Using Poser 7's New Morphing Tool to Fix Joint Problems

As I'm sure you're all aware, Poser simply does not handle it well when you have characters bent at some more extreme angles, and causes unattractive effects such as the bent shin, deformed foot, and ugly knee in this picture. Until this point, you would either have to paint over it in Photoshop, fix it in a modelling program, or go through the fiddly process of editing the joint setting to make it bend properly, which all require another program and/or technical knowledge of how to do it.

With Poser 7's newly introduced morphing tool, it is now possible to fix these problems without leaving Poser, in only a minute or two.

Step 1

Pose your figure, and identify problem areas (I'm using Victoria 4, as she's fun to play with). In this case, It is the shin, ankle and knee that bother me, as well as the poke through on the bikini top I added for modesty's sake.

 

 

Step 2

Open the morphing tool- it is the little hand icon in the button bar up at the top. In the menu box that pops up when you click that, click the 'create' tab. Now, click somewhere on your figure- you will notice a circular area of points, that shows where vertices are. The ones in the area that is red will be affected most strongly, while the ones in the green areas will be affected more weakly.

You can change how sharply the effect of the brush falls off by clicking on the circular things in the menu box- the fuzzier the circle, the smoother the resulting morph will be. You change the size of the brush with the 'radius' slider, and how strong the effect is with the 'magnitude' slider. If you fiddle with the buttons, you'll quickly get the feel for it. Notice that when you click on a body part, the brush does not extend outside that area- this can be useful most of the time, when you don't want 'spillover' from your brush on nearby body parts.

For the purpose of this tutorial, you will want to have your brush large enough to cover a decent amount of each problem area you work on, with the fuzziest setting, and a low magnitude (such as 0.06, for work on figures), so the affect can be built up gradually for smoother results. I like to set the 'relative to' checkbox to 'screen', and the mode to 'pull' for most reshaping purposes, as I find it easier to work with like that.

 

 

Gradually use the brush and many small strokes to pull the areas into the correct shape. This is a simple process once you know the tools, and can take as little as 1 or 2 minutes for a simple fix such as this one. After you've got it into the shape you like, set the brush to 'smooth' with a quite high magnitude to smooth out any accidental bumps.

3. Finished! This was done in only a minute or two, and still isn't quite photo realistic, but is a vast improvement on how she was before. After the morph is done, all you need to do is add clothes, hair and a texture of your choice, render, then you're done. Hope this was helpful :)

 

 

Jasmin is a 19 year old arts student and illustrator from north queensland,  who uses 3d as reference when photos of her skinny boyfriend won't do.