Keeping your new figure's head together.
Eyes
Eyes and Sliders
Ouch! Having trouble keeping your new characters' eye balls in their head. DAZ used some special tricks inside the CR2 file to make the eyes work right. Find out what they did here. This technique can be used on pistons and sliders too.
Poser skill Intermediate
CR2 Editing Intermediate
You should be able to create Poser figures and have at least looked inside a CR2 file with a curious (maybe devious) intend. We won't actually be using poser. This is a tutorial for character creators. If you've never hacked the CR2 this may be a good first venture. You will only remove lines from an existing CR2.
Description:
This tutorial covers how to edit a CR2 file so the eyes in a new character will work properly.
This prevents the eyes from warping the head when they move. This is the way the eyes are done on
the figures that came with Poser. The technique can be used to setup mechanical movements such as a
piston and cylinder too.
What you need:
- Poser, any version.
- A good text editor, or a CR2 Editor.
WARNING:
This tutorial is for Poser users who are advanced enough to get into a CR2 file and edit it
without breaking it. In the name of mercy, backup your file before you edit it!
The Theory:
Each poser body part has a parent. Eyes are parented to the head. To prevent the eyes from
tweaking the head when they move, we need to remove some channels of communication between the
parent and child body part. Most of the channels are actually in the parent body part, the head.
This theory can be applied any where you have adjoining body parts and do not want the child
effecting the parent. Just substitute the name of the child for eye and the name of the parent for
head.
OK, lets go…
- In any text editor, open the CR2 file for your figure.
- Use the find feature to search for "eye".
- You'll find the "Actor" geometry sections near the top of the file, leave them alone. Keep
searching until you find something like this. It will be in the Head section under the
Channels.
- Put an star in front of "twistY", like this:
- Use the "find" feature in your text editor to jump to the next occurrence of "eye" .
- Here are the channels that need to be removed.
- twistY leftEye_twisty
- jointZ leftEye_jointz
- jointX leftEye_jointx
- twistY rightEye_twisty
- jointZ rightEye_jointz
- jointX rightEye_jointx
- smoothScaleY leftEye_smooY
- smoothScaleY rightEye_smooY
- This brings you to the actual "Eye" Sections. The left and right eye need several sections
removed. Put a star in front of each channel just like in the head section.
- jointX jointx
- jointZ jointz
- twistY twisty
- Change these in both the left and right eye sections. All you have to do is put a star in front
of the first line, or you can delete the whole channel. This is all you need to change. If you are
having fun, read on for a little bonus.
The Bonus Round...
- As an extra, you can "unhide" the translate channels so you can do bug eyes. Look for this in
the "eye" sections:
- Change the hidden line to 0 This allows you access to this morph channel from within Poser. The
Translate dial will show up with all the other morph dials:
- You can do this for all 3 Translate channels, or just the ones you think you'll need
- Save the file, be sure to save it as "text only" and with the CR2 extension. It will also need
to be saved in the library, usually in the same folder your original was in.
- Open up Poser and load your new character. check you the eyes. If you save the character back
to the library now, Poser will strip out the sections with the *'s on them (that's a good
thing).
This technique can be used to create mechanical type motions too. For example, a
piston and cylinder setup could be done the same way.
Happy Rendering!
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