Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/gallery.ez?ByArtist=Yes&Artist=deci6el

Page 9 of my Poser/LW hybrid comic has been posted. I offer it as an example of "the path of least resistance". Not for purists. While I have the dream of the one button solution I have yet to be good enough or have the time to make it all happen in one software with one execute command. Characters are all done in Poser, backgrounds and SkyCar in Lightwave. And then lots of post effects. I can not say enough good things about post effects. Suffice it to say, they get the job done. Thanks in advance for any comments, pos or neg.

Your "path of least resistance" is a good one. This is a nice image. I seriously doubt we will ever see the one button solution very soon if ever. It has nothing to do with "good enough" or "having the time". You just can't get everything you need from a single app. What makes us unique is our ability to make all these applications play well together. You have done it nicely here. Cheers, Joe P.S. Purists have a tendency to be narrow minded.

Your response is a wise one, re: no one button solution the narrow mind is the one that says, "you are weak and worthless if you have to leave "The App". But that's what Extreme-ism is all about. However, I do understand the lure of wanting to develop one's talents so that it can be said, "I did all that on an Amiga and only used one finger to type!" Bad analogy. The job of animating really urges one to automate as much as possible because frame x frame is cost prohibitive or just too tiresome. Luckily, illustration begs me to cheat as much as possible, as does my producer. Thanks Joe. cheers, Don

I read my comment about purists being narrow minded and found "my own" comment to be narrow minded. :)

Message edited on: 06/15/2005 02:03

LOL! I know, with every key stroke I tread carefully about what absolutes I'm about to espouse (?). Eventually I just have to give in to being who I am and take the hit if I deserve one. BTW, buddy of mine who flies gliders asked me to help him name his new plane and I suggested Lawn Dart. I think he actually used it for a while. Anyway, your nick always makes me think of that.

That looks really cool. Who cares if there was postwork involved? Are people really that anal about it? I remember reading an article about highend 3D production for movies and stuff, and how almost every single "3D" movie you see undergoes some form of postwork like color grading, compositing, and effects. For video/animation, there's lots of effects editors that can add cool things to the final output much faster than doing it all in one app, and often it looks better too. And those are professionals we're talking about. So keep up the good work, and never worry about what people might think about how you did it. That's the 'smart' way to work in my opinion.

"Who cares if there was postwork involved?" I don't and most people don't. It seems like the non purists always think purist have something against their images. Most of the time the non purist create the whole issue by making remarks like "not for purists". Sounds like deci6el has a real problem with purist, if they even exsist...... I'm only using Poser 6 for my comics, at least I render it all there. In that sense I'm a purist, but some effects just cannot be make with Poser (even if I wanted too) so I need Particle Illusion and PhotoPlus for those. If no one makes a comment about being purist or not, I wonder why you should make such provoking comments at all.

"Sounds like deci6el has a real problem with purist, if they even exsist" Dude, I'm right here. No need to talk about me in the third person. I'm being up front about what it is. And purists exist. Then LawnDart and I made sure between each other that we weren't slamming "purists". Then I stated my reasons why even I (me) would want to be one (a purist). Yes, the Pros knows there's no one shot render. My comment was not meant to provoke but to clearly state that the work I was promoting contained parts of Poser. This was meant as a courtesy for those in the Poser forum who only want to deal with Poser issues. I hope I have answered your question.

"Most of the time the non purist create the whole issue by making remarks like "not for purists"." Hmmmmmm. Not to hinder the continuity of this fascinating topic of debate, but... I have to say I personally see a heck of a lot more "no postwork" comments under posted images in the galleries than I do "not for purists". Just a tiny observation for what it's worth. Carry on. ;-)

@deci6el As someone else who uses Poser with LightWave (via PoserProPack), I'd love to hear how you do your workflow between the two. Do you use ProPack as well? Do you simply render seperately out of each program and then composite the renders or do you export Poser figures into LW and render once? (Obviously ProPaci can influence that? Do you set up your actual camera angle in Poser while posing the figures or wait until you're in LW to see what you come up with? Do you actually draw out some form of storyboard? Have you found an easy way to address the surfaces when converting between programs? (I ask because sometimes it's a pain to go through in LW and change all the image based textures to "additive" rather than "Multiply" and also having to manually re-set up transparancy map textures is rather annoying).

