Quote - MikeJ: I hope you haven't started with the new UVs yet. I just realized that the file I uploaded had the wrong (old) shape. I just replaced it with a new version that has Antonia's current default shape. Sorry about the new confusion!

In addition to being more up-to-date, the new shape should also be easier to handle for UVLayout. The breasts are smaller and smoother, and I've removed the genital details since I decided that those are better taken care of by morphs.

PS: Since my mesh software is in a bit of a mess, there might be a problem with the way the new file is formatted. If UVLayout doesn't load it correctly, let me know. I'm off to work, otherwise I'd fix it right away.

Does this mean you've removed the polys from the genitals to maker her like all the old Vickys? :scared: 

Quote - Does this mean you've removed the polys from the genitals to maker her like all the old Vickys? :scared: 

Nope! I left all the polys in. I just simplified the default shape so it would be easier to apply other morphs to the hip. There's a morph "labia detailed" or something like that that goes back to the old shape.

Quote - Does this mean you've removed the polys from the genitals to maker her like all the old Vickys? :scared: 

Nope! I left all the polys in. I just simplified the default shape to make it easier to reshape the hip as a whole. Before I did that I had loads of trouble with my JCMs.

There's a morph "labia detailed" or something like that that goes back to the old, anatomically more correct shape.

Good to know that she's still got the stuff to be anatomically complete. Thanky! :thumbupboth:  

Quote - Good to know that she's still got the stuff to be anatomically complete. Thanky! :thumbupboth:  

Yeah, that's one of the things I'm going to change in my current remapping for Antonia. The pubic region will be UVd out larger, to allow for more detail, but the seams will be further out, more like what a bikini bottom map would look like, minus the back of it.

I've been doing some nipple and areola morphs, and as a consequence, have been forced to spend a lot of time looking at Antonia's breasts. I noticed some slight issues with the breast, below the areola. There seems to be quite noticeable peak and trough when viewed from some profile angles (see image above). This is less pronounced in a polygon smoothed render, but still there.

I made a morph to improve the profile shape, and will shortly post it to the developers site as "BreastFix01_114_LB.zip".

Good catch, Les! That's what I call true dedication to detail. :laugh:

I used a bunch of 3-poles around the breasts to keep the mesh density at bay. One of them got pushed in a bit too much when I reshaped the breasts. I'll fix it for the next preview.

 I thought someone might have been feeling her up and dented them! @__@  :laugh:

Maybe she just needs some new implants. ;-)

Olaf,
I don't know how I could have not noticed this sooner, but I just noticed that the latest lo-res Antonia OBJ you posted at the Dev site doesn't have the handle objects in it.
Is that going to matter any?

No, it shouldn't matter. In fact, it's probably better to keep the handle geometry out of the base mesh altogether.  At some stage I had them banished into the cr2, but they crept back in when I wasn't paying attention.

Okay, thanks.
I'll probably have the lo res version done tomorrow sometime. I'm not real sure what to do with it after that, how to transfer the UVs to the high res version. I don't know if UVL will do that or not. I've never tried such a thing before.
Although I do know I could simply subdivide it once in Lightwave and it would at least give the appearance of subdividing the UVs too, and any textures will remain intact.
I'm not sure that's the right way to go about it though...

I don't know Lightwave, but in Blender that would be about the only way to go about it.  Normally if you're going to have two versions you'd do the lores one first, map it, then subdivide and sculpt for the HR version.

Whilst breasts are still a current topic, there is something I want to ask about the Antonia topology (if that's the right word). Making a cylinder is about the summit of my modelling achievement, so forgive me if this is a stupid question. The vertices are positioned as per the red dots in the above image. I'm wondering why this is so, and why they are not positioned as per the green dots? I would think that the more rounded topology of the green dots would make it easier to create smooth curves on the breasts. At least this seems so when working with magnets in Poser.

Quote - I don't know Lightwave, but in Blender that would be about the only way to go about it.  Normally if you're going to have two versions you'd do the lores one first, map it, then subdivide and sculpt for the HR version.

Well that's what I've typically done in LW when I've worked on figures to be used in LW. And it works just fine to take a low res UV mapped figure and subdivide it, or even add polygons as long as they don't touch the seams of the UV map, and any textures still work well.
But this is for a figure that has to be able to work and render properly in Poser, so I'm not so sure if that's the best way to go about it in this case, or if there's a better way to do it.

