NOT possible without FULL support from SM.

Listening in. :)

It does amaze me at how little stuff is made for the native poser figures, why is that? Are they THAT bad?? They have the most flexability within poser with the face room and all. It would be nice to see more skins.

Indeed; speaking of that, I was playing recently with your weight mapped Sydney. In spite of her issues she's better than most.   I wish I could find out how to create an add bones pose for Outfitter to make her clothes fit better, but the Poser Place Forum seems to be gone forever.

I know that Syd's mesh and symmetry issues drove you crazy....

I'd like to see more morphs and textures for Rex and Roxie. Preferably some African American or Asian morphs for her and textures. If you don't want to include the morphs in  the figure, then perhaps Roxie and Rex should have their own Morphs ++ package.

Quote - I've always liked alyson2 mesh... here is what breaks her for me

Exactly !! Ditto for me.

I also want to get rid of his vampire claw fingers and make them more masculine, less fingernails. Those have always bugged me.

If I ever finish it, I may do the same to G2 James. Never have liked how long and awkward his body is. He's virtually the same mesh as original James, just reworked a bit and reqrouped. 

Also been doing some reworks to Jessi and Ben, but there's nothing to show there on him, since it's just been UV work so far. 

Also started resculpting Miki4 to look more like Miki2, but that has a long way to go too. 

Most of this all started for experimental purposes to put their rigs through the gauntlet and see how much could be done. Haven't been able to do much with them lately tho, been busy with other things. But I've always liked the P6 figures the best and intend on finishing them eventually even if its just for my own use. 

But yes, the more fixing that's done to existing figures, the more content that's broken. Anything done that changes the geometry breaks every morph - to include facial/expression morphs, so they all have to be rebuilt. ZBrush makes this a bit less of a headache, as a lot of things can be reprojected, but it's still tedious and extremely time consuming. 

~Shane

Kate and Ben: Lack of face morphs. They don't work in the face room, and have very little else to make them more versatile.

Poser 7 Kate: Shoulders slope too much.

Alyson 2: Strange eye shape that gives her a hard and staring look. Not even Blackhearted was able to overcome that fully with Anastasia. It is very difficult to morph these features away.

Ryan 2: Similar problem with the eyes to Alyson. Pinched cynical mouth that is also very hard to overcome.

Poser 6 Jessi: Oversized skull dome. I can fix that in Blender, but it is extra work. Poser 6 James has a similar issue.

Roxie and Rex - Modelled lashes that limit the ability to change the eyes.

Simon: Strange eye shape, very difficult to change.

Way too much to list, as they are all broken beyond repair.

Biggest problem is the badly made mesh topology that ignores anatomical correct muscle and bone structure, so developing new, correct shapes is nigh impossible. On the one hand edgeloops are missing, on the other hand there are tons of redundant vertices doing nothing.

(I've created versions of MIKI-1 that had 30.000 instead of 130.000 polygons and rendered just as nicely as the original long before Poser had SubD.)

Second problem are the stylized, unrealistic bodyshapes that ignore human anatomy. (MIKI -1/2 being the only exception, but her mesh topology is some of the worst I've ever seen)

Third is the bad rigging. Often magnets are used to "fix" problem zones but the results are generally pathetic. It's a spaghetti shoulders and balooning buttocks bonanza.

Finally there is the lack of any support to speak of. No texture convertor to tap into the vast array of Vicky/Mike textures. (Don and Judy being the only exception as they can use V2/M2 textures. Sort of)

There is WW support, but the results are usually not good enough for frontpage work and take way too long to convert.

My advice ?

Make a deal with DAZ and licence Genesis 1 or 2. (If we get HD technology in the future, there will be no noticeable difference between them, so I'd actually prefer Genesis 1)

Rework it so that it a) works natively in Poser and b) give it a new default morph it loads with so that Poser has it's own signature figure for marketing reasons. It would still be Genesis, but "our" Genesis.

(After all, Dork and Posette were licensed from Zygote which later became DAZ, so I don't see any "ethical" problem here)

Other than that, copy Genesis as closely as you can get away with it.

