Sorry for the mess with the download links - I tried to "invalidate" them yesterday evening, after I was informed that a few errors were still in the figure and I wanted to stop more people from downloading the faulty version. Now the errors are fixed.
I'll upload the fixed version tomorrow. All you'll have to do is to download SASHA again (from the new link!!!) and replace the files.
I'll also fix all the download links to point the new download source, and make it more clear that it's a direct download (instead of the dl.free.fr page popping up) (B.t.w., that's why always set my browsers to "bloody ask me where!!" before saving a download to an obscure default sub-sub-subdirectory on a clandestine drive...)
Sorry for the hassle; it was my own fault because I wanted to add the new "Sonya" character at last minute, so I skiped the usual QC steps.
Agreed! I posted this snippet of information here just to make us aware of the change. I don't actually expect anything new for a "Poser2020" or the like, because, as you said, "now work begins", and you're bloody right about this (and I hope they are aware of this too!). But now there's new hope for Poser - contrary to what we had when it was still with ShithMicro.
So - maybe not actually break out the shampaigne... but maybe a good moment to put some bottles into the freezer?? :)
No - you can as well use SASHA's (or V4'S) geometries for modeling.
What I meant with a special "mannequin" was just an extra figure which has the original geometry, but comprises only the relevant weight maphs, the few JCM's, and SASHA's own shape morphs while skipping all the other hundreds of morphs that SASHA is made ready for.
This (hopefully) would make it much easier for content creators to import the relevant "SASHA" features into their items, without the need to wade through endless lists of rarely used morphs. Until now it's just an idea, so if you have any suggestion of what you would like to have included in that "mannequin", I'm all ears!
@RLOwens: You may be right - too many promises broken. But let's stay positive: at least it can't become any worse...
@Lost Alien: Agreed. The favourites are the best invention next best to sliced bread
@Rokket: Definitely! I have my whole "Karina's Tool Box" there plus some other scripts that I use all the time. It's the next best to keyboard shortcuts when working in Poser.
@emjay247: Thank you for the heads-up, and good luck with your install! I tried P11 only briefly on an obsolet and slow laptop (because it doesn't work on my Win-XP-64 workstation), but from what I saw, it's worth the upgrade, especially for content creators.
"SASHA-16" was hitherto called "SASHA 2.0". To avoid conflicts in the denomination system generally used for Daz/Poser figures (here: STEPHANIE S1 /S2 etc.), I decided to call the figure after it's first year of production. To further differentiate it from future incarnations of STEPHANIE, I added the dash.
So it's "SASHA-16", or "S-16" for short, or simply "Sasha".
What is SASHA 16?
SASHA-16 basically is just another version of Daz3D's "Victoria 4" (V4). But she was optimized to make use of the features of the latest Poser versions (Poser 9 / Poser Pro 2012 and later). She has a completely new rig and almost all joints are weight mapped for better joint-bending.
[[File:Meshes.jpg|none|fullsize]]
All the cumbersome magnets are gone, some vintage stuff no longer needed was removed and the original "dial groups" were completely replaced with a logical and easy to use concept.
I also introduced a new concept for posing SASHA which makes it as easy as never before to pose the figure or fix bad click-poses. A couple of switches and parameters can help you to avoid the dreaded distortions made by some bad click-poses too. All this can be switched on or off anytime as you need it.
[[File:DialsParams.jpg|none|fullsize]]
You can use SASHA exactly how you used V4.2 before. All "Victoria 4" textures can be applied and all poses and expressions will work. All injection characters can be applied as usual. Fitting hair and clothing isn't a problem either and needs only a few extra clicks.
To use SASHA, you need Daz3D's Victoria 4.2 installed in your runtime and you also need the "Morphs++" pack from Daz3D. That's all!
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Well, *almost all:*
Along with SASHA you'll get a collection of tools and Python scripts that add even more to the functionality of SASHA. They were all custom made for SASHA, making your handling of SASHA a breeze.
[[File:Toolbox.jpg|none|fullsize]]
I think that you should give SASHA a try if you - like so many others - still have gigabytes of V4 stuff sitting in your Poser library.
And though I already saw this lingering behind the corner (no more feedback from SM, nor the development team in Portugal, nor in their SM forums), I'm surprised that it happened so soon, and I'm glad that it was sold to a company who cares for Poser (and not the other one from Utah...).
