Attached Link: http://www.grfkdsgn.com

Here is a comparison of the standard P4 dork and my Cerulian. What I did was to up the res on the face mesh. Kind of similar to what had been done to Posette/Eve to make into Azura. What I would like to know was it worth my efforts to make the P4 Dork into a better model? Disregard the eyeballs as they are totally different meshes and not a fair comparison. Waiting to hear any constructive criticisms. - Dave

BTW,This is not a texture by me. That credit goes to Joelegecko. I used his Jeff texture and modified it to fit the P4 Dork and Cerulian. - Dave

The result looks pretty good. I think it is definately an improvement.

I can't see too much difference to tell you the truth. It may have been better to maybe add patches of tesselation over the eyebrows and around the mouth to make wrry lines etc. Maybe assigning a material to the nostrils to darken them would help. Nice try though.

For me I can't see too much use for it. I also don't much use for Azura ... I don't do the pure headshot pictures for the most part unless I am doing a texture test.

Well considering I was having to rez it up using RayDream and not Max, add patches of tesselation was a bit beyond me. I was doing good to increase the vertices in the facial area and ignore the ones at the back of the head. Had thought bout doing the nostrils, but by the time I had come to that idea, I would've had to start over from scratch. And that prospect was not all that appealing. David

Well what I found in max is, if you note down the procedure order in which you tesselate an object like this head, you can change all the MTs if you follow the same procedure. If you tesselate his whole head then you can use the same methodology to tesselate all the MTs and they should work.

Sounds great but I dont have Max which is why I did it in Raydream.

I'd be interested to see what you'd get by using my Clay headmorph (in freestuff) as your base instead of the base Dork. Dork's problem isn't that his mesh is too lo-res but that Zygote was --sloppy?-- when it came to normal head proportions and overdid the head and nose length, distance between nose and lips, the depth of the philtrum, weight of the jaw, and the unnecessary temple pits beside the forehead. People who've downloaded Clay might have noticed a somewhat feminine appearance; the point is that Dork's draftsman decided to overemphasize secondary sexual characteristics to differentiate between Dork and Posette. It's my opinion that those characteristics should be dial morphs, not permanent features of the mesh.

Yeah I modifed Dork so that he didnt have those stupid cheek dipples beside the corner of his mouth and smoothed out the harshness of his eyebrows (a la Traveler). I might be tempted to use your "Clay" morph as a starting point. I've downloaded it but have as of yet to test it out. Dave

Be my guest... I didn't do anything to improve the eyebrows for Clay.

Well here's cross-section that shows off what I've done to the mesh. Dave

And here's another pic. Wasnt sure which one depicted it better. dave

What I like - in particular - about the Azura model is the added morphing flexabilty... it seems much easier to get nice results without causing weird, unwanted results (eyes popping through eyelids, strange divits or wrinkles, etc). This may just be a matter of improved built-in morph targets, but having additional vertices means you have finer control on which vertices/facets are altered with a given morph. The shot above is a set of characters based on Azura. They are all using the same skin texture (one I modified from HappyWorldLand, of course), so the face shape, hair and skin-tone is all that differentiates them. I also added a (experimental) 'lip-liner' material that's visible on a few of the above. The additional facets really help make nice poofy/rounded lips and keep the other angles on the face smooth in general. I'm not sure how this applies to the Male head, but it might help when you're tryig to get rid of some of the dorky features (what's up with those dimples?). - Spanki

Yes that was one of the reasons I went this route. I also wanted to make the body similar to Michael's to have better flexibility. I encountered the morph restriction when I was trying to make ridges similar to a Klingon for the male head. I plan on attempting it with Cerulian and see if I get better results. - Dave

I believe the last time someone asked about the Klingon ridges the consensus was that bump maps would be more useful. Even at a higher res, you may still find bump maps doing a large part of your work. One gripe I have about Azura is that the two defective (i.e., non-symmetrical) Posette morphs -- blink and worry -- are reproduced a little too faithfully. If there were a simple drag-n-drop application for converting Posette's morphs to Azura's, I'd be a lot more inclined to use Azura more. But then, I'm biased on these sorts of things.