I have Antonia from 2008 ... and I find her innovative even for today ... the duel hip parts so you can bend from the hip and move the hip around without rotating the whole figure is quite a welcome feature.  When do you expect to release your new version of Antonia? 

It is always fun to try something "new" and refreshing.  As the old adage, "built it, they will come".

I see this thread is growing again, great!
Life has taken so many twists and turns over the lat 9 years and I haven'y worked much with Antonia but now that I amd more into DS shaders and Poser 12 shaders, might do a new skin for her. :)
Hi ODF (waves). :)

Why the sudden comments from people other than primorge? Has the forum software update revived all the bots? :-)

Boni posted at 8:47 AM Fri, 17 September 2021 - #4427610

I have Antonia from 2008 ... and I find her innovative even for today ... the duel hip parts so you can bend from the hip and move the hip around without rotating the whole figure is quite a welcome feature.  When do you expect to release your new version of Antonia? 

Seriously, I have a growing list of things I'd like to make for Antonia, and I still like to share things and exchange experiences. But I'm also still an insufferable perfectionist, and this time around I am going to try not to burn myself out by getting too ambitious. So I'll basically work on whatever I feel like, take breaks whenever I feel like and not press forward too hard on anything. This is my hobby, and it's supposed to be fun, right? That means, among other things, that I have maybe one or two hours a day max in me before things start to feel less like fun and more like a second unpaid job.

To be a bit more specific: if the texturing work goes well, I imagine having a new CCA-licensed skin for her by the end of the year is not too unrealistic. I'd like to make a set of every day clothes for her, too, which I can just release as I go. Other things, like the weight map edit I've started on, will need a bit more coordination. The eventual goal is to make myself a new base version of Antonia that works just the way I like it, probably lo-res, weight-mapped, with my old "A" type UV map and an improved and extended set of expression morphs. When I'm happy with that, I'll share it, but I don't know how much time I'll feel like spending on polishing her so that she's generally usable.

Hi ODF (waves). :)

It is always fun to try something "new" and refreshing.  As the old adage, "built it, they will come".

Here's an unshaded OpenGL render for primorge. Some of my first watery brush strokes from before I edited the fall-off curve in Blender are still in there. Obviously, I'll be fixing those or start again from scratch.

I still think you'll save yourself a lot of work if you use a suitable skin tile as a base. Back when I briefly was working on a texture for Antonia I used that fill method, it can give you a very quick method of having an entire base body texture without relying on photo resources for that. After the fill you can very easily fix seams and detail through various methods and 3d painting. These texture previews are the culmination of about 4 days work on Antonia, I decided to go back to some unfinished La Femme projects that I'm still working on. This might be useful to you in some way...

Here's a close up of the flat ear texture with blood vessel detailing. The basic shading is derived from a set as multiply baked AO map...

Here's the flat eye detailing. Same method with some lid wrinkles hand painted in mudbox...

How it looks on Antonia...

I deliberately made the base texture kind of pale so I can more easily use it for color changes and creature/alien morph skins for her. I also added quite a bit of blood vessel work in mudbox... you can faintly see this along the temples and forehead.

I also took the most time doing the mouth interior parts... here's the tongue texture, created in mudbox with spots and noise brushes. They're a bit over saturated but it's easy to dial that back when I resume working on this eventually...

Here's a close up of the painted tongue texture...

Part of the mouth interior. Specifically where the interior attaches to the tongue. Again, mudbox painting. You'll find it useful to have various body parts as seperate pieces while painting, masking and toggling visibility. Especially the eyes and various mouth parts. I won't bother describing the cross uv UDIM tile painting method I use, you've probably already come up against that in Blender. If you need help with that still I can describe how I do it in Mudbox, it's similar, I imagine, in Blender. Teeth dont really need much in the way of diffuse texturing, a flat off white fill with a very faint occlusion map works well. Teeth visual properties are handled mostly by SSS.

A couple of full head shots to show cumulative. Like I said it didn't take long at all to come up with the base head and neck skin, the mouth parts required the most work. Eyebrows are easy, it's the positioning sometimes that requires fiddling and second guessing. You can find plenty of open source brushes or reference. Pubic hair is a little more tricky but I have very good reference photos lol. Lash brushes are easy to find.

