What are your pet hates about the Poser program and/or the various Poser add-ons (freebie or otherwise)? I'll kick things off:

1. Lack of a decent Undo feature! Not only can you only undo the last action, but some actions cannot be undone! This is what really limits Poser - it's a pretty big risk when used on, say, commercial ventures.

2. (this is the one that caused me to start this thread)

Expressions which reset the face morphs! Grrr...this winds me up. I suppose I can always re-apply the character morph, but it's a pain in the jacksie - particularly when it's not necessary. There are plenty of expression morphs sold which don't reset the shape morphs, so why on earth are they any that do?

This is also related to the #1 since, for some reason, this type of expression morph isn't undo-able.

1. Inverse kinematics always being on by default. Yes, it's very handy. But it's also really annoying. You'd think that you could at least have the option of whether to have it on by default, or off by default.

2. The crap Library system. God I hate scrolling. It's a particular pain when you have multiple runtimes and subfolders. Wouldn't it be much easier to navigate with an expandable menu - much less scrolling.

3. Products which put things in the wrong folders. Clothing MAT poses in the Camera folder, hand poses in the main Pose folder - that sort of thing.

Message edited on: 07/28/2005 05:58

Not just expressions but body poses which reset the morphs. You shouldn't find that nowadays, not with bought stuff, at least. Pose sets for sale have to have all the morph channels removed. Characters with great big "Smacked in the face" pouty lips. God, I hate those. Painted on pubic hair. Baked in specularity. Faked reflection maps.

• Characters with unrealistic morphed breasts. - Firefly is too slow. - Bad textures. - Unrealistic human eyes that give a figure a unnatural or dead look.

okay, this drives me batty: when i'm looking at the one side of the character; and whenever i click on a body part, poser ALWAYS selectes the limb on the FAR SIDE of the body. if i wanted to grab that side, i'd LOOK at that side! hey... i LIKE my mat files in my camera libraries. saves me from scrolling through the regular pose files to find 'em! ;) there's a trick to getting poser to not use leg ik by default, by simply changing the internal name of the leg ik in the cr2.

• Claims that Judy is a humanoid character (I would guess she's more closely related to the Jolly Troll). - Endless Alan Alda clones. - Unimesh characters' ragdoll arms, macaroni shoulders, and detachable thighs (especially V3). - Michael 2's dainty little hands and feet. - Michael 3's vague resemblance to a praying mantis. - Supposedly "asian" characters that just don't look asian. - Supposedly "african" characters that just don't look african.

On Poser ... - Not being able to completely replace a light set, so that when you add a new set it completely removes the lights and settings from the previous set. It's a pain to delete lights from preceding sets, especially when there are 20 of them and only 3 of them that are on. - Not having a "Zoom Extents" command that allows you to zoom out so that you can see everything in a scene. - Multiple undo's ... please!!! On products ... - Poses that pose body parts beyond limits that the human body can handle. - I agree on the collagen lips. Too many of them. - Getting 50 hair colors in one set, most of which I'd probably never use. 5 good ones are a lot faster to download, and if I need color variation it's easy to do myself. - Flood-filled texture sets. And though not mentioned, some of my "pet peeves" in Poser art ... - Eyes that aren't posed. - HANDS say so much in an image ... don't forget to pay attention to hands when you pose a figure! - Feet that don't touch or barely touch the ground. - Lighting that doesn't match the shadows in a background image. - Don't forget to adjust cameras and get away from the default lighting.

I'd like to be able to overwrite something in the library without overwriting the png....in fact i think i will e-mail e-frontier that now. Id also like to see IK appear in the Properties tab for the hands and feet and/or in the body properties.

easy: the fact that the poser world suffers from designer label syndrome. that label being "daz" - 2 products the same, 1 with daz label one without.. guess which will sell the most?

My pet hate on poser is the missing glow effect. Vue d'Esprit has such a super-duper cool glow, and I know Firefly can do post render effects - it can do toon outlines. So why not glow? >3. Inverse kinematics always being on by default Yes, that can be a pain. I am starting to completely delete IK chains from some figures. >4. The crap Library system. God I hate scrolling In P6 the palette can be expanded as large as you want. This is at least an improvement to the situation before. But BACKSPACE to go one level up would be very convenient. (But it's true, it can be very hard to find something. So I use the Windows search a lot.) >5. Products which put things in the wrong folders. I always expand products into a temp folder and place the stuff manually. First, I want to know what is in the libraries, and second, after opening it within Poser I remove these rsr files. Also, some freestuff only consists of an obj file. You have to handle this manually, anyway. And the poor UNDO ... well, I got used to it.

