I really don't mind paying for Poser 7 if it delivers. But I am fed up with reading about slicker rendering and "features will be revealed in the next bulletin". Why don't E-Frontier wake up and look around a little.

Poser has always been marketed as a 3d Character and ANIMATION programme. But the latter has always been a complete joke. I have yet to see a single walk Animation which comes anywhere near an emulation of believable walking.

I think we all get sucked into acceptance of current capabilities and kind of forgive the ineptitude. I accept that the user has to tweak and work at it, but Poser makes the simplest task ridiculously difficult and it really is time the designers of Poser actually delivered what they claim they are delivering.

Let's get back to basics here: Poser 7 needs at the very least:

1. User-Sizeable interface so when you are working in either 800-600 or 1900-1200 the entire screen isn't festooned with oversized camera icons etc.

2. Infinite UNDO's. Yes I know they are promising mutliple undo's but is this really news? Multiple undo's have been around since the stone-age in simple apps costing 10 quid.

3. Why do I have to INDIVIDUALLY set IK. Where is a global menu for this and a thousand other niggling things that take hours of button pressing when you add them all up. Yes I know there are Python Scripts but at Poser's price I think it reasonable to ask for this out of the box.

4. Forgive me but DAZ characters have been going since almost the begnining of time yet Poser still presents us with pathetic characters having completely unbelievable bodies, knocked-kneed extremities, bony, joke faces and a complete absence of any link to a human structure with FLESH on it. Why does E-frontier leave it to others to get their house in order. I think it is reasonable to ask for half-decent characters that do not look like terminally-starved concentration camp victims at the point of sale.

5. An Animation implementation that is a solar system apart from the current one which would be a personal emnarrassment if I was the author of this software. How cluncky, clumsy and wholly unusable does an "animation" have to be before we own up and admit it is bloody awful.

6. Just ONE decent walk animation would do. Is it THAT difficult?

7. We are promised a 4x render speed compared with Poser 6. BIG DEAL! Of course this is with multi core processing and I very much doubt this is anything but a dream. So that means I will now have to sleep for two days instead of eight to get a decent quality render, but only if I have a perfectly optimised system costing several thousands of pounds. Has E-Frontier not seen what's going on around them.....many many video and other apps which render in a twentieth of the time with better results?

8. Clothes which fit better than a sack over a barrel would be nice. Could give the phrase "conform" a new meaning.

9. Shadows. Poser recommends NON raytraced shadows, and quite right because they are jagged, So we use mapped shadows which NEVER line up with feet or ground contact points in Poser rendering. You have to use Firefly (what a description for a render process which takes almost a millenium to work)!. Please wake up e-frontier....this is embarrassingly slow, steam driven and belongs to the dark ages.

I know this sounds a bit rantish, and I apologise. I hope there might be some others here who feel the same but perhaps are too polite to mention it.  But I think we are all getting drawn into accepting limitations which simply are there through some kind of complacency. This is 2006. Concorde was retired over a year ago, and we (apparently) put a man on the moon decades ago. But I still cannot get Poser to make a character walk without non-poser junkies laughing at it.

Good Wishes to All,

Leonardis

If you want to see good poser animation go to Rotica and look at Stimuli's gallery (his stuff is very tame compared to others there and much better)

The best Poser animation film: http://www.auroratrek.com/

It delivers, and was done in poser.

Ya know if Poser had been owned by one company and had one consistent design team and an appropriate design/programing budget equivalent (or financially proportionate) to the other programs you seem to be comparing it to then i would likely agree with you.

If Poser had a program that was truly competing with it (and had these things) poser likely would have died for the very reasons you have stated.

Posers interface is a product of its concept. It is not a professional application. it is designed for amatures. and the interface was designed by Kai Krause

Posers figures, like DAZ figures have their problems, many caused by the limitations of the current bone/joint system. I dont think they look starved. Defiantly not average American (overweight). perhaps a bit more ideal or even stylized than "normal" people, but hardly starved.

"4. Forgive me but DAZ characters have been going since almost the begnining of time yet Poser still presents us with pathetic characters having completely unbelievable bodies, knocked-kneed extremities, bony, joke faces and a complete absence of any link to a human structure with FLESH on it. Why does E-frontier leave it to others to get their house in order. I think it is reasonable to ask for half-decent characters that do not look like terminally-starved concentration camp victims at the point of sale."

Excse me, but I think that Judy is MUCH more realistic looking than V3 even on her best day.  Judy is Jane, while V3 is nothing but Cheetah's wife.  As for the rest of Daz's chazracters, the only one which looks remotely human is Aiko, and she's a manga!
David P. Hoadley

Subtracting the "rantishness" I tend to agree on several points, but it does sound like EF have woken up. Maybe P7 delivers. Let's wait and see. The first 4 reasons certainly sound promising.

