All images from Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide by Kelly L. Murdock.

This is the next in a new series of excerpts from the Thomson Course Technology book Poser 7 Revealed: The e frontier Official Guide. In the next few months, VFXWorld readers will develop the skills needed to create, render and animate scenes and projects using the amazing tools offered by Poser 7. We will offer step-by-step tutorials for each task, followed by projects that allow readers to apply each new skill.

What You'll Do
In this lesson, you learn how to create morph targets.

Once a figure is deformed using the Morphing tool, you can use the Create panel, shown in Figure 1, to create and save the deformed object as a morph target.

New Poser 7 Feature
The Create panel of the Morphing tool is new to Poser 7.

Creating a Morph Target
Once the surface of an object is deformed, you can use the deformation to create a new morph target. Morph targets appear within the Parameters palette as a new named parameter. Dragging the Parameter dial changes the deformation between the full deformation amount (with a value of 1.0) to an inverted deformation (with a value of 21.0). Morph targets provide an easy way to create subtle surface changes and they can be animated.

[Figure 1] Create panel of the Morphing tool (left). [Figure 2] Brush size is displayed (right).

Within the Create panel are several methods for deforming the morph. They include:

• Push. Causes the vertices to be pushed inward toward the center of the object.
  

• Pull. Causes the vertices to be pulled outward away from the center of the object.
  

• Smooth. Causes a general smoothing over the entire surface, thus eliminating any extreme peaks or valleys.
  

• Restore. Causes the vertices to gradually return to their original location.

The position the vertices are moved as you drag over them and the move can be based relative to the Surface of the object, or relative to the Screen. You can also choose the Brush size and Feathering options using the Presets or with the Radius and Magnitude parameters.

The Accumulate option stacks the changes on top of one another so that more painting yields more of a change. The Stroke option lets the vertices move only one magnitude value for each time you drag over the vertices. You can also select the group that the changes are applied to. This helps prevent changing the wrong sections.

The Display Mesh option shows the original mesh under the morph changes. The Display Brush option shows the brush as a cursor over the surface of the object, as shown in Figure 2. This option provides some feedback about the size of the current brush. The brush also displays a gradient showing the areas where the effect is a maximum and how the brush's power falls off with distance. The hard edge brush doesn't have a gradient.

The Mirror option includes selections for defining the symmetry axis. When enabled, any changes on side of the object are mirrored to the opposite side automatically. This is a great way to make sure that changes on either side of the face or body are symmetrical. Zero Morph resets the vertices to their original position.

Saving a Morph Target
The Save a Copy As button in the Create panel opens a dialog box where you can name the new morph target. This new target is then added to the Parameters palette where you can test out the changes.

Spawning a New Morph Target
With a deformation set to its maximum value, you can create a new morph target using the Object, Spawn Morph Target menu command. This command opens a simple dialog box where you can name the morph target. This name appears in the Parameters palette for the selected object. Figure 3 shows a new morph target created for a serious condition called Chipmunk cheeks caused by stuffing nuts in your cheeks.

Deleting Morph Targets
To delete a morph target, open the Hierarchy Editor, locate and select the morph target and press the Delete key. Morph targets will be visible when the Show Parameters option is enabled. The morph target will be located under its object. You can also delete the morph target using the Delete Morph command in the pop-up menu to the right of the parameter.