Meet Mojo's 3D Band Members

In the last couple of months I have built a virtual recording studio in Poser. I built the basic building in a 3D Architect package and then created and imported props from Blender into Poser. These props were covered in my last blog and can be seen in the gallery. This last weekend I started to populate my studio with 3D characters who were my musicians. While Poser is a very powerful package for doing this, it still required a lot of work to get realistic characters into Poser.

As you may remember the studio is made up of a reception area, a control room, a hallway and the studio itself. I populated the studio area this last weekend with musicians. You create the basic character in Poser in one of two ways. The first and most popular way is to take one of the Poser or Daz created base characters and change it. The second way is to create your own 3D model of a character, import it and then rig it in Poser. After my experiments with the creating your own character which I have blogged about earlier, I decided to take the more traditional (and easier) route of modifying existing characters. This blog will cover how to do this and also debut the new musician line up at mojoDallas.com.

There are a number of basic 3D characters that are available for Poser. It ships with two adults (Simon and Sydney) and two adolescents (Ben and Kate). Being a bargain hunter, I also came across other ones that were being offered for free on the Poser Content Paradise website that came free as part of my 6 month membership that you get when you buy Poser. These included James, Kelvin, Jessie and Koji. Also, I imported some free figures I had gotten from DAZ Studios.

The first character I worked on was of course a version of ME. He is named Mojo. Since this is a virtual world, I made sure that my character was both thin and younger. I used the Simon base character and did what is called morphing in Poser. Morphing is done in the Face Room. You basically have a number of settings you can change that will effect the basic geometry and textures associated with the face. For example, you can change the size of the nose, position of the eyes, height of the forehead and literally a hundred other settings. Also, they have some basic settings to change the overall ethnicity of the character that combine many individual settings. In any case, I played with these settings and compared this to some pictures of me to get a close enough representation of me for the Mojo character.

Picture of Face Room

I then added hair and a beard by going to the Hair Room in Poser. This was both time consuming and had a fairly significant learning curve, but, I ended up after a few tries with something that approximated my hair and beard from days gone by. I then dressed my character by adding some standard clothes from the Poser Library and changing the textures on them in the Material Room in Poser. These models all have slightly different geometries which means that the clothes created for one model will not fit "out of the box" without some moderations. All told I spent somewhere around 10 hours in getting the Mojo character created.



I saved him as a Figure in the Poser Libraries and then placed the figure in my Studio scene. When you place the character in a scene it puts them at the center of the scene. You then move the figure to where you want it and then apply a pose to the figure. There are many standard poses that provide a good start. A pose takes the figure and using the rigging of the mesh it changes them into a specific position. There are dozens of standard poses that come with Poser. I chose one of the sitting poses and put Mojo on a stool in the studio next to a microphone. I then moved the various parts of the figure's body to make it look more natural. Again, a pretty steep learning curve and a few hours were invested in learning how to pose.

After finishing Mojo, I then took the same approach and created a number of other musicians. They were created using different base characters, morphed to suit what I wanted them to look like, given a hair style, dressed in clothes I added textures/patterns to and then placed in the scene and initially posed. I spent a couple of weeks getting these characters introduced to my scene.

My drummer is Asian and named "Sticks".

My organ keyboardist is based on Rick Seeley who was a former band member in an old high school band.

My bass player is called Rasta who I created an afro for. I will have some Dreadlocks in future versions of his character, but, didn't want to go through the amount of work that will require at this point.

My conga player is just the base Simon character with no morphs.

My pianist was my first girl character.

The lead singer in the isolation booth was based on my partner from Rough Cuts, Ron Jones as I envisioned he looked like in his earlier days.

After putting all the basic characters into my scene, I discovered that I brought my high powered PC to it's knees when I tried rendering. So, I have split the studio into various scenes with only the appropriate characters and props in each scene. There is no way that I can just load everything and then move the cameras and the lights for taking pictures. All those meshes and textures are more than even my dual processor, dual graphic card, 2G memory machine can handle. So, now I go to different scenes to get different shots. So instead of having one Studio model, I now have about a dozen that have subsets of the original model.

My plans for the future are to now play with the cameras and lights and get many, many shots. This is where I hope to familiarize myself with all kind of photographic type techniques to render many kinds of scenes. I will probably spend weeks just taking pictures, tweaking the models, etc. I will then probably put together a slide show of the resulting scenes. After I have explored this, I plan on diving into the animation features of Poser and along with these still images creating a music video tied to some of my original music. So, stay tuned.