Putting People Putty in its place

[antec2]

I have to admit, when I first installed ultra hal 5 on my pc, I was very disappointed with the selection of characters that came on the CD. When i visited the haptek site, it was a pleasant suprise when I downloaded the free Fullbodygirl files. (Not necessarily speaking for myself, I think many of us on this on this forum are more inclined to be intrigued by attractive female characters for our hals[].) After all, this certainly does add to the entertainment value of the program.
ANYWAY, i noticed there is some buzz again on the formum about Haptek's Peopleputty program, as it would seem some of us are giving it a shot. I thought about purchasing it, but before I do that, I would really like to hear some opinions from the risk takers that went out and blew some money on this software. Is Peopleputty a serious program for building characters? Are you able to edit or build characters with a full body, or is it completely limited to that creepy floating head thing? After painstakingly downloading that 90 MB demo version of the program on a 26.6 dial up connection, as of now I am not exactly convinced peopleputty is worth the money from the abilities the demo was able to show me. Those childish, ridiculous looking accessories also made me wonder if i would be wasting my money. Anyhow, I'd like to hear the opinions from anyone who would like to comment on this topic.

[KnyteTrypper]

I haven't sprung for People Putty, though I've also tried the demo. I'm not sure, either, that it's really worth the money unless you just really have a penchant for antlered floating heads, etc. The Virtual Friend program may be geared more to the torso and full body characters, but I don't know. However, for designing your basic creepy floating head characters, there seem to be plenty of resources available on the net without buying anything to satisfy most people's design inclinations. Downloading the "Kate" program gives you most of the more common morphs and textures. You can visit Haptek enabled sites and pick goodies out of your Temp. Internet files for your personal use. The free Haptek SDK will give you instructions for putting it all together. As far as I know there's not a way to save your creations as discrete .htr files without having People Putty, which is about the only drawback to not buying it.

[Art]

If you want the ability to create
realistic human figures (M & F), you
might consider trying Poser (I think
version 5 is the latest). Lots of
accessories, hair, clothing, props.
There are several online communities
as well. Some of them are more "adult"
oriented than others.
www.3Dcommune.com
www.renderosity.com
www.renderotica.com (Adult)
for starters.
People Putty though nice, is somewhat
limited in flexibility and overall
output of finished product.

[vonsmith]

Art,
Poser is a pretty cool 3D character "posing" software that has many professional features. It can be very difficult to learn. I bought my version 5 for the bargin price of $123. That was the introductory price. I don't know if it is still that cheap.

As I understand things you still need Haptek People Putty to actually create the .htr character file. Poser is great for editing poseable characters and creating/modifying textures like skin, but it doesn't make Haptek character files. If my understanding of this is incorrect please let me know.

Thx,


=vonsmith=

[zenman]

I'm going to answer the question in the form of a review of the product, so I can point out the things I like and dislike about it.

People putty is a cute toy, but fairly limited.  It uses a single object mesh for it's head with a set of 30 or so built in shape-tweaking morphs (i.e. nose up, nose wider, lips wider, chin longer, etc.), and 20 or so character morphs (monkey, cat, dragon, etc.).  With this set of morphs, you can get some interesting characters.  The tool allows you to apply the character morphs, and then modify the degree of application from 0% (no change) to 50% (half-way applied) to 100% (fully applied).  You can also apply the morph in a negative percentage (e.g. -50%) which can give some interesting effects.  For example, a nice female head can be created by applying one of the male head morphs and changing the application percent to -40%.

One interesting aspect of the program is that the shape-tweaking morphs will not allow you to create any of the character morphs.  That is, you cannot create a monkey by using the shape-tweaking morphs.  Which means that the character morphs were all created outside of the program.

You cannot replace the object mesh.  This isn't too great a surprise, because shape-tweaking morphs only work with a particular mesh, and if you replace that mesh, you have to replace the shape-tweaking morphs as well.

The mesh itself is low poly, as is every other object.  This is also expected since it is intended for real-time animation, and higher polys mean slower animation.  But the angles of the polys can be seen fairly easily, and limit the extremes that morphs can be applied.

The textures for both the head mesh and all objects are very low resolution (max 512X512).  Same reason as for the low-poly objects: fast animation.  But the resulting character can look very blurry. It has the option of using 1024X1024 textures, but does not come with any.

You can bring in new head textures, either by applying a photo of someone, or by creating your own texture.  Applying your own photo works adequately as a starting point, but doesn't give very satisfactory results unless you subsequently hand-modify the texture.  The options supplied to use an existing photo and turn it into a reasonable texture are very limited.  The max texture size you can import or create with a photo is 1024X1024.

One cute option that the full program gives is the ability to apply texture modifiers to any head texture.  These modifiers are things such as scars, bruises, tattoos, and makeup of various sorts.  It increases the range of textures that can be created.  You can then save your modified texture for later use if you wish.

