Applying Pre-Transform Morphs

When you create morphs for Poser content, the appearance of the morph can be affected by joint rotations during posing. Poser gives you the option to apply morphs before joints are rotated. These options appear when you create morphs in the Morph Palette, or when you return after exporting a figure or object to ZBrush using the Figure > Export Figure Mesh to GoZ or Object > Export Object Mesh to GoZ command.

Generally, full body morphs should be applied before a joint is bent (prepended), and joint controlled morphs applied after a joint is bent (appended). Prepending morphs allows for better processing of morphs before a joint is bent. The Morphing Tool and Export Figure/Object to GoZ commands now provide options to apply morphs before joint rotations.

In general, when you are creating full body morphs in a figure, you want to apply those full body morphs to the figure or to clothing before the figure is posed. The following two figures illustrate what happens to a full body clothing morph that is applied either before or after joint rotation. In the first example, a Heavy morph was created in ZBrush for Pauline’s panties. If the Heavy morph is not applied before joints are rotated, unexpected results occur. Before the figure is posed, the morph appears to fit the character perfectly. However, after posing, you will notice that the bends in the clothing aren’t deforming the clothing as expected.

Results when a full body morphs is applied after joints are transformed.

Conversely, when the Heavy morph is applied before the joints are rotated, the posed result is what you expect to see. First, Poser applies the Heavy full body morph to the clothing, and then it calculates the deformations needed to pose that shape correctly. The following figure shows the result using the same pose as the preceding figure.

The same Heavy morph works better if the full body morph is applied before joints are transformed.

See GoZ and Pre-Transform Morphs for information about creating pre-transform morphs with ZBrush and GoZ.