"BTW, buddy of mine who flies gliders asked me to help him name his new plane and I suggested Lawn Dart. I think he actually used it for a while. Anyway, your nick always makes me think of that." I got that nick from my older brother. We used to fly flight simulators together. Back when there was no gaming on the internet (not long ago). We used to hook two machines up with a null modem cable and dogfight each other with f16's. He was better than me. I chose LawnDart as opposed to Target Drone. LOL

Bobasaur,

Yes, I am using Pro Pack, was never able to get the Poser2LW plug-in to work. Eventually, I bought the Greenbriar plug-ins.
While they have worked well getting objects into LW with their materials intact, there has been a fair amount of tweaking to do on weight maps and adjusting some joint setups, limits etc.

I want to be clear that this is not a meticulous appraisal of the Greenbriar products. My time budget for Liquid Stealth is small so when the characters needed more work I just stuck to rendering them in Poser. I hope someday to take the time to work out the kinks so that any Poser character will be workable in LW.

So, here's my work flow.

First I should mention this all started as an improvisation. In LW , I wandered around Dystopia scouting cool locations. Then, Liquid Halo came out as did the Drone Trooper and I thought wouldn't it be cool if...

So, from that beginning began to emerge this story. I roughed out an outline of the plot. As I fine tune the narration, I break it down into individual captions for each panel.

I sketch out what I'm expecting in photoshop or if I have a LW render of the location I'll stick that in and draw on top of that.
Then I adjust text or images until I think it's working.

I render the bkg in LW first. Pose the characters in Poser and render them in Poser. So, my camara match move happens in there.

re: surfaces
The Greenbriar plugs do a good job of transporting those things over. One thing that is a bit of a pain is that I find "Reflection" set to 100% on many materials so that has to be adjusted.
Otherwise, all maps are set to "normal". I'm suprised your setting maps to "add" unless your material is set to black.

Thanks for your interest. I'm interested in your response, or hearing how your pipeline is working. Like, how did you get the Poser2LW plug to work, or does it?

Attached Link: http://homepage.mac.com/kflach/first.html

I've looked at the Greenbriar plug ins but it looks like I'd have to re-rig and then animate everything in LW. I don't want to have to go through that much work (and at this point I can't afford them). I had a bit of difficulty getting the Poser2LW installed but once I did, I found everything it installed, noted where it was, and then archived the components (with a Readme listing their proper locations) on a CD so I didn't have to use the installer again. I don't think it works on any LightWave versions later than 7.0. I'm still using 6.5. I didn't buy Poser 5 because they never came out with a LW plugin. I haven't got 6 yet either and it's partially for the same reason. There are things that the high end animating apps have that I passionately love - like bezier-based keyframes and a much better lighting system. As far as it working, yes, it does (for me). Once the plugin is installed you use the "Load Scene" from Lightwave. That dialog box defaults to "LightWave Scenes" but you have to change that to "All Documents." I can then navigate to my PZ3 file and select it. LightWave will give me some kind of loading status display and then after a bit it gives me the option of triangulating the meshes or leaving them "as is." I tend to triangulate them - it seems to work better. What it is doing at that point is creating a folder with .lwo versions of all the Poser objects in the scene. Once it gets done it displays the first frame in the layout window. I go in to the meshes (within LW's layout) and change the surfaces. The actual changes are done on the .lwo files and I can change them *as desired* - as long as I don't rename or delete them. This is great! I've found that if I'm going to use a character in several scenes I can use the same "saved" .lwo as long as I start him in the same first frame location in each scene. Thus, I now use my Poser first frame as a "staging" area, keeping my characters in default poses. I still have to load the Poser scene and it creates new meshes for each one, but I simply swap them out with the one's I initially surfaced for LightWave and I don't have to resurface them again. My basic workflow is oriented toward animation. I usually set up the initial scene in Poser (starting at Frame 2) with just the characters. If there's a prop or other element that's integral to the scene and it's not a Poser prop I'll create a very low res version of it in Lightwave and import it. For example, in my LW Drum Test Animation (via the link or in the Animation Outlet - it's one of the first one's posted) I modified the drums that came with LW and then created some simple non-textured cylinders that matched the locations and sizes of the drum heads, cymbals and the drummer's seat top. I exported the low res versions out of LightWave as OBJ files and imported them into Poser. [Note: I made sure the drums (both high and low res) were centered on the x and z axis]. In Poser I scaled them down to fit the figure and kept them centered (I wrote down how much I had to scale them so I could scale the high res version the same amount). I imported a sound file of the drums to use as a reference and animated the character playing the drums in Poser using Poser primitive cylinders as drum sticks. When the animation was complete, I saved it and made a copy (just in case). At this point I could have deleted the low res drums. The drum sticks were parented to the Poser figure's hands so I kept them. I opened and imported the Poser scene in LW. In addition to the scene itself, LW allows you to manipulate the objects themselves so I could have rotated or resized the scene or any of it's elements. I also can delete unwanted elements like the low res drums. Anyway, next I imported and scaled the high res drums. Since everything is based on the same x=0, y=0, and z=0 coordinates, my Poser character fit right in to the drums in the LW scene. I animated the high res cymbal in LW to move as required. I also Imported the floor and set up my own lighting in LW. I can add and scale any element I want to within LW. I'm pretty sure I can parent things to individual Poser objects, but I haven't done much testing on that. Since the Poser2LW plugin appears to act as some sort of displacement plugin (displacing the .lwo in accordance with how Poser moves it's corresponding element) within LW, I'm not sure how it would work if you parented something to a part that moved (like a hand which LW considers a part of the Poser character .lwo and not an object by itself). I've done things like have the Poser characters walk in place in Poser but move the whole Poser scene within LightWave so they appear to move across the scene (the Poser2LW plug in doesn't handle Poser's Walk Designer paths). I also can easily apply .BVH files to the character within Poser and have it animate perfectly in LW. I do work out my basic camera angles in Poser - sometimes I use stills of that as a story boarding tool. I rarely draw a story board, however, My drawing is so poor it just confuses me (grin). I'm very fond of the Poser2LW plugin. With the exception of having to resurface things it works great for me. I rarely use the Walk Designer so the "Motion Path" limitation doesn't impact me. Lightwave renders faster than ProPack - which is an added bonus. I kind of worry about the future. I don't want to have to learn rigging etc. but it looks like CL - I mean e-frontier - is not too committed to making sure Poser stays compatible with LW. I really don't want to have to learn another 3D software package - even if I could afford it. This was the biggest reason I didn't buy a G5 for my last computer - it was important to me to be able to start up in Mac OS9 to use PPP and LW 6.5. I am curious how this compares with the workflow of those using some of the other high end apps and whatever they use to integrate Poser with that app. This has been a bit of a long post. Sorry about that. I'm perfectly willing to answer more specific questions if you have them! ;-)