Adding all the little spots and imperfections, pores, etc can be tedious but I find it meditative busy work. Make sure you try to keep things on as many separate transparent layers as possible, you'll thank yourself later. Only bake down and final beauty blend when you are ready to make a particular master file. Keep all your templates as an over the top multiply layer and keep many selection sets. Especially the saved selections will come in handy later for detailed makeups. I usually use a combination of solid color filled selections that can easily be magic wanded ( lips and eye cavity areas) and many template based saved selections...

...oh, and make sure the blend between the lip perimeter where it joins the mouth interior has a nice transition. A lot of people might skimp on that but it's important otherwise it'll look like crap during open mouth smiles and such

Anyway, as an OT personal aside I just finished another "fantasy" makeup for La Femme, or it's just about finished. It's my take on Black Metal corpse paint makeup that you see alot in Norwegian Black Metal bands. I'm not crazy about much of the production qualities and ideologies attached to Black Metal though I do like a lot of "extreme" music such as Doom metal and GrindCore. I do think the visual aesthetics of Black Metal are kind of cool though, especially when sported by women lol. That being said this Makeup was partially inspired by the media personality Poppy's appropriation of the the aesthetic on the cover of her 'I Disagree' recording shown below. Though it's a graphical overlay it works well, perhaps better because of it...

Here's my take, more akin to traditional corpse paint.

Just the diffuse maps, no shaders, regular Firefly... triangular pupils are one of my eye morphs...

Fantastic stuff, primorge, very helpful! I'm definitely planning on using all the "shortcuts" I can in my texture painting. Right now I'm just getting my bearings and playing with simple things, though, being an absolute noob in most of the software and techniques. It took me ages to figure out how to get multiple UDIM textures (one each for the various slots such as color, roughness and bump) into a material in Blender, for example. Very simple once one knows. Or the fact that Poser/SuperFly applies gamma correction to a color that I plug into a value input, so I have to reverse that in a math node. If I didn't have less than the average amount of hair before, I would have now.

I made a halfway decent merkin in The Other Software a few weeks ago, so I don't I'll be painting any pubic hair any time soon. I might try the same with brows and lashes, at least for my own work. Can't hurt to have a painted brow option when distributing a texture, but that's not an immediate concern right now.

Oh, I forgot to ask: what resolutions do you use in your texturing work?

Oh, I forgot to ask: what resolutions do you use in your texturing work?

To be honest I'm anxious to wrap up my various Poser character projects and go back to more modeling projects and figure creation. Making props, static sculpts, and non human figures, feels more like being an artist for my particular interests. Making stuff for existing Poser figures carries a lot of preconceived notion/expectation baggage that feels a bit stifling. Maybe by the end of the year. Working under those constraints has been a decent learning experience though.

Very simple once one knows. Or the fact that Poser/SuperFly applies gamma correction to a color that I plug into a value input, so I have to reverse that in a math node.

I just use the texture node gamma correction options, if I'm understanding you correctly, 2.2/custom 1 alpha. Unless the render has some poor lighting it's pretty consistent results across software and devices. I check my work across different displays, my tablet being a bit more contrasty of a display than my computer. Usually auto contrast in photoshop results in no visible adjustment from most poser renders unless I really hastily lit it or the global illumination is poorly set. OpenGL preview render stuff I tweak in photoshop if necessary.

Nah, that gamma correction issue is a bit more specific, and  the texture node settings didn't seem to make any difference. I'll probably ask about it in the technical forum later, rather than have it buried in this thread. It was just an aside to illustrate my general level of ignorance.

To be honest I'm anxious to wrap up my various Poser character projects and go back to more modeling projects and figure creation. Making props, static sculpts, and non human figures, feels more like being an artist for my particular interests. Making stuff for existing Poser figures carries a lot of preconceived notion/expectation baggage that feels a bit stifling. Maybe by the end of the year. Working under those constraints has been a decent learning experience though.

OT  but, "To be honest I'm anxious to wrap up my various Poser character projects", I just hope you're still planning to release them when finished :)  I'm looking forward to seeing that Sera package.

