Poses, poses, poses

Poser file formats are wonderful (or terrible) patchwork of figures and properties, endlessly extensible through a procedure called pose or morph injection. Basically you will take base figure (or extended one), add custom morphs, poses, materials and accessories (props), call it with fancy name and sell the extensions separately. As a result there is big and lively ecosystem of modelers and artists making living by selling virtual things for virtual worlds.

I am currently halfway through the implementation of those extension mechanisms for Khayyam. The most important ones - materials and poses mostly work now in CVS version and the results are really worth seeing.

Normally you start from plain base figure. As an example I use here the most famous one - DAZ Victoria 4 freely available from DAZ webpage.

Victoria 4 base figure

Not very pretty - right?
Next let's load a predefined pose to make it a bit more lifelike.

Victoria 4 posed

A bit better, but still ugly.
Now we import custom materials.

Materials, swimwear and hair

Most texture sets are a bit ... realistic, so I added swimwear as well. Also imported hair. Imported objects are usually immediately skinnable - i.e. they follow the figure pose automatically, as you can see from swimwear.
There is more Khayyam can already do - like apply morphs.

Closeup of face with eyes targeted and mouth morphed

Materials can be applied one on top of another - like eye color or makeup separately from main body texture. Transparent hair is a bit messed up in Khayyam, but will render properly if exported.
And last a quick render of the same figure with POV-Ray (different hair material and pose):

Victoria 4 at beach - renderd with POV-Ray 

That's all for today. Expect a release soon ;-)