Yeah, I love the big guy on the beach.

You should definately post some of these Faceroom characters too.

My Gallery here is pretty empty though, so I guess I should do a fill-up some time soon.

Cheers

quote*:"... but its still crap compared to a properly rigged figure using industry standard tools."*

as you say, there´s two different standards on rigging characters. there´s gollum on the one hand, and there´s s3p on the other, and the only thing they have in common is the size of their feet.

still, i don´t think that eF wants poser to be more than it is. as long as people buy poser and poser stuff for their peach-sword-temple renders (and still ask for p7 and for hi-poly characters) eF is merrily collecting money and everybody´s happy!

sorry to say, but we won´t get what we ask for. at least not from eF or daz, that is.....

it seems that weve gotten what weve asked for in the past.

it was vitally important to people that poser have a hair room, face morph room, dynamic cloth, subsurface scattering, ambiant occlusion, etc... yet most people dont even make use of these features.
what every single poser user would make use of every time they loaded poser is reworked rigging.

eF - and now daz is following suit - have become indolent with the development and refinement of the core functionality and have rather just been adding new 'bullet points' to the boxes. poser is still using the same rigging system it has since its first incarnation, and it is long obsolete.
in fact poser 6 is just poser 4 with some plugins piggybacked on it.. the core software remains the exact same, just with 3rd party addons like firefly, facegen modeler, etc hacked into it. its about time the core application was improved... they dont have to rewrite it from scratch but how about getting whats there to actually work efficiently and to an industry standard before adding more bells and whistles and calling it the next version.

quote:"in fact poser 6 is just poser 4 with some plugins piggybacked on it."

well, let´s take a look at it from a different POV. i don´t know p4, but p5 is definitely and beyond any doubt the most unreliable and unstable software i ever ran into. all the updates have done little or nothing to change that. now, browsing this forum, you´ll hardly find a day without someone seeking help for p6(sr3!) making trouble.

accordingly both, the p5- as well as the p6 developing team, prooved themselves as being unable to write a properly working (professional?) program. that´s a fact. amen.

considering this, do you really expect them to be able to rewrite poser according to our needs? if yes: do you believe in faeries too? (pls accept my irony with goodwill. i don´t mean to be impolite, i just cannot resist.)

Quote - Yep, I'm with destro75 on this one - the only real issues Poser needs to address are basic functionality problems like lack of multiple undos, the memory leak issues and render crashes.

An in-built Mat file maker would be good and the ability to save partial poses wouldn't go astray either, heheh. (if I'm missing this functionality in P6 please point me at it!)

Poser 6 does indeed have a built in Mat file maker.  Just go to the material room,
select the object  you want to make a Mat file of, click the + sign at the bottom
of the material library.  You get a pop-up window. Click select material collection
and you get another pop-up window.  Select the material zones you want in your
collection, hit OK, then give your collection a name and hit OK.  Then when you
want to apply this Mat file to another figure just select the figure, select the
Mat file, and click on the check mark.

i dont think theyre as buggy as people make out. i havent had a poser crash in eons.
sure there are some program quirks but if you know what you are doing and experienced in the program they dont affect you negatively.

i wouldnt call poser 5 or poser 6 'unstable'. keep in mind itsmostly poser newbies asking for help with the program in the forums.... look in any program forum - max, lightwave, etc and youll see the same.

i would be perfectly happy with poser 7 if the only change they made was to redo the rigging to an industry standard. the resulting poser figures would blow you away, and make you wish you had asked for better rigging half a decade ago. besides, there are so many untapped P6 features right now that are nowhere near being used to their potential - the firefly renderer, cloth room, hair room, displacement mapping, etc that we hardly need more right now.

Since SR2 Poser 6 has been rock solid for me, and with SR3 I haven't noticed any difference.
(I'm not even sure what SR3 was supposed to do, as I haven't noticed any difference.)

I agree with Blackhearted that it would be nice if the joints would bend more realistically.
Even poses that I can do with my old and stiff body look a mess in Poser, especially
sitting poses, with the hips and thigh getting all scrunched together.  Elbows never
look quite right either when you bend the arm too much.

I do like what they did with the cloth room.  It is far more faster and stable.
With some clothing items the animation progresses in almost real time.

i think we have left this thread long ago, plus: it´s bedtime for me.....

i´ll contact you tomorrow, ok?

The Face Room can be quite useful but there are definitely certain quirks that need to be addressed. Someone already mentioned the inability to enlarge the working space. There also needs to be less interaction between the morph points - moving a nose should not totally deform the rest of the face the way it does. And the most annoying is when the whole piece moves in the same direction as the mouse sometimes but opposite in another view or with another tool.  I recently raised all these (and more) issues with eFrontier tech support.

