Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2506995

On a recent thread cited above, images from several different Poserized (rigged for Poser) meshes appear. These still exhibit some or all of the issues seemingly intrinsic to Poser:

1. inward curving upper arms
2. shoulder pads
3. bent-drinking-straw inner elbow

My question is: Are these traits UNAVOIDABLE because of the limits to rigging in Poser, or is it possible to avoid these problems by some sort of advanced technique in the Poser setup room? I know this has been batted around before, and most people cite the weighted and advanced rigging in other apps, which is fine. But are there any new developments in rigging right in Poser?

To tell you the truth, I use Don and Judy because they seem to be less infected with these issues. I may have to stay with them, or move to another app, unless I can find other models to work with.

I have a beautiful mesh I obtained at Turbo Squid, and am considering taking her into the Poser setup room where I have no experience whatsoever. However, if -- no matter what I do -- I will still end up with the three problems mentioned above, then why bother.

::::: Opera :::::

I have a feeling they are unavoidable in a standard Poser rig; however, I believe you could overcome them with some very smart morphs. You know, the kind of morphs which are supposedly included in the DAZ models, that take into account the bending joint and the angle of bend. So far I have never seen it done properly but I bet it could be done.

ApolloMaximus is rigged a lot better than any of the Millenium figures I think. It bends much better at the elbow and knees and hips. Anton seems to have a better way of rigging figures in Poser than anyone else has found so far. One of the biggest problems with almost all Poser characters are the shoulders and buttocks. Vicki has some really horrible bending at the hips. Her butt blows up whenever she bends over. Carrara 5 Pro has weight mapping now, and it will convert Poser figures over to a native Carrara bones rig so you can take advantage of it.

Really. I didn't know about that automatic rig conversion in Carrara. I've been eyeing Carrara and also Character Studio with 3dsMax as future avenues. I purchased Apollo, but do not like the hefty shoulder pads, which I was unable to get rid of. They look okay when the character is buffed up with hero muscles, etc., but I couldn't get normal shoulders in an animation with Apollo. ::::: Opera :::::

I think the next "breakthrough" will be weight-based rigging. DAZ has already said D|S will have it, and I'd bet my bottom dollar e-Frontier is planning something similar for Poser. Perhaps as soon as this summer.

If only collision worked.... You bend a knee or an elbow,,, the flesh has to displace on the x axis and compress. Unless you accept morph poses. Which are a compromise. People have so many dials as it is. I've looked hard at it. Gravity plays in as well. Nothing delivers even 80%. Yeah you can make it better but change the axis and it no longer makes sense. A super lean male on his stomach looks nothing at all like a lean male on his back (180'Xrot). Rib shifts,,,gravity. Anti gravity flexing. Lots of dials... Elbows the perfect example. 0 bend versus 130o bend. How to get the elbow bone to isolate from the flesh? The human form is a very difficult thing to copy and I guess what makes it one of the challenges in cgi Plenty of places to study if you want a crack at it. Weight based rigging would be great.

"I think the next "breakthrough" will be weight-based rigging." "Weight based rigging would be great" Your right it is great, but it does have its limitations, for instance it only currently works on Jolly's computers with select characters, and only for P5&6. ;) Happy holidays everyone! 'Tis the season to be JOLLY.... P.S. New Jolly webpage comming in the new year

I've seen a couple of things which seem transferable to Poser, but I'd worry a little about the extra complexity and what it might do to posing and rendering. Poser still has some serious internal problems, it seems. Anyway, the simple answer might be to have a zero pose which is bent. So a straight elbow has a bend value of -20. I suspect it wouldn't make much difference to a human elbow, but it might make a significant difference to conforming clothing. More complicated would be an extra bone, not between existing bones as the V3 buttock is, but a spur which controls some of the elbow (or kneecap) mesh, and is driven by the motion of the main joint. Throw in magnets, and you maybe could set up something horribly complicated whixch would work in Poser, and fall apart at the slightest alteration.

"for instance it only currently works on Jolly's computers with select characters, and only for P5&6." :) bookmarking.. in the hope Getjolly elaborates on that ;)

~bookmark

Bookmark...

"I've been eyeing Carrara and also Character Studio with 3dsMax as future avenues."