(No ethical problems here either, as DAZ usually copies any new figure development as soon as possible. (T-chest and buttock actors were first introduced on a modified Posette. No buttocks and waist actors were introduced by Apollo and the Poser 6 folks. JCMs and ERC were a Poser "invention". And so on, and so on.)

Everybody copys, so again, look at Genesis and copy it, but raise the polycount to about 50.000 so it will render fine without SubD.

Any other solutions or half-hearted "fixes"  will just be a waste of time.

We need a new start, but we have to do it right !

Quote - Indeed; speaking of that, I was playing recently with your weight mapped Sydney. In spite of her issues she's better than most.   I wish I could find out how to create an add bones pose for Outfitter to make her clothes fit better, but the Poser Place Forum seems to be gone forever.

If you can tell me which version of Sydney~WM you have I may still have the Outfitter files for her. The poses are not that hard to make out of the cr2 that you have. Look how they are set up in V4~WM, all you have to do is make a pose file with just the helper bone info in it then apply it to the clothes.

That's a nice rebuild of James. Shane. Looks good.

My only niggle would be the inward facing kneecaps. 

Could you share your method of making meshes symmetrical again ?

I have my own method using some of Ockham's python scripts, but it takes a lot of manual work and is still not perfect.

BTW, unless you drastically reworked the shape of the head, all the three "morph projection" scripts (Cage's python script, D3D's morphing clothes and the PP-2014 morph transfer) should be able to rebuild the expression files quickly, no matter the changes you made to the geometry.

Sometimes a vertice can get "stuck" if the mesh intersects, but this can be easily fixed with the smoothing brush.

Quote -(After all, Dork and Posette were licensed from Zygote which later became DAZ, so I don't see any "ethical" problem here)

The issue is not exactly an ethical one, it is a copyright/tradmark/licensing/opps, they changed it and it broke Poser one. Dork and Posette were just text files, kind of hard to break that. Genesis is programmed into the code of Studio, and that is a tad more complex than loading a simple text file.

If Genesis is such a great character in Studio, why do people insist that is should work in other programs? Just use it in Studio. Yes you can use DSON in Poser, but other than that it doesn't work in anything else. If it was the best character in the world it would work in just about every 3D program, but it isn't.

Think about it, if developers looked at Genesis as the best character out there it would be in every 3D program by now. But it isn't. Yes there are users that think it should be in there, but it isn't..... It isn't in Houdini, Cinema4D, Blender, Autodesk anything, etc, etc, etc.... Face it, other developers don't want it for a good reason. It is not open source, and it isn't the best way to go.

How does this relate to the fundemental flaws in characters?

It points out that any character you want to look at can be picked apart, because there will never be one that works in every situation using the current setups.

The best way around having the perfect character would be to figure out a way to make anything work, with anything else. Then it doesn't matter what character you use. Lots of developers have been trying to do just that, and we are getting a little closer....

The first key to it, is to use things that are open source. Every 3D program out there is based on the gift of open source. Without those gifts, we would still be using a wooden doll which ironically is what Poser set out to replace.

We don't need more characters, we need to figure out a better way to use what we have.

But, if what someone comes up with is proprietary it will only be in that program. That's the way it usually works.

Nothing proprietary in programs works in anything else, nothing new about that....

Open up a .max file in each of your 3D programs and see what you get....

Opps, wait, you can't... It's proprietary...

Open up a Blender character in Poser or Studio.... Hmm, that doesn't work either...

If only there was a free standard...

Wait, that would make it open source wouldn't it?

(disclamer... this post is not meant to bash, just explain things)

Carry on.....

I'm trying to give a practical suggestion , not an ideological.

I don't care what brand something is or if it's proprietary or not, as long as it works and I have full control.

Professional CGI Studios will never use "Poser" characters because they don't need a character that can withstand the abuse of hobbyist users and can morph into a gazillion of shapes with a mouseclick.

And they want proprietary figures because they want to build a brand that can be copyrighted for marketing.

So the idea of an "universal" figure makes no sense.

BTW, Genesis 1and 2 are also "just text files" once exported as objects. So are their morphs. All the "tech" is built right into Poser already. The DSON-importer just translates the DSON files into something Poser can understand.

