Ok. I got Poser 4 and I'm just lost. I'm working on reading through the manual, which is taking me forever since I don't understand half of the terminology. I've read through tons of tutorials here and at a few other sites, but of course those make little sense as well. I've made a few decent poses but nothing spectacular. I'm a complete beginner. I don't understand how to make clothes, put make up on my characters or anything! I can pose a nude character... but thats about it. I don't even know what a morph is (well I know it can increase breast size - but beyond that I don't really get the concept) If anyone could help me out. Even tell me how you got started, after all everyone had to start somewhere. I would appreciate some helpful advice more than you could possibly understand. I have all these pictures in my head and I need to get them out! :) I really look forward to hearing extremely newbie advice (well anything slightly beyond the interface tutorials would be ideal). A big thanks in advance for those who take some time to reply! Desparate, Kelly

Oh shoot. And I forgot to ask, does anyone know a way to import my Poser peeps into Photoshop 6 without them looking so blurry and pixelated? Kelly

Just above the poser forum logo, you will find the Poser FAQ. You can also do a search for Geep, he has great tutorials for beginers. The saved render problem. When you save your render, look at the bottom of the save window. There you can save as a JPG. at what ever % you want. Defalt is at 25%, so it looks bad. Change to 100%. You can also save as a PSD. or Tiff, which I do, so it has an alfa channel saved, better for layers and better quality.

PS. I render twice the size of the intended image. Better for postwork. Then reduce to the size I want when finished.

Ooh! I totally didn't see the "%" thing. Thanks that will definately help. I've looked through the Poser FAQ, which was helpful but some of it just didn't click. I will also search for Geep's tutorials. Hopefully one day I'll be able to understand how to get from Poser to Bryce to finished work of art! I just hope everyone felt this way when they first started out! I mean its exhausting, Poser has become the only thing I think about! An obsession if you will! :) Kelly

Hi duckee, You might want to ... TRY THIS. cheers, dr geep ;=]

There is a way to move Poser to Bryce. Daz has taken over Bryce. They have an app. to to just that, DazBryce Turbo Import. You do need Daz Studio, which is free from them to import the Poser saved file, PZ3, to Daz Studio, then into Bryce. Long way around but works well. Before you buy Turbo, you might want to check the daz forum. By clicking on someones link you can get a PC membership trial till the end of Oct.31. I think you can buy turbo for only $1.99 then. I'm not sure but it is worth checking first. Last, welcome to your new addiction. We hold meetings 24/7 right here in this forum.

Thanks Dr Geep omw to check it out right now! Beryld - Do I understand this right? I need to get Daz Studio (free) but I will need to also get DazBryce Turbo Import (not free). Then I open my pz3 file into Daz Studio (I'm not sure I understand what role DazBryce Turbo Importer plays) then save it in Daz Studio which I will then be able to load into Bryce? That is a lot of work. Is it that much work to load a poser character into say Maya or Lightwave? But from what I understand, Bryce is different from Maya or Lightwave. (I'm also new to Bryce - but I'm not going to rush into that or anything - I need to figure out Poser first!) Also you mentioned you render in twice the size. How do you do that? Where do you change the size? I apologize, you all have probably answered these questions thirty gabillion times! Thanks again! Kelly

I think a lot of the people who post here will agree that Poser (or most any other app) is a bit daunting the very first time you fire it up. My suggestion is to just spend an afternoon playing with the program. I know it probably doesn't sound all that helpful to you know, but it will pay off. Try different things. See what happens when you select certain things from the menu or the interface. Get used to the various commands and options. And of course as others have mentioned be sure to check the faq and tutorials.

I'm pretty new, well a year in and am still learning. I just opened P5 and am feeling all new again lol. The way I learn best is to find a tutorial and do it step by step flicking back and forth between the poser and the tut. Also making it easier is to find tuts with pictures! :) Don't worry. As for Bryce Maya or any other program, me personally I'm learning poser.....then I'll learn about importing and such. You find your nude persons in figures, also the clothing is there. Poses is not only poses, but for certain outfits or people, to change the appearance. Camera is for pre set cameras and same with lights ( I still have a heck of a time with lights so I use others fantastic light work!) Props are extra things to add to a scene usually, like a chair or such. Not sure if anything I've said helps or not, but figured it was the least I could do to try to help. Good luck!! Smiles***

Lol yeah I've spent a lot of time futzing with things I didn't understand. Lets just say I made a lot of crazy blobby deformed characters! Its true tho, the more I use it the less frustrated I am by the actual program, but I don't understand it. Does that make sense? For example, if I mess with the eyeballs, the character will turn to a box and I'll have no idea where the iris or pupil are pointing. I still haven't figured out how to change the characters gaze. One eye usually ends up looking one way while the other freakishly is hidden in the back of the head. Is there a way to select both eyeballs at the same time? And is there a way to actually move them with out the character turning into a box? Everyone in this forum will hate me in no time :) Kelly

Ahh awesome! Thanks a ton!