The program comes with a set of accessory objects that you apply, Mr. Potato-Head style, to your head.  The accessories are limited (6 hair styles, a couple mustaches, some hats, cowls, helms, a few glasses, etc.).  Perhaps they can seem adequate at first, but after spending years in the world of Poser, I'm used to having hundreds of objects available.  There is no reason why the program could not provide an option to import an object with a texture; this is a very simple function.  Then the list of accessories becomes near infinite (at least to the extent that someone can create one he needs).

The "expansion pack" that Haptek sells has a few more objects, but many of them are the same object with a different texture.  Not much of an upgrade.

Overall, I would classify it in the range of a $20 program.  Fun for a few hours, but too limiting in creativity and options.  I personally have enjoyed it more than the average person might because I have a lot of experience creating textures, and have been trying to push the boundaries of the program.  For example, for a recent Elf character I created, I used a hair texture from one of the existing hair props to put on my character texture, then used two hair props with some scaling changes to create a long-haired elf with pulled-back hair and braids.  But I think that is about as far as the program can be pushed.

If I had one suggestion to Haptek to improve the program, it would be to allow the importation of objects & object textures.  Then you could pull in glasses, earrings, necklaces, chokers, hats, headbands, sweatbands, horns, antlers, goggles, masks, beards, mustaches, goatees, eyebrows, ears, piercing rings, and any other thing you'd like to dress up a head with.  It would greatly expand the variety you could create without having to change head meshes or existing morphs.

[antec2]

Well thanks everyone for the info on peopleputty. To tell the truth, I actually have never considered trying the Poser program before, because I thought the haptek player that is incorporated into hal 5 can only execute .htr files.

[Art]

Antec & others,
Don't rush out to buy Poser in hopes of having it
animate your .HTR files. I can't speak for Poser 5,
but I know Poser 4 has no such provision.
Poser is a great character (finished creation) program.
One assembles preset attributes to characters and adds
or modifys texture, size, appearance, props, hair, morphs
of all kinds and even animation. But one can not "create"
a character in the true sense of the word. One needs a
3D program such as 3DSMax or similar.

[vonsmith]

zenman,
Thanks for the review. That's 10x more info than I can get on the Haptek site. I can't even tell what version number they are currently selling. I'd really like to know how old the current version is. When is the next version due to come out? For instance, I'd hate to purchase a version that is two years old and then have a new version come out 4 months later. I don't know what their upgrade policy is. I suppose I should email their support and find out. Robert says they will gladly reply nowadays.


=vonsmith=

[Smokey]

Hello to all.  I logon almost every day to see what is new in the forums.  I own Poser 5.  I agree about the limitaions of Poser for use as an animation tool.  I use it for creating characters that I can pull into PhotoShop and place into various photos that I have taken.  Creating fantasy photos, adding wings, tattoos, changing coloration.  I have created some very nice work using characters I have created in Poser.  You could also create some skins with Poser and using PhotoShop adjust them for use in PeoplePutty.  If you try to use real photos of people to create PeoplePutty characters you should make sure that the person does not have an open mouth smile.  A neutral expression is best when trying to apply any photo to a PeoplePutty character.  Putty allows you to save your work as a .haptar file.  You must then rename it to .htr for use with Hal.

That is my two cents for the day.  Thanks to all who post here. I have the Genius 8b brain and the 5XTF v1.0 brain and enjoy both.  I cannot experiment with them as much as I would like but when I do Hal always suprises me.  Keep up the fine work.  I look forward to testing any additions you might post.

Smokey

[vonsmith]

zenman,
Can you share with us the process of how you create new textures to import into Haptek? I tried the demo version and importing and scaling photo's is not very effective. Can you use some of the hundreds of high-res textures available for Poser? If so, how do they need to be modified?

Thanks,


=vonsmith=

[zenman]

As I mentioned above, using your own photo isn't that effective. Even using the "fine tuning" tools to define the mouth, nose and eyes, there are limitations.  It does work to the extent that you can get a face on the front of the head mesh.  But typically the neck and sides and back and top are not covered.  People Putty handles this by allowing you to choose a "cover" which covers these areas.  The cover is never going to match the coloration of the face unless you're really lucky.  Once you have the cover in place, you can put hair on top (once again in the form of a texture).  At this point you've gotten as good as you are going to get.

So I don't use this method; I paint the texture from existing photos.  I use Paint Shop Pro 8 for texturing, but many paint packages will provide similar functionality.  I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on what each function mentioned below does; I'd have to write a book.  So this assumes you have some limited knowledge of paint programs.  Note that I don't consider my self an artist as I don't really do any painting. I'm really just a mechanic that follows a process.

