Each day I pray for a miracle-Poser-to motionbuilder PlugIn.

Poser 7??!! Crivens!! I don't have Poser 6 yet and there are parts of Poser 5 I just don't understand....my poor computer is choking already.... Ah, well...perhaps the mything "Make Art" button?

Zoomable Material Room for ease of working on large shader networks.

I like poser`s interface, it could be worse, it could be like 3dsmax.

Poser 6 is much improved over P5 and I am pleased with it to a great extent. I do, however, find the parameter dials to be touchy and difficult to use. I like D/S's sliders a lot better and find the joint movement to be more precise, the ability to move an element one click at a time is very useful. The D/S directd 3d manipulation tools make it easier to precisely move only desired elements of a figure withouth accidentally selecting something else. The lighting system could still use some work, but the image based lighting is easy to use and has been a huge improvement over what we had. Modules are a tough question, I guess we'll see how that pans out with D/S. If it will raise the price of the application to get a full functioning product I don't think it would be a good thing. I'm sued to Poser's interface, I'd rather they put more effort into improving already existing features than doing a complete redesign that's not really needed.

Multiple undo and fewer bugs. And a preview window that remotely resembles the final render. It takes me multiple renders to get the lighting right, because it is not at all representative of the final product.

How about rendering to disk (as jpg, png, tiff, psd?) Could be a tremendous memory saver, allowing us to render BIG scenes at BIG resolutions.

Fix all the crap that needs fixing before adding features.

Pulldown menus that actually work reliably, even with "big" scene files. Better dynamic clothing controls -- no more zero pose, zero morph junk... there's no reason the program can't handle that mapping automatically. Still image draping should "just work". If you want stills with wind effects, fine; a short animation is fine; but the vast majority of Poser users never animate and requiring an animation for even the most basic dynamics is dumb and pointless. (That of course goes for hair as well as clothes.) Stability, speed. After that, background rendering would be great... I'd like to be able to work on new scenes while one renders. Why not a batch queue? And then they can tie into a network rendering system. That'd be fine. (Ideally with an autoconfiguring grid infrastructure.) Better library management! This is pragmatically difficult without changing the file format -- but maybe that'd be worthwhile. I'd love to be able to look at any arbitrary prop, conforming clothing item, character MAT/MOR file, hair figure, and have Poser tell me on which figure it works. Vicki 3, David, GIRL, HIM, James, Jessi, whatever. Right now, you might make inferences for morphs from mesh groups, but that doesn't generalize well; and you might do image outline diffs of MAT files against UV mapping templates, but that also doesn't generalize well (especially for MATs where the artist doesn't bother to color inside the lines ;-) ). A good start might be for Poser to be able to install its own zip file at a particular root in the hierarchy. That is, "install this hair as a Vicki 3 hair prop", etc. And why do I need to have "Read-Me", "ReadMe's" and "ReadMe" directories PLUS a bunch of zips that just dump their readme files into the Poser app's root folder? Sure, external tools can help some of this, and some have been written that approach aspects of the problem from various directions; it ought to be built in.

You want pull down menus that work, dbutenhof? That's not enough... They should get rid of the pulldown menu completely... I can move the parameters, the library, the tools wherever i want, but i have to select Body Parts and Figures from a drop down that is fixed to the preview window? Move those drop downs to their own parameter window... or allow access via both ways at least...

I second Dizzi on that. Just add a figure dropdown to the top of the Properties window, so we can select everything from there! Edited to add: And while you're at it, make some room for longer figure/prop names. Anything longer than 10 or so characters gets clipped - very irritating when you can't see whether you selected the right boot figure or the left boot figure!

Message edited on: 08/29/2005 20:02

I'd rather have a separate window with a treeview like the hierarchy window to select the current actor (and for the material room the current material) :-).

If someone makes a list of all these, taking out the less practical ones and let e-frontier know about it, it might make a difference for poser 7.

I agree fully with the respondent who wants better poser people. They wanted a more realistic woman, I would like a more realistic male figure without an ugly face. I would also like to see facial/body hair options for the male figure. No version of poser has offered any facial hair for it's models and no third party has come up with something especially for the native poser male. I want to like like James, but I can't get around the face and when I've tried to redo it in the face room I've gotten unacceptable results, for some reason I can't get my photos to map properly or consistently to James. I've had better luck with P5's Don. I really don't see why it isn't possible to make a native poser male and female comparable to Apollo and Victoria. I also agree that a fly out hierarcy window would be helpful. It is difficult in the hierarcy editior to see the entire tree and it's something I use often and it would be good if it were handy.

