I want to add more four laws to the well known Murphy's laws, this time applied to Poser: 1) The best texture is always behind a plant. 2) The best texture is so small to be useful. 3) You can find the best texture in a place and angle that there is no way to take a photo of it. 4) The best texture of a wall has always a door or window that makes it useless.

by "textures" do you mean 'things in reality I can shoot with my digital camera and turn into backdrop and building textures?' or 'portions of jpgs I find and want to crop out to turn into a texture?'.....in which case it may be that the best place to get fantastic textures is to purchase them ready-made from the marketplace here on Rendo where you can avoid problems 1-4 ::::: Opera :::::

Excellent list. Here are some corollary rules for modelling for Poser (with emphasis on inanimate objects.) 1. The clearest picture of the real object will be taken from an angle that makes it impossible to measure anything. 2. The most interesting real objects have facets and cuts that Poser will choke on. Breaking the facet into pieces that Poser can chew will lead to topological impossibilities. 3. Just after you split all the wrong vertices, you will delete the original good mesh, thinking it's an unnecessary first draft. 4. If you get all the way through the process of making a UVmap and painting the map, you can be sure you've used the wrong version of the mesh. 5. The most interesting objects have complex motions that can almost be represented by ERC setups, so that you will spend hours trying to get the numbers right, only to realize that it's essentially non-linear.

Proposed Ockham/Murphy's Law for Modeling:

1. After your model is 'perfect' and you spend hours adding morphs to it, you will see something wrong with the model and have to go back and make alterations which change the number of vertices, rendering the morphs useless.

Proposed Addition to kawecki/Murphy's Laws for Texture Photos:

1. Outdoors, the best textures of trees, walls, etc. always have utility lines in the way.

Yup. And here's another: 7. After you've arranged all the joints properly, you'll realize that the most important piece of action requires 'dual parenting'. You then have to go back and rethink the whole setup to use a (dishonest) morph instead of the dual parenting.

8- The most beautiful photo of the most beautiful sky has always a plane flying in it.

Here's a more general law, that I just now bumped into..... Your Poser backup CDs will contain 300
copies of stuff you downloaded but never
used and never will use. Your CDs will not
contain even one copy of a project you spent
months on.

Message edited on: 03/03/2005 13:17

You have 100 Giga of Poser props, but when you need a chair after have wasted several hours browsing you discover that there is no chair prop among the 100 Gb, so you need to spend another several hours of search in the internet to find the chair.

When you have the right onject, the right texture, everything in exactly the right place, and the perfect scene ready to render... ...the program crashes.

Corallary to kawecki's Law of Poser Chair Props:

The number of hours you spend looking for a certain kind of chair on the internet only to not find one is exactly equal to the number of hours you spend making a certain kind of chair only to then find one for free on the internet.

When you have everything just perfect and hit the Render button, about halfway through, a frickin' piece of spyware that somehow evaded your last sweep activates, freezes your render and Poser conks out. Worse, you have to reboot the damn computer because now everything else is also frozen. Your curses would make an entire navy blush to hear them, wake up all your neighbors & relatives -- even those on the other side of town -- and scare your cat so bad he doesn't make it to the litterbox. Did I mention that by this time you are such a raving lunatic that you can't even remember your own name, let alone the name of the file, assuming you managed to save it before the whole darn works went kablooey? Ah well ...

Message edited on: 03/03/2005 14:56

lol and terrified :::::: uploading energy field to keep all newcomers from reading this thread :::: ::::: Opera :::::

Pakled's law of Props- after congratulating yourself on creating just the right prop, you will find out someone else did it 2 years ago...and better than you did..;)
2nd law of props- despite all the careful advice you've listened to and tried to follow, all your props in Poser will look like they've been ice cream left out in the sun
3rd law of props- Object files come in bright white and untexturizable, but 3ds comes in with the ability to be textured..;)
4th law of props- despite 3 degrees of rotation, your prop needs a 4th to fit in the picture..;)
just had to say it.

