crosstalk for conforming clothing and hair?

Yofiel

Please can someone explain how to set up crosstalk for conforming clothing with the same morphs as the figure? I purchased many pieces of clothing with dials for the same morph names as in Michael and Victoria's 4++ head/body morphs and Victoria Elite morphs. When I change the figure morphs, the corresponding morph dials in the conformed clothing don't change also.

I found one piece of clothing which stated way down in the feature list it has 'crosstalk.' There are two versions of its conforming clothing, one stated to have 'crosstalk,' and an identical piece of clothing without. 'crosstalk.' When I load the piece of clothing with crosstalk and conform it to V4, the clothing inherits the morph settings. In Poser 2012 properties, a second grey number appears above the morph dial number showing the amount the morph has been changed due to changes in the figure. The same does not happen for the clothing without 'crosstalk.'

None of my other clothing appears to pick up morph changes from the parent figure. How do I get it to work? When clothing in the DAZ shop states it has V4 elite morphs or whatever, I sort of assume it means I don't need to apply a morph injecition manually for a custom morphed figure. I sort of assume it should just work. I thought I had done something wrong. I reinstalled all the morph libraries several times and tried putting everything in the same runtime. It doesn't make any difference. I finally figured out it's because the clothing I bought doesn't have crosstalk, I want to add it, I don't know how, and this has been a problem for so long,, and now Genesis needs more fiddling to open in Poser at all. I've been a very loyal cusxtomer for DAZ figures, but I'm getting fed up and thinking of switching everything to G2 Jessi and Ryan instead.

Yofiel

I found another thread via Google on this topic:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/7482/

FSMCDesigns

emeyer said:

but I'm getting fed up and thinking of switching everything to G2 Jessi and Ryan instead.

Well that won't be any better, LOL. Cross talk is/was hit or miss and never really worked for me with poser. i had better success without and even wrote to a few vendors asking for non crosstalk enabled files. best solution I had for clothing when i was using poser was with morphing clothes. I would get my character exactly now i wanted them, then save it as a FBM using the free script from Dimension3D's website. then i would save a copy of that figure in it's own folder and use morphing clothes to ad that specific FBM to any clothes i wanted to use and had great success doing it.

Now that I primarily use DS and Genesis, clothing just fits and on the odd occasion it doesn't, the smoothing modifier in DS fixes it. I rarely use poser 2012 anymore and can't imagine going back to the old system I described earlier, but Reality for poser will be out soon, so I will be giving it a try

Yofiel

That's interesting, thank you. But what I observe is a declining progression of simplicity:

1. Poser 4. one can position simple figures. When things on them don't fit, use magnets.

2. Magnets are difficult to use, so add morphs.

3. Morphs don't work across figures. Get multiple sets of different clothing morphs for different figures.

4. Clothes don' fit on different figures. Get different clothes with different morphs for each figure.

5. Figures are wrong shape, so add more morphs to adjust figure shape. Now clothes don't even fit on the same figure after morphs.

6. Add more morphs to clothes to fit different shapes of same figure. Those don't always work depending on combination, so add custom morphs for additional adjustment.

7. Morphs of same name don't get linked between figure and clothes. Manually adjust morphs correspondingly.

Is there any hope that all this automation will eventually remove the manual work?

Richard Haseltine

Most clothes should cross-talk - the requirement is that the morph in the clothing has the same name (name, not the label that appears in the interface) as the morph in the figure, and that the figure is selected when you load the clothing. If it isn't working then fixing it is likely to involve editing the CR2 file, a fiddly process.

Yofiel

I started to look at that, there is a very clever developer I think at Dimension3D who has made an editor and alot of tools which he updated recently. There's some older ones which are free, but I don't think the older ones know about weight mapping so they probably don't work properly.

It also seems like a good thing for a Python script which could display a list of morphs and let one choose which affect a piece of conforming clothing, but then probably the data is not saved in the object and has to be saved in the scene or archived separately, in which case it would have to be reconnected each time one loads the same piece of clothing and same figure in a different scene.

icprncss

emeyer said:

I started to look at that, there is a very clever developer I think at Dimension3D who has made an editor and alot of tools which he updated recently. There's some older ones which are free, but I don't think the older ones know about weight mapping so they probably don't work properly.