Save Genesis as a cr2 and it'll still functions. (Maybe not as good as Genesis in Studio, but still much better than anything  else.)

Anyway, if someone builds a mesh that is as anatomical correct as Genesis II, provides some morphs and expressions that are as good or superior to Genesis', writes a texture convertor and also builds some (high quality) basic content, and then makes it all open source, I'll happily use that mesh then and ditch Genesis from my runtime.

But until this happens, I have way better things to do with my time than bthering whether a mesh is proprietary or not or holding a grudge because of a buisiness decision that was made in the past.

(To be frank, Poser (and it's users) got what they deserved when DAZ kicked them out of the party. I told them exactly this would be happening long before it actually happened, but everybody was just too busy playing with V4's knickers.)

I'm 48, and after 13 years of working my ass off creating better figures, I'm done with promises and big plans.

Genesis is happening right now  and it's the most realistic, most perfect Poser figure I've ever seen.

I'd rather wish Poser had it's "own" set of high quality figures, but unless we find an angel investor willing to dump a couple 100.000 $ into such an endavour, I don't see any viable alternative.

Quote - My 2 biggest issues are :

• Not fully welded obj files
• Not fully symmetrical obj files

Secondary :

• a lack of textures for the default Poser figures
• rigging problems

As stated above : Fixing is NOT possible without FULL support from SM.

I see a lot of good and constructive critiques so far, but which characters are affected by these problems? all of them? a specific few? I do like too, the idea of an open source character that could be taken on board by the community and show the big companies that something that is good, WILL be supported.
I was talking to a vendor about the rigging in miki4 for instance - apparently it is pretty bad, her breast is connected to her butt (not quite that simple but that is the gist of it.)

I myself have found posing the newer native SM figures hands (roxie in particular) to be a chore, I don't use use Genesis or D|S so I can't comment on them, and I always end up back with V4, with all her flaws, she is still (for me) the easiest model to work with. I would love to make poses across a range of characters but some of them are just frustrating or take too long to get right, so I don't bother.
I made poses for Roxie, but apparently the new fixes break the poses, so I will have to remake all of those.the frustrating thing is, they took long enough in the first place.

Yes, all of them are bad. Very bad. Some are better than others, but still not even close to the quality you get from DAZ.

I so, so wish I could tell you otherwise, but unless you want to give Genesis a try (No installation of Studio necessary. How did that rumour get even started, btw ?), I'd say sticking with V4 is your best option.

There are several JCM-fixes out there for her joint problems or you could use one of the weightmapped versions.

I sometimes play with the Poser meshes and just made a new custom face morph for P5 Judy.

You can do "nice" things with them with a little spit and polish.

But for serious work, there are simply too many problems that need fixing.

And even if you fixed all of them, you'll need to convert/modify/rebuild all the content you have.

Right here, right now there simply is no other practical solution than using V4 or Genesis if you need high quality figures for your work.

I forgot a critical one :  The magnets.

All native Poser figures come with magnets, and most figures have around 40 symmetrical magnet errors. Some small, some huge.

The magnets, their zones, the dependencies are not the same left-right.

With all those magnet errors in place, the figures are simply unusable.

Not a big issue for me, as the very first thing I do with all Poser native figures is : DELETE the MAGNETS.

To answer the question of what figures are affected => All of them.

I think Sydney is in the worst shape

• not welded
• serious symmetrial issues in the obj file
• tremendous amount of magnet errors.

i don't like the magnets either.  was a nice feature in p4.

first time i saw a Roxie render with her arms bent made me wanna cry.  
couldn't they have spent a couple more days working on her?

Joe, I understand that Genesis can be exported as plain text. As we both know, once you do that, you loose the benefits of that system as soon as you do so. The Genesis wire frame is laid out pretty good, but it has issues as well. All characters have issues, even the proprietary ones that studios use. (they can actually be even worse on purpose)

No one is stopping anyone from using Genesis in Poser thru export or DSON. And at the same time there is little content/developement for it in Poser. Everything is there to use it in Poser, yet it gets very little use or support in that fashion. That tells me that here are not enough people interested in using it in Poser to make it worth the trouble.