Truth is, I've simply never tried it before. For the stuff I've made for my own use, I've had only one version, either hi res or lo res, and never had to think about how to have two versions of the same  figure, sharing the same UVs.

I have no experience with LOD specifically, but I really can't imagine that method not working in Poser if it works in other 3d programs.  And if LOD involves the program swapping out lores for hires meshes, it will definitely work.

Quote -
I'm wondering why this is so, and why they are not positioned as per the green dots?

The green dots would make triangles, while it looks to me like the way he did it was to keep it quads.

Quote - I have no experience with LOD specifically, but I really can't imagine that method not working in Poser if it works in other 3d programs.  And if LOD involves the program swapping out lores for hires meshes, it will definitely work.

Well, we're not talking about LOD here.
Olaf wants the same maps to work on both the lo res and the high res versions of Antonia, so they both have to have the same UVs.
He said he might look into LOD in the future, though, but as far as I know, Poser can't do LOD anyway. Daz Studio can, and I think that's what the request was for.

It'll still work if you observe the other caveats (in re: the seams).

Quote - It'll still work if you observe the other caveats (in re: the seams).

Well I'll definitely try it. Thanks. :-)

I was also wondering though if Olaf had some "official" way of doing it, something he would prefer, or some suggestions, something I might be overlooking or not thinking about.

@ MikeJ

Quote - The green dots would make triangles, while it looks to me like the way he did it was to keep it quads.

Sorry for being dense here, but, in spite of being triangular in shape each facet would still have 4 vertices, so wouldn't applications still treat them as quads?

Yes, you're right. I wasn't seeing it, and I looked to me at first glance like you split the quads into tris.

 Most hobbies don't use terms like "Quadratic tesselations".  OURS does. :laugh:  A quadrangle is a quadrangle.  I watch to much public television.:lol:

Quote -  Most hobbies don't use terms like "Quadratic tesselations".  OURS does. :laugh:  A quadrangle is a quadrangle.  I watch to much public television.:lol:

You think that's bad, we also have "degenerate triangles" which are triangles where all three vertices are each at 180 degree angles to each other.

But I try not to be obtuse about it. ;-)

lesbentley: You're assuming I put those vertices there, but I didn't.

You have to remember I model in low-res and then apply a Catmull-Clark (a.k.a. sub-d) subdivision step.

MikeJ: No, I don't have a special method to subdivide the UVs. I hoped you did. :laugh:
Lightwave will probably do a decent job. Let's try that and see what it gives us.

Two points to remember: 

1. Make sure that whatever LightWave does, it doesn't shift the seams or hard edges. Some smoothing is probably okay, but that's between UVLayout and LightWave.
   2) When you subdivide, the vertex numbers will be different from the original Antonia. So morphs won't work in this version. I can fix that by transferring your new UVs onto the original mesh, so don't panic.

I was going to tell you about the toe caps (or, as you call them "foot stuff"), but I need to go get milk, wine and bread before it starts raining again.

Quote - MikeJ: No, I don't have a special method to subdivide the UVs. I hoped you did. :laugh:
Lightwave will probably do a decent job. Let's try that and see what it gives us.

Two points to remember: 

1. Make sure that whatever LightWave does, it doesn't shift the seams or hard edges. Some smoothing is probably okay, but that's between UVLayout and LightWave.
   2) When you subdivide, the vertex numbers will be different from the original Antonia. So morphs won't work in this version. I can fix that by transferring your new UVs onto the original mesh, so don't panic.

I was going to tell you about the toe caps (or, as you call them "foot stuff"), but I need to go get milk, wine and bread before it starts raining again.

Thanks Olaf.
The vertex numbers will increase when I subdivide it? Gee, I never would have expected that.

When I've used Daz figures in LW I've routinely put them into sub-patch mode, to eliminate the effects of non-planar polys in a render and that has never messed up the UVs or the textures, so I'm not concerned.
But what I'm wondering is if that's "true" UV subdividing going on. Meaning, is a texture interpolated across the new points generated by the subdivison, or still interpolating based on the original points, in spite of all the new points in the UVs?
I guess we'll see what happens. I'm actually finished with the lo-poly new set of UVs, just still have to arrange it all in a practical manner. I'll probably upload something to the dev site tomorrow some time for you to have a look at. A link, that is, not a mesh. ;-)

Enjoy your snack!

Quote -
The vertex numbers will increase when I subdivide it? Gee, I never would have expected that.

Just don't blame me when your cat starts to behave strangely, okay?

