As a comparitively new user of Poser and Daz products I can be accused of typical newbie reaction to the scale and scope of software and addons available, but please hear me out for the moment.

It intrigues me that creating a 3D figure is so utterly over-technical in the 21st Century, and the processes involved seem to require a mountainous understanding of software, utilities, processes and protocols which would be perhaps almost ludicrous when applied to other comparable functions in other aspects of creativity with computers.

It really does amaze me that one's creative impulse must be so often dissolved in a confused, complex and labour intensive myriad of UV mapping, conversion from this format to that, endless use of obscure addons, consumption of tutorials, manual processing of tedious and extremely long files, and base software (by Daz in particular) that is carved up into smaller units a way that to me suggests a very cynical way of coining profit with very little real value to the end user.

For instance, there is almost no point in purchasing Vicky 3 unless you also purchase all the addons necessary in order to even vaguely make her look believable. But even accepting this fact, very few of the addon characters I have seen (and I assume they all somehow attempt to capture some reality of human form) look anything like a viable human face let alone body.

I assume that Vicky 3 has been designed to accomodate clothes so they "hang" acceptably, because the naked torso has extraordinary characteristics which I have never seen in any real body. For example the bony mass of the exaggerated shoulders, combined with the painfully thin upper arms are quite foreign to real female bodies. It surprises me that no-one seems to have mentioned this fundamental thing before.

Having searched thoroughly for an addon or inspired piece of software that takes the drudgery out of creative modelling I have failed to find a single product which for instance enables you, reasonably easily, to take a custom morphed figure and create a template from which one can design custom clothes. There are of course some payware addons which claim to do this but there are so many caveats to beware of and so many hoops to run through in making such addons work that it becomes a hopeless task unless you really enjoy hacking about with the huge complexity of protocols the 3D world seems to demand.

The point I am making is not one from someone who is afraid of hard work or learning basics, but is predicated on an observation that surely there is an easier way. It seems to me that the lack of outstanding 3d products is partly due to a conventional wisdom which almost wants to perpetuate a culture of technical complexity where a better, clearer path might be of use.

If anyone could recommend an addon which allows the user to bypass the donkey work and get on with creating I would be most grateful. By that I mean the donkey work would be better spent in perfecting the image one desired rather than negotiating the absurd and circuitous processes in just producing one agreeable image!

Leonardis

Message edited on: 06/26/2004 18:44

Well, considering 3D is a somewhat complex field, and considering its relative newness in terms of application, it's hardly surprising there's not a lot you can do except bite the bullet and deal with it "as is". Then again, there are a lot of very talented and intelligent people hard at work in this very area, and if they ain't come up with anything better, there's probably a damn good reason why. As for Victoria, yes, we all commented on her rag doll arms when she was released. Everyone kinda got used to 'em by now, I guess. Me, I tend to beef 'em up for my own characters but I can't speak for anyone else. By the way, I do understand your frustration, but I willtell you that it all comes to naught unless you can actually come up with something better than the systems we currently use. The reasons everything seems overly technical is because 3D is overly technical. You're manipulating thousands of virtual points in virtual space, in more or less real time. That's the kind of stuff which makes grown computers cry. As for producing an image, it's a piece of cake...if all you want to do is "cookie cutter" images. You can buy poses, light sets, scenes, characters, hair, clothes, you name it. All you need to do is install, load and render. Et viola! (said the starving cellist, and yes, it was a deliberate error) instant art! If, however, you want to do something a little more adventurous or original, then you really will have to learn a lot of the other stuff.

I had to dump my first renders. Just too painful to remember. If you really think this is for you, then take the bit in your teeth. Watch the galleries. Ask people right here. You can bypass tedium by saving successes in your library. Poses lights, custom clothing...etc You'll be amazed at how fast you pick it up, if you're hungry enough. This process is much quicker to learn than any of the other classic ways of producing art. Just a bit more "desk" intensive!

Thanks for your tolerant and intelligent replies. Yes I understand about dealing with the 3d world "as is", but, for instance I have recently purchased several payware addons claiming to take all the pain out of creating clothes for a morphed figure, based on V3.

Forgive me if I have missed something but I bought these addons on the naive assumption that I could, in this order:

Load in V3
Load body and face morphs
Create my own "character"
Save this character to a convenient file format
Import this character into one of the addons above
End up with a template allowing me to then design clothes

In fact the reality is that these programs do NOT allow me to do this without an enourmous amount of research, technical knowledge and procedures which to my mind completely defeat the whole point of buying them!