Readmes I abhor having to clean up my runtimes moving all the readme/licence/promo files into one folder after they've been installed in up to six different places >:-/

This list is mostly presented as a number of suggestions for improvement, not as a list of complaints. Complaining isn't my style.

1. Body data is not saved in poses - this should be available as an alternative.

2. I have to go into Preferences etc evey time I want to switch between compressed and uncompressed formats. Make the path much shorter to it. Like directly in the Edit Menu.

3. Many popups still are not sizeable - the Open dialog is, but many others are not.

4. When creating a camera etc, does not save it. I have to click on OK with the mouse! I seem to remember that P4 & P5 were not like this.

5. I want to be able to define my own maps at the highest level in the Library - for instance, a MAT library, a Clothing library, etc. In other words, multiple Pose, Figure and Prop libraries, with my own names.

6. IK on/off available in an onscreen menu (as TP suggests)

7. If I hover over a thumb in the Libraries, if the name... is too long... to be fully readable..., it should popup so I can see what it is. Alternatively, allow 2-line thumb texts.

8. How about "Render Settings" and "Render Dimensions" shortcut icons in the Preview/Render wiondow frame? And why not combine the two, avoids a whole lot of scrolling in menus and opening different windows all the time...

9. Make it possible to NOT have figure circle on all the time by default.

10. Make it possible to have IK OFF when loading figures.

11. Make the Library window adjustable by it's bottom left corner as well, not only bottom right.

12. Make it easy to throw away renders in the render pile if I don't want then cluttering the place up.

13. Put an "Add new category" icon in the Library window frame.

14. Make it possible to rename items in the Library easily.

15. Every time I save a render, the popup defaults to the most recent folder that was used when loading a pose, prop or whatever. Very silly!

16. Add info to the Properties tab that shows what the figure or prop is conformed or parented to.

17. When a tex fails to load on adding something to the scene, the popup should suggest a path by presenting the path which is specified in the cr2 or pp2 or whatever, to give me something to start with when I have to search. This is a common solution in similar situations in a number of other apps I use sand should be easy to implement.

18. A lot of space is occupied by very broad borders in the Library for example. I could use that space for other things.

19. Make it possible to choose (easily) how Library entries are viewed: Large Thumb, Small Thumb, List or Details - just like Windows Explorer does it.

20. It's very very nice that now activates main Camera regardless of which window/menu is highlighted (Fixed in SR1). Excellent!

:] Fish

Message edited on: 07/28/2005 08:42

-Cancelling renders... I wish there would be something like the Unix "kill -9" command in Windows. -Readme files that splatter all over Runtime. -!!!!+++ -marks in product names

Poser: 1. The default camera settings - and the endless fisheye newbie renders (yep, guilty of it too about 6 years ago!) You'd think they'd change it in P5 or P6. 2. The default Poser lights - good if you want to do a scene with malaria patients slowly dying in some infested swamp but that's about it. 3. The really annoying P6 bug that does not remember where you loaded the previous .obj morph from (try morphing a whole character, exporting all the morphs and then bringing them in - hours of fun) This was even fixed in Poser 4 with the last update. Poser products: 1. HUUUUUGE texture maps for a bracer or an earring - about the size of V3's body map - come on people, is that really necessary? 2. Templates that are 90% white with only 10% of the area actually mapped. Unfortunately Poser calculates the entire size and we end up with the aforementioned 3000x3000 textures for a headband. Game developers are probably the best at getting the most out of a template. That's not to say all the others that were mentioned do not annoy me - I didn't want to repeat them all :)

My pet peeves are... in no particular order:

1. The undo system. I really don't like that you can only undo the last action.

2. That it's a HUGE memory HOG!!!

3. The manual! It's way too technical and not very user friendly. It skips all over the place. PLUS there are mistakes galore in it. One in particular is a major one if you are completely new to poser.... tells you the wrong button to click to get a "NEW" figure into the window. Refers to the "create a new figure", and not the "add new figure". Also considering that most people use stuff from various poser stores and don't create their own things in the cloth room, face room etc, one would think that e-Frontier would cover how to use MAT and MAT POSE files too.

