Attached Link: http://spanki.home.mindspring.com

It's a post-processing utility for .obj files. You can find it in the free stuff area, or I just set up a quick web page for it at: http://spanki.home.mindspring.com Mostly, I wrote it to generate smoother normals to eliminate 'seams' between body segments, but it also has several export formatting options. I'm in the process of adding a gl rendered view window now. - Spanki

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

This is not on the same level as some of the above, but I was really happy with the 'illustrated' quality that came out... straight Poser render, no post (I scaled it down from 900x900 to 700x700).

Both of my previous (and future) texture/character packs have no brows painted on the face texture, they are added using the Upper Eyebrow mesh, which can easily be swapped out via MAT files - the appropriate upper eyebrow texture area on the face texture is filled in with some brow texture, but the trans maps and material color settings do most of the work. I'm not sure if I understand your proposed method ("...rather than a transparency for a little more realism"), but it sounds like you plan to include a ton of (face) texture maps with the different colors... if that's the case, I'd recommend against doing that ;).

As a frequent user of your Product Shot backdrop, I just wanted to specifically thank you for it. I found it early on in my Poser life and have gotten much mileage from it (I've used it with a Vue background before - works great). Great prop, thanks a bunch for making it available!

Problems 1,2 and 4 definately look like you've got a few polygons reversed. Problem 3... hmmm... that's an odd one for sure. It looks like some problems I've seen with triangulated meshes (as opposed to using mostly quads), but I've never seen it quite that severe. It's kinda tough to guess much about it without seeing the mesh itself. I'd be willing/interested in taking a closer look if you can't figure it out (spanki@mindspring.com). BTW Kris, I've seen people mention several times - "the free version of painter 3d that came with poser" .... was this only included prior to Poser 4? I don't seem to have any Painter program on my disks.

Thanks.. I have the Curious Labs version of P4, so that makes sense.

If you like Nendo, you'll love Wings3D... it was written as a Nendo clone by a guy who had problems purchasing Nendo. It is very actively updated, has all (?) the same features (and more), exports in .obj format (and doesn't force you to triangulate the object... it prefers to work in quads, by design) and best of all - It's FREE. http://www.wings3d.com MilkShape - it's a nice program too (I own a registered copy), but an additional caveat is that it only works in triangles.. it will convert your quad meshes to triangulated ones, but fails to load lots of .obj files. It does understand groups and materials pretty well though (Wings3D seems to think the two are linked). Another one I recently purchased (sub $100 range) is 3D Canvas ( http://www.amabilis.com/ ). I hadn't had a chance to play with it much yet, but it looks fairly feature-rich and also supports .obj format.

You need some sort of modeling program and the preferred mesh format is wavefront .obj files, so the modeler should export the meshes/models in that format, or you'll need some way to convert them.

There are several 'free' modelers available... you might want to take a look at these:

Wings3d - http://www.wings3d.com
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com

...both of them will export in .obj format. I personally use Wings3D currently for most of my work.

If you want to be able to texture-map your model, you'll need to create UV mapping attributes... one of the most widely used utilities for doing this is Steve Cox's UVMapper program - http://www.uvmapper.com

Once you have your model created and/or set up for texturing, you can import it as a prop into Poser ( File/Import/Wavefront OBJ... ). Note that Poser's world space is very tiny... your newly created cigarette prop may be as large as one of your characters. You can either scale the model as you import it, or (as I normally do), load it full size, then scale it using the prop dials.

Once you have it scaled and positioned to suit you (ie. good 'default' positioning), export your model back out, delete the one you have from the scene and load the scaled/positioned one back in... set up your materials (optionally parent it to a character if you want a smart-prop) and save it to your prop library.

The reason for re-loading it after scaling is so the prop's new 'default' size is 100%. If you just used the one you scaled down, it might be scaled way down (4%, 10%, etc)... scaling happens in finite steps and those steps are huge if you're starting out with a prop that's already only 5-10% it's original size. If you load it back in after scaling, you get the full range of scaling available again, so you can make fine scaling adjustments.

Good luck,

• Keith

Wireframe rendering with lighting disabled...

Flat shading, with textures disabled...

Compressed both Normals and Texture Coords (compare stats in lower right) and mirrored on x-axis...

Here's the material editor (the two smaller sample blocks are copy/paste slots)...

One last one... this shows a sample before and after 'Smooth All' to fix visible seams on an old mesh I converted ages ago with 3D Exploration... The question marks on the 'after' image point to dark areas where very sharp polygon edges/corners are... my routine didn't fix those, but you can see that the other seams are gone.

Just to clarify... this is NOT a 3d-modeller and it is NOT a 3d-file-format-conversion program (unless you count being able to read .obj files that some apps can't and spitting out ones that they can ;). It is (currently) just a tool to manipulate and view .obj files.