Why is it THAT hard to create a program with a reasonably intelligent, clear interface which simply allows me to create a clothing template which matches the character I have made? One of the addons I have specifically states that I can ONLY import into it the character file of an "existing" P4 figure. Well what is the point of that?

If you or anyone could please point me to a program (and it really would be a pleasure to pay for it handsomely if it actually did what it claimed), which can take my character and then enable my own, or someone else's clothes to fit, I'd be ever so grateful.

Leonardis

Message edited on: 06/26/2004 19:38

Message edited on: 06/26/2004 19:39

Perhaps you have never stretched a canvas, ground your own pigments from malachite and lapis, or sanded and primed a board? All before making that first stroke! (I have also made my own ink from candle soot, but never dealt with raising silkworms. One of my friends has.) To make art in any medium requires either what you call donkey work or the purchase of stuff made by others. The more you do yourself, the closer the result to what you hold inside your mind. Carolly

Sorry, Leonardis, missed your thrust. You're obviously not a nwbie if you're ready to make your own product. The weekend is not always the best time for timely answers, but someone's bound to answer later

There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch What we do with these figures and program is well outside what they were orignally designed for. Since I've been making content (or reading about it) for this program for over 8 years, I think I can say that you should be HAPPY that ANY tools exist to make things easier. They weren't always there and many of us had to handcode things to make them work. Try that for fun value. If all you need is to fit clothing to figures that uses standard morphs then get Tailor. You can queue up all the standard bodymorphs and sod off while it does the work. Save your new fitted clothing objects in your library. Then apply the same settings to clothing and figure, and there you go. They don't always work 100%, but thats the Easy way. If you need to fit to new bodymorphs and want more control I'd suggest clothing convertor. There will be work involved, Technical boring tedious work. There's no getting around it. Playing god doesn't come easy. Anything worth doing is worth working for. You want Fast and Easy? paint it. Lyrra the (Ex) Evil Overlord

Leonardis, take note of Lyrra, she really does know her stuff. Now, do you mean you wish to create original meshes for Poser characters, or are you wanting to adapt existing stuff? Either way, it's not fantastically easy, although the second option is arguably easier with the right tools. Just be sure you're not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. For example, it's probably not the greatest idea to make Koshini's clothes fit Mike 2. Or fit The Freak's clothes to LaRoo. Could be funny, though. :) If you're wanting to make original meshes, you'd best be learning all about modelling, grouping, conforming and boning. I wish you luck, it ain't easy. While you're at it, best be learning the art of UV mapping and then you can ask Lyrra all about texturing - she's very, very good. (By the way, Lyrra, please pester Steve into making a realistic space suit for Poser.)

Clarity without compromise. The truth is above. The reason no one has created such a program is that no one with the particular skills to create such a program and an understanding of a process which is still changing and evolving even at this time has ever written one. There are people with both skills. They are frequently at the leading edge of the new developments. They are frustrated by a lack of documentation for the elements which comprise the features. The variables involved in such a task are enormous. To further this difficulty, the Poser boning system is still being used rather simplistically, the meshes available are of varying degrees of complexity and design, the most popular features of many of the more popular figures are nothing more than hacks of the existing program base which do not operate the same across the platforms still in use, and the process itself involves just as much artistry and design savvy as the creation of the product. I agree, incidentally -- the tools are only useful if you have the knowledge to use them properly. Oddly enough, that does apply to most tools. Sadly, there is no program capable of such a thing at this time. If there was, someone would have a great deal of money and the rest of use would be in heaven. And let's make matters worse, just for the sheer exhilaration of it: What works today will not work tomorrow.

Thanks again for the replies. Please let me emphasise that I fully appreciate the free stuff available. I was talking more about the commercial programs. And please also understand that I AM prepared to do some hard work too!

Perhaps I misunderstand the instructions in a couple of the programs I was referring to. And the misunderstanding again is probably due to a flawed grasp on my part of the jargon.

Some of the programs I have referred to probably ARE what I'm looking for but the instructions that come with them are very hard to follow and obviously assume a prior knowledge which I simply do not possess, even after reading various tutorials.