4. I have the downloaded version of Poser 5. I don't like how after a fresh install I can't open the program unless I'm connected to the internet because Poser.exe seeks permission to access the net. Once I've given it permission, I can use it off line. If I don't give it permission, I can't open the program off line until I do.

5. Not being able to paste the serial number into the serial number area. It's problematic for those who are dyslexic and have a hard time with long strings of letters and numbers like that...exspecially when letter O and number 0 look the same.

6. Poser preferences going askew sometimes IE: opening up without a pose window. Getting warnings when starting up that the window is too large (when it wasn't the previous 30 times).

7. Such a small limited number of library areas. It's confusing looking for textures in the "Poses" folder".

8. That awful small limit of thumbnails allowed to be viewed. You can change it to a higher number, so I don't understand why it comes set to 100. Why is there a limit anyway?!

9. Lack of completely NEWBIE friendly teaching resources for poser.

I have much more... but those are the main ones.

Instructions that tell you to do something without telling you how. Merchants seem to think that everybody is a computer expert or even an expert on their own products. Like an automobile manual,to replace the alternator. Step one was "remove the transmission" Just as, not everybody knows how to remove the transmission. Not everybody knows how to expand files to the correct place or do many other "simple" procedures. Tell us step-by-step and don't leave out any because "everybody knows that"

I recently bought some figures from content hell, which were supposed to expand into place and all they did was half complete the job and then go to a sign saying complete installation manually. Naturally, they didn't give a clue as to how. I guess it's simple, but anything is complicated, if you don't know. I am coming to hate the word "simple"

An undo button! Undo Button!! UNDO BUTTON!!!!!!

Vicki 3, puts characteristics which have nothing to do with posing into the poses file. I have yet to figure out how to put an expression on her face. The dials don't do anything.

Inverse Kinematics should be off by default. I'm tired of characters with their foot in their left ear.

Tech support's number is extremely well hidden. If that is the intent. It should be large and easy to find.

Hmm..the only thing I think that could stand improvement is the folder (runtime) system. It would be nice if you could just create character folders (for Jessie James, Pretty Boy Floyd, or whatever other characters), and make all their stuff as subdirectories of the character folder.
That being said, I have just as much trouble with people who make addons (don't stop making them on my account, though) who come up with cryptic messages like 'just unzip in the Runtime folder' (and then turns out that some texture folder goes long, and things don't load..;).
After almost 2 years, I finally found my @#$ manual, and I'm just too happy to have it again to do much complaining about it..surprise this thread hasn't been locked yet..;) Now if I can just find the Bryce manual..but that's another forum..;)

Quote "17. When a tex fails to load on adding something to the scene, the popup should suggest a path by presenting the path which is specified in the cr2 or pp2 or whatever, to give me something to start with when I have to search. This is a common solution in similar situations in a number of other apps I use sand should be easy to implement." This is a biggy with me. Stop the damn searching/don't crash or let me stop & search it out. Multiple undos being a 2nd.

My peeves about Poser have already been covered, so I'll list my product peeves.

The difficulty in finding products in the Poser 5 library and the way that merchants name them with the ! or the !!, and the underscore in strange places, and the abbreviations such TRK32, the merchant name or the mat whatever. I find myself repeatedly having to hunt for the readmes just to find out where in my library the products were installed. Why can't merchants just name the library files the same as the product to make them easier to find. If the product is for instance, Glorious Wings, it would be great if I could simply look up GloriousWings in my figure and pose library.

I've started saving all of my readmes in an easy to access folder on my C drive so that I can easily find the readme's. That has helped a lot, and I love how Renderosity merchants post the readmes on the product pages.

Now if it's a poorly written readme and doesn't say where the files were installed--that really ticks me off, because that means that I have to hunt through my folders and guess.

I also hate how some merchants will divide their product packages into separate folders in the pose directory. For instance, say I purchase a hair kit with fits, colors, and styles, and they install into separate folders. This means that after I've adjusted the fit on the character, I have to struggle through my library again to find the hair texture, and after that, I'll have to go all the way through my library yet again to find the pose style--and my pose folder is a scary place. You don't want to go there unless you absolutely have to.