Points 1,2,3 (and 9 too a bit) are really at the core of the problem. At one level Poser is supposed to be for amateur users and has a chunky user interface that tries to be friendly, but slows you down in the end. (As you mentioned IK on/off, the mirroring dialog box that you have to click away etc) But then on the other hand you can't really use any of its (considerable!) power if you are not an absolute expert and can work out what the cryptic rendering options are, the obj export options, you have to be able to understand and hack cr2 files, even if you install an item you need to know exactly where in its guts (called runtime) poser keeps each bit. The technology for dynamic clothes is there, but it is so slow and cumbersome it is hard to believe. For a conforming item you press conform and basta. Why should the process be any harder for a dynamic item. Poser has all the information it needs and all of the technology.

I am still hopeful though :-) there are a few more reasons left, the next weeks should be interesting.

The trick is to make it easy for amateurs, yet open enough for experts. Look at Silo for inspiration.

And on point 7: YES 4x or more render speed improvement is really a big deal :

Posette was (IS) pathetic?? Judy is pathetic? (Judy is ugly, yes, but pathetic...) Jessy pathetic???

There's no pathetic characters, but pathetic artists. A good artist can do miracles with any character. Perfection... there's no perfection in the poserworld (TG neither in the real world, so we can search for it)  :P

quote - "Perfection... there's no perfection in the poserworld" ...is the typical cheap excuse of both software developers and merchants. that "perfection" is out of reach is no reason not to try.

Quote - quote - "Perfection... there's no perfection in the poserworld" ...is the typical cheap excuse of both software developers and merchants. that "perfection" is out of reach is no reason not to try.

Bravo!

EF does Poser, CP the characters. Both are about to ship new stuff, so I will postpone any "rants" until after the release. They make mistakes but you can' accuse them of not trying!

Also:

The new G2 characters are not bad at all, and they use built in magnets rather than JCM. Miki is wonderful. People moan like hell about her deformities - quite right and CP have said that they will fix them, but she already is streets ahead of V3.

V3 without gazillion of morph packs, texture packs, etc packs (which are mostly not free) is pretty much lame.

So I think in that point we have to compare figures out of the box.

As to using firefly vs P4 render engine, it's just like any high end proggie using scanline vs GI+final gather+bells&whistles. Either you are an überguru and use the quickie limited render and get outstanding results and jaw dropping renders in the slower renderer, or you are a mortal and get quite good results with the nicer but slower renderer and extremely ugly results in the fast renderer.

 I once read that there is a quality-price-time relationship on whatever software you use. So there is a compromise always between this factors. Sure, Poser could have a non linear animation system and ecosystem instancing and renderman and mental ray and vray and kray and fprime and maxwell, and realtime particles and a SDS and nurbs modeler and UV unwrapping and pixels painting and OpenGL shaders and so on, but I doubt it would cost what it does now.

As to the interface, there are always keyboard shortcuts, and for really tweaking everything, python scripting. Even high end programs do this, be it Mel, maxscript, lscript, python, or what not.

Of course Poser can be improved. The reasons already mentioned by e frontier are quite cool, maybe not groundbreaking or reason enough to dump wives and girlfriends and dedicate lives to just using Poser, but they do show lots of improvement and development over previous versions. And I suspect they are leaving the best for last.

As it is, there will always be the doomsday and death knell users, chanting Poser's imminent demise. As well as the fanatical followers which cannot see fault in Poser, no matter what. So this thread is somewhat nonsensical, is it not? No reason to complain of Poser7's shortcomings, until all it's enhancements and features have been announced, right?

It's quite useless to address problems right before the release of the next version, especially if it's not even known if they are "fixed" by the next version...

I want to make it clear (and apologise for not doing so before) that I wasn't implying the DAZ figures are a particularly wonderful alternative to the stock Poser figures.

I think it is important to distinguish between an application which gives you the tools to get on with creating and another which you fight with just to get a half decent result. That is different from saying "here's a paint brush and paint...now get on wtih it and don't blame the tools".

Coming back to the characters, of course it is a matter of personal opinion whether a body is too skinny, but it does seem to me that Poser (and DAZ) follow the paradigm offered to us by the disgracefully anorexia-oriented fashion press. Whether or not your personal taste is for flesh or bones I am expressing the thought that most available characters give little opportunity to cover the bone structure with flesh in a convincing way, despite the plethora of "boob" job magnets and so forth.

And while I recognise that some artists have succesfully overcome the limitations, looking at the vast majority of output available here and elsewhere, anyone would thing we are all barbie doll collectors. As for animation it is interesting to note that at the average Poser site there are tens of thousands of single frame-orented exhibits, software and addons available as against a mere handful of animation tools and images. I think that indicates far better than I could the gulf between a piece of software claiming to have animation at its heart and the actual reality, and indicates to me how clucky the animation implementation is.

Leonardis

Quote - quote - "Perfection... there's no perfection in the poserworld" ...is the typical cheap excuse of both software developers and merchants. that "perfection" is out of