Just FYI, Operaguy... CharacterStudio uses falloff zones (envelopes) that are very similar to Poser's joints. The big difference is in the level of control. In CS, you can specify the degree of influence for each envelope right down to the vertex level, excluding or including individual vertices (or groups of vertices) as you see fit, in order to get the best possible bending. It also has other goodies, like "buldge" and "tendon" parameters, that make muscle deformations possible without the use of special morphs. It's a really easy and useful solution, but not quite as integrated as standard weight-mapped bone rigs. There are some pros and cons to using CharacterStudio in 3ds over standard bones, but for the most part I think it's a really good way to rig a character.

Now if Carrara 5 really can convert a Poser rig over to Carrara rig, then that's worth the price of admission right there. Depending on how good Carrara is at animating human characters.

Message edited on: 12/19/2005 11:16

Well, you could just learn a lesson from what character TDs do in Maya with lots of MEL scripting and deformers - why not use Python and one or the other script-driven magnet to build better Poser rigs?

Message edited on: 12/19/2005 11:22

Now if Carrara 5 really can convert a Poser rig over to Carrara rig, then that's worth the price of admission right there. Depending on how good Carrara is at animating human characters. << It does make me wonder...if the bones in Poser are not deforming the mesh very nicely, how is automatically moving them into Carrara BY ITSELF going to make magic happen? Probably won't. However, when you get the rig over there, maybe a little Carrara-tweaking can put things right. Thanks for the CS insight, toolz ::::: Opera :::::

stewar, hopefully you were using the generic "you" in that post, becuase as reckless as I am, attacking with script-driven magnets (i saw a product for Poser that does that) and python, is not a job for operaguy. I would have to put on my alternate ego, software-engineer-guy. He is not as happy as I am, and needs too much beer. ::::: Opera :::::

You ask about developments in poser rigging, we set off on a path of investigation with regard to advancing Poser rigging, you could call it a bit of a personal project which keeps expanding all over the place. It all started with the Jolly Troll and a wish to have him appear the same in Poser as he is in Maya. His full body 16-bit displacements were not the only Poser first, he also has a system of complex multi-axial corrective morphs which have surprisingly not as yet been duplicated. There was then the notion to create soft skinned muscle deformation system using Poser Cloth which works quite well all said and done. The progress thread for this is currently offline - Ho-hum theres a thread here on Renderosity We now are experimenting with a method which is identical to Maya's "Soft Skinning" / "Linear blend Skinning" - Essentially each vertex is assigned a set of influencing joints and a blending weight for each influence. This is different from Posers current method which uses two ellipsoids per bone with influence range and linear interpolation. It works grand, but is still a bit work in progress, hopefully it will be of benefit to all. I'll post a comparative animation a bit later for anyone whose interested. Tra-la-lah la-lah la-lah la-ah got to get into the spirit Jolly

Bookmarking this

::::: uploading milk and cookies -- no, strike that -- uploading bottle of Knob Creek Straight Kentucky Bourbon to jolly::::: looking forward to animation. ::::: Opera :::::

.

One thing to remember is that most Poser characters are meant to wear clothing at one point, Vicky eventually leaves the temple you know! So whatever fancy joint controlled morphs etc... you devise to get rid of those shoulders and other pesky problem areas, have to be duplicated in the clothing. That's one of the reasons why it's best to limit those joint controlled morphs, they are real hard to duplicate in clothing. Rigging is an artform, it does not matter how high end the software, all rigs have to be tweaked and finessed. It is not uncommon in production to have 3 or 4 rigs for the same character to be applied in different circumstances.

Attached Link: http://www.getjolly.com/images/stories/wip/smoothleg_anim.mpg

Heres the work in progress animation of linear blend skinning within Poser as promised... Just right click the link and save.

They work pretty much in identical fashion. The flesh behind the thigh deforms when the knee bends, and the crease in back of the knee looks realistic. og

"More complicated would be an extra bone, not between existing bones as the V3 buttock is, but a spur which controls some of the elbow (or kneecap) mesh, and is driven by the motion of the main joint." Yeah, I tried that, I had a early version of Glamorous Jessi set up that way, more-or-less JCJ rather than JCM, with ghost (not physical) parts. Worked fine for the figure but I couldn't get it to work in conforming clothing. Oh well... I do think GJ bends pretty well, though, given the current state of the art. I'd love to see some non-biased person compare the bending of all the available figures.