I'm going to try and sell my La Femme stuff. Sera and Antonia stuff will be free. The Sera thing will probably have to be distributed as a cr2 because of some of the crazy morph and JCM stuff. If I don't put the Sera thing out there I'll PM you and give you a copy. I have to redo the textures on the Sera thing, it'll have to be toon skin ala La Femme's Anime Girl style, the textures I made aren't up to snuff because the figure is so poorly UV mapped. Any kind of detailed skin on the body suffers from stretching during bends because the whole body map is on one tile. Even at 4096 the body map details take up too small of a portion of the tile. Consequently details such as nipples and skin modulation are very pixelated even at high resolutions. A flat toon skin style will fix that, very easy to do. I think the figure was intended for toon shaders mostly. I worked for a long time on morphs for that figure and there were a lot of hair pulling technical hurdles to overcome, particularly with the existing magnet JCMs and the way the eyes are constructed as flat planes... so I don't plan on just abandoning the work I did.

You'll be the first to know when I wrap that, and thanks for the interest :)

Oh... and the Sera features are... sublimely perverted lol. Just a heads up. I kinda went overboard in that regard.

And the corresponding back views.

Looking good.

Happy to see Antonia is allready living.

"Or the fact that Poser/SuperFly applies gamma correction to a color that I plug into a value input, so I have to reverse that in a math node...

... Nah, that gamma correction issue is a bit more specific, and  the texture node settings didn't seem to make any difference. I'll probably ask about it in the technical forum later, rather than have it buried in this thread."

Says this in Dimension3D's 'Introduction to Superfly' pdf...

 
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/introduction-to-superfly/112622

and that's it. Apparently, according to this it's omnipresent. All of my forum searches return the same prognosis... GC is always present and no mention of a workaround.

Actually there is a GC section in the above cited pdf, after reading a bit more in there's this... not sure if it's relevant to your particular problem but here's a citation

Introduction to Superfly, p.37 

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/introduction-to-superfly/112622

Thanks primorge! I have that document and consulted it, too, but it seems I was too impatient. I'll have another look and see if it explains the specific issue.

Okay, judging by Ralf's descriptions there, it looks as if there may have been some changes between between P11 and P12, and possibly a bug in the P12 version I'm running. So I guess I'll upgrade to the latest version, do a more controlled test and ask in the P12 forum if things don't work the way one would expect.

Just in case anyone was wondering, I haven't left again. It's only that I fell into a bit of a Blender rabbit hole. No details or I'll get a talking to from the mods again. :-) But I'm still practicing and studying painting textures for Antonia, as evidenced by the image.

Greetings from my ever-growing Blender rabbit hole! I'm still learning and practicing, with the eventual goal to create a hand-painted realistic skin texture for Antonia.

In the meantime, some things I'm pondering. As I mentioned, the overall plan is to create a new version of Antonia that's basically tailored to the latest Poser and my personal preferences. That said, I'd still like to share my results under the CC license just like the existing Antonia versions, and I would like to avoid making life unnecessarily difficult for folks who might want to adopt her.

So one big question is compatibility. How hard do I want to try and keep old content working with the next Antonia? I'm less concerned with that when it comes to textures and conforming clothes, i.e. potential problems arising from modified riggings and UV mappings (each of which we've already had more than one of, anyway). Fitting clothes is much easier now, and there are ways to convert a texture to a new UV mapping (Blender is quite good at that kind of thing). But morphs might be a different story. It's relatively easy to adjust an existing morph to a new base shape, but if I were to change the topology, I think things could get trickier. On the other hand, it might be nice to fix some of the things that have been identified as problematic.

So in short: should "Antonia 2.0" be more like a minor update with a more complete CC-licensed base, or basically a new figure that is loosely based on the existing mesh?

Wow, that's a hard question to really answer.  I'm all for an update even if it means making changes to improve the figure.  However, will content makers be willing to create new clothing/accessories for her?  I'm pretty sure there are many that will jump at the opportunity.  So I guess my answer would be an Antonia 2.0.

Honestly, I'm not particularly optimistic when it comes to content creators adopting a new Antonia. That didn't really happen with Antonia WM, when a group of very talented people did their best to turn her into a broadly appealing and usable figure, despite my best efforts to the contrary (just kidding about that last part!). So what has changed that would make it more likely now?