Zip files within zip files--meaning I think the product has been installed when it hasn't been. I extract the main zip to my poser directory, and so I won't know if there were more zips within until I start hunting in my library folder and can't find the product.

I also hate products that don't fit the character well. I know that poke through is inevitable, but it really rankles me when the character is busting through all over the place, and no matter what I do, I can't get the clothes or shoes to fit right.

I also hate dresses and other items that won't bend or conform to a sitting or walking pose.

I despise bad and plastic looking textures, and textures where the seam shows.

I hate how some products were made for Poser 4 and haven't been upgraded for Poser 5. This can make it very hard to me to adjust the specularity and other things--especially since I'm new to Poser. There have been many days when I've gotten nowhere due to all of the things I've listed above and have left my computer in a bad funk, knowing that I accomplished nothing that day.

Anyway, thanks for starting this thread. I really needed to vent. I think I had Poser frustration buildup that needed to be released. LOL! :-)

I can still get grumpy about the ugly-colour, low-contrast, interface. And every so often you hit a bit of pure Windows, which you set up as you wished many years ago, and you wonder why Poser needs somebody to hack their way though a maze of twisted XML files just to get black text on a while background.

Aside from many things already mentioned, main peeve
at the moment is poorly chosen keyboard shortcuts.

Worst one is Shift-Ctrl-N for the parameter panel,
which gets used constantly. If you don't hit it
just right Poser gives you Ctrl-N for New Scene,
and then you unconsciously hit OK. The parameter
panel should be Ctrl-P. (Or better, it should go back
to the way it worked in P4, where it's always present,
yielding focus to the library.)

Every one of the cameras should be Ctrl-something,
not just a few. When you hit Ctrl-A expecting to
get the Aux camera, instead you get Reset Everything,
which destroys the scene. Reset Everything is so
dangerous it shouldn't have a shortcut at all.

Message edited on: 07/28/2005 10:44

I have so many pet peeves. However I will mention only one as it is fresh in my mind. It is about products. I spent an hour and a half last night looking for a pair of boots I had recently purchased. The folder name in character file had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the boots. I wanted to find my Pretty Boots (not the real name). So, I of course look for something in the character library referencing to Pretty Boots. Nothing, nada, zip. I find my boots and hour later under something like Haveyoufoundmeyet didntthinkso And I wont go into trying to find the MATS for these boots in the Pose library. It took me longer to find my item then it took my image to render. To avoid this sort of nuisance you need to obviously go and manually change the names of the folders in the Props, Character and Pose files to all match / reference a single item. Which I have started doing this morning. What a nightmare. I tell you I have folder names that are a mile long now. They end looking like this V3 Clothing Pretty Boots by DontForgetWhoMadeThese. Because I like to know what character the item actually is for, what the item is (it could be a character, clothing, weapon or what not.), and who made. The artists seem to like being credited for what they have made when you use it. So, I dont like to forget who made the item. The alternative to this is making sub folders in the library such as V3 clothing, M3 clothing etc. Being very new to using Poser. I thought that composing the actual images/animations would be the most difficult and frustrating part of Poser. It just isnt so. I would love items to be named so you could find them. Such as my Pretty Boots actually named Pretty Boots in the character file.. Pretty Boots MAT or MAT Pretty Boots in the Pose Library and Pretty Boots in the Props library. Or if you think that there may be another product with a similar name then personalize it to Pretty Boots MyNameHere so they dont go into another Pretty Boots folder and make the name consistent for the Mats etc. And maybe it wouldnt hurt to add into the title WHAT character they are for such as V3 Pretty Boots or Pretty Boots V3. No !!!!s please! It would be awesome if texture artists would also name their folder with what the Textures go to. Say if the Texture is for the Morphing Fantasy Dress then have the folder in the Pose section say so. Like Kickbooty MFD or something. It would really help out newbies like myself who didnt even know you could go ahead and rename certain things at first. Oh yes, and I dont like the ads and read mes that have found there way into ever folder, nook and cranny of my runtime. I like them all in the same folder so I can reference them if I need to.. Er, and I always need to.

Wow, that was looong. My apologies! l

Vendors who name their Runtime folders differently for the same product.