You don't need a killer mesh in high end programs simply because there are more geometry controlling options than Poser and Studio put together. And they use multiple versions as well. If there was a perfect design they wouldn't need to use different versions of the same character. But they still do it that way, with the best software available... If there was a killer mesh, they would reuse it all the time, but there is no such thing.

Ironically Poser characters are used in the developement stage. It is far faster to make a storyboard in a program like Poser than to do it in Houdini or Cinema4D. There are a few threads about it. One that comes to mind was on the Reality site.

I rarely use V4 or Genesis. I think that V3 is a better mesh than V4 or Genesis, but that is just my opinion. I have played around with the Genesis mesh, and it too has areas that no morph can fix, simply because there is nothing there to morph. To each his own, that is the nice part about having all of these characters available. And if something is broken in the character, all the tools to fix it are available if you know how.

I have taken many characters into other programs, cut of the most offending side off, fixed the remaining mesh, then exported a mirrored version of it. Thats the easy part, then you have to fix everything else.... Far easier to work around the broken parts and just use it as is most of the time.

We have enough characters available to keep us busy for a while. Adding another one wont hurt, but it wont help unless it has more to offer than all the others put together.

The only way to offer much more, requires the programs offer more as well.

We don't have things like selective tesselation, selective culling, etc, that allow you to add or remove detail anywhere on the mesh, on the fly. There are a lot of tools that Poser and Studio wil never have. Adding all of them would make the program for more complex than the average user is used to using.

It would also put the programs into the same price range as ones that can do all these things.

I'd just like to say that the REASON you will not see genesis - or ANY other Poser figure - in Houdini, anything by Autodesk, etcetera, is simple:

They are not programs that people use at a hobbyist level. People who use these programs will, 99% of the time, MAKE their own figures. If you ever go to their communities, people using any sort of pre-made content will be razzed, shot down, and considered amateurs who can't do their own modelling.

That's my $0.02, adjusted for inflation...

Without a decent marketing budget, no matter how awesome a new figure is, it will not get off the ground. Want it to survive or make an impact? Well then, you need a strong inhouse content development team that will guarentee it gets the constant support it needs, and not rely mainly on 3rd party. So those fundamentals need to be looked at before you even think of releasing a figure. A figure can only survive if it has the needed support structures in place. No other company (related to this market) other than Daz has this, and that is no cheap thing to implement. It costs serious money. It's why every other non Daz figure, no matter how great, never lasts. There is no business model in place so it ends up all over the place and eventually unused like the other figures. Sort out the business model first, then worry about the figure. A good business model will naturally attract content creators. "Fanboy" type support is not enough. It will never be, and that has been proven over and over. You need the big guns to jump on board and show support. SM does not do this, Hivewire can't because they are to small to take on the big guns (also Dawn is not G quality). So that is the hurdle a figure needs to over come, before it's even in developement. That to me is a figures biggest flaw.

Quote - I'd just like to say that the REASON you will not see genesis - or ANY other Poser figure - in Houdini, anything by Autodesk, etcetera, is simple:

 

They are not programs that people use at a hobbyist level. People who use these programs will, 99% of the time, MAKE their own figures. If you ever go to their communities, people using any sort of pre-made content will be razzed, shot down, and considered amateurs who can't do their own modelling.

 

That's my $0.02, adjusted for inflation...

Very true. However they too have their own level of pre-made content:) It's just not ready to use out of the box in most cases:) Same thing with Photoshop, contains plug-ins to use that simplify creating effects. Photoshop artists never do everything from scratch:). Those 3D elitist types are just upset because we can achieve similar results with our little hobby:) It is the end result that matters anyway:)

Quote - If you ever go to their communities, people using any sort of pre-made content will be razzed, shot down, and considered amateurs who can't do their own modelling.

I do go to those sites, and that mentality is usually not present in the majority of the postings.

Houdini Engine was developed around the idea of reusing content across different platforms. You can take things between Autodesk, Houdini, and Unity very easily now.

I doubt that one of the top 3D companies did it so others would get mocked and to feed the trolls. They did it so you could actually re-use content you already have in other software.  The main focus was on getting things you already had into other programs, be it premade or custom. There is a lot of premade content for Autodesk, Unity, and Houdini. You just have to know where to look for it, and actually be a member of the sites.