1. you get a 780 frame animation just the way you want it and you are scrubbing back and forth just watching your precious and beautiful model dance in the moonlight and yes you are really exhausted by can't help just making one or two small changes to her position but you forget you had applied spline interpolation all through that part of the sequence and you start pushing her feet around but in the next 20 frames she twists into a pretzel and her feet go six feet under the ground. Since you forgot to save before you started tinkering and you are completely exhausted it takes you two hours to get everything back the way it was except its not quite all the way back and never again will be as good as when you started down this nightmare path. ::::: Opera :::::

Ya spend 3 days findin'/ settin' the "perfect" sphere maps on all the chrome & brass of yr 21 piece drum kit, a 'nother 7 hrs settin' the "perfect" pose fer yr drummer, 14 hrs 19 minnits & 32 seconds gettin' the lighting "just so", and a day to figure out volumetric lighting....just to end up backlightin' it all & end up w/ a 14 hr render in silouette. Or so I've heard....

Bookmarking while laughing hard - and recognising herself in a few of those....

Here's another one. You've set up your scene perfectly, did a test render, and figured it looked ok. Then, (on P5) you turn on firefly to get a good end render, only to have it last 30 hours....and one of your props/figures exploded/expanded/dissappeared during rendering.

After two or three weeks of work making an animation, for avoinding the Murphy laws you have divided the animation in six parts, rendered each part, joined the uncompressed videos into a big one, added sound to the video, installed all kind of codecs in your pc, compressed the video, and when you play the final result the computer always crashes! One month later I still want to know what is wrong with my computer that is not able to create compressed videos with sound!

Ah, but you can't avoid Murphy's Laws. Murphy sees all, knows all, reads all thoughts. By avoiding the known laws, you were just inviting Murphy to be more creative!

Yeah, Murphy's a right sadistic so-and-so, ain't he?

More seriously, I note that you mentioned "installed all kinds of codecs". Some codec installers are truly bad, and can in fact ruin your computer's ability to make videos. (I had a similar experience with the K-Lite codec set.)

I have installed by hand one by one, tested and are working, there must be something wrong with the windows dlls, Msvfw32.dll etc.

Oh, also, whenever you find the perfect outdoor scene for use as a backdrop, there's always a van parked in just the wrong place.

kawecki, you are not a fan of Quicktime? GREAT compression, easy to work with, can export to .avi as well as .mov, only costs $29.99 ::::: Opera :::::

I hate Quicktime, many megabytes and lot of dlls for nothing. Xvid codec have few KB, is free and works fine!

addition to kawecki's Law of Poser Chair Props: after you can't find a chair in your 100 Gb, you spend hours looking for one on the web, and finally download a chair only to find out you actally have that same chair already installed among the 100 Gb.

Since you already hate it...I am not trying to persuade, but allow me to say..... ....we are responding because apparently what you are using does NOT work fine! What do you mean by many megabytes? If you mean, can Quicktime take a 1 gig folder of individual frames and make a lossless movie out of it that weighs in at 1 gig, then yes, lots of megabytes but that is a POSITIVE FEATURE, not a problem, because then you take that orginal and make Quicktime compress with Sorensen or other settings, down-sizing, quite effeciently. So, I don't know what you mean. I also have no idea what you mean by 'many dlls' ::::: Opera :::::

"What do you mean by many megabytes?" I am refering to the quicktime runtime dlls, if a codec size has several MB it means that is very badly done and very slow. You only need codec.acm or codec.dll and if its size if bigger than 500K something is wrong with the codec. I have the movie in msvideo1 format with 100% of quality and the sound in pcm format, the size is about 200M. I can compress the video alone or the sound alone, but if I try to compress both the resulting video crash the video player. If I can compress the video or the sound alone it means that the codecs are working, so the problem is with the video editor when it assembles the compressed video and audio into the avi file. I have experimented several video editors with the same result, so the problem must be in some buggy old version windows dll that is called by the video editor.