Or, if you want to shortcut that a bit: Within Poser: File -> Export -> Wvaefront obj

And by choosing antialias in your render options your output to PS won't be so pixelated. Marque

...as for posing eyes, load a ball, select left eye then go to object > point at (I think) and select the ball. then do the same for the right eye. move the ball around, the eyes will follow. the further away the ball from the eyes, the less cross-eyed they'll look.

On the Poser to DS to Bryce issue; There was some intention, in the old days of Metacreation, where Poser and Bryce were to eventually talk to each other...but the implementation never got done due to Meta going bye bye. Poser's Wavefront (.obj file) export isn't quite up to snuff; it leaves out a lot of info from the .mtl file; this is the materials file that holds the information about textures. Originally, you would have to export a Poser scene as a .obj file, import into Bryce, and then manually load and apply the textures, doing any tweaking of the material manually for things like transparency. There are a couple of freeware utility programs (Metal Fixer comes to mind immediately) that corrects most of the problems in the .mtl file, and eases the process a bit. Then DAZ rescued Bryce from Corel. The turbo importer people have mentioned was written to make import work, and since DAZ Studio is intended to be a competitor for Poser (don't ask about that unless you want to get into....religious debate, shall we say?), the importer was tailored more for DS (although Poser could use it if they changed the .obj exporter to match Wavefront's specification). But DS -can- open a Poser .PZ3 file, preserving the material settings. So you can use the Poser to DS to Bryce as a sort of importer kludge. Or you can check out the demo of Vue D'esprit, which imports the Poser PZ3 file natively (and can support animation import, if that's your interest). As for the frustration....welcome to the club, m'dear. CG of any variety is steeped in frustration; it involves a whole new language. And forging new ways to think about what exactly you are doing. There are a ton of tricks out there, usually several tricks to achieve the exact same thing. Experimentation is the price of learning what works for you.It takes time. A lot of it. And there isn't a single person here who wasn't just as much of a beginner at one time as you are. Some of them a lot -more- beginner than you are (frightening thought, eh...? ;) ). But most people her just love to show off their smar....er, help and guide the newbies. Poser's hooked you. You have been assimilated. The asylum =always= has new Velcro patches to attach a newbie to the wall with. One tip. Make sure you have a few gigabytes of hard drive space, then hit the freebie downloads here, at RuntimeDNA, at PoserPros, and digitalbabes2.com, the home of Kozaburo and some of the best transparency mapped hair props on the net (Japan has a thriving Poser community, and the stuff they make is incredible), and plan to spend a few hours downloading. I'm evil, I am........ >:)

Hello duckee. I was almost new to Poser when I got Poser 5 in may, almost because I had Poser 3 for a short time way back then. Like you I felt it was fustrating that I couldn't just open it and do just something so I could see I did something. I started with reading manuals and tutorial, a big mistake, for me at least. I found out, that I have to do/learn one thing at the time and I started with posing. Then I went to conforming clothes and after that to dynamic. Then I found out, that I would like to do textures for the clothes, after that came the figuers. And so on, step by step. I would like to learn everything but I have to realise, something I'm just not to good at, so it's great with all the artist here at ROS. I still havn't learned everything about those thing I've mentioned above, but enough to know what I'm for the time being will spend my time on doing with Poser.

However, if I read DAZ's info about the upcoming Bryce 6 correctly, it's going to have PZ3 import capabilty soon as well. That will make importing Poser people into Bryce very much easier.

At the present time, bringing Poser into Bryce requires a lot of tweaking with the textures and transparency.

Also, you said you have Poser 4. You can change the way your figure looks on the screen with the buttons right on your working area (shaded, wireframe, etc.). Please see the attached image. I hope this helps some. By the way, welcome to the Poser universe. You'll be hopelessly hooked on it soon. :)

Melanie

Message edited on: 10/17/2004 10:08

Its best not to save in JPG from poser, because when you edit the image in photoshop and then save again in JPG the image with loose further quality.. I have Poser 4 Propack and i always save in PNG... But if you don't have that option in P4, then save ur image in anything but JPG.

Try saving in TIF format. It is uncompressed and you can subtract out the background easier should you want to composite your images.

I might have missed it, but the "people turning into boxes" is the auto-LOD problem, and you fix that on the RIGHT side of the render window shown in the image above. The three little balls at the upper right side of the grey render window? Poser defaults to the center one being ticked, which makes you figures turn into boxes whenever they are moved. Tick the lower of the three to stop this.