For me, the biggest issue I have seen with the Poser characters has always been the rigging. I used to try to use a few of them but it ended up that I had to take the heads off and use another body because things like the forearms were bending in the middle, etc. I barely look at the more recent ones but they have always had similar issues.

As to why I might not want to support it, they have a two year life expectancy, at most. Then they will be replaced by the latest and greatest thing that will probably have no support either.

The rigging is  the main reason why my Poser enthusiasm is at zero. None of the figures bend well. Not even weightmapped. You end up in an endless chaos of JCMs and some poses still look crappy. Joe Public did a great job on his DAZ People mods and I wish he could be involved into native Poser Figure development. As far I understood him, good mesh topology and well done weight mapping are enough. I am not skilled enough for that yet. I need something better out of the box. I did a lod of character creation for Roxie, made a lot of JCMs, but shoulder and crotch bendings killed all the fun in the end. I am willing to pay more for a real PoserPro !!! with some additional technologies that help to look joint bendings more realistic.

It will be cool if one day somebody comes out with a figure that bends perfectly in every pose.  But if Pixar needs, what was it, seventeen rigged versions(?) of a toon for proper bending in various situations then I'm not gonna hold my breath for a miracle Poser character that bends perfectly in all situations.  I'm very happy with the figures I have.  None of them pose well with their arms straight up over their heads.  Shrug.  So what?  I won't make any basketball animations ;)  If we let various shortcomings of content bog us down we'll never get anything done.  The other day I had a problem making a shoe fit Angela2.  No problem.  I put a potted plant in front of it so it couldn't be seen.

When it comes to Native Poser characters, one of the biggest downfalls is that they only usually work in the latest versions of Poser. That in itself limits who can use it right off the bat. Many of them focus on demonstraiting the newest things in Poser, so they are more geared towards showcasing what you can do over trying to be the next main character in use. Many of them wont work in other programs due to the rigging used as well.

Judy was probably the one that got the most support upon initial release. Ones after that have had issues that made it next to impossible to do much with them.

Sydney is so asymmetrical, that making morphs for the breasts is a challenge in itself. Mirroring weight maps on the wireframe is next to impossible, and using symmetry and copy joints destroys the weight maps. I think her head has more vertices than the rest of her body does. No idea why the inside of her mouth is so detailed....

I have some extensively modified versions of a lot of the Poser characters, including Sydney. But releasing them would not make them popular without an entire library of things to go with it. I know how to use just about anything in my Runtimes with them but the average user may not know how, or want to invest the time to do that. A lot of it can not be done easily from within the Poser itself.

I have played around with code to do so outside of Poser, and you can do a lot to any character that way, including getting it back into Poser. But they way I have been doing it wont work on a Mac or a computer without a Directx11 video card unless you want to wait ages for it to be done on the CPU. When my new workstation is done, there is presently only one GPU that will do what I have in mind to process things. The method I am using is based on a point cloud reconstruction routine and needless to say there is a lot of coding involved, and even more number crunching in the background.

Like I said before, what we really need is a way to use the best of everything, in one character no matter which one you choose to load first. It is a tall order to code something like that, and to date no one has come up with a reliable way of doing so.

Not even me.... I can get BSOD just as well as any other programmer. The other day I forgot to release an a rather complex looping object in the code I tried, and it was still running after I exited the program.... Needless to say, Windows ran out of memory in a freaking hurry.... Opps.... Crash....

Quote - It will be cool if one day somebody comes out with a figure that bends perfectly in every pose.  But if Pixar needs, what was it, seventeen rigged versions(?) of a toon for proper bending in various situations then I'm not gonna hold my breath for a miracle Poser character that bends perfectly in all situations.  I'm very happy with the figures I have.  None of them pose well with their arms straight up over their heads.  Shrug.  So what?  I won't make any basketball animations ;)  If we let various shortcomings of content bog us down we'll never get anything done.  The other day I had a problem making a shoe fit Angela2.  No problem.  I put a potted plant in front of it so it couldn't be seen.