It also seems like a good thing for a Python script which could display a list of morphs and let one choose which affect a piece of conforming clothing, but then probably the data is not saved in the object and has to be saved in the scene or archived separately, in which case it would have to be reconnected each time one loads the same piece of clothing and same figure in a different scene.

The scripts by D3D you are referring to were written before the current versions of Poser and it's introduction of weight mapping. He updates the ones that need updating mainly because the python scripting language used in Poser has changed.

Crosstalk used to considered the bane of Poser. I have any number of older python scripts written to "kill" crosstalk.

You won't find many python script writers here at DAZ. If it's a simple script, go over to Rendo's Poser forum and make a new thread. Ockam, Les Bently, and several others have been known to knock out short scripts in a surprisingly short amount of time for free.

If you really want to deal with guru of Poser Python, go visit PhilC's site.

http://www.philc.net/index.php

Phil also has a lengthy and comprehensive tutorial on Python that can help you on your way to creating whatever script you need.

Yofiel

Thank you, that saved me quite a bit of work )

How can I inspect a CR2 to determine if there 'should' be crosstalk?

The problem being, there appears to be no documentation on what is necessary in the file to fix something like crosstalk if the designers have 'deliberately broken it because of problems in Poser,' which I also understand,

Yofiel

Well I just purchased 'Pervect Pose V4' it being more likely I'll get V4 clothing to work properly on V4 than Genesis, and it reportedly fixes many of the morph problems, but more happily, it had a link to a thread with better explanation of crosstalk problems which is for Carrara and on the old forums, therefore not findable otherwise:

http://forumarchive.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=185755

It also loads very, very slowly, so this is what Fenric explains there:

In the PZ2 file, you will find ERC statements. They look like this:

valueOpDeltaAdd
Figure
BODY
SomeChannelName
deltaAddDelta 0.0231237

This tells Poser/Studio/Carrara to go look at the "BODY" part of the same figure, find "SomeChannelName", multiply it by 0.0231237, and add it to the current channel's value.

The problem comes in when the author has done this:

valueOpDeltaAdd
Figure
rShldr
Bend
deltaAddDelta 0.0231237

There is no channel named "Bend" in the right shoulder. There is a channel named "zrot" with a DISPLAY NAME of "Bend". According to the ERC specification, this is wrong. This is most likely what the people who scolded Indigone were talking about.

Why is having the display name wrong?

Consider that I have a set of injection channels named c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, c6. There is nothing stopping me from giving them all the display name of "Morph"

valueParm c1
{
name Morph
}

valueParm c2
{
name Morph
}

and so on. I'll get a very unhelpful set of dials in my display: six lines that all say "Morph". But it will work.

Now, I add an ERC command

valueOpDeltaAdd
Figure
BODY
Morph
deltaAddDelta 1.0

um... which "Morph" does this mean?

Except that Poser and Studio both happily accept it. THEREFORE, I CONSIDER THIS A CARRARA BUG. This is the Poser content support code, so Carrara is required to treat things the same way that Poser does. They made it work for Studio, so it is silly that Carrara doesn't handle it. (NOTE: Carrara doesn't import ERC from PZ2 files AT ALL - so it's even a little worse than it looks)

Btw: Poser and Studio pick c1 (the first one). Carrara silently throws the entire statement out because there is no such channel.

So, when finished, this utility will fix up the PZ2 file so that it fixes the channel names so that Carrara will recognize them. You still can't inject the PZ2 file with Carrara, it won't work. You can inject the file with Studio or Poser, and then save the resulting CR2, or you can create a loader CR2 which uses readScripts to load in the files. I just got the utility to properly walk back through readScripts, and I need to write up some documentation. But I'll be out this weekend, so it will probably not be ready until next week.

Yofiel

It also should be noted, this thread is from 2009, which indicates it is a known problem for at least four years, and that Fenric states it is NOT a Poser problem. He states it is a Daz and Carrara problem. Fenric is independent so there is a reason to believe what he says, but on the other hand. he's indpendent, so he's not privy to the deep secrets of inner workings like other folks here....

This is really a setback for me personally, because I like the Carrara rendering engine very much, and now I'll be trying to get the morphs working in Carrara for the next week instead of drawing pictures :)