I produce quite complex simulation software myself for a living so I do understand that you can't hand things on a plate to people who aren't willing to learn. In my own work however I pay huge attention to the guides and NEVER assume more than a basic knowledge on the part of the user, and proceed step by step, even when it is obvious to me, because I have to put myself in the position of the person who hasn't seen the software, or related things, before.

So coming back to these Morphs to Clothes conversions, is it correct that for instance "Tailor" WILL convert a reasonably close clothing design to adapt to my particular character, the chief difficulty in which is that I have assigned a much more bulky figure than the standard V3 and all the current clothes I try have bits of flesh cutting through, even after resizing the clothes in Poser. If so please could someone take me STEP BY STEP through the process because I simply do not find the Tailor guide anywhere near understandable.

LYRRA SAID:- "If all you need is to fit clothing to figures that uses standard morphs then get Tailor. You can queue up all the standard bodymorphs and sod off while it does the work"

Thanks for that but I'm not fully with you and this is exactly the confusion, What do you mean by "standard morphs"? Do you mean the morphs that come with Poser or do you mean the INJ morphs which are an optional addon to Vicky3, which I have. Can "Tailor" convert clothes to fit these extra INJ morphs with Vicky?

Thanks for your patience!

Leonardis

Message edited on: 06/26/2004 21:17

Message edited on: 06/26/2004 21:19

Provided the clothing is primarily composed of quadrangles (four sided polygons, as opposed to triangles) and is reasonably close in general format to the figure, yes, Tailor can do that. Lyrra was referring to the add-ons for victoria (the INJ/REM). A good step by step with Tailor... Hmmm... I know there are two at least out there, but I'll have to dig them up again and hope they are still around.

(working from memory right now, so I may get a name wrong here or there) Load all FBM's onto V3, save HUGE cr2 into your figure library Open Tailor Load your loaded v3 cr2 as the figure. Load a v3 clothing object. add all Full Body Morphs to Queue (I forget wether its a menu option or right click option) This will add them in that 2nd panel in from the left. Remove all unneeded FBM's for your clothing item. now 'create all morphs in dress' wait. (good time to read forums, check email, get coffee walk the dog , take over the world ...) save completed dress. overwrite original or not, your choice. Ta da! Tailor works best on clothing items that are tight. loose fit items confuse it a bit (it uses collisions). But then loose fit items are easier to deal with natively in poser. Now you have a Tailored clothing item. Load your v3 figure. Load your clothing item. Apply the same morph settings to the clothing as to your figure. Hopefully it will fit. You may have to fiddle a little with scale, and maybe a magnet here or there. If all you use are standard morphs, then once you've tailored a clothing item and save it, you should never need to mess with it again. I say should. You never know. When I'm really bored or have nothing to do hah! I Tailor stuff so I don't have to stop in the middle of a project. You can also use tailor to convert items from one model to another (kinda) but I'm not even gonna touch that right now. Samtherapy we have a realistic spacesuit already, for Mike 1&2 and as a standalone figure. er ... American style suit. If you want a cosmonaut we might have to fiddle. Swing by PW and pick up the 80 page PDF catalog ..helps for finding stuff :) We have a pulpfiction spacesuit on the drawing board .. but it'll be a while. That to do list is as long as my arm :) and thanks for the compliment re texturing, I do my best. Its hard to keep up with Steve lol Lyrra

oh.. while I'm thinking about it If you really want to understand Poser stuff, go get Bloodsong's book "Secrets of Poser5 Figure Creation" Read it, keep it by your desk. That's your new bible grin No you don't need poser5, you don't even need poser4. She starts with the Poser3 method and goes through all the variables and versions. Handy.

a-ha! I've been beat! Which is a good thing. lol Looking over those instructions, those are pretty dead on. And they pointed out the thing that's making this so hard for our dear requestor. Now I feel like a dolt for not having spotted it earlier. Leonardis -- do not use your morphed figure as your basis. Use a V3 figure, unchanged but with the morphs you want to use loaded up, that has already been saved to your library. That seems to be where you are getting kicked. of course, I'm lacking in sanity, so my pov may be off kilter a bit...

I have found that rendering the clothes, figures and pretty much everything else in layers helps. If the clothes are close with a little poke through, after using Talor, you can use a magnet to fix it, or render a cloth layer with Vic invisable. If you have time, check my latest image in my gallery. I got the clothes close then layered everything. This really works more for stills than animations.