I agree with this. I think every character has it's own set of drawbacks and it's own set of attributes. There are things I like about most of them and things I don't like, but like you said, pros often have multiple riggs for the same character and we are talking about a toon that does not have the high level of texture detail that we see on some of these models here. I love my V4/M4, but her shoulders leave something to be desired and she is best used only for taller models;neither of them really bend well in some extreme poses. I love Anastasia/A2, great body morphs and control, but she is difficult to morph into original looking faces and did not have much support. I love My Michelle and Miki 4, but neither of them had extensive morphs. I love Dawn and the fact that I can make a shorter character with her, but she does not yet have extensive morphs to use. I love Genesis, but did not like the all in one concept and I hate DSON, so there is always something that we can critique, but there will never be a "perfect" figure because perfection means something different to everyone.

Perfection in model building simply means having the correct shape.

It's that simple.

If I build a model of a car and I make the roof too short, the wheels to small, the doors too long, then the model is garbage.

If I get every shape and detail exactly right, the model is perfect.

Making a model of a human being is no different.

If the shape is correct, the model is perfect. If the shape is not correct, it is garbage.

There are no "different kinds of perfect" for a modeller. Not if the goal is realism.

While there might be no "absolute" perfection ever, M6 and V6 are the closest I have ever seen a Poser figure coming to perfection.

They are at least good enough for me that I don't feel the need to immediately "fix" anything that doesn't look right. This is something I never experienced with another Poser figure before.

If you don't "need" that perfection, fine. Enjoy spaghetti shoulders, balooning butts and weird anatomy. Or just hide your figure of choice behind a tree or under a table cloth.

But I do need that kind of perfection for my figures, just like I need that kind of perfection for anything I build.

All the stuff I build for Poser is made by using blueprints and photographs and every shape and dimension is exact down to a tenth of an inch. That's how I built my physical models, that's how I build my virtual ones.

And that dedication to detail and correctness I expect from the virtual humans I use, too.

Bad craftsmanship is not "art", it's just bad craftsmanship.

What I "do" with my figures is "art". (Or maybe not. Lol)

But the figures themselves are just tools like a brush or a pencil.

And I rather use the best tools available than make do with second rate.

That's great, Joe.  Where can we buy these figures?  If we can't buy them then I'll work with what I have.

I swore they just locked a thread like this.

Anyways

If ya could create your own character model,map,texture,rig etc etc.

If ya could run all the CGI software C4D,Max,Maya,Poser,DAZ etc etc.

Then ya would get why things are the way they are.

Bingo.  Most of us hobbyists have careers unrelated to cgi, businesses to run, mortgages to pay and limited time for the 3d stuff.  If some of the perfectionists want to create and sell some of these phantom ideal figures I'll buy them so long as the base figure is less than, say, a hundred bucks.  But I don't see them for sale anywhere.  Pointing out flaws in other peoples figure creations in Poser is an old and tired topic.  We all know about the flaws, but we work with what's available.

You guys clearly haven't seen the wip images of my genesis style vicky killer figure, it even has multiple uv maps.

Haha.  Very cool, Joe :)  Nice work.

Quote - You guys clearly haven't seen the wip images of my genesis style vicky killer figure, it even has multiple uv maps.

Vicky R.I.P.

Quote - That's a nice rebuild of James. Shane. Looks good.

My only niggle would be the inward facing kneecaps. 

Could you share your method of making meshes symmetrical again ?

I have my own method using some of Ockham's python scripts, but it takes a lot of manual work and is still not perfect.

Sometimes a vertice can get "stuck" if the mesh intersects, but this can be easily fixed with the smoothing brush.

Thanks for the compliments Joe. 

Yes, his knees are turned in too much. They're like that on the original shape too. I haven't done much sculpting work to most of his body yet. I Just did some smoothing through the shoulders, traps and a bit through the chest so far. Like I said he still needs a lot of work. Most of that pic is just scaling and posture in Poser.  His hips need reworking and there's some questionable muscle flow through his uppper thighs. But I want to get the rig adjusted before I do much reshaping. That probably sounds backwards, since it will just need more adjusting after, but I have my reasons. 

