Forum: Poser Technical


Subject: Where to start ? Anatomy of a room prop ...

Dr Max opened this issue on Mar 17, 2003 ยท 10 posts


maclean posted Fri, 21 March 2003 at 3:59 PM

Well, having spent the last 6 months building a room, I can tell you what I did. My room (ie. the structure) is a multi-part figure with 40 walls (4 walls x 10 variations), all interchangable. The reason for this is to allow the user to choose the wall he wants with the appropriate spaces for windows/doors in different combinations and positions. In addition, I have 10 different doors/windows, all figures, with an average of 20- 30 body parts, allowing full posability, switching between styles, switching on/off roller blinds, venetian blinds, etc. There are also another 30-odd add-on props which can be used to change the shape of the room, plus various floors, and so on. That stuff comprises the basic pack (it will be for sale at DAZ). On top of that, I'm building several expansion packs, (because I designed the basic structure so that it can be easily expanded); sunken floor, extensions, mezzanine, attic, yadda yadda. Right, Now that I've bored you with all that, LOL, my advice would be to go for multiple figures. One for the room, and one for each door or window, This will give you a lot more flexibility. If you look at your room, each window has between 2 and 5 'windows', plus an outer frame. Then there's a door and frame, 4 walls a roof and a floor. If you put that lot in one single figure, you'll end up with too many body parts. No one likes to scroll through a list of 50 parts looking for the one they need. Much better to split them up. Also, if you find a way to add multiple spaces in the walls for doors and windows, the user can move single figures around. If the room's all one figure, you're a bit limited. Plus, with separate figures, you can do things like, make the window crossbars separate body parts which can be switched on and off. Having said all that, if you don't know about creating cr2 figures, you'll have to learn a lot from scratch, but it's not impossible.... just long and tedious. 6 months may seem a ridiculously long time to spend on a room, but I've had to redesign it several times over because I keep finding great new tricks to improve it. mac