Attached Link: http://www.sparkchaser.net/blather/penglatest.html

Well written article! While I do not share your opinions in every point, I enjoyed reading it - it's not just a pointless rant, like so many others. Just two quick things I noticed: * You don't need to make an animation for the cloth room. Just set the draping frames to a sufficient number (15 works for me most of the time) and make sure you check "start draping from zero pose". * Carbon is native. Finder is a Carbon application, iTunes is, Photoshop is, Cinema4D is, Maya is, DS is and so is Poser. What's wrong with Carbon and what would be the benefits of a Cocoa version (and would they outweight the porting effort)?

Carbon IIRC was mostly a means to help port over OS 9 and under apps, no? (could be wrong, but that's what I had gathered...) I figure that a purer Cocoa codeset would help bump the speed up a bit and at the same time better insure it aginst obsolescence. It would also lighten the load a touch, at least in the GUI department. (which reminds me... forgot to mention incorporating OpenGL/Quartz in there, dangit.)

As for draping, why should I need to set up frames at all? Why not just have it simply drape, such as in Rhino's "Drape" function, which is a zillion times faster? (granted that Rhino is draping a NURB set while Poser has to deal with mesh, but it would be easy enough to clone-out a set of pseudo-NURBs from a given mesh, drape that, and then re-convert the results to mesh, no? Given Poser's engine, that may or may not be true, but since I'm demanding a ground-up rewrite anyway... :) )

/P
(edited to squish some typo faeries.)

Message edited on: 01/18/2005 12:56

Not sure if you followed it, but we had the Carbon vs Cocoa recently over in the Mac forum. I couldn't find any evidence that Cocoa would be faster than Carbon (rather slower due to the dynamic features of the Obj-C language). There are a few features in Cocoa that are not available to Carbon apps, but these are some OS X-only features that wouldn't make sense in a cross-platform 3D app (judging from your article, you're not very keen on an embedded Safari web browser).

Carbon as a porting path was the plan 4 years ago, but Apple has changed its mind in the mean time. On every developers conference they stress that Carbon is a full citizen of OS X and that it's here to stay and that it will be updated.

For your reading pleasure, a few related links we threw around in the other threads:
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/10/70789.aspx
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000024.php
http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000111.php

About the Cloth room - sounds to me like you'd be happier if "drape from zero pose' and 15 draping frames were the default? Or am I misunderstanding you? I don't know how Rhino works, but I guess it's a bit easier there as the user can put the mesh in any shape before draping, where Poser, not being a modeling app, needs to go other ways.

A polygon->NURBS conversion would not make sense here. Converting a whole polygon mesh to one NURBS surface is not possible, as NURBS have certain topology restrictions that polygons don't. Converting each polygon to a separate NURBS surface would obviously not be of any advantage, as it'd be causing more instead of less overhead.

"About the Cloth room - sounds to me like you'd be happier if "drape from zero pose' and 15 draping frames were the default? Or am I misunderstanding you?" Not really... I guess I should've worded it a bit better myself :) It just seems that there are too many controls and too much work going into something that other programs seem to be capable of doing in very little time, at least in comparison to the massive calculations that Poser churns out getting basically the same thing done. The NURBs reference was just in relation to how Rhino handled it, but I'm fairly sure that it wouldn't reallt be a necessary condition to draping, at least if all that was necessary was a few basic collision parameters. It just seems that IMHO the Cloth room was over-engineered for what most people who use it get out of it. "Carbon as a porting path was the plan 4 years ago, but Apple has changed its mind in the mean time. On every developers conference they stress that Carbon is a full citizen of OS X and that it's here to stay and that it will be updated." Heh - for some reason, that doesn't suprise me :) /P

The problem is that Carbon will abandon the old system calls.... in favor of the new ones - even if you stay in Carbon you will have to rewrite

I'll have to completely disagree on the cloth draping issue. "Draping" in Rhino isn't any kind of cloth simulation at all. It's just a loose surface built over the top of a model with walls down to the ground plane around the edges. Real cloth simulation is slow in pretty much any package. There are certainly things I'd like to see fixed with Poser's cloth simulation but the speed of the simulation and the ease of doing it when you want still pictures both seem fine to me.

The cloth in P5 is fine to me as well. I've used other dynamic cloth simulators like "ClothFX" and "SimCloth", which are both rather advanced, and P5's cloth room holds up just fine to those. There's only a slight difference in speed. The others have an advantage in that you can stitch together your own meshes to make clothes, etc. much easier than in P5, but for what it does, it works very well.

"It just seems that there are too many controls and too much work going into something that other programs seem to be capable of doing in very little time, at least in comparison to the massive calculations that Poser churns out getting basically the same thing done."