I fixed his symmetry in ZBrush. It requires some basic math, but basically, there's a feature in the deformations pallet called smart resym that helps with that. Depending on the quality of the mesh, it can be as quick as 5 minutes to fix, or you could struggle with it for hours. James was fixed in about 4 attempts, and less than 20 minutes.

As I recall you stated you stopped using ZB at v3, so I don't remember if 3 even had smart resym. I think it's been there for quite a while but I've been on 4+ since sometime in 2009/10 whenever it was released, so it's hard to even remember what ZB3 looked like, much less what features it had.

The geometry has to be consistent across the X axis in order for that feature to work tho, so some meshes, such as G2 Sydney, won't work because the left side of her chest is damaged due to some seriously sloppy production work and lack of quality control. (Sorry G2 creators - whoever they are - but I call it as I see it). Edges are merged, so the polys are actually non-existant so there's nothing that can be... re-symetrified ? - and I think I just created a new word there. G2 Jessi doesn't have this issue as far as I recall (and her rigging is much better than Sydneys, making her a better candidate for rebuild work anyway). 

Worst case scenario, you split the model in half and mirror it. This can be done in ZB too, and retain all your groups. Then it will definitely work. But so long to all your morphs, and your UV maps have to be mirrored now too. 

Keep in mind also, that many of the older Poser meshes can't be worked in ZBrush due to their inconsistent geometry, N-Gons, stray verts, etc. The P4 baby, for example, has N-Gons. ZB spits these out automatically, even via using GoZ. It gives you the option to rebuild the faulty faces with tris or quads, but either way the mesh will be broken back in Poser. You can morph it, and then try transfering the morphs in Poser via one of the various python scripts, but results will vary.

This is one of the reasons why it's so important to keep your mesh all quads, or at least quads and tris. N-Gons are bad for most any modeling app. 

There is a ZBrush plug-in for Poser that helps with keeping groups and vert orders intact, but again, results vary. And I'm not even sure if it is built for any version of ZB prior to 4r4 or so, but not sure about that cause I don't even know who wrote it. 

Quote - BTW, unless you drastically reworked the shape of the head, all the three "morph projection" scripts (Cage's python script, D3D's morphing clothes and the PP-2014 morph transfer) should be able to rebuild the expression files quickly, no matter the changes you made to the geometry.

I'll keep that in mind. I prefer to use projection morphing in ZB tho, as I have more control over it than what any script would allow, and I can modify them as needed, while I'm projecting them. Scripts can be a decent starting point though. But, especially with James, a lot of his expression morphs just look retarded and need reworking anyway. Same is true for a lot of other figures. 

~Shane

Personally, the only figures (Poser) that irked me were the poser 8 and above figures. They have short arms anbd the facial features are odd.

Poser 6,7, I liked. My favorite poser women to use for promos and comics are Poser 6 Jessi and Poser 7 Sydney (and JessiG2).

"(To be frank, Poser (and it's users) got what they deserved when DAZ kicked them out of the party. I told them exactly this would be happening long before it actually happened, but everybody was just too busy playing with V4's knickers.)

I***'m 48, and after 13 years of working my ass off creating better figures, I'm done with promises and big plans.***

Genesis is happening right now  and it's the most realistic, most perfect Poser figure I've ever seen.

I'd rather wish Poser had it's "own" set of high quality figures, but unless we find an angel investor willing to dump a couple 100.000 $ into such an endavour, I don't see any viable alternative."

Bluntly stated sir^^...but essentially Correct

DAZ has won. and rather decidedly.

SM has made the obvious Mistake of focusing on bullet point features to add to the Poser program itself while consistently
ignoring the very area where DAZ has long been prevailing.

Human Figures!

Where Exactly Did SM see a broad based Demand for a bullet physics engine that Does not add native ragdoll physics
and appears to not offer much in the way of an improvement over paul's Affordable Physics Engine in the area of hard body Dynamics ( Collapsing buildings etc.).

BTW ,not to nit pick,but Physics simulations are an ANIMATION FEATURE are they not??

Would not it have been better to improve the FIGURE animation features such a new graph editor,Dope Sheet, or perhaps some poser version on a non linear motion mixer like the aniMAte feature in Daz Studio?