One of my major gripes (with all versions of Poser) is that the dialogues aren't consistent. OK, I realise that this came about 'cos of sub-contracting the work out to different s/ware houses, but it's really a PITA. In Windoze, if you hit "tab" in a dialogue, you confirm the existing value in the current field and move on to the next field. In Poser this sometimes also occurs....(try doing it in the dialogues in the Cloth room - doesn't work). Hitting "return" whilst in a dialogue field should NOT close the dialogue! It should accept the field's value that you've just typed in... I could go on (and on...) For the Mac, things may be different. OK, I can accept that there may have to be compromises for cross-platform applications. But a consistent GUI within the app should not be beyond the bounds of possibility.. At least then, the need for multiple "undo's" (and thus the need for multiple "save before doing next step") might be slightly reduced.. Cheers, Diolma PS: And yes, I agree with the point about the heirarchy editor (and all the other dialogues that access the elements of the scene, eg, the "collide with" in the cloth room); They should look like the user's operating system's file system (which, after all, is just a hierarchy..) After all, the code for this is already there in the system, and can be accessed directly (so less system overhead). How much endeavour it would take to make those parts platform dependent I don't know, but it would help wonderfully..) Apologies if this appears twice; 'rosity disappeared as I attempted to post..

I'd rather have a separate window with a treeview like the hierarchy window

That's a good point. So who's played with DAZ Studio? There IS a popup you can use, if you want; but there's also a dockable palette with a hierarchical list of everything in the file; and of material zones in a figure; etc. In fact, I might be using DAZ Studio much more than I do (and likely more than Poser), except that I will not give up dynamic hair and clothing.

The code to access all those OS GUI goodies is almost trivial. So what do you need? Dialogs, non-modal windows, dockable windows, textboxes, spinners, treeviews. Both Mac and OS make those easily available from the OS. You could consider writing simple wrappers around those GUI objects so that you only have to reference a different set of libraries to have a Mac build instead of a Windows build. Nothing new there, the Java AWT works exactly like that - and it works fine and fast and reliable.

How about a program that really works and does not crash or bug out..... How abut some honesty from curious labs about the release of the program, if there are bugs in it tell us before you sell it to us so we can decide if we want to buy it or not....

And 1 I've just discovered... Point-lights that can use shadow-maps, not just ray-traced shadows. Just tried to render a scene which included 2 point lights and a mirror.(Well 2 mirrors actually, but they're both in the same plane..) All was OK 'til (render time was about 10-15 mins) til I enabled ray-traced shadows ('cos the point-lights weren't casting shadows; took me a while to work that one out, having only had P6 a couple of weeks). Set the shadow blur to 2 or 3 (can't remember exactly) and the no. raytrace bounces to 1 or 2, low anyway. So Firefly crawled along at about 5-10 secs per bucket til it hit the 1st mirror then stopped dead. For 25 mins. Then it moved on to the next bucket... It's a small scene. I have a reasonable spec PC (well over the "recommended"). I have only 1 Vicky in it & 1 set of dynamic clothing, plus a few not-too-poly-heavy props. No advanced stuff, just the minimum (I thought) I could get away with. It's not using the disk at all, so it's not a memory problem. It's just s-l-o-o-o-w. It's got to the point where I've shelved the project, 'cos I can do any test renders (not even using the area-render thingy) without having to wait several hours... Ahh, well. Back to using grouped spots... Cheers, Diolma

How about a total, ground-up rewrite of bug-free code? Poser 10 (X)? Poser 20 (XX)? Or do I have to wait until Poser 30 (XXX)? However, I'm still waiting for a version with the instant NVIAT button. -scara

Well, let's see. When was Poser first developed (by MetaCreations)? Poser 3 was released in 1998, seven years ago. The original version comes in around 1996, nearly ten years ago. In that time, the archaic, old, bad, noodly base-code that continues to cause bugs and prevents adding certain features has not been rewritten, now on owner three (MetaCreations->Curious Labs->e-Frontier). I'm certain that some Poser Python wizard could whip up a NVIAT button in no time! ;) Robert

Actually, Fractal Designs orginated Poser. Believe it or not Poser was developed as an add on to Painter (now owned by Corel) to provide virtual manequins for import into Painter for people to draw over. The originator of Poser was frustrated with his wooded manequin and wanted to do something that would more suit his needs. It was the users that caused Poser to change directions from a Painter add on to a program for creative expression in and of itself. If you could see old Poser pictures people had done, the human figures were rather undetailed, but people used them to create surreal scenes with them. The relationship between Poser and Painter is still evident today as Poser can still generate Painter scripts. I had thought that with the advent of Poser 5 that the Poser code had been completely rewritten (and badly so I might add). Poser 5 was a total waste of money for me, I used P4PP instead of it until Poser 6 came out. I think we must give e-frontier credit, I think that P6 is a big improvement over the last version and they were more quick in coming out with bug fixes this time than with the last version.

I had read abou the Poser-Painter connection, but didn't know about Fractal Designs. Thanks for the correction and info! :) Curious Labs stated that 'Poser 5 would be rewritten from the ground up', but that was not the case. Just some changes (XML) and addons (FaceRoom, MaterialRoom, HairRoom, DynamicsRoom). Yes, personally, I think that Poser is in better hands with e-Frontier. But there still hasn't been any address to that old code.