And as some already hoped in that thread, maybe Rendo will hire back some of the old Dev team (like Chuck, and of course Larry Weinberg).
We'll see - eventually there's still a bright future for Poser!
At least I'll try to assist them as much as I can: If they accept, SASHA-16 (2019 Edition) will be published (*1) in the Freebie section of Rendo ASAP; maybe it helps to win some former Poser users back too.
I think this is a good time to break out the champagne!
K
Footnote *1: But you, as my patient followers, will still get her this weekend, as an extra reward for your feedback, your help, and for keeping the faith.
Thank you for the update @ Rokket (which actually should have been my job instead... )
I'm currently in the process of updating and uploading the promo images, and creating the download posts. Nearly had a heartattack today when my screens suddenly went black again, but it was only a badly connected cable (probably happened while I was fumbling to insert the new processor).
f you create or modify a piece of clothing, you always have the agony of choice of which morphs to copy into your clothing. The endless list of morphs presented by Poser is rather appalling.
So here are a few hints to make your life a bit easier:
Hint #1:
As for the SASHA morphs to be copied:
First, you should consider to include all the morphs with an exclamation mark at the beginning of the "! DialName". These are the SASHA morphs I made and which are unique to SASHA. Your decision to choose whether you need any of those.
Second, you can skip ALL morphs starting with a hyphen in the "- DialName". These are only control dials (like the "Easy Pose" dials and others, and they must not be copied into the clothing.
Hint #2:
There's already a "helper" in the "body" section of the "Select Morphs to Copy" list:
! ### SASHA JCMs - HIP AND DOWN ### ! ### SASHA JCMs - HIP AND UP ###
If you select these, all the "invisible" JCM's will be copied too. (Not fully tested yet because of lacking beta feedback)
Hint #3:
Instead of painfully clicking each single dial in the list, try this for "bulk" adding and removing a line of dials from the list:(Windows only, no idea whether it works on a MAC)
To add:
0. Make all boxes unticked by unticking the root. 1. Check the first entry which you want to add in the list. 2. Press and HOLD DOWN the [SHIFT] key all the time from now on! 3. Click the last entry. Your selection will be marked in blue. All boxes are still unticked though, except the first and the last one! 4. Click that last entry another time. ALL boxes will be unticked now! 5. Keep calm and carry on, while keeping the [SHIFT] key pressed... 6. Click the last entry JUST ANOTHER TIME! Oh miracle! All boxes, including the first one, are now ticked! VICTORY!!!
7. Welcome to the "Poser Magical Mystery Tour"! (You may release the [SHIFT] key now...)
To remove:
Proceed as above, just skip step 0.
I would really love to have a word (with a Kalashnikov and a full magazine) with the guy who coded this... !
First off, good to see you've managed to figure out a routine to get it to work.
About the "baggy" clothing, there's really bot much I can help you there except for the advise to try out "Dimension3D" Ralph Sesseler's "Morphing Clothes" program. It offers a lot more options than the Poser built-in functions, and generally is more precise in it's calculations. I prefer it anytime over the Poser function, even if it requires an extra, external step in the workflow.
As for the morphs to be transformed:
First, you can include all the morphs with an exclamation mark at the beginning of the "! DialName". These are the SASHA morphs I made and which are unique to SASHA. Your decision to choose whether you need any of those.
Second, you can skip ALL morphs starting with a hyphen in the "- DialName". These are only control dials (like the "Easy Pose" dials and others, and they must not be copied into the clothing.
All other dials without these two prefixes "! - " are NONE of SASHA's, but probably DAZ or other. So you can add or ignore them to your liking.
If anyone here is interested, and I have some spare time, I could make a sort of "mannequin" only containing the SASHA specific morphs.
First, your problems have nothing to do with the way that collars and shoulders work together, because conforming always means the clothing part follows the bend of it's direct parent. It's all in the weight maps!
To make SASHA's arms bend as they do now, I had to do some heavy engineering in order to get a nice shape and also to eliminate texture stretching as far as possible. I'll spare you the lengthy explanation of how I achieved that, however it has a lot to do with polygon stretching and compression, and the bulge maps.