You should work with Reactor in 3dsmax some time. There's so many variables and interaction possibilities, your head will spin. ;-)

In my opinion, dynamic cloth (regardless of the application) is best used for animation anyway. Yes, it's processor intensive, but I've run 3000+ frame simulations in a relatively short time. I ran into a few calculation problems along the way, but in the end they look great, which is the whole point. Message edited on: 01/18/2005 15:59

I miss one thing here. Point lights! D|S has them AFAIK, just about any 3D app I know has them. I have to simulate point lights by a bank of 6 or 8 spots, takes a lot of extra time to render if I use shadow maps, and raytraced shadows seem to be more crash-prone. I like the cloth room. I never waste time posing a long skirt or dress - I simply convert to dynamic cloth, make a simple animation, and render at the frame that looks best. The only feature I miss is the use of "pre-stretched" cloth, that would be great for elastic waistbands/straps/ropes/whatever. Got to agree with the collision detection problems. A simple "drop" routine that drops a figure/object to the nearest surface below it instead of to the ground plane would be greatly appreciated. And a Setup room that allows for precise positioning of bones and joint parameters would be great. Now I only use it to create the base skeleton, I have to hack the CR2 by hand to get everything exactly right. Better scripting facilities would be great. Python in itself is a good language, but Tkinter sucks big time - doesn't even work on Macs. A COM or .NET interface for Windows, AppleScript for the Mac, and it would be so much better... Now I hope that someone at CL/Egisys is reading this thread...

Attached Link: http://www.planit3d.com/source/index.htm

Could they perhaps give Judy an extreme makeover ?

3Dream already did. Eternal Judy is a pretty girl!

The issues raised on Sparkchaser, about CL and about Rosity, pretty well nail both, albeit with minor quibbles about details. I still would like to fill out the picture a bit. 1. "It's my business and I'll run it as I see fit." Fair enough, but just remember the old saying, "nobody ever won an argument with a customer." Your way works exactly as long as the customer is willing to pay you for doing it that way, and not one microsecond longer. Read up on how the railroads set themselves up vis a vis the trucking industry, and spend some quality time with the lessons! 2. So far as the Market Place dominates the site, you are pandering to the beancounters at Paypal rather than serving your actual customers. OTOH, it takes money to run a site like this. How to get off that tiger's back, I have no idea. Not my business model, not my problem. 3. The said beancounters, in common with some of the types who post here, do not understand that one of the distinguishing features of being an adult is to be able to distinguish erotic from pornographic. Erotic refers to gender-aligned behavior that constructs and articulates a pair bond based on mutual affection and respect. As such, it is of the essence of human nature, whether or not the Rev Mr Falwell has a problem with it. Pornographic refers to using someone's body as an accessory to masturbation, and is more emetic than erotic. As such, it vitiates human nature, whether or not the ACLU has a problem with your flushing it. Leaning a V3 barbie doll up against a free-stuff prop, inflating its breasts to six times normal, and giving it a suggestive title is pornography, whether or not there is literal contact to the genitals. It is also sheer dreck, devoid of any connection with "Aaahhhrt". The problem here is not only prurience, it is also (and worse) sleaze. That, I suppose, is a 50-50 split in odium between the poster and the mods who allow that crap to proliferate and, incidentally, drive out the people who might have put up some real quality. It gets beyond incompetence into moral cretinism when the mods flush a really high quality, effort intensive, tasteful series of images because they and the beancounters can't fathom the distinction, while leaving the pornographic barbie dolls on the adjacent pages undisturbed. 4. Me, I'd have torn off Rosity long ago except that Dr Geep's tutes are worth wading through the sludge. I don't think I am alone, judging by the comments I keep seeing here and on the competing sites -- some of which come acceptably close to qualifying as adult, both generally and as defined above. Food for thought there, and bon appetit.

*3Dream already did. Eternal Judy is a pretty girl!*That's true, not to mention Quarker's Farrah. These wonderful products show that Judy has great potential.

But how about the monstrous Judy that comes out of the box ??

" Have you read our interview with Larry Weinberg of CL over at PlanIt 3D? There's a few "teasers" about what's to come in P6 there ;)" Yup - I linked to it in the very first sentence ;) Joe... haven't mentioned Renderosity yet. I still have to finish rating R'osity's RMP and posting the results (Friday.) Kinda separate issue-wise (for now.) The two are linked quite deeply, but in this case I was wating to address CL in particular. /P

"Yup - I linked to it in the very first sentence ;)" Ah, that's one of those link to a link type links that involves actually reading the content of the first link then? ;) Seriously...I know you've seen it Penguinisto, I intended the comment for svdl whose name I hadn't seen in the other thread here at 'rosity about the interview.

I've read it, and - well, let's say Larry Weinberg did a pretty good job of not saying anything. I would have liked a more penetrating style of questions too. The things I mentioned above (along with a more robust version of Firefly) are my wishlist for Poser 6, in order of importance. Nothing special, mainly bug fixes - I consider the absence of point lights a bug in a 3D program! I've read those articles on sparkchaser too. Good stuff. Kolschey made me grin - a much better and deeper view of a certain class of Poser users than usual. It's not as black and white as his introductory line implies.