From TrueSpace to the Great Space in animating

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24) Now that you are in the pose room you can open up the parameters dial by clicking on window from the top menu, this will provide you with access to the dials that control each body part, move the chest left to right and see what else moves, makes sure you set the dial back to ZERO before you continue, play around with the other various body parts and see what I mean when the head is part of the arms or the hip is part of the legs. What you have just done is to create your first boned character but this is just the easy stuff.
25) At this point I would suggest that you add what you have just created to the characters and name it, reason so that you can take a break and prepare yourself for the real fun, its not really that hard just time consuming. Once you have saved your work and cleared your head and are ready then proceed. Below is the image of my pirate after the basic grouping you will see arrows pointing to the parts that are not grouped correctly.

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26) See how as the abdomen bends to the left that other areas bend that should not and see how as the head bends that the hair does not flow with it well this we will correct in the following steps.
27) If your done taking a break and have tried your character out and are ready to make him move like he or she should then lets get down to business.
28) If you saved your character like I did and exited Poser then open Poser and then load you character back into the pose room and get ready for some real grouping.
29) First set the display of your character as full wireframe (CTRL + 3) then enter the setup room.
30) Now click on the Group Editor and select the hip to start with, you will see from my image below that more than the hip area is in red so you will first want to remove the areas that you don’t want to be defined as the hip, click on the (Minus) button at the top of the group editor and then drag the dotted box around the area you don’t want. Don’t worry if you have selected more than you wanted you can select the PLUS button to add it back in. the below image shows before the selection (Grouping) was defined.

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31) The next image shows the result of after defining the Group using the Plus and Minus buttons and dragging the dotted box around.

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32) For each bone a group will need to be defined, learn to use each of the various views and look for any red areas that are not what they are supposed to be. Learn to click on show multigrouped and non grouped faces to see what you are missing and what too much you are including.
33) When you are finished doing all of your grouping click on the Pose room tab and see what happens. Look at the image below if you get this message it means that you have a polygon(s) that are not grouped or are grouped to more than one part. Click on NO for the answer and go back to grouping and once again use the views to find the polygon(s) that are not grouped correctly, in most of my experiences I have found that the one polygon is hiding and you will need to look carefully for that one little microscopic area that is not grouped, the other thing that can cause this is that if you pull down on the grouping menu to display the various groups you will see one that says NO BONE, delete this group as Poser creates this automatically as you do your manual grouping. This group is not needed and will only cause errors.

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See the NO_BONE in the list, delete it.

34) Once you have successfully grouped all the polygons you will receive no warning message, Poser will smoothly go into the pose room and allow you to manipulate the various parts of the body from bending or side to side to twisting. Make sure you save this character before proceeding to the morph section.

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I am working on the morphing portion of this tutorial, please be patient, you have alot to learn and practice with what I have already provided.

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Here is a short sample animation of the character walking I rendered this in preview mode.

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[jeffroig]

Now that you have gotten over your frustration of grouping and are ready to have some fun I will show you how to create a morph.
Some important notes about facial morphs.
1) Take a look at one of the characters that Poser came with and right down all the face morph names such as OpenLips etc... Write them down just as you see them making sure to use the capital letters were needed.
2) You may even want to play with the morph dials and see how each morph reacts and make notes of this.

Now lets begin.
1) Click on file then export and choose OBJ format.
2) The hierarchy window opens unselect everything and only select the head as show in the image below and then click ok.

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3) Now a second window will appear, see the image below for the correct selections to choose.

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4) When saving the file I use a name such as Head_Base.obj from this object file you will be creating all you head morphs.
5) I use Argile to create my moprhs, you can use ZBrush, MudBox or whatever you choose, if you use TS to do this remember this do not, DO NOT try and split the Heirarchy of the object or the morph target will give you undesirable results.
6) Open up your software to create morphs in and then load the Head_Base.obj.
7) I have chosen to create the OpenLips morph for this example, the image below shows the results after doing the modeling to create the morph, this is a screen shot from within Argile.