If anyone does that comparison, don't leave out Judy, she's better than most. Either straight Judy or EJ. Jim, what if conforming clothing was not a factor? Actually everyone, what if conforming clothing were not a factor, therefore no morphs in cloths. All dynamic. Would that significatly alter ones approach? ::::: Opera :::::

1 - The rigging currently in use by the bulk of poser characters is, in the nicest terms, simplistic. IT is this simple, easy to use and understand rig that creates the problems noted -- which can be overcome by the creation of a more developed and complex rigging system -- which, by nature, would mean a more complex and difficult to develop for by third parties one that would inhibit clothing creation of a conforming type. 2 - The use of python structures inherently built into a character rig is already being done by some of the more adventurous and knwoeldgeable about python folks out there. This is not backwards compatible stuff, however, which has been affecting the interest in creating said rigs for sale. It would mean essentially ignoring anything previous to Poser 5 and most certainly D|S, which most merchants are hesitant to do (but certainly not all of them). This also affects the ability of third parties to create conforming clothing. 3 - Note that while I'm talking about merchants for the most part here, it really isn't them entirely, nor is it unrealistic for them to be that way. There's another side to this same thing as well. New ways of doing somethign mean that end users willhave a hard time adjusting to them, becuase none of the "old" ways of doing stuff will work for them. Apollo MaX is an excellent example of this: he's sufficiently different to use that there is a learning curve to go along with him, and although the creator did an incredible amount of work to make him as familair to use as the Mil figures (for example), his newer capabilities and general differences make support for him problematic both among general users and among merchants. 4 - Dynamic clothing would indeed solve a lot of these problems -- but not all of them. Dynamic clothing also requires a great deal more skill and preplanning to develop for, and is also not backwards nor sidweways (to D|S) compatible -- again, affecting the support from third parties. 5 - "lowest common denominator" -- so long as merchants try to support both D|S and 4 versions of Poser (4, PP, 5, and 6), this will continue. It's not a lack of capability on the part of the program, it's a lack of willingness to do things which are more difficult all around on the part of the greater community. The programs are quite capable of creating rigs that avoid that stuff -- but they need to be used differently than the "norm" as well, which will make them specialty figures. 6 - All of this will change, anyway. It is inevitable. although D|S and Poser will likely run parallel and most probably retain the same level of cross compatibility they have at present for some time to come, they are already diverging, and the next full release of both will essentially change the whole thing entirely, unless one or both companies works intentionally to retain greater feature (dynamics) compatibility -- unlikely to occur, imho. So be patient. When the market shifts away from P4/PP core base into D|S or Poser (5+), you'll be groovin. It's already happening, based just on the way that freestuff is falling out.

The problem I see is that most people believe that a hobbyist program could and SHOULD deliver better results than what the professionals can.

"It is not uncommon in production to have 3 or 4 rigs for the same character to be applied in different circumstances."

So, why dont we use several rigs for several ranges of motion ?
Want V3 to sit without her ass exploding ?
Change the buttock JPs with a JP-pose and inject corrective morphs.
Want her to raise her arms above the head ?
Do the same with her shoulders.

You can inject morphs and change joint parameters as easy as you can click on a normal pose, so why does nobody USE this feature ?

Adding new bodyparts is not the solution, because it ruins intuitive hand posing and animating.
Look at DAZ and EF and you see that V3 has only one neck (V2 has two), and Jessi has no buttocks. (Judy has them).
They both gave additional bodyparts a try and both changed direction later.

While I DO like JCMs, they should be combined with new joints and IMO injecting them only for more extreme poses would be better than having them permanently in the cr2, even for poses when they are not needed.

Biggest part of Posers success is that it is SIMPLE, so even the unwashed masses can understand (and afford) it.
Noone wants bad posing characters, but noone wants characters that get so complicated that they cost twice as much to rig or twice as much to cloth.
And the more time a merchant has to spend creating something, the more money he needs per item to brake even.

Most people who use Poser are not "just too poor to afford MAYA or MAX", they also just dont WANT to spend as much time as a professional artist learning to pose or to create clothes or sorting out a myriad of nodes.
(Thats why Poser6 also brought back a P4 material room, and DS doesnt even bother with them)

And its these folks who BUY stuff and keep the Poserverse running by paying DAZ and EFs bills.

If you try to twist their arms because youre on a crusade for the "Holy Rig", they just wont buy.
The cloth room, the face room, the hair room, the set-up room are all big fat failures.
(Dont get me wrong, I DO like dynamic clothing and even created my own, and Im happy that the other rooms are there, too )

But the majority just DOES NOT USE them, so if I were to sell clothes, Id sure make them conforming, and if Id create hair, Id sure make it transmapped, not strand based.

Poser is a tool to create pretty pictures, sometimes even art, and the easier this tool is to use, the more people will be able to use it.
Again, im all for improved posing, but just remember that not everything that looks good on paper will also be a success in your runtime.