I'm also a bit worried about the whole content creator angle because making a figure appealing to content creators would require making her appealing to the general public, i.e. at the very least easy to use with any potential "rough edges" smoothed out as far as possible, but also very versatile. That's hard, and I don't think I'd have the stamina a second time. It's also highly speculative. What are the features that will get users on board? No one really knows. What are features that a particular prospective user asks me for, now that's a much easier problem to deal with. :-)

My feeling is that if I made a largely incompatible Antonia 2.0, it would effectively be restricted, at least initially, to a very small user base consisting of people who are comfortable to make or adapt their own content. I'd give her a new CC-licensed skin base and basic wardrobe though this time, so that might help a little bit.

Hmm, maybe it would also help a bit if a new Antonia came with conversion scripts for existing content, particularly morph packs.

I am not that concerned about morphs. Poser's morph copy tool works pretty well provided the mesh surfaces coincide. A good pose or morph is 90% of the job.

I would think poses are the primary problem. Antonia has a different arms position and of course a different hierarchy in general than most other figures. 

For Project Evolution, also featuring some private rig solutions, there is an excellent pose Converter by Nagra_00_: https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/80991/poseconverter-data-update-v04-for-pe. It formally takes only V4 poses but results for V3 and even Schlabber's V2 based poses come out very well. My PE has about the largest collection of poses of all figures in my Runtimes. Something similar for Antonia(2) would take away many hurdles.

A doner rig or two might be helpful to make it easier to convert clothing. I make a lot of use of the ones for Lafemme. Not everyone is willing to convert, but there are those that do.

My opinion for a new Antonia, off the top of my head, would be to use the original as a base and change the following things;

Make the lips part of the head UVs, additionally I don't think a lip material is really necessary. Masks are pretty universally used anyway.

Remodel the eyes so that they are concentric loops throughout without that weird cubic iris topology. The iris should be connected to the sclera with the cornea and cover as one separate piece. Makes texturing and morphing easier. It would be nice if the 2 eye parts (eyeball; sclera, iris, pupil/cover with cornea) are both complete watertight spheres. Also position the eyes so that they are aligned straight along the z axis rather than at an angled orientation as they are now, makes using match centers and animated orientations easier or more predictable.

Complete genitalia topology built in, the bits needn't be apparent just so long as all the topology is there. That is, model the gentalia in and morph flatten/smooth it out leaving a non-descript base but with all the necessary topology present for morphs. Would be best to perhaps uv in a present state, morph to non-descript, tuck the additional topology up into a non-descript genital crease for the base. And nope, HD morphs aren't as good nor practical as having the actually modeled topology available. HD is just icing for anyone who would extrapolate, being the ideal scenerio.

Avoid poles in the outer breasts and have the poles moved into the nipple area.

Try to avoid exotic rig choices. Weight maps and JCMs suffice with a "conventional" poser rig. I also have some opinions about body handle controllers (mostly about weights influence for those bits) but that's drifting even more than usual.

Also bear in mind that, probably, many people here who will be giving you pointers and suggestions, however well meaning and second hand informed, have never manually rigged a figure from scratch nor created a JCM in their life, regardless of how Poser lofty the demeanor. There's a difference between the knowledgable collector and the creator. Conversely the creator has a difficult time seeing the forest for the trees. Caveat in both directions.

What really makes anything Antonia unique is the license, and all that comes from that. It would be the figure's biggest advantage, comparably.

There's a ton of other things,  just personal opinion, and very specific about morphs and figure topology/UVs... but just woke up and need my coffee. Not to mention I've probably haunted your comments over the past few months to a sufficiently irritating degree :D

Oops. One other thing

Make the teeth and gums separate this time, pretty please.

@primorge: I agree with most of your points:

- Lips can best be done via maps and/or (in Superfly) layers. 
- There are issues with higher priority than full modeled/operational genitalia. For those who make work outside the more prudish clauses of the Rendo TOS there is PE One X and add-ons to other figures.

- The most 'exotic' in Antonia's rigging is that the hip is a child of the waist ('hip2') and not the usual other way round . Also the zero pose of the arms is a bit un-orthodox. These two factors limit the exchange with other figures. Of course if you change these in Antonia2, it really breaks the compatibility with the earlier versions.

