Forum: Poser Technical


Subject: Is there a Poser Language Document? (Not Python)

WagnerTheUndead opened this issue on Mar 27, 2003 ยท 2 posts


BeatYourSoul posted Thu, 27 March 2003 at 12:15 PM

If you mean a book that tells you how Poser takes the information from its files and creates figures, you're outta luck. There isn't any such information. Much of it seems to be dependent upon whatever algorithms they have used to implement each Poser feature - morphs, bones, cameras, lights, materials, etc. All I can say is that Poser does alot of the work "in the background" where you can't see how it is interpreted and constructed. There are a scant number of websites with good information from those who have had the wherewithall to examine the processes in Poser and correlate them to what appears in the files. The Alias|Wavefront .obj format is a general 3D object exchange format which is well-documented. Poser only uses this as a base for the geometry. The real magic is in the pz3, cr2, pp2, etc. files. As a for instance, there are a number of cameras set up in Poser. Some of them are keyed to certain body parts (by name). They work rather expectedly if you just rotate the camera around the target object. But try "point at" something else or, worse, "point at" and translate the camera and you get some complex rotations which are hard to deduce unless you examine many variations or happen to have the Poser source code at hand. Same goes for scaling body parts. Scaling the forearm, doesn't scale the entire geometry associated with the part, but instead does not scale the geometry at the interfaces to other parts and scales the rest nonlinearly. Again, the algorithm used is not easily known. I'd love to have such information myself... BYS