What I did on my last Haptek character (not yet published) it to find a high resolution photo of someone.  I've purchased photo collections that are designed to be used for texture creation, so I have a good selection, but a 800x600 texture from the net would work as well.

I start by loading an existing Haptek texture into PaintShop.  I then resize it to 2048x2048.

I create a 2nd drawing layer above it.  This allows me to have two images, one on top of the other, with the top layer transparent except for areas that I paint.  I do this so that I can use the Haptek texture as a guide for the new texture.

I then copy sections of the photo onto the top layer using the bottom layer as a guide.  For example, I select the left brow and eye of the photo using the "selection tool", and copy it into the clipboard buffer.  Then I select the exact same section of the Haptek texture.  Then I perform a "Copy into selection" function which copies the brow & eye into the selected area.  Paintshop automatically resizes the photo selection to fit within the selected area.  If I did a good job with my selection, the brow and eye fit nearly perfectly over the Haptek texture brow and eye.  Sometimes I have to try two or three times to get a fit that I am happy with.  I also set the transparency setting for the top layer to 50% so that I can see through it to the bottom layer to make sure my fit is exact.

I then repeat this step for the other eye, the nose, and the mouth and ears.  It takes some trial and error to get it right.  Now I have to fill in the gaps between these areas.

To do the gaps, I then copy sections of the photo into the other areas.  For example, I copy the cheek from the photo onto the cheek section of the texture.  Again, trial and error is needed to get the fit right.  It doesn't have to be perfect, because I can cover up imperfections later.  However, if I don't at least get it close, it takes forever to clean it up later.

After a while, I have every section of the photo copied into my top layer in exactly the right spots.  At this point, I will load this into People Putty onto the head to see how it fits.  If there are areas I don't like, I tweak them in Paintshop until I'm happy.

Now I have a texture that is the equivalent of the applying the photo using People Putty, but far more exact in it's representation of the photo.  You could potentially skip all the above and instead use People Putty to get this far, but I haven't been happy with the results when I tried it.

At this point, you have to fill in everything else.  What I typically do here is create a "skin texture sample".  This is a square, 80x80 or so, of a section of the skin that I think is typical.  I create it by selecting a section of skin, copying it to a separate image, then touching it up with the clone brush and paint brush and some of the other tools until I have a section of skin which is uniform, but not all one color.  I then use the Paintbrush function to paint this image over the rest of the gaps between areas.  This it typically the sides and back of the neck and the sides, back and top of the head.

At this point I have a bald head.  There are typically some mismatches in the various texture copies, so I use the close brush and smudge brush to paint these out.  I rarely RARELY paint color with the paint brush; as I said, I don't consider myself an artist.

Now I'm nearly finished.  I load it back into People Putty and check the fit around the eyes, nose, mouth, ears, and the overall general texure appearance.  This generally results in more changes using the one of the techniques mentioned above (section copies, clone brush, etc.).

Whatever the size of the texture I load, People Putty resizes it to what I've selected via the interface (256x256, 512x512 or 1024x1024).  This is the size that is saved when the haptar file is built.

The site www.renderosity.com is a Poser site with a number of tutorials, many of which describe similar or alternate painting techniques.  Some of them describe actually painting an image; it's very hard to get a "photo-realistic" image by hand painting.

There are tons of detail I left out; hopefully some of it will be obvious when you're in the middle.  This can be a tedious process which is why a number of my recent characters have the same or only slightly modified texture, and why I'm not doing some of the recent requests I've gotten.

[vonsmith]

zenman,
Thanks for sharing. That removes some of the mystery of getting good results with Haptek. Your characters are great, I suspected it couldn't be done that well with Haptek fitting on the textures. I use Corel Photopaint and I can use the same techniques you have described with Paintshop. I didn't know you could export the Haptek textures and use them as patterns. I was wondering how you get a match-up.

I have some excellent high-res texture maps for Poser. I wonder if those could be overlaid on the Haptek textures. Might be easier than a photo?


=vonsmith=

[vonsmith]

zenman,
Thanks for your info, it inspired me to experiment a little. I've successfully changed textures on the fullbodygirl. I even applied the naked texture. Whoohoo! I used Corel Photopaint to change the orange catsuit to yellow. And I finally figured out how to change lighting on the character and move her about in the window. Now to figure out how to animate the fullbodygirl. I think that will be tougher to do.

With a little work I could figure out the boundaries on the fullbodygirl texture and make a matt. Then many things become possible to add.

As soon as I clean up the code I'll share the texture, lighting and other methods here on the forum. It's too messy to explain at the moment.


=vonsmith=

[zenman]

vonsmith, did you get my email?

[zenman]

Oh, and you can use Poser textures just as you use a photo.  I would suggest using only free, public domain textures, though.  People who create textures for sale can be very cranky if the texture is used for anything else other than a Poser render.