Making clothing - that's an advanced concept and not for newbies to 3D. You can't make clothing in Poser - you'll need 3D modelling programs for that. Get comfortable in Poser first then try making simple props, etc., and branch out from there. Morphs - change the shape of a model. Yep, breast size is probably the most popular type of morph. Imagine that the mesh is made from clay. A morph pushes the clay in, or pulls it out in an area. You can spin dials or set the values directly. Morphs are made to look good from 0 to 1. A lot of times, the morph will also look good down to -1 as well. Anything below -1 or above 1 may or may not look good - it depends on the morph. Usually morphs work well when combined with other morphs, but not always. Make-up - this is a function of creating texture maps. A very rough analogy is a paint-by-numbers set or a world map that you color in. You can put whatever color you want on anywhere you want on the map, but if you run a yellow stripe down the 0 degree longitude line, you'll have a yellow stripe going down England. If you want to color the U.S., you'd have to go to the proper coordinates. Snow Sultan has some wonderful seam guides to help you figure out how to color in templates. Different meshes have different templates, just like a globe has to be colored differently than a flat map. Pixelation - I always recommend that you save as .tif or .psd. .jpg is a lossy compression scheme, so everytime you make changes to it and save it again, you lose a little bit of detail. I save as .tif, take things into PS and save that as .psd (that way I still have the original as .tif) and save my final result as .psd (to keep all my changes) then Save for Web as .jpg. I hope this pulls some stuff together for you, Cres

Thanks everyone so much for the help! I appreciate it so much and already my experience with Poser was better (I stayed up until 5am!) Cres: I know I probably won't ever be able to make my own clothing but its good to have goals right? :) I have Maya and learning that will be a difficult task which there is no rush, since I'd rather master Poser first. I saved in .psd last night to see how much of a difference it would be from the .jpg and holy cow! Huge difference. And since I don't understand what you are saying about make-up yet, I just painted in on in Photoshop, which doesn't look that great, but better than nothing! I learned out to change breast size thanks to Dr Geep, but I still haven't figured out how to change nose size. Another new question I have is when I put clothes on my Poser characters (I don't have Vickie yet) weird holes appear. I know the FAQ mentions this but I'm not quite sure I understand how to fix this problem. If someone could explain it in super noob language I'd appreciate it :) Thanks everyone for the help you have no idea how much better I feel about all this! I mean yeah, I have a long way to go yet, but at least I feel its actually a possibilty that I will figure this stuff out! Kelly

If you select the face, you should see morphs there, which may or may not include nose morphs. (Morphs are not in alphabetical order most of the time, so scroll through the list.) If you don't see any, or can't get the morph you want, you can create your own. www.morphworld30.com has some excellent magnet tutorials. (Magnets pull/push parts of the mesh to create morphs.) Make sure the clothing you put on a character is made for that character. Vicki clothing will not fit Judy, etc. (Imagine being a size 12 and trying to fit into your size 4 friend's clothing. It usually doesn't work.) You're probably getting what's called poke-through. Make sure you've picked clothing that fits the character and conformed it. In some poses, you may get pokethrough. If the clothing should cover that body part completely, such as pants covering the thighs, you can select the thigh and turn it invisible. (Object: Properties.) You can also play with the scaling of the body part and/or the clothing piece. (Sometimes I can fix pokethrough with breasts by scaling the clothing up on the ZScale.) Also, check the clothing to see if it has morphs to cover up problem areas. It's hard to go into all the possibilities, but hopefully this will get you started. For makeup - look at tutorials that talk about creating your own texture. Those might make it easier for you to understand what I mean since they usually have lots of pictures to show how it works. Cheers!

Also, there's loads of free figures to use in Poser, don't feel obligated to use the default characters because you haven't bought Vickie or Michael yet. Do a search for Mayadoll, Sara, or Kaekedo for a start. Sixus1Media also has a handful of great characters in their free offerings, go to poserforums.com to see some of them. They're very good quality and load into Poser with little effort. You might want to mess with Posette (default Poser female woman) for a bit until you get the hang of the application first before adding new characters though.

I found Mayadoll and Sara. Still trying to hunt down Kaekedo... Sixus' stuff isn't really my taste, but they obviously do great work! I like the more realistic look... like Vicky sniff Anyone wanna buy her for me? ;) JK!

Hopefully I'll be able to find Kaekedo, she sounds pretty.. but until Vicky, I think I have enough to mess around with ;)

Thanks again everyone for all the great help and advice!

Kelly

Message edited on: 10/17/2004 23:59

I believe the low-res Vicki was offered on the cover CD of one of the 3D magazines (3D World, maybe?) some months ago. Maybe they have a back issue you could buy. The magazine is only $13.95 and you get a lot of goodies on the CD that comes with it. Anyone know what month that low-res Vicki was offered? Melanie