@primorge: I agree with most of your points:

- Lips can best be done via maps and/or (in Superfly) layers. 
- There are issues with higher priority than full modeled/operational genitalia. For those who make work outside the more prudish clauses of the Rendo TOS there is PE One X and add-ons to other figures.

- The most 'exotic' in Antonia's rigging is that the hip is a child of the waist ('hip2') and not the usual other way round . Also the zero pose of the arms is a bit un-orthodox. These two factors limit the exchange with other figures. Of course if you change these in Antonia2, it really breaks the compatibility with the earlier versions.

Not a priority. Simply a curious omission on an indy open source figure from a progressive content creator. Very few use PE One X to make Poser P*rn besides, near as I can tell Genesis and DS has that market sinched judging from my observations at the other R site.

Anatomical correctness would also be good reason, particularly coming from an artist (ODF) who obviously appreciates nude pin up style renders. If you're going to do something why not do it to it's fullest from the inception, I can only see that options would be an advantage to the figure. Plus, with the method I described above in my original post, I'm not seeing how it would inhibit or handicap any other feature of the figure... Or even really bring it into some puritanical realm of "prurience"... and the additional modeling is really negligible, and I know this from experience.

Anyway, was just a suggestion, It's ODF's time commitment after all... if thats what you're suggesting with 'higher priority', priorities which are actually only really known by ODF himself.

In the end does ODF really want to spend the, potentially, next couple/few years redesigning Antonia? Especially considering that he worked a long time on the original Antonia mesh before even revealing it to the Poser community. And here we are a decade on now. From my personal perspective a redesigned Antonia would be great, but the original figure is freely redesignable by anyone who chooses to do so. I've changed a few things on her myself and eventually plan on doing more. This hobby is slow going when full time work is a factor, there's many ideas, and frankly we're getting on in years, the effects of which probably many of us are starting to feel, ODF included.

Thanks @FVerbaas, @RedPhantom and @primorge for all the helpful comments! I'll go through them in chronological order.

FVerbaas posted at 4:44 AM Sun, 31 October 2021 - #4429628

I am not that concerned about morphs. Poser's morph copy tool works pretty well provided the mesh surfaces coincide. A good pose or morph is 90% of the job.

That's reassuring. Somehow I was under the impression that transferring morphs might be more problematic. Will have to do some tests when the time comes.

I would think poses are the primary problem. Antonia has a different arms position and of course a different hierarchy in general than most other figures. 

For Project Evolution, also featuring some private rig solutions, there is an excellent pose Converter by Nagra_00_: https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/80991/poseconverter-data-update-v04-for-pe. It formally takes only V4 poses but results for V3 and even Schlabber's V2 based poses come out very well. My PE has about the largest collection of poses of all figures in my Runtimes. Something similar for Antonia(2) would take away many hurdles.

RedPhantom posted at 7:00 AM Sun, 31 October 2021 - #4429631

A doner rig or two might be helpful to make it easier to convert clothing. I make a lot of use of the ones for Lafemme. Not everyone is willing to convert, but there are those that do.

I'm pretty keen on making new original clothing for Antonia, but it's unrealistic to expect all the clothes she'll ever need to be done from scratch. So I guess I'll put looking into clothes conversion on the big long to-do list and learn about creating and using donor rigs when I get to that. Unless of course someone were to donate some donor rigs. :-)

My opinion for a new Antonia, off the top of my head, would be to use the original as a base and change the following things;

Thanks for the detailed list!

Make the lips part of the head UVs, additionally I don't think a lip material is really necessary. Masks are pretty universally used anyway.

Yes, definitely! In fact, I've been thinking about making my original UV-mapping (a.k.a. Antonia-A) the default again. It has the integrated lips and was mapped with closed eyes, so no weird stretching on the eyelids. If there's an Antonia 2.0, I might also try my hand at remapping from scratch, but that might fall prey to the "no headaches" clause depending on how cooperative my available tools are. :-)

Remodel the eyes so that they are concentric loops throughout without that weird cubic iris topology. The iris should be connected to the sclera with the cornea and cover as one separate piece. Makes texturing and morphing easier. It would be nice if the 2 eye parts (eyeball; sclera, iris, pupil/cover with cornea) are both complete watertight spheres. Also position the eyes so that they are aligned straight along the z axis rather than at an angled orientation as they are now, makes using match centers and animated orientations easier or more predictable.