Attached Link: Federation-21.com

Just wanted to post so I could find this info later (about the methods used with LW and Poser)

Kevin, That explains a couple of things. I kept upgrading LW. But even when I had 6.5 it just kept crashing my machine. And I'm in deep with OSX now on a G5 so there's no going back. Yes, that material switching would be a pain and is the one very good thing about the greenbriar plugs. It's not a total re-rig but as you said, then you'd be in LW animating and not Poser. Currently I'm working in LW with a character built in LW so it works fine and yes, Lighting and the Graph Editor, woohoo!! As for this comic strip, its way better to be in Poser and tweak the motions. The IK works really comfortably in Poser. I can understand your reluctance to go to the bottom of another learning curve. I have re-rigged my LW character (and re-modeled) three times from the bottom up. And really, I just want to be animating scenes. The drum animation looked good. Good sync. Also had a look at the Fashion animation, very nice. I really liked the illustrations and type animation. So, Kevin. I've only met one person with the last name Flach and that was Bob Flach in Dallas. I saw your Fashion animation was in Ft. Worth. So, I had to ask any relations named Bob? I know astronomical odds but miracles happen.

I have a cousin named Bob who lives here - well actually he lives in a suburb of Dallas. I live in another suburb which is just down the highway from his suburb and is between Dallas & Ft. Worth. We all tell people we're from Dallas because that's the name of the metropolitan area we're in. How did you meet him? I used to be a producer for a Creative Agency in Ft. Worth. We did promotional videos for a series of 3 Annual Charity Fashion Shows. I produced the videos as well as doing 3D and compositing for titles. They don't do that series any more which is a shame. I enjoyed working on them.

Bobasaur, Yeah, your also an After Effects-guy. I've got to say that After Effects has been an indispensable part of doing the strip, even though they're all still images. I've never used any of the particle plugs for Poser, maybe they are for PC and I'm on a Mac. LW has really serious particles but serious particles take me a long time to wrangle. Most of that smoke and haze pictured above is all from AE, a plug called Particular. What a really quick, fun, easy way to make particles. Maybe not completely on topic but I thought I'd throw that in.

I have very rarely used particles, either in AE or LW. There used to be a set of plugins available for AE called "Final Effects" but they dissappeared. I messed with their particle generators a little bit. I'm under the impression that some of their capabilites were built into the newer versions of the AE particle plug in but I haven't messed with it. I have actual flames and explosiions and smoke stock footage that includes alpha channels. I use it instead of particles.