When you use the Poser function for copying the weight maps into the clothing, that's a bit like using a shotgun to shoot a hole into a wire mesh fence: Some grains hit exactly, others are more or less "near misses". But the denser the mesh, the better are your chances that more grains hit more exactly.
So subdivision might be one way to improve the copy operation? No, because the weight maps work on the original mesh, subdivision is just interpolated. You need to make a denser mesh in the modeling stage already.
Whether you model on V4 or SASHA doesn't matter because the body meshes are identical. It also doesn't matter whether you use a V4 or SASHA rig as donor, because either the "Copy joint zones from..." or my "350 S-16 Joint Centres" script will correct the rig in the clothing.
The weight and bulge maps however are a different beast.
Keep in mind that a WEIGHT MAP must work equally well in both directions, up or down. So changing something in these, except a little smooting, often won't give you the desired changes.
Look at the BULGE settings instead!
To find out which bulge map is acting on the area you want to change, toggle the "Use Weight Map" on and off. Now play with the "_ neg" and "_ pos" dials to see if that helps to fix some pokethroughs. Often it does!
To eliminate the crumpling is a bit harder. You need to play with the dials again, and trying to smooth the bulge map is a good starting point too.
Just don't expect miracles! All copied maps are just an approximation, and the further away from the figure body mesh the clothing is, the more inaccurate it becomes. Also, the stronger the arms are bent up, the more these inaccuracies become noticeable.
If a weight or bulge map is really FUBAR, setting all vertices of that map to zero and painting a new one often is faster than trying endlessly to fix it.
Contrary to the old system (which never worked properly whatever I tried), the new system works by the number of posts. You can see your current "rank" by the number of stars in your profile. There are other options available to "upvote" posts, but I still need to figure out how (and IF!) they work in this free version of the forum.
But be assured that, regardless the number of stars anyone has, I value ALL your input far beyond anything of what the forum software may decide.
That's intentional: The current subforums (except this one) will remain read-only because they are meant for publishing SASHA and related stuff.
The subforums in the "---> Archive" category will remain permanently locked. The purpose is to keep the main threads and areas lean and not confuse new users with hundreds of outdated posts. They may still serve as source of information though. If there are specific threads that you think should be moved back to the actual ---> Discussion, let me know. I'll move them back to the "---> Discussion" category.
@Yggdrasil:
And me! It took me a while until I found the settings which make English the default language of this forum... Fortunately a friend who understands more German than I helped me. Wenn sie ihre Deutschstunde fortsetzen wollen sie können ihr Benutzer Profile "options" > "Forum settings" wieder zu Deutsch zurückgehen...
It works with original SASHA-16 from 2017 and with the new 2019 Edition. The extra "S-16" functions only kick in if your figure is SASHA.
To use it, just replace the "_Normalize Pose.py" in your Poser native runtime with this version: [[File:f6t140p1170n271.py|none|auto]]
This modification takes into account the "Shoulders Slope" and "Collar Control" dials when normalizing a pose, and also gives you an option to continue with or without "Collar Control" active.
It enables you to either
continue posing like nothing had happened (except for resetting the Easy Pose dials), or
to create a normalized pose, ready to be saved to the library and used by any other V4 version.
Now you can use SASHA and her advanced features to create poses faster than you could ever before, and then convert the poses for original V4 and sharing them.
Hope this is useful
Karina
EXTRA:
It even allows you to convert a conventional V4 pose to work with "Collar Control", with several restrictions though:
Re-adjusting the pose is inevitable in all cases!
The more "naturally" the original V4 pose was made, esp. the "collar/shoulder" bend ratio, the better the pose will be converted.
The more "unnatural" the original pose was made (e.g.: "shoulder" moved up while "collar" was left at default), the worse the results become.
FUTURE PLANS:
To give you the option to save such a pose directly to the library as well, like this:
the script asks you "Do you also want to save this pose?"
if "yes" you'll get a file chooser dialog where you can navigate to the runtime folder where you want to save the pose.
the pose will be saved, as a clean "rotations-only" pz2, without all the overhead that comes when saving a pose with Poser!
But before I can write that, I need to learn a couple of other Python codes. I also need to migrate and reorganize this forum to the new host "Xobor". AND I need to finally release S-16 (2019 Edition)