Olaf,
I am about to upload a link to the latest version of the Antonia lo res UVs I just finished, to the dev site.
What's included in the zip file is only the low res version, because I'm really not sure how to go about getting the the proper hi res version for conversion.
I think you said you used Catmull Clark for Sub-d and the subsequent freezing of the mesh into the high res polygon mesh.
Well, LW does CC too, but I never have been sure if they did it right or not, as others have complained about it...
In any event, I'm not getting the same polygon counts when subdividing the low res as the original high res has. It's off by a couple thousand, and I'm not sure what to do about that. I figured I would wait for any suggestions... or maybe you can just transfer the UVs somehow?
Is that what you meant by what you said about the vertex count? That it would not scale up as I expected it to?
Anyway, it will be on the dev site in a few minutes after I post this, so you can have a look at it.
I'm putting the text file with the link in the Files To Work On section, of course.

Sorry if I sound confused here. It's been a long day and I'm beat. ;-)
Also, I may not be around by the time you come around tonight, so don't worry about getting an answer to me right away.
And I also got a huge job I have to start on tomorrow, so I'm not going to have much time for Antonia stuff, at least for the next few days. Gotta pay the bills and all, you know. ;-)

MikeJ: The difference in vertex counts may come from the fact that the high-res mesh includes handle geometry while the low-res one doesn't. Don't ask! :laugh: Don't worry, though! I can easily do the subdivision with my own software.

lesbentley: Extend the nipple wall and the areola outward by one row and you're golden. It's a pity that my mesh manipulation software isn't quite ready for public consumption yet, as it would be useful to make fiddly morphs like that on low-res version and then transfer them to high-res. That said, if you feel adventurous and are not afraid of using the command line, I could bake up a pre-pre-pre-release and put it up on the developers site.

Decided to check in before crashing for the night...

Olaf, yeah, I checked it against the with-handles version and that didn't account for the discrepency. Not 2 thousand or more polys, anyway. ;-)
And without the brows, lashes, and eyes, too, and various combinations... in the end I was too tired to think about it any more. ;-)

I have uploaded "Dial A Nipple-B_LB.zip" to the "Pose Sets" section of the developers site. The Pose Sets section did not really feel like the right place, but then neither did any of the others. I tried creating a new page as "Body Morphs" but that did not seem to work right, and then I could not work out how to delete it, so I gave up befoer I destroyed the whole site.

@ odf,

Quote - lesbentley: Extend the nipple wall and the areola outward by one row and you're golden.

I plan to to move the nipple wall out in my next set, but I would like to see what the texture creators come up with before attempting another set. At the moment with the default BE4Antonia-Body-Shaven map, the edges of areola are so poorly defined that it does not seem to make much difference. Personally I don't like the areola to be too big, and prefer to start them one ring in, but I guess ultimately I will have to match what textures are available. I can always pull the outer areola rings in a bit to make them smaller, but then the ring beyond that would start to get a bit large, so I guess I would have to pull that in too, and that's where my question about topology in previous post was coming from.

I'm not that interested in making nipple morphs for the low res version, as I doubt that the mesh density will support what I want to do with it, but I may make a few simple nipple morphs for that version. To tell the truth, I have never even loaded the low res version into Poser as yet.

Changing between nipple and areola shapes can be a pain, so I tried something new with this set. Using one dial to change between 27 different nipple shapes/sizes. There are only 13 nipple morphs, but some of the morphs are applied in combinations. Another dial swaps between 15 areola shapes. This is not geometry swapping, but rather an application of a ERC technique that I have developed.

YAY, Nipple morphs.  I love nipple morphs!!  :thumbupboth:

Uh... erm... hem... never mind!!  :blushing:

lesbentley: Those look great. You certainly have a point basing this on available textures. All I can tell you is were I intended the areolae to end. As for low-res morphs, that's up to you, obviously. I'm just saying I wish I had better support for low-res going, so if you wanted to, you could try this on the low-res mesh first, transfer to high-res and see if you needed more detail.

As textures go, why don't you try SaintFox's? I think that should have somewhat more defined areolae.

MikeJ: I just checked your remapped low-poly mesh with my version. The poly count matches. The discrepancy you saw is probably due to welding issue. Don't worry about it. I'll do the subdivision here on my side, and we'll see how it looks.

Thanks Olaf, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.
As soon as I get a copy of the new one, I can make up some UV templates for it and package it up properly.