"These days, you have to be pretty technical
before you can even aspire to crudeness."

^-^

stahlratte

Look at DAZ and EF and you see that V3 has only one neck (V2 has two), and Jessi has no buttocks. (Judy has them).
They both gave additional bodyparts a try and both changed direction later.

Actually, someone who should know said the reason Jessi has no buttocks is that e-Frontier is preparing for an advanced rigging system that will make the buttocks group unnecessary. That's why Jessi is rigged like Posette.

IMO, the Face Room is a failure because it doesn't use the DAZ figures. If it did, more people would learn to use it. As it is, we have people wandering in here at least once a week asking how to get Vicky into the face room.

I don't consider the cloth and hair room to be failures. They've just taken longer for the community to embrace. Partly because they're a little harder to use, but mostly because of Poser 5's flaws.

Poser is a tool to create pretty pictures, sometimes even art, and the easier this tool is to use, the more people will be able to use it.

If e-Frontier takes that tactic, the gaming industry (Second Life, The Movies, etc.) are gonna eat their lunch. They can't be as easy and as cheap as games.

"As it is, we have people wandering in here at least once a week asking how to get Vicky into the face room."

Jacky, my Jessi/V3 hybrid IS 100% face-room compatible, but I dont want to release her unless some kind soul remapps Jessi to V3 so she can use V3 maps on her whole body:

But still, I havent seen a single great celebrity clone that was done entirely in the face room.
Even IF V3 would be face-room compatible, I doubt we would see better morphs than we already have.
Most people never spin a single of V3s morph dials by themself but rely on premade charcaters they buy, and for them the cloth room is way too complicated to use, with or without V3 support.

"If e-Frontier takes that tactic, the gaming industry (Second Life, The Movies, etc.) are gonna eat their lunch. They can't be as easy and as cheap as games."

Could you elaborate this more ?
Im not sure I understood what you mean ?

stahlratte

***"Most people who use Poser are not "just too poor to afford MAYA or MAX", they also just dont WANT to spend as much time as a professional artist learning to pose or to create clothes or sorting out a myriad of nodes. (Thats why Poser6 also brought back a P4 material room, and DS doesnt even bother with them) And its these folks who BUY stuff and keep the Poserverse running by paying DAZ and EFs bills. If you try to twist their arms because youre on a crusade for the "Holy Rig", they just wont buy."*** I too am somewhat amused at this "joint obsession" that some poser users have Even though I am mostly an animator . it seems to me that instead of telling stories and evoking moods etc. with a totality of presentation with good lighting ,use of color and props etc that some are just coming from the perspective of a **nekkid chick** in poser in an extreme pose with the camera zoomed in on her kness/elbows. Dont get me wrong I am big fan of big breast nudes ,as my galley clearly shows, but for the genre's I prefer most clothing will cover most of the joints. I use V2/M2 almost exclusively as they have far better shoulders than the DAZ unimess clones but even V3 is not totally unusable in the outfits I usually have her wearing (See pic)

One of the problems/failures with the face room is that it was sold as a way to "make yourself" in Poser. But unless you allready looked almost like Don and/or Judy (and now Jessi and James) there was no way you could move those all too limited morph dots into the right shape. That WOULD be a little easier with V3, granted, but really, you'd need something like the 250+ morphs-version of V3 before you'd have enough points to move. BECAUSE the face room and the Morph Putty tool only can move EXISITING morphs and not individual vertices as many people (including myself) thought. That said, I use the Face Room almost every time I use Don or James for something because it's a great and easy way to get away from the Stock Character look. But then again, my big hobby, when it comes to Poser, is to create new characters by morphing the heck out of them :o) I agree that going the dynamic way is a bad idea in general. It's meant mostly for animators, but how many here animate in Poser? Not many. Besides, there's next to NO male dynamic clothing out there... I also agree that Poser's big success springs from the fact that it is so easy to use. And a lot of people seem to be stuck in the P4-past (partly because of how buggy P5 was initially) so they've never even dreamed of using the head, hair, clothes and Material room. One of the main reasons that I don't use Daz Studio more is that I sorely MISS teh material room whenever I'm forced to bring it out (there are some scenes that Poser just won't render)

But still, I havent seen a single great celebrity clone that was done entirely in the face room.

There have been a couple, but it does take a lot of work. But then, it takes a lot of work even with $1,000 Facegen.

The problem with the Face Room is most people don't have the right photos to use in it. They must be large, clear, evenly lit, with a neutral expression. And an exact profile and front view. (Sadly, most celebrity mug shots are too small and poorly lit to make good textures.)