As part of a response I (finally) received from them was the following:

"...As for the rest, your suggestions are well-taken- if you'd like to get these directly to the development team, you can send suggestions or feature requests in to wishlist@e-frontier.com

...and certainly emails sent there are more visible than tech support submissions." 

While people complain heartily about Poser, there is really an astounding amount of power in the program, it's just that it is not readily accessible to the casual user. Each and every "Room" could take 9 mos to a year of constant usage to fully understand and there is no resource to access for a deeper understanding. The manuals are 375 pages of totally "bare-boned, just enough to get you started" info, but provide no way to drill down into the more complicated capabilites. And the third -party materials are little better, but I think a book that really plumbed the depths would take a forklift to move around and would cost as much as a Hummer.

Just an additional IMHO observation:

Can't one go into the Setup Room and create any rig they want and then use Grouping and Constraints to weight the mesh appropriately? Unfortunately, I don't have Poser on this computer, so I can't confirm this. I do know that people import these meshes into other programs and then rig them the way they want. They just weld the seams during import to create a single mesh so there is no breakage. Maybe there's a market for a few good rigs??

<"))%%%<<

Hear hear fuaho!

Sounds like an option for variable "soft selection" for the morph points should be added to the face room...some dial or slider that influences the effect of the chosen morph point on the whole face down to a more localised effect.

It will be interesting to see where Daz chooses to go with rigging/jointing - will it stick to market standard as BH suggests or now with D|S in play will they supply an new alternative...

Cheers

I played with rigging in Max and Softimage XSI a couple of years ago. Although I have no idea what the state of play is now, at the time I found it a major pain to set up with all the right weights for each body joint and it's surrounding mesh. You wouldn't be fighting so much to get your mesh to bend well as you have to currently in Poser, but there's a lot of extra setting up to do.

I wonder how the increased complexity of an industry standard rigging system would interact with the dynamics of content creation for Poser (?). In other words, would it make it harder and more time consuming to create figures and clothing? Would cost of content be affected?

XSI ships with pre-made rigs (as does Poser I guess with the default figures), but there are undoubtedly licencing issues with using and tweaking these for redistribution purposes as 3rd party content.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fundamental improvement that is required of Poser. But I wonder why better rigging hasn't been introduced by now.

it would be no more difficult to produce than it is now. merchants would simply shift their focus towards weight maps as opposed to CR2s and extensive JCMs.  JCMs would still exist for some small realism tweaks but the entire joint wouldnt have to rely on them.
it wouldnt affect the customer negatively at all, since they do not have to produce the content.
some merchants who are attached to the current ascii-based system would bitch and whine as usual, but the smart ones would immediately devote themselves to learning the new, more powerful system and producing superior products.
it would invalidate a lot of content initially, but the next version of poser could simply add support for new types of rigging and wouldnt have to completely discard the old system.

improving something like rigging in poser can never be a bad thing. thats the problem with poser - whenever they try to improve something many people who are used to how it is just whine and moan about it in the forums.
its the reason why im willing to bet that over half of poser users are still either using poser 4 or using the poser 4 renderer in poser 5/6, even though firefly is a vast improvement. the community's knee-jerk reactions to change and improvements, and clamouring for the wrong features, is whats primarily responsible for poser's current state - not CL, or eF.

> Quote - > Quote - Yep, I'm with **destro75** on this one - the only real issues Poser needs to address are basic functionality problems like lack of multiple undos, the memory leak issues and render crashes. > > > > An in-built Mat file maker would be good and the ability to save partial poses wouldn't go astray either, heheh. (if I'm missing this functionality in P6 please point me at it!) > > > > Poser 6 does indeed have a built in Mat file maker.  Just go to the material room, > select the object  you want to make a Mat file of, click the + sign at the bottom > of the material library.  You get a pop-up window. Click select material collection > and you get another pop-up window.  Select the material zones you want in your > collection, hit OK, then give your collection a name and hit OK.  Then when you > want to apply this Mat file to another figure just select the figure, select the > Mat file, and click on the check mark.

Thanks for that - PhilC also told me that you can save partial poses in P6 now by using the "select subset" option when saving to the library.

Supercool.

Cheers

Here's a preview pic of V4 reduced Rez - apparently she's coming in 3 flavours "Realtime", "RR" and "Hi Rez" - one of the low rez ones is specifically for subdivision users.

Some new function in DS is supposed to allow morphs between all unimesh figures (ie you can morph from Preschooler Matt up to Freak within a single animation)

 

Is it just me, or does it look like V4 will actually have ears that don't make me go LOL when I look at them? Tell me she has enough polygons (in the RT and RR versions) for ribs/lats and I'm sold :)