Need a little help with Hexagon & morph creation

marke61254

Hi, I have been using Poser for quite a while but I haven't done any modeling yet. I'm trying to add a morph to a wavefront .OBJ model but Poser doesn't seem to recognize what I'm trying to do. I have an .OBJ prop that's like a mail box with a hinged door in the top that I want to add an "open" morph to. I have been able to do the edits in Hexagon and save the modified geometry, but when I import the morph target and try to use the dial it only makes the prop much larger. How should I be creating my files and adding the morphs?

Roygee

Is the original a Poser .cr2? If so, there are sizing issues you have to deal with. Poser uses very small dimensions, so you need to import to Hex at 500% and export at .002%

Then there are import settings in Poser that have to be changed - I don't use it, but have read about it in this forum - hopefully someone who does know will step in, or you can ask in the Poser forum.

If you are going to animate the opening, you'll get pretty weird results. Morphs work by moving in a straight line from start to finish, so don't give good results on movements that hinge.

If this is not for an animation, simply make a new prop of the open lid. If it is for animation, you'd have to rig it for the lid to open, or possibly there is a script you can get for Poser, as there is for DS, that can change the pivot point and make it possible to hinge without rigging.

marke61254

No, the original file is a wavefront .OBJ - it seems to render OK in Poser, but when I create the "open" version the original texture doesn't work with the new file. (I seem to need to know a lot of basic skills for 3D prop creation before I can do much with this,)

Roygee

Yes, its a good idea to get some theoretical knowledge of topology and various formats used in modelling. For instance, morphing means changing shape, without making any actual changes. Think of it as closing your fingers to make a fist - all the original parts are there, only the shape has changed. If you do any cutting or adding to the original, such as cutting your hand off and sticking it to your head, you've made a basic change - it changes the UV's, the topology and the shading domains.

Your rendering app will not recognise it as a morph; the app will not know where to put the pixels of the texture, so it will be all wrong.

If its simply a matter of putting on basic colours or procedural shaders made in the rendering app, its no biggie, but if the textures were painted on a template in a 2d app, or otherwise imported, you'd have to re-UV map it.

emfederin_9bc0c524c8

Everything Roygee has told you is 100% correct.

But I get the feeling that your mailbox is a 3rd party object file that you want to use in poser, and modify using hexagon, and I have a gut feeling what's causing your problem.

For reasons beyond the scope of this problem, you don't want to make a morph target from an OBJ file you grabbed off the net. Instead, you want to create a new object by loading the original into poser and resaving it as a new "master" OBJ file. In a nutshell, hexagon speaks "poserese" and poser reads "hexagonese" (for the most part :) ), but hexagon and poser may handle OBJ files created in other applications differently.

Here's how to create a new "master" mailbox:

First take the ORIGINAL mailbox you got from somewhere and load it into poser. You'll probably rotate it, move it around, resize it or whatever you want to do to it to place it properly inside your poser scene. Once you do that, export that mailbox as an OBJ file. Let's call this newly saved mailbox "newbox.obj". When you do this, the ONLY TWO ITEMS you want "checked" in the poser "export options" box are "As Morph Target (no world transformations)" and "Include body part names in polygon groups".

Here's the first issue: newbox will be slightly different then mailbox because poser will assign newbox a new poser origin and poser-scaled coordinates. You may now archive your original mailbox since it will be of no further use. The master mailbox for importing into poser and for creating morphs will now be "newbox.obj".

Also, since "mailbox" apparently textured properly inside poser, it means that "mailbox" was already UV mapped. "Newbox" will preserve this mapping, so you don't have to worry about that.

Now you should import newbox.obj into hexagon. As Roy pointed out, your import/export ratios in hexagon must be inverse to each other (exportvalue = 1/importvalue). That is, if you import at "1", you export at "1". If you import at "10", you export at ".1"
Roy imports at 500 and exports at .002, whereas I import at 100 and export at .01

So once imported, do whatever work you want on the newbox flap with the following caveats: Do NOT SCALE newbox. Do NOT MOVE newbox.
You may scale, rotate and move vertices and groups within newbox (such as the flap), but you can't scale or move the entire model. Doing so will create a morph target which will scale or move the newbox in poser.
Remember that it's the poser "newbox" model that defines the size, origin and position of newbox.
Any and all work you do on a newbox morph target inside hexagon will be relative to the size, origin and position of the newbox in poser.

And one last thing you NEED to know when making morph targets is this:
Adding or removing so much as a single vertex (point) will destroy the UV mapping - even if you add or remove the point again to restore the original number.
Likewise, tessellation adds lines which, of necessity, adds points; so you want to stay away from that, too.

Hope this helps you get from point a to point b... :)