Yeah, Im going crazy with the posts today! Id like to get some opinions from the talent here on constructing an overall scene in P5. Ive been experimenting with creating rooms by using cubes with inverted normals, atmospheric spheres, simple background images, etc. Needles to say, my results seem to vary. Id like to hear what you guys have to say about this. Have a safe and happy 4th! Thanks!

I think you'd be better off doing like most of us do and "buying" the type of room set that you want to use. IMO poser users fall into 2 categories: 1 The type of person that likes to experiment and make stuff from scratch. 2 The type of person that buys what they need and just makes images [like me]. Usually a type 2, like me has a full time job and so Poser is a hobby rather than a money making tool so they don't have the time to be a type 1. Just my view and I dare say some will disagree and that's ok as long as it stays friendly! thefixer, poser coord.

Read Geep tutorials. Don't stop creating. Above all have fun. So a search here in the forum for "geep" and you will find a wealth of valuable tutorials.

You didn't make it really clear, are you trying to create rooms in Poser? If thats the case... As a long time Poser user and a somewhat accomplished set creator, I would have to say don't even waste your time trying to build sets in Poser, unless you enjoy pain and suffering! :) You'd be much better off getting a 3d Modelling program, even an inexpensive one, to create sets and props. It is much much easier.

You can download some free rooms at www.sams3d.com but you don`t have to make a whole building if you are only going to be rendering characters in one room at a time. To make them go from one room to another you only need two rooms loaded in at one time.

Sams 3d has several rooms in their freebies section, just put up a coupla days ago. There's a bunch of room props in the freebies section, from the ubiquitous (but very useful) As Shanim room (the round grating on chains..trust me..you've seen it), to the Blue room, and others..check it out.

There is a free plain room (very plain) available at planit3d in the props part, the good thing about it is that it is uvmapped so can have the walls and floor with different textures. It is a bit cheesey but not too bad. ;)

There are lots and lots of buildings you can get for free. Remember to look at things in .3ds format, which you can import into Poser. There seem to be far more free buildings available in .3ds than things that are Poser ready. Add to the above sites 3D Cafe, mapps's site, and Baumgarten. If you need simple things like walls, scaling primatives is an easy way to do it. I just got Blender which is a free 3d modeling program, and pretty good with good documentation. Poser has the tools within it to be a kinda simple modeling tool if you don't get too complicated. With enough tweaking you could get the primatives to make what you wanted. But that time you spend tweaking could instead be devoted to actually learning how to model 3d.

Make a good drawing of the house you want to build. Use Photoshop to make images for wall papers and add detials like pictures on the wall. Make walls from squares, use transparency maps for door and window openings and displacement maps to simulate thickness abd recesses. Same for celings/floors. Build a separate library holding your 'house'. Define each wall/floor as a separate prop with it's correct position. Same holds for furniture. For rendering work cinematography style. Build open 'stages' as you need for the different scenes. Unless your images are as seen from the eyes of a character, you will find your ideal camera/light positions for the scene will invariably be outside the room.

I have often built rooms, furniture and simple props in Poser. It can be fun and very rewarding to look at a finished image, knowing that you made most of the stuff in there. If you want a very simple room, a cube with reversed normals is ideal. Even better is a low poly cube (1 poly per face) with reversed normals and a missing front face.

Attached Link: http://www.sams3d.com/Freebies.htm

"just got Blender which is a free 3d modeling program, and pretty good with good documentation. Poser has the tools within it to be a kinda simple modeling tool if you don't get too complicated." Blender is great, but if the models are original, you do need to UV map them. There are a ton of great meshes out there for free, columns for example to build that temple to your own custom specs. If atmosphere is worth it too you, build your own stuff, and architectural interiors are some of the easiest things to model.