I would love items to be named so you could find them. The problem with that is that everyone has a different idea of what the standards should be. And that we are still dealing with the restrictions that Poser 4 and Poser 4 Pro Pack Runtime library files have. But I agree that the exclamation points have got to go. 8-)

What I hate most about Poser is the light system. It is hard to maneuver them.

True enough Deecey, the restrictions and standards ideals can be a pain in the hind side. Everyone has their own idea, system or method to their madness. I dont think the general idea of naming a folder with what is actually in it is all that far fetched or cumbersome though. I am just happy to have the items being as I can not make them myself (yet). l But, being able to find my treasures would surely be a welcomed and added bonus for me. I will definitely be changing folder names from here on out though before putting them in my Runtime. Live, learn, rename and reorganize The life and trials of a newbie. l I am really liking this tread, as I am so new to using Poser I didnt even know half of these quirks exist. It is so nice to forewarned!

Poser: -Huge Tabs at the top of the interface chewing up space -Not being able to make rsr/png thumbnails skinnier. -Having Morph dial sensitivity still randomized upon load after 4 versions. -No internal cr2 editor Products: -Textures with pixel info beyond the template seams(backgrounds/floodfills/etc that bloat file size) -Green and Blue hair textures -Copycats -4000 by 4000 blurry textures

The naming issue is a tricky one. As Deecey said, there's no standard. Some prefer everything listed by product and some prefer it by creator. I'm guilty of both. Most of my stuff will end up in a TrekkieGrrrl folder (all my free stuff will at least) but some have a folder named after the product. You can't please everybody. My biggest Peeve about Poser is the CTRL-A - I hit it all the time, expecting the AUX cam (ok nowadays I usually stop my fingers hovering over the buttons BEFORE I actually click it, but WHY CTRL-A?!?!?!? Granted, it is one of the few places where the undo function actually works, but still... And yes, FishNose, before P6 you could save something to the palette without using the mouse for OK. That one IRKS me!

"-Textures with pixel info beyond the template seams(backgrounds/floodfills/etc that bloat file size)" Hell yes. PP don't allow it, I noticed. Merchant guidelines say texture backgrounds should be plain white. Green and blue hair is ok in my book. Some of my best friends have weird hair.

"-Textures with pixel info beyond the template seams" I've been discovering a lot of this lately, mostly with plants. Stray pixels....not properly tubed(for alphas) or whatnot & there are jagged edges. "-4000 by 4000 blurry textures" Doesn't matter what size....but I'm finding this more & more especially with the less expensive items.

My biggest grief about Poser..is it goes through too many hands now..and each time it does..some company (thinking they can build a better mousetrap) writes a new version full of new bugs..I wish Metacreations would have just kept doing it themselves...Guess that's why I still use Poser 4 L

ernyoka1 it sure is tricky. And you are so right you can't please everybody. There probably never will be a standard that would appease everyone. It would however, be nice. I dare to dream! 

• BUM files. (EF should sell ONLY P4 with Propack, not P4 alone) - Rewrite Manual. Poser 6 manual is still a rehash of P4 manual and incorrect in places. Make it 1000 pages to cover everything. - Node shader documentation with examples (see rewrite manual) - Assignable keyboard shortcuts. Others mentioned the Ctrl keys, let us assign them and have a default set that makes sence. - No way to render outside of Poser. Access to render engine for setting up batches or clear the bloat when rendering. - Customizable Interface. - Tabs for rooms I don't use taking up space, turn off or add to dropdown menu. - No uninstaller in Poser. Have to delete files manually, then delete in poser ugh. - Lack of documented features and limitations. Rewrite manual, rewrite manual, rewrite manual.

-The far too complicted system to select something. -Runtime chaos: hair is not a character and should be in the hair folder. Together with its poses and textures. Skins should have their own tab as they are not poses. -Milfigs armpits, and female breasts that look like as if they are semispheres glued to the ribcage. -merchants who sell products with empty (faulty named) folders in them, or who use !!!!!!!!!!! to have their product on top. Or who use comletely different names, often without any reference to the product, on the different folders for that same product. -Most of the readme's, especially Daz'. Daz' weblinks folders. -Skincreators who use merchant's resources, or who add the most ugly and inspirationless make ups. What I do like: - Although I wish there were an alternative for Poser, at the moment, no other app comes even close to it for posing. - Merchants who sell characters with self-created morphs. - Some merchants are real artists. They create dreams rather than meshes. Usually they don't do a character every forthnight.