Love the Dial-A-Nipple. Is there one listed in the Yellow pages too? Would love to call them for myself!  LOL
Great idea for this project.  :)

ok, i stopped getting ebots for some reason about this.
so - i've missed out.. are you guys remapping Antonia? or did i misunderstand?

Yes, Antonias UV maps seem to get a makeover and as the first version already looks good (and IMHO "developer-friendly") I'm looking forward to the next version.

About those nipply morphs: Some of these combinations look very real!! And some... well... you may know this from your childhood: Be careful not to gouge your eye out!! :lol:

Quote - ok, i stopped getting ebots for some reason about this.
so - i've missed out.. are you guys remapping Antonia? or did i misunderstand?

Well to answer that, I took it upon myself to make new UVs for Antonia, just for my own purposes, and it kind of went from there.
But there's no telling yet whether or not what I've done will become part of the "official" Antonia or not. That will be up to Olaf, of course.

And I'm not entirely sure about this latest version either. I'm waiting to see what we have after Olaf does whatever he's going to do to her, but this latest UV version was mapped to the lo res Antonia, in Sub-D mode. I'm not sure that was the best way to go about it now, because it seems to have created a certain amount of distortion (albeit negligible), which may or may not be evident with textures applied.
The distortion vanishes when the model is put into "true" sub-d, but reappears when frozen into a higher res mesh. I should have expected that, but I didn't.

Easy enough to redo though, as this last version didn't take very long at all.

ok. good luck with it. :)

*...and it kind of went from there.

Hmmm... this sounds familiar to me Must be a kind of Antonia-virus!

Quote - *

Hmmm... this sounds familiar to me Must be a kind of Antonia-virus!

Yeah, I noticed this thread early in its development and made a comment or two, checked back every now and then, but it wasn't until maybe a month or more ago when I noticed Antonia could be downloaded that I sort of got hooked. Antonia Fever. ;-)

I think Antonia has a real shot at competing with Vicki.x, but even if not, it's still an excellent figure, excellent model, definitely, IMO, the best that's yet been created for Poser. And really, Antonia ranks up there with some of the best 3D human meshes I've yet seen anywhere.  :-)

I like the way she bends so much - she is so soft!! And of course I like the idea that many people work together to complete her and create something special that will be available for everyone, even for 3d-beginners who hesitate to buy a lot of things just to get started.

I have to say I am totally looking forward to your figure being released fully to see how she's received and supported.  I see a new female figure that's just been released at another store (RDNA) and not bashing her at all but I am more and more impressed with Antonia when I'm looking at other female figures.  Hell, I'd buy her!! 

I'll just be here waiting and watching and of course reading!!

Antonia fever - I like that. :laugh:

Mike, it took me a bit longer to transfer your UVs onto the standard meshes. I kept getting null pointer exceptions and thought I had a bug in my program, but couldn't find it. Then I finally looked at your obj file and realized it was using negative vertex indexes, which I hadn't implemented. So I imported the mesh into Wings3D and exported again, and that finally worked.

When I said the vertex numbers would be different, I meant the vertex orders, not the vertex counts, by the way. When you do sub-d in Lightwave, it's unlikely you'll get the vertices out in the same order as produced by my program. Since morphs rely on vertex order, that means there's additional work to be done. But don't worry, except for that little hickup with the negative indices, I've got it covered.

Those distortions you mention should have been expected, I guess. When you suggested to make UVs in low-res for sub-d, I kind of thought LightWave or UVLayout had some clever way of compensating for that. Normally, I would suggest to load the subdivided mesh back into UVLayout and optimize it there. But I know that UVLayout is very "creative" when importing UV maps from other software, so that might not quite work.

I might still be able to do something about it, though. Since I have my own software for subdividing meshes, I can make it do with the UVs whatever I want. I'd just have to get a better understanding of how texture mapping works when sub-d is involved.

Olaf,
What I wasn't considering is that in UVLayout, when you UV map something in Sub-D mode it's because you intend on using it in sub-d mode. So it builds the distortion into the polygon mesh, which, as I already pointed out, straightens out when put into sub-d in a program that can do it...
So, UVL was compensating for it, and it is clever. It's just not meant to be used on a polygonal mesh. ;-)

I don't know if there's a way to un-distort it in UVL though.
Soon as I get a chance I'm going to redo it in regular polygon mode and see how that turns out.

MikeJ: I may have misunderstood. Are you seeing that distortion on the low-res mesh already, or only after subdividing once?