And then, as soon as you apply an expression, you lose the likeness. To make a true celebrity clone, you have to do what DAZ did with their Dick van Dyke: create all new expression morphs, too, so it looks like them even when they're smiling, frowning, etc.

I think the Face Room will always be limited, at least when it comes to celebrity clones. But for people who can take their own reference photos, and don't mind "mannequin face," it's okay. I think most people use it just to get a variety of different faces, not to clone actual people, and it's good for that.

Most people never spin a single of V3s morph dials by themself but rely on premade charcaters they buy, and for them the cloth room is way too complicated to use, with or without V3 support.

I just don't believe that. People think the Cloth Room is complicated, but once they try it, they like it. And what it takes to get them to try is a product they want to use. I know several people who refused to use the Cloth Room until they saw the beautiful free dynamic kimono at PoserClub. Now they love the Cloth Room. :)

Could you elaborate this more ?
Im not sure I understood what you mean ?

I mean the difference between 3d gaming and Poser 4 is closing fast. And people who just want an easy way to make pretty pictures (or even movies) are going to buy a $50 game, not Poser.

Indeed, they are already making use of Poser content. Someone was here awhile back, asking for help with Poser. Turns out she didn't really want to use Poser. She was a Second Life merchant, who just wanted to use Poser to convert Poser hair and clothing to Second Life so she could sell it. She said a lot of people do that, and make big bucks.

I think the only thing really holding these games back is that the makers don't quite realize that for many customers, the game isn't the appeal. Being able to build your own characters and sets is. "The Movies" sort of gets this; you can turn off the game play and just make movies.

*"Jim, what if conforming clothing was not a factor? Actually everyone, what if conforming clothing were not a factor, therefore no morphs in cloths. All dynamic.* That would probably be do-able, only the big advantage I saw for JCJ (rather than JCM) was it would be directly tranferable to conforming clothing, instead of the current system where you have to recreate all the morphs. The end result is about the same, the only real other advantage doing JCJ is there is less overhead, as there are no morph deltas. *"You can inject morphs and change joint parameters as easy as you can click on a normal pose, so why does nobody USE this feature ?* Well, I do. ;-) A number of my figures (including Glamorous Jessi) and/or shoe sets have a pose set up to switch in high-heel or flat feet morphs AND the joint parameters that go with them. Seems (to me) to be easy to you and work well, but I've never gotten much feedback from users saying they find it worthwhile (or not). Anyway, I think there is a lot more than can be done with the current system of Poser rigging, rather than flying off into a whole new stytem of rigging with problems-yet-to-be-found. I do find Poer 5/6's cloth room to be great, BTW. I've never used the face or hair rooms. Anyway, GJ here demonstrates her bending. ;-) In all modesty, I think she bends very nicely at the shoulders, elbows, and knees. I designed her thigh bend to be corrected up to about about a 90 degree bend (which is all I can bend mine), this pose puts her well past that, so you can see a small problem. GJ, remember, just like stock Jessi doesn't have buttocks. Does Max have buttocks? I actually think buttocks are more in the line of a cludge, myself, real people don't bend two places at the thighs.

Im surprised at the level of negativity towards improving Poser/DS rigging style. Improvements in rigging dont just make the naked bird pictures better, but improve posing of clothing, creatures, animals and animation ten fold. Poor weighting really shows up when figures move - and we are not talking about extreme pose either - a 90degree bend on the of knee of any current available commercial characters looks unrealistic. If you dont experiment things wont get any better, if thats the attitude why not stick with Poser1. Anyway who said that advancements have to be more complicated? Poser is not just a hobbyist package it is also used professionally by many. It was the many requests for better rigging on these forums that sent us off experimenting. (The inquisitive mind) The simplicity of use of poser is the beauty of poser, and no one is talking about changing that. Rigging advancements on the whole are invisible to the end user - one click and your off. Even if the back end of the figure contained a full muscle rig, the end user should still pose/animate in the normal way. The solution we would like to see would be the adoption of a generic format for set-up - the widely used FBX format for example. Both Poser and DS have adopted a generic format for the meshes (OBJ) and textures, so why not rigging. This is in essence what we have tried to achieve with the above example. The weighting of the dinosaurs legs is identical in both Maya and Poser, the skeleton is also the same between packages. Incidentally the character that the leg belongs to will not have custom skinning when its released for Poser, as this is an experimental project. For the moment we will still be using standard methods J Jolly

"Anyway who said that advancements have to be more complicated?"