I have built some pretty complicated rooms based on Geeps Magic cube (a 6 facet cube) as I think it is better to have seperate walls so then can be taken away like in a movie/TV room set. Also I like that using the cube you can see if your view is blocked as there are visible facets on each side. And since my base cube is a Poser foot cubed I can make a 1500 by 8 foot wall by scaling X=1500% y=800% and z=40%. I make component wall elements flush by setting them face down and dropping each part to ground... then I export the group as an .obj and import it back in and erect it into place... export and import again so it can be in place with the dials zeroed. I have done molding and double hung windows and panel doors (geep shows how to change the origin so doors swing properly). I import an open posed sliding window onto a close posed sliding window as a morph and I can slide it open and closed. The real pain in all this is using UVmapper Classic before assembling and while assembling parts so everything will map properly to a texture (using groups in construction is important for later in UVmapper). Geep explains all... Magic box, Poser "glue", the grouping tool. It is fun and worth the hassle for the satisfaction you get. I have seen on this forum such complex scenes, houses, chicken coops, temple structures, all done in Poser alone.

Geep's neatest maybe was a half ball set on a short cylyder up on the ceiling with a faux volumetric light painted on the ceiling texture in a comic he did. Note: Search Gerld Day and PhilC for extended primatives sets. MaCleane has fancy shapes I thing at PoserCommune. I think texturing sets is the hardest part.

Don't forget you can cut mesh with grouping and use magnets to make morphable primatives... my magic box and other primatives, skew, shear, twist, bend, partial scale etc. all that is required is primatives with enough vertices for the magnets to work on.

Attached Link: http://www.3dcommune.com

Sorry maclean. :( I actual use and apreciate a number of your Poser things -thank you for them. And I see you around here too... I just could not remeber the name of the 3Dcommune. I need to adjust the dose!!! Oy! Out of curiosity, korn313, what scenes in particular are you interested in acquiring/making?

Heh, heh. No problem, momodot. sometimes my brain need more RAM too. mac

But 'rosity seems to have disbled the "search/forums" box. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I was looking for a specific thread yesterday and couldn't search the forums. Still can't. Maybe it has something to do with the slow response/"too many SQL queries" that I have been getting recently, so they have disabled forum search to allow the rest of stuff to continue at a reasonable speed, but it sure makes it difficult to search for Geep's threads... Cheers, Diolma

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2063281

Geep rules.

I agree, Geep Rools (misspelling intentional, attempt at street cred..) I've already saved most of the good Dr's tuts directly to my HD. So no need for me for CD etc..:-)) I'm just praying that my HD doesn't give out before I get my new PC, like the last one did... Cheers, Diolma

Geep's techniques, as used in his house project, are great for the basics of a set. I know that I was surprised at what could be done within Poser. But there are still times when it's better to work in another program. I knocked up a building recently as a possibl;e airfield control tower, and making some of the adjustments were much easier in anim8or. But the big advantage of the set concept is that you can concentrate on the visible. There are times when what is behind the camera can affect a scene -- shadows and reflections -- but that doesn't need a detailed mesh. And you don't need a window, or an exterior, behind closed drapes.

Good point AntoniaTiger. My bigest hassle as said above is texture. There is a book on digital texturing I can't afford unfortunately. I have searched high and low on the net but not found but one tutorial on how the master 3D CGI artists make real world looking textures... the stuff on the net is mainly oriented to stylized graphic arts stuff. Also I find it difficult to make certain specific shapes in Poser... a the interier of a rectangular shute intersecting a tube for instance... but still what you can do in Poser is amazing. I love the control by dial since I have limited motor control for moving objects/vertices by mouse (Parkinson's). I was so hyped about Metaforms Python tool for Poser to build objects from primatives with fused joins but I find the edge artifacts that are not visible in the promo images basically make the objects unusable though the construction method is great. I got a very nice e-mail from the company in response to my request for help but they said it was just a basic limitation of the vertice generation.

I've done a few things with a digital camera, and I doubt it needs a hugely expensive one. Get square-on to a brick wall, take the picture, and then a lot of fiddling in picture editor to get it with edges that will tile. It sounds like that last will be the tricky part for you. For a brick wall, there might be a lot you can do with the procedural shaders in P5 and P6. And I've tried making a planked floor out of very elongated tiles. It worked sort of OK, but grain patterning tended to line up across plank edges.