"Why is it THAT hard to create a program with a reasonably intelligent, clear interface which simply allows me to create a clothing template which matches the character I have made? " I am working on it, it will take some time to be ready. The biggest problems with current clothes are: 1) Excessive and unnecessary great number of polygons. 2) Don't pose correctly. Real clothes only bend with little deformation and the bending points are not the same in number and in position as the figure body, (different bone structure). So you need to comform a figure with one bone structure to an other figure with different bone structure. I don't know if this can be done in Poser or it needs another pose software. Many research to be done yet.......

Well thanks for all sticking with me! And thanks too for the generous tips.

Just one mystery remains: When I load a cr2 file into Tailor with my character there are TWO sets of morphs listed and they seem to be repeats of the same ones! Perhaps one lot are associated with groups and others not. Sorry to ask again but this is yet another confusion, and perhaps the answer is to know the differences between morphs that appear to ge grouped, full body morphs and ordinary morphs. I think I understand that morphs can be grouped together to act as a multiple morph (eg: Barbarian which obviously morphs many things from one dial). Am I getting there?

Leonardis

Message edited on: 06/27/2004 06:29

An intriguing, thoughtful thread, to be sure. Perhaps the question is more a matter of perspective...this being 3d and all. I have always considered Poser to be a crossover product, a translator, between the 2d and 3d world. The actual 3d portion of the marketplaces, Daz, here, etc. really belongs to a relatively few actual modelers: the "Popes" of an earlier thread. Most of the rest are 2d graphic wraps and skins and back drops and such.

I suspect there is a majority of us who just can't model. Or maybe it's only me. Myself, I can glue primitives and morph pre-existing models and UV map and texture and retro-fit and so on, until the cows come home, but just the mention of XZY rotational requirements or the Setup Room makes my eyes glaze over. The closest I come to modeling is firing up Amorphium Pro and squishing around with Meta thingees or wax. To me the Rhino demo is just an excellent file conversion tool, if it's not the niftiest polygon count reducer.

I may be over-simplifying...but not much.

I gave up on the clothes thing a long while ago. Especially with the new, high polygon count figures such as the Vickies, the Mikies, the Davies, the Stephs...or wait, they're all the same thing, aren't they? Anyway, all those extra polygons are terrific for making clothes right on the model, pulling out cuffs and seams,skirts and collars, armor, melting toes and reshaping for shoes and boots, lifting scalps to model short hair, and so forth. Don't like the new templates, but remapping fixed that and I find though I'm 3d impaired, once I have a flat plane to work on, I'm off like a rocket. A few props--hats, swords, transmappable drapes for long hair, the "skirt" part of a long coat, or a dress, an arch primitive, and I'm pretty much set to do anything.

I'm a little "Blanche Dubois" about the whole 3d thing. I depend on the basic mesh to start off with and I depend on a smart hacker person to lead me through the cr2's once or twice...

But I find this particular world is just chock full of many, many kind strangers

There are several kinds of morphs, mostly distinctions having to do with how they activiate. I'm going to skip the weirder ones for now. a poser figure has bodyparts (lShin, rShin, lEye, lShoulder, etc.) and Body Morphs, the actual vertex change information, live in bodyparts. Rather then go to each bodypart flipping a dial to apply a morrph, Full Body Morphs(FBM) are used to install a master switch in the Body channel. To make things less confusing, generally the community has adopted a standard of naming morphs on bodyparts that are controlled elsewhere with a prefix indicating their type. So if you see Thin in the Body, you will see PBMThin on various bodyparts. Its usually a good idea to ignore PBM dials. There are some grouped dials where the controller is NOT in the Body, or there is a second controller in a bodypart. ECM, JCM and EP dials tend to be on bodyparts When you load a figure into Tailor it works best if it is NAKED, no props, no hair. Load the clothing seperately. Lyrra

Thanks very much Lyrra! Getting there slowly. Kind Regards, Leonardis

If it helps any, consider this much like learning a foreign language. Sure, it's easy to memorize the basics of "How do you do?" and "Where's the bathroom?" and "Why does this cost so much?" -- but if you really want to express yourself, you need to learn the subtleties and nuances that make language expressive. Well, it's much the same with 3D: it's easy enough to start with the basic shapes and make something fairly decent -- a table, after all, is just five distorted cubes. But if you want to create something expressive, like any of Dreampaint's props, you have to know a little bit more to make it happen. And sure, it's not easy. But if it were easy, what would be the point? :)