They usually are, as more and more features are added.
Compare the simplicity and ruggedness of a Ford T that basically every village blacksmith could repair with todays computer controlled cars that can only be repaired by specialists.
Back in the sixties many people could do at least basic maintenance, cleaning a carb, changing oil, adjusting brakes, and even bigger modifications became a national hobby because THINGS WERE SIMPLE enough for everyone to understand.

Poser is in many ways exactly like that.
Some professionals, but mainly a group of hobbiysts that support each other by modifying a few given charcters.
Vicky3 is to Poser what a 32 Ford was to a HotRodder.

Raw material you can shape anyway you like.
But ONLY if you keep things simple.

Make her too complicated or tiresome for the average person to work with, and 99% of todays grassroots support will be gone.
You will end up with a few specialists who can handle the complicated rigging and who are able to create new stuff, and consumers who just buy stuff and hit the render button.

But the "semi-pros" or "semi-amateurs" will be gone.

Posers advantage is not just that it is easy to use.
todays cars are much easier to drive, too.
Its advantage is that it is easy enough so that many people can actually CREATE their own stuff with it.

And this is what exactly will be lost with :
"Rigging advancements" that are "invisible to the end user - one click and your off."

As for "Poser is not just a hobbyist package it is also used professionally by many".

Umm, no. Just mention Poser at CG-channel. LOL !
I know that Poser content is used because its cheap, and some use use Poser charcters for (low end) advertising, but unless you ALSO mastered MAX or MAYA, Ill doubt that youll ever get a real "professional" job at a studio just because you know your way around Poser.

Theres absolutely nothing in Poser Max or Maya couldnt do better, thats why they are the industry standards.
But this perfection comes with a price, and that is complexity.

And sacrificing Posers big advantage, its simplicity just to stroke ones ego would be a big mistake in the long run.

stahlratte

Stahlratte wrote "Make her too complicated or tiresome for the average person to work with, and 99% of todays grassroots support will be gone." I could not agree with you more, Poser is what it is today because people could open up the cr2 files and read them and then figure out how to tinker with them. It's the grass roots users that pushed the software where it is today. Yep, don't mention Poser in the 3d software forums unless you are ready to duck the rotten tomatoes, although it's made some real advances it's got someways to go yet. Right now Poser is positionned where it needs to be which is easy enough for the hobbyist to use, that's how it's gotten what I suspect is a huge user base. It's appealing because there is a ton of products available, make it too complicated to rig and the cost/profit ratio of developing products will no longer be advantageous since users have gotten used to inexpensive products over the last few years.

I agree with you 100% Stahlratte. I can understand the longing by some to make Poser more Maya-like and I think CL tried to address some of those desires with the shaders, hair, cloth etc. in newer versions. I also think that conforming clothing, transmapped hair and bitmapped textures represent something of a sweetspot in terms of what many people are comfortable with and support at the moment. Sure that will change gradually but what are the user priorities for most people? Which do they want more, hair blowing in the wind or do they want simple fast, good looking hair? Sure, you can do great things with shaders and nodes and such but most people know how to modify a texture in an image editor while not a fraction of them know how to manipulate nodes to get the effect they want. And what of rigging? I guess I'm blind but I swear, I look at some of these pictures people show as examples of how horrible and inhuman the current figures look and I just can't really see it. I suspect I'm not alone though. I doubt Poser is going to somehow be overtaken by lowpoly game systems and it's only real competition, after all the years is the nascent DS. It EF wants to make a poor man's Maya, then they should incorporate those features into Shade. If they're not careful, DS will inherit the majority of the Poser user base who aren't concerned about esoteric rigging technologies. Ironically, with it's modular architecture, DS could incorporate the higher end features as well, much more smoothly than Poser.

I suspect Daz Studio will have more advanced rigging features in upcoming versions. It seems to be programmed with a view to accept plug-in modules. Also DS will be in a better position to introduce these advances because Daz is the company that produces the main Poser figures, they may very well introduce generation 4 figures with advanced rigging for Studio some time down the line.

*I doubt Poser is going to somehow be overtaken by lowpoly game systems*

I think it will, if it remains stuck in the P4 past. A lot of "low-poly" games look pretty damned good. And the trade off is that you can build much larger and more complex scenes than you can with Poser. If all you want to do is make pretty pictures, it's enough.

And games are improving all the time. Look at the difference between the original Sims and The Sims 2. It's a huge improvement - much greater than the improvement between Poser 5 and 6.