The thing with textures is that in P6 especially you sort of have to go beyond the seam areas (at least some) since it likes stretching or something and if you don't it leaves nasty white seam lines. It is an awkward thing to fight. Gotta type up my stuff sometime.

Yeah I agree. Leaving a nice edge is a good idea. I think of all those figure textures with 5 extra megs of texture data not being used.

• Scrolling the runtime folder!! ACKKK - lights not deleting all at once it takes forever to delete the light set to add a new one sometimes. - i can't complaing about much more yet, still have only skimmed the surface of poser ability. oh wait yeah the undo thingy ;)

See post #21...What StarDogSirus said

products: thumbs DB files included in the zip - I got 3 of those the other day in one product. I don't mind textures beyond the template outlines since I really hate seeing what appears to be seams prior to rendering - but be reasonable - only expand about 4 pixels - and don't flood fill the white area with a texture. Definitely exclamation marks at the beginning of a folder. When figures and Mats have different folder names. I move all my clothing into character or creator specific folders so I like knowing where to find them.

Several of the above AND what about an align function??? --Naylin

-Firefly speed
-Memory errors during Firefly rendering (better in SR-1, but still far from perfect)
-Location dependance of the library system

In the 8 years that I've used poser, I've complained about so many things that I'm not even going to start again. Here's one constructive suggestion for now. LET ME CHOOSE MY ROOMS I don't want the Hair Room or the Face room. Let me get rid of the ones I don't need and MAKE THE LIBRARY A ROOM!!! If the library was a room, it would solve a lot of problems. I want a mouse-scrollable, resizable library where I can double-click a file name to rename it, set the size of thumbnails, and delete/move content around. Each content category should have easily accessible sub-folders with hotkeys to move up/down through the levels. Right-clicking a file should give a range of options, including the option to open the file in a text editor (Right, anton?). At the absolute worst, CL should buy Yarp's Explorer and figure out how to crowbar it in. mac

The whole interface is a pain, making easy tasks way too complicated. The character and body parts selection via drop downs is so bad. Why not move that to windows similar to the parameter dials? And as the poser library will never get as good as 3rd party library browsers it'd be the best if EF just provided a native interface for those tools to communicate with. Well at least there's that python script that can do that for now.

Yes, those long long content lists you have to scroll through, undo (or lack of) ..oh yes another thing I will always hate is using a mouse to turn the dials,,the dials are precise yes, but most mouses are not..I finally got a little Mouse Emulator program that lets you use the arrow keys like a mouse..works great too :)

Where did you find that emulator!! :o)

Just my two cents: Poser 6 does allow you to resize the Library window so you don't have to scroll as much. But, Poser 6 also does not recognize the Enter key or the Space Bar in its dialog boxes. When you add a camera setting (for example), you have to click on the "OK" button- the Enter Key no longer works. Poses and face files that change the character's morphs. This isn't a Poser user, but a maker-issue: the person who made the pose (or expression) decided to include the morphs as well... or rather, did not know any better to NOT include them. Then, these re-shaping poses may make it through testing and will re-shape the users' characters. Deleting a light set: In Poser 6, there is a Python script that can remove all lights from the scene. Multiple levels of Undo: Alas, this is still a far way off. The Undo command still sometimes doesn't work properly. As a work-around, use the Figure > Memorize command (and as an "undo", use the Figure > Restore command). --John

oh..and one more thing, for most of us old f*rts out there..could we be able to change the fonts on the dials, etc? if not, just make them larger and easier to read?..;)

http://www.geocities.com/pronto4u/mouseemulator.html Its freeware too, GWeb .. but only for windows..there may be others out there for Mac too :-)

Scrolling through the library works much better on a Mac from my recent experience of playing on my girlfriends PC and hating that scrolling problem.

This is easy - I agree - there should be an undo button. I hope that E-Frontier reads this thread!!!! Thanks for asking. seattletim

my biggest pet peeve about Poser is......... IT DOESN'T COME WITH A ADDICTION WARNING..:) ~Nancy~