I've been working with Poser for about the last couple of years. When I first started, I was so overwhelmed that all I did was manage to twist Dork's head around like on The Exorcist, at which point I put Poser away for about six months. When I opened it back up, I was determined to learn it. Somehow I managed to find Renderosity and Daz, which lead to other sites. Slowly, by reading others' posts and asking questions, I figured out enough to make a basic scene. I then got brave, got UV Mapper and found tutorials on doing textures. I'm not a fabulous texture maker, but I'm good enough to do some basic stuff, and getting better.

I still don't know a lot about lights, so I use premade lighting; I'm not very good with posing, so I use a lot of premade poses too. I've even recently delved into modeling. It's something that takes a lot of patience and practice. I can make a few basic things and am getting a better understanding of that too.

My point is that even though I have gone through a huge learning curve and taken a few years to figure out what I do know, I think the actual process of figuring all of this out has made me understand it all better. Yeah, it would be nice if there were an easier, faster way to do some of this, but I don't mind the way it is now - it's confusing, but once the light goes on, then there is no stopping you. I'm mediocre at it at best, but I am "having fun", and since it's just a hobby to me, that's the important part.

The essential point is correct, tho. Poser is primitive. We're going to look back five years from now and not know whether to laugh or cry about the incredibly tedious, finicky work we had to do to make the thing work. As a point of reference, when the music for Doctor Who was first composed, the guy who did it had to; 1) Set the dials on a brick-sized tone generator, 2) Adjust record levels and roll it to recording tape, 3) Take a razor blade and snip out each note, using ruler and eyeball to get the length of the tape (and thus the length of the note,) right, then glue the little bits back together with individually cut bits of splice tape (anyone here ever splice tape the old way, with the razor cross-cut, the buffing, the final trim cuts? Not fun.) 4) Run several of these tapes at one time, synchronized (perhaps he used a Moviola?), to do what we call "bouncing" from one set of tracks to another set of tracks, 5) Let's not even go into what it took to add reverb! These days you switch on your forty-buck Radio Shack keyboard and start playing. Or you can do it with free software that is almost as easy to use.

Hi Nomuse, Absolutely spot on. I remember splicing tape myself, whereas nowadays I load up Cubase (another steep learning curve) and things which took days seven years ago take seconds now. On the other hand, where are all the live musicians? Leonardis

Yah. My first sound designs were all tape and razor blade. Did one ugly job in which I was bouncing tracks on one of those nasty "PortaStudios." Finally got the CPU power and memory to handle sound files and it still was far from real-time -- eight track limit, and mix-down would take eight hours. I'm still behind the tech curve, but the last design I did I brought my Wallstreet into the theater with me and was changing 16-track mixes and adding DSP on the fly, as the director asked for them...and playing the cue right from the computer a few minutes later so he could hear the result. I think the next iteration in the Poser landscape -- and a much anticipated one -- will be total integration of cloth dynamics and collision detection, followed by some basic physics (gravity and wind). At one swoop this will throw out a lot of what we clothing makers have needed to learn about transferring morphs, conforming, body handles, ERC, and the rest of it; clothing will then begin to do it's own math, following the base mesh the way it does in the real world.

"I think the next iteration in the Poser landscape -- and a much anticipated one -- will be total integration of cloth dynamics and collision detection, followed by some basic physics (gravity and wind). At one swoop this will throw out a lot of what we clothing makers have needed to learn about transferring morphs, conforming, body handles, ERC, and the rest of it; clothing will then begin to do it's own math, following the base mesh the way it does in the real world. " From your lips to CL's ears.... Some improvement in P6 from P5 in those ares, but minimal. Then, for 7, I'll bet we see exactly that.

Maybe by then the average computer will be able to handle it!

"will be total integration of cloth dynamics and collision detection, followed by some basic physics (gravity and wind)." We have a fair amount of that now in P5 - and even though it has been years many merchants still haven't bothered to learn them and Daz has almost deliberately turned it's nose up at them. Most of this is of course because many P5 vendors are hobbyists and don;t really have a strong 3D background. it is worth considering that as the software gets more capable more and more fo the vendors will be left behind if they don't want to learn and adapt.

Could change dramatically though...