Games already have a much larger base of users than Poser does. Millions of people have bought The Sims. Some Second Life merchants make thousands of dollars a month, selling items for $1-$2 a pop. They are cheaper, easier, and faster to use than even Poser 4. Could that indie film (described in the "Movies" link I posted above) have been put online as quickly if done in Poser? I doubt it. The rendering time alone would be prohibitive. Games are going to take over the "quick and easy" segment of the market.

And I think DAZ and e-Frontier are well aware of this. They are not going to be standing still.

Dominique - I think you're right. DAZ has said D|S will have weight-based rigging. I don't know if it will be part of Victoria 4 or not, but dolllars to donuts, they are planning to make characters with advanced rigging eventually. (Probably with a P4 version for Poser users.)

I think Ynsaen is right, too. Poser and D|S will begin to diverge, unless they collaborate on an advanced rigging system (which I suspect is highly unlikely).

***"And what of rigging? I guess I'm blind but I swear, I look at some of these pictures people show as examples of how horrible and inhuman the current figures look and I just can't really see it. I suspect I'm not alone though."*** No you are not alone :-) ***"Theres absolutely nothing in Poser Max or Maya couldnt do better, thats why they are the industry standards. But this perfection comes with a price, and that is complexity."*** I Agree completely!! here is a screenshot of an "advanced" rig in Lightwave3D with all of the rig controls needed for nice joint deformations during posing and animation. figure out a way to implement all this in poser and keep it simple and hidden from the average user and i'll be impressed. .........................I wont hold my breath

One of the problems with the post-P4 features of Poser is that the official documentation is so dreadful. Go look at the Materials Room, and the Poser manual (printed or PDF), and even the e-frontier website, and try and find out just what some of those node-inputs do. At least the Python info tells you more, even if its written in programmer's MEGO-speak.

Yes, games are getting more advanced graphically and ease of use has always been their forte. The point is that Poser can't compete by piling on features that are beyond the ken/patience of the mass market. "...figure out a way to implement all this in poser and keep it simple and hidden from the average user and I'll be impressed." That is exactly the point. Poser needs to take a cue from the game designers. More functionality is great, expose it in all it's sausage making glory (or gory) to those who like to tinker but KISS for the average (read the folks who pay most of the bills) users. Wizards, presets, designers yada, yada, yada. The alternative is moving into a losing niche. There simply aren't enough pro users to support the product unless you charge Maya prices for each copy OTOH, with their emphasis on real-time performance, I doubt that games are going to challenge even Poser 4 for artistic purposes next week or even next year. At the same time, there are certainly game designer type metaphors for setting up environments, behaviors, characters etc. that could revolutionize Poser. Throw in some of that Nvidia hardware rendering technology and you could have a killer system.

I got maya but its just too hard to figure out there are so many menues and tools i dont know how to even get started with it...So im just hanging out with poser because it's alot easer to unbderstand and operate....

" I got maya but its just too hard to figure out there are so many menues and tools i dont know how to even get started with it...So im just hanging out with poser because it's alot easer to unbderstand and operate...." You spent $2000+ on software you aren't even going to use now? Or you mean you got Maya PLE? There's lots of tutorials and literature out there that can help you get started if you really wanted to. I tried Maya, and I didn't like it either, but not because it was too hard. I went with an older edition of 3dsmax instead, because I found there was MUCH more free information out there to help me learn it than there was for Maya. More forums, more tutorials, more literature, etc. The one thing that tickles me when browsing through Poser forums are that so many users of the software seem to demand MORE, yet stop short of applying themselves to learn something more difficult than pressing a few buttons, or applying a pre-made pose. It seems so many Poser users want advanced features.. things like GI (but without the wait); complex rigging (without the learning curve); immediate satisfaction (without too much effort). The irony here is that I have found Poser to be one of the most difficult and frustrating 3D applications I've ever used, and as I mentioned, I've used those evil "pro" apps too. Yes, it's convenient to have software that you don't need to rig or model your own characters, but then you have to deal with all the other stuff Poser throws at you, like it's insufferable workflow. Not to mention, for the price it costs to PURCHASE all the props and clothing you need over the years, you end up spending way more than it would have cost you to purchase a more expensive app in the first place. Some people who have used Poser for a long time probably have close to $2000 invested in their runtime items alone, and hardly use any of them very often, and continue to buy new stuff for it every month. Poser can be an easy, but very COSTLY, hobby. Whereas, someone who dropped $5000 on Maya to create models, and took 6 months to learn it, might never have to spend another dime on their hobby again, and might actually end up MAKING a lot of money with it in the end. I have to agree with Stahlratte here. If Poser gets too advanced, then it's going to lose it's base. On the other hand, users should know that if they want "high-end" results, they will need to be prepared to put in a lot of learning time, and do the homework required to master the more complex features.

