A while ago someone (picnic?) made me very happy by reminding me the keystroke "po2" would give me the Poser 2 interface, I had read something about it in one of the User Guides (P3?) but couldn't find it again. Now I'm happy, the P2 interface is much better for me given my tiny screen and just the way my mind works. Problem is, I do miss the really good P4 lighting controls sometimes but I haven't found a keystroke for reverting to P4 on the fly... All I can think of to go back to the P4 interface is to set the Preferances for Factory Setings and restart the app. Is that as it must be?

po3

I tried po3 and po4 a bunch of times but maybe i hit them wrong... will try again. I think that P4 lighting interface is great! Thank you wyrwulf.

heyas; the po3/po4 interface knows you hate it, so it won't come back. ;) this happens to me, too. you can fix it in your poser.ini file... USE_META_UI 1 this is the line, i think. 0=old interface, 1=the meta ui.

Thanks.

I have a question...who here HATES the poser interface completely? Whatever version... Who here wants a more functional less artsy-fartsy interface?

The P2 interface really isn't bad... simple, utilitarian, I'm getting along well with it except when it comes to fancy lighting setups where I still want the P4. P2 UI really is relaxing to use after a couple months of being irritated by the P3 and P4 interfaces. That arty interface must have shelf apeal or somesuch as the marketting division would put it. P2 UI is okay by me.

I just want a CAD style view...i.e. 4 seperate viewports. I want to be able to see my model in from 4 different angles at once. It increases my modeling time exponentially having to switch between left, top, front and camera views...I want a 4 viewport screen!!

You are right... that would be a cool function, to at least have the option of simple orthognal views in adition to the actual "document" window to help with positioning etc. A zoom buton to facilitate selecting the head would be cool, I'm always getting the hair or one of the eyes.

Hi Folks! I'm all for a four-window viewpoint; it's one of the things (among lots of others) that made Infini-D my preferrred 3D tool. Maybe Curious Labs will find a way to incorporate a feature in the next edition of Poser that allows you to toggle between single and multiple views. Peter (Dr Zik)

Hopefully, CuriousLabs will drop the P4 interface entirely and design something a little less.... artistic (JMHO) While I have absolutely nothing against the current interface, I'd really prefer the 4-window viewpoint Paul

I'd be happy to have a two or three window view (top, front, one side). And I think this would be best as an option (Open View Windows, perhaps, where you could have as many minimizable views as you wanted open, along with the edit screen - each open view window would automatically update to reflect changes to the edit window - and the contents of any one view window and the edit window could be "swapped"). The "perpetual" four window view on the Rhino demo threw me off the two times I tried to use it...

I find myself almost always using the two side-by-side viewport setup in Max, 4 windows is just too small for my tired old eyes on anything less than a 21" monitor. But the viewports need to be swichable, just like Max, with a single keystroke, so they can become the correct view for the operation. I hate to say it, but they couldn't go far wrong on patterning the rest of the interface on Max too, do away with the horrid little dials with the tiny text labels. A better interface would go a long way tward getting Poser the respect it should have as a serious program.

glad to see I'm not the only one to think the Poser interface is the most screen-wasting, almost unuseable, frustrating, time consuming interface known to man. The ultimate insult: Microsoft develops BETTER interfaces!

Foxhollow, you've said it all.

heyas; let's not be TOO hasty. i LOVE the fact you can move all the interface thingydoodles around wherever YOU want. customization! i love it! you can even make the silly row of balls or tools into a column. i also like the ui dots. i have normal, and animation, and i can switch with one click. (actually i have normal in 3 different colours... well, i like variety sometimes.) the camera dots and pose dots are okay, but would be more useful if they were scene/file specific, rather than the same ones apply to everything you're working on. you know, like you save three standing poses of your human, then are working on the cat or some such... well, those human poses aren't any good for that! i like the interface okay, but not the mechanics. i like p2, where you click on a body part and it DOESNT jump around, it just gets selected. then you can drag anywhere in the window to pose it. and it doesnt twist around like an over-pressurized garden hose while you do it. i have to agree with momo, though. soon as i quit posing, the 'other' interface is better. (oh, and that zoom tool! switching camera views i've gotten pretty quick at, using the keyboard shortcuts. i spend most of my time trying to zoom in, then trying to re-center my view, then zoom in some more, find where the heck my model went... argh!)

