R.I.P. The DONT SCALE MORPH TARGETS rule is DEAD!!!!!!! If you are modeling your figures and morphs in MAX you know that the 3D preview cant handle the small Poser scale, the figure is placed along the wrong axis witch makes view rotation awkward and that its hard to place your vertex exactly. And of course you have seen the replay on questions and also tutorials saying that whatever you do dont rescale or move the figure. CRAP!!!!. In my latest project I wanted to find a solution to this and I did some experimenting so that I should be able to work in a scale that MAX can handle. AND IT WORKS!! I dont know if this is known by some MAX users out there but I have never seen anything about it. As I understand it the morph target is noting more than other version of the bodypart. It doesnt contain any scaling values or things like that so why shouldnt it work? I found that the problem with scaling and moving the figure has to do with not getting the parts pack in the exact place when scaling down again, and to that I found a solution. I havent tried to scale thing up and down lots of times because there is no need to work that way and I also think that eventually there will be a calculation differens making the part to drift. The best thing to do is to import a figure scale it up and save it as a MAX file and only scale down parts before export. I have also found that the rotate option in the obj import plugin works fine so why not work along the axis that MAX is used for. So how is it done?

(part 2/2) 1. Import the obj file (using HABWare plugin) you want to work on as usual, and feel free to use the rotate option. 2. Select the bodypart or the whole figure(I recommend to scale the whole figure in case you want to make more changes later). 3. In the tools menu open up the Transform Type-In tool. 4. In the toolbar select the Select and uniform scale tool (make sure its uniform). 5. In the Referens coordinate system in the toolbar select World. 6. In the Use pivot point center in the toolbar select Transform coordinate center. 7. Now in the Transform type-in dialog enter 10000 in the Offset:World field and press enter. 8. Now you have a scaled up figure. Save it and you can start your editing. When you are ready for export : 1. Select the figure or the bodypart. 2. Open the Transform type-in tool. 3. Make the same settings as in #4, 5 and 6 above. 4. In the Transform type-in Offset:World field type in 1 ant hit enter. 5. Select export and .obj ( If you used the rotate when importing dont forget to use it on the export to!) And you should now have a figure or a morph target with perfect fit!!!! The trick here is that the center of scaling is the world coordinate center and not the figure itself. Using the figure center fails because when you move vertexes on the figure the centerpoint moves and this means that when scaling down you won't get the figure in the same place as before the scaling. HellBorn

A little warning: This can cause your .cr2 files to get very large. When you bring altered geometry into Poser to make a morph target, Poser only stores the vertices that have moved. This is done by testing to see if all three (x,y,z) coordinates of the altered .obj are equal to the coordinates of the original figure .obj. If you scale the altered part up and down, the coordinates often change at a microscopic level. You'll never see the change, but Poser will, and it will store an outrageously small morph delta in the .cr2 for every vertex in the morph target. Ciao! Joe.

Maybe...I'm gonna check that..but I think it would be worth it anyway. Storage space dosn't cost very much compared to the broblem when working in MAX!

Try loading a few of those fat .cr2's into your workspace at the same time and then see how you feel about it. It's not the space they take up on the harddrive, it's the space they eat in memory.

If so I'll gonna try to make a Morph Optimizer program that compares the original mesh coordinates with the morph targets coordinates and fix the problem. MAX is one of the best 3D tools and it realy sucks that you almost can't use it for poser models. I'm gonna try to do some test this evening or at the weekend. Of course you could also ask yourself if you realy need to load all morphs into one single model! Why not only load the ones you need?

I agree, morph targets should reside in a morph target library until you need them in a particular figure. But I disagree about the storage space issue. Although it doesn't cost that much to store figures, large .cr2 files seem to be more likely to bring Poser down (even on systems with hundreds of megs of memory). One of the functions going into the next version of Morpher is the ability to threshold the morph target deltas in an existing .cr2 file, so you can strip out the ones that are very close to zero and are probably math errors. It's not just scaling that does this, several programs "drift" the verticies just enough to be a problem during normal operations. RayDream has a bad tendency to distort the entire mesh slightly when using the sphere of attraction, for example. Sometimes the fidderence can be subtle. One program (which I wrote) did enough "damage" simply in the way it was printing out the floating point numbers to generate excess deltas in the .cr2.

I can agree in that Poser isn't the most stable product I've seen (by my experince most 3D programs is a bit unstable). Im gonna make a simple box and try to rescal it and see what happens. If it drifts I'm gonna see if I can make that program. HellBorn

I have made some tests now and here is my conclusion. I could give you a description on in witch digit position values started to drift when you do this or you do that (If someone really wants to know you can get my numbers) but it will give me a lot to type. Importing a model into MAX scaling it up and then scaling it down creates a small drifting of values. The differens is less than Poser uses but not much less. So we are close to getting bigger files here. I was thinking of creating a program that fixed the files if the problem would appear, (and it should be no problem writing it). Then I thought I first should test how much precision I could gain by creating a model that was zeroed from MAX. I imported a model from poser and scaled it up 10000% and saved it as a MAX file. I opened the MAX file and scaled it down to 1% and exported to obj file. This was now my new model to witch morphtargets should be created. I opened the MAX file made a morph, scaled it down 1% and exported as an obj file. Now I checked the values in the obj files, and except for the moved vertex all vertexes hold the same coordinates down to the 12th digit( Poser uses about 7 digits in its cr2 files)!!!!!! If you work this way you should have no problem. HellBorn