Yes to all of that.

Complete genitalia topology built in, the bits needn't be apparent just so long as all the topology is there. That is, model the gentalia in and morph flatten/smooth it out leaving a non-descript base but with all the necessary topology present for morphs. Would be best to perhaps uv in a present state, morph to non-descript, tuck the additional topology up into a non-descript genital crease for the base. And nope, HD morphs aren't as good nor practical as having the actually modeled topology available. HD is just icing for anyone who would extrapolate, being the ideal scenerio.

Yep, the lack of geometry there has been bothering me, too.

Avoid poles in the outer breasts and have the poles moved into the nipple area.

Again, completely agreed.

Try to avoid exotic rig choices. Weight maps and JCMs suffice with a "conventional" poser rig. I also have some opinions about body handle controllers (mostly about weights influence for those bits) but that's drifting even more than usual.

I might not feel up to doing a complete re-rig any time soon, but if I do I'll keep that advice in mind. More likely I'll just tweak Phantom3d's WM rig and maybe simplify some things. If you have some details on what you consider exotic, I'd be interested to hear them. (I know, potentially opening the flood gates here :-) )

What really makes anything Antonia unique is the license, and all that comes from that. It would be the figure's biggest advantage, comparably.

Yep!

Oops. One other thing

Make the teeth and gums separate this time, pretty please.

Sounds doable. I was thinking about separate finger/toe nails, as well. What's your use case for separate teeth? Just easier morphing/hiding?

[on genitals]

Not a priority. Simply a curious omission on an indy open source figure from a progressive content creator. Very few use PE One X to make Poser P*rn besides, near as I can tell Genesis and DS has that market sinched judging from my observations at the other R site.

Well, back when I first made Antonia, I wasn't planning on using her for pron, and I got a little bit too obsessed with keeping the poly count low (see also the weird eye and breast topologies). So that explains the lack of detail in her "swimsuit area." :-)

Anatomical correctness would also be good reason, particularly coming from an artist (ODF) who obviously appreciates nude pin up style renders. If you're going to do something why not do it to it's fullest from the inception, I can only see that options would be an advantage to the figure. Plus, with the method I described above in my original post, I'm not seeing how it would inhibit or handicap any other feature of the figure... Or even really bring it into some puritanical realm of "prurience"... and the additional modeling is really negligible, and I know this from experience.

Yeah, even though I have no ambitions to make her fully ready for the other R site, I do think it would be nice if she were ready for closeups and had the potential for some shape variations. Perhaps not a big priority, but it would be fun.

Anyway, was just a suggestion, It's ODF's time commitment after all... if thats what you're suggesting with 'higher priority', priorities which are actually only really known by ODF himself.

Yes, we already have a functioning figure, so I'll be prioritizing features I think are fun to do and/or learn, plus ones that I am or specific users are missing in the figure, and deprioritizing features that are tedious to get right and ones that we think will make her popular but are not really that keen on ourselves. I got huffed at in this thread at some point for using the phrase "pearl before the swine," which I admit was unnecessarily derogatory, but I don't really have the ambition to create a figure for everyone. If Antonia had just a few happy users who are willing to do a little bit of extra work in order to create or adapt content, that would be plenty.

In the end does ODF really want to spend the, potentially, next couple/few years redesigning Antonia? Especially considering that he worked a long time on the original Antonia mesh before even revealing it to the Poser community. And here we are a decade on now. From my personal perspective a redesigned Antonia would be great, but the original figure is freely redesignable by anyone who chooses to do so. I've changed a few things on her myself and eventually plan on doing more. This hobby is slow going when full time work is a factor, there's many ideas, and frankly we're getting on in years, the effects of which probably many of us are starting to feel, ODF included.

Hey, who you calling old? :-D Seriously though, that's spot on. I really like Antonia as a figure, and I can see myself gradually adding on to and improving her over the coming years just for the fun of it, but it is a hobby and, at least as long as I still have a day job, should not turn into work.

I think the long term plan, insofar as there is one, would be to start with add-ons that work on the current figure, with an eye on future compatibility, and in the meantime compile a list of changes that I find important for Antonia 2.0.