IMO complexity can almost always be reduced to a greater degree than it often is, while retaining a good deal of power and flexibility. The Mayas of the world have little incentive to invest in doing so. They cater to a tech savvy audience where there are often sub-specialists in rigging, texturing, lighting etc. It used to take a programmer many lines of code just to put a window on the screen. Now, you can do it without writing any code at all. It's all about moving to a higher level of abstraction. Some people use premade light sets because they struggle with positioning and adjusting lights. Now yes, they could put in the sweat equity to learn how to do it that way but why should they have to? What you're interested in isn't the lights but rather the lighting in the scene. Why shouldn't a lighting module allow you to specify what kind of light you want where and do the work of placing the lights for you? The manual tools are always there for those who prefer them or need more precise control. The same idea can apply to just about any task. Granted, once they've invested in learning the manual techniques, some may actually see something easier as a perhaps not a good thing. I 'm bemused by the fact that any bozo can do in Microsoft Access whit it took me many hours and a lot of work to do in dBase years ago but the world moves on.

"Some people use premade light sets because they struggle with positioning and adjusting lights. Now yes, they could put in the sweat equity to learn how to do it that way but why should they have to?" Well, that's true to a point, but then you're always going to be dependant on buying or using free light sets that someone else made, and the downfall to that is that eventually you might come across a time when you want something specific, and have to compromise your vision because you don't know how to do it. If all you know is how to open your wallet and purchase stuff, eventually you might run into a proverbial "brick wall" of creativity. When you know how to do something yourself, without depending on merchants for EVERYTHING, then there's no limits to what you can do. In other words, you aren't going to find exactly what you want every time, unless you pay someone else to do it for you. So then what's the real difference between a studio that uses Maya with sub-specialists in rigging, lighting, etc., or the Poser hobbyist, where a single artist is depending on others for different parts of a scene? Truth is, the high end apps are not really catering to the tech savvy audience much more than Poser is (unless you get into the scripting end of things, but then again Poser has Python, which is largely geared for "techies" as well). The difference, aside from price, is the depth of the applications. To elaborate on this, I point to the aforementioned "Character Studio" in 3dsmax. Most Poser users think it's too complex compared to Poser. The truth is (and I've used both), CharacterSTudio is actually EASIER to use than Poser. Rigging is easier (Poser's rigging is hard to master), animating is easier (doesn't suffer from the IK and gimbal lock problems Poser has), and the workflow overall is smoother (you don't need an outside app to interchange animations or poses from one character to another; every character rigged in CS can use each other's poses and animations with little to no tweeking required). That's just one example, but because the program is considered "high end" then everyone just assumes it must be hard. It IS more time consuming to learn certain things, because there's so much it can do, but once you learn it, many things that are difficult in Poser are much easier done in these other apps. Sure, you can get into really techie stuff too if you wanted to, but the same thing can be said of Poser. I guess the bottom line is that if you want more stuff, expect it to come at a price. Literally.

I think somehow you missed my entire point. In the lightset example, I'm not saying people should continue to buy what they need, I'm saying that the application should provide different/better approaches that will make it easier for people to do it themselves. Just because the traditional lighting metaphor is moving lights around and adjusting falloff, intensity, etc, doesn't mean that's necessarily the easiest for everyone, especially the more casual user to grasp. There's always going to be a learning curve but intelligent software design can do a lot to lessen the slope of that hill. That's part of the key to the whole 'prosumer' world. Whether it's 35mm or video cameras, desktop publishing or whatever. They would not be nearly as popular if the technology hadn't become more user friendly. They've done such a good job at it that you now see backward migration of some of the ease of use feature to the professional grade tools. The auto-focus, electronic, icon driven approach won't always give you the complete degree of flexibility and power that old fashioned knob twirling will but the knobs should still be there and more importantly, if you make 90 or even 80 per cent of the total available, that's what most people will want most of the time. Years ago, it took a skilled artist to produce police sketches. Then, someone invented the Identikit and suddenly everything changed. You might still need an artist to get the most refined likeness but now you can a novice quickly produce a workable likeness. Unfortunately, that's the kind of innovative approace you're more likely to see from a game company than from a 3d company and that needs to change.

~bookmark