But (Oh joy!) ,instead you few remaining ,poser only, animators can now have primitives & things knocking about in poser "2012".
when in reality you have had that option, at a VERY affordable
price ,>>PLUS interaction with figures<<  , since 2006 WITH paul's well executed PHYSICS plugin.

Nicely Done SM
you certainly are "in touch" with your user base.

"DAZ has won. and rather decidedly."

That's highly subjective.  I love working with Poser.  I never liked working with ds.  That's highly subjective too, of course.  I wasted too much time on ds in the past and so finally deleted it from my systems.  It's redundant to Poser and just a time sink to learn how to do things in ds that I already know how to do in Poser.  Daz made the decision to not make Poser figures.  That's their prerogotive, but I'm a Poser user and I only buy Poser product.  To me 'Daz has lost, and rather decidedly.'  I buy a lot of Poser content sometimes, but there's no longer a reason for me to go to their store.  No problem.  I buy elsewhere.  In my industry we call what Daz has done "winning arguments and losing sales."

I have used both programs (poser since poser 4 and ds since 1.8). To be honest, I favor Poser over DS.

I don't like dawn's oversized chin or the little line that extends horizontally from the side of her mouth as soon as she starts to smile a bit.

Not saying people don't have mouths like that.  The guy who acted luke skywalker in starwars has exactly such a mouth. I just find it unappealing.

As for her chin, i bet it can be morphed smaller, but the fact that most people don't change it in renders makes me think that maybe it isn't that easy to get rid of it.

Love esther

Quote - I don't like dawn's oversized chin or the little line that extends horizontally from the side of her mouth as soon as she starts to smile a bit.

Not saying people don't have mouths like that.  The guy who acted luke skywalker in starwars has exactly such a mouth. I just find it unappealing.

As for her chin, i bet it can be morphed smaller, but the fact that most people don't change it in renders makes me think that maybe it isn't that easy to get rid of it.

Love esther

You can morph Dawn all ya want chin and all.

I have not seen one render without thte distinctive mouth corner thing, and I have seen very few renders with a reasonable sized chin, so that makes me wonder about it.  are people just too lazy to make a good morph for her or do they like her default maybe?

and what about animatable joint centres? I heard that would make scaling easier to make teens etc?

Love esther

Quote - and what about animatable joint centres? I heard that would make scaling easier to make teens etc?

Love esther

Do you mean on Dawn? Or on Poser native figures?

It likely won't ever happen on Dawn, at least not officially, as that will break her pseudo "compatibility" with DS. So it will have to be done as a 3rd party injection and it will only work in Poser. There are some scaling features in her new morphs set, but I don't know how it was done. 

As for the Poser figures, scaling works pretty decent on several of them without need for animated joints. Some not so much. And it depends on the body part you're trying to scale, AND how much scaling you're attempting. Most only need a few points, + or - 5% or so is usually plenty. Buttocks usually get scewed on the X axis, but Y axis works. It just depends on the figure's individual rig as to how well it works.

~Shane

Quote - I have not seen one render without thte distinctive mouth corner thing, and I have seen very few renders with a reasonable sized chin, so that makes me wonder about it.  are people just too lazy to make a good morph for her or do they like her default maybe?

 

and what about animatable joint centres? I heard that would make scaling easier to make teens etc?

Love esther

A lot of people are lazy with all figures TBH and the dial spinners to change her look have just come out.  Everything I have heard is that she is easy to morph.  I've never been too much into making morphs for figures so I couldn't say.

As to animatable joint centers.. forgive my ignorance here.. but isn't that just like a check box that can be hit in each body part to bring up the offset dials?  Or is there something else that must be done?

What Shane said ! Scaling, or more precisely, single-axis-scaling, can work quite nicely if the figure's rigging was prepared to use it. But it's hit and miss. MORPHING a leg longer or a shoulder wider and then linking the new joint center coordinates to that morph is a much more precise and error proof method. But it's a lot of work to make those morphs manually in Poser, while it's a simple click-click-click set-up in Studio. For Genesis. You simply morph a new shape and the rigging snaps back into place, and then both the morph as well as the new joint centers are a single morph dial.