Duh! Making the tools veritcal will be a big help on my small screen... didn't realize it was possible. Bloodsong, maybe parenting your cameras to various body parts would help keep things centered for you. Its really only the lights that are tough for me in P2 UI though I wish I had a palette with the "dots". I have a weird bug on my system (due I think to my children's computer games which screw with the resolution settings of the video driver) where when I was using P4 UI the document window was always shifting around to a different place each time I opened Poser, often with the title bar cut off the top so I couldn't reposition it. Now that I use the P2 UI I miss the function I had on my old Mac which minimized palettes in place to only thier title bar by double clicking it (a functionaslity called "window shade") is there suich aq function in Windows 98? When I double click the pelettes nothing happens.

By the way, I remeber now, it was you Bloodsong who clued me to the po2 Vulcan Nerve pinch. It has been of great use to me with my underendowed monitor, thank you.

Hi Folks! While we're on this interface topic (which is no doubt getting lots of play in the Poser 5 wish list forums), Poser and Bryce seem to be the only programs I have that refuse to yeild the screen or be minimized when I want to switch back to the desktop--a real annoyance when I'm working with several programs concurrently. But I could live with even that if I had the option of multiple views. MS makes better interfaces? Now, now, let's not get carried away. IMHO, the Bryce/Poser/KPT interface may be ideally functional for the "Internet Appliances" that are coming our way eventually. Anyone who's tried to program a TV with a remote can appreciate that the verticle text palette is an interface dinosaur. Maybe this interface is just a bit ahead of its time. Peter (Dr Zik) P.S. Note the grammatically correct use of ITS, y'all!! (The teacher hat is never far out of reach, even in the dead of summer!)

heya; that's okay, momo, i look like picnic sometimes. (er, i guess. :) ) no, there's no 'window shade' thing in the windows poser that i know of. you can turn off the tool title bars, which leaves the bare 'dots' and 'balls.' of course, that is no help with the body part dial list, since with that off, you can't tell which body part you have selected. use ctrl-click to make the rows into columns, if you haven't figured that out yet. also, stack those suckers in real close. i have my tools and display mode rows overlapping slightly, and they overlap the side controls on the display window, and the camera title overlaps the light controls. just be careful; if you cover up a title too much, you won't be able to grab it and move it. dr zik: thanks for using 'its' correctly. :) woulda also been nice if you spelled yield and vertical right, too. ;) but you must be a grammar teacher not a spelling teacher!

oh... about interfaces in general. mac os/moronsoft made the standard interface. kai then designed a custom interface for kpt, a sleek, beautiful interface, an interface that wasn't too intrusive, an interface you could live with. then metacreations kinda went nuts kai-ifying its other programs, to give them that 'cool' look, but they didn't keep to kai's philosophy in my opinion. they seemed to implement form over function, and that is a design disaster.

It's this kind of great info I love to find here. This has been messing me up for a long time. Now let me get this straight, apostrophe when it's a contraction and no apostrophe when its use is possessive - right? :-) and Bloodnic, thanks for the tip, but I was control clicking like crazy with nothing happening -- seems on a PC it's actually Alt-Click.

Do I remeber correctly an option to lock the controls in place or am I extending the lock window aspect with wishfull thinking? I'm glad y'all clarified the alt-click thing cause I was trying to "verticalize" by ramming the controls against the side of the screen like you do in MSIE, which my damn windows machine forces me to use have the time by messing with my Netscape! I'll try turning off those tool bar titles, I need every inch of screen I can get (600x800 13" screen!). Other issue, I set IE to block graphic sex and didn't bother to rember my password, now I can't acess Mirriam Websters dictionary etc but I don't know that damn password to turn the block off... do I have to reinstall IE? Will that even work? I ask before making the big download involved --sigh tested and the block does let hardcore porno through!! I'm new to windows and still afraid of "breaking it". Mac used to let me install a new copy of the OS leaving the old one and all my files intact but when my kids' games scrambled my video driver and I put in the Windows 98 disc to reinstall it, it said it would only do so after re-initializing my drive and deleting ALL my data and files! Yikes!

Good news: There IS an easy way to change the IE password. Bad news: I can't for the life of me remember what it is! Reinstalling won't work - it stores the settings in your Registry (maybe that's where you can fix the password? I wish I could remember!), so any new version, unless you have a "bastardized" one from AOL or the guys who made your machine (those impose their own settings on the registry!), will keep whatever settings the old version had.

ROFL at momo!!! no, can't help ya there... but that's hilarious. :) sorry. it's alt click to verticalize 'em? sorry. it's some weird thing that i tried when i was trying to... do something with them. no, i dont think you can lock 'em, momo. oh... it's is 'it is' contracted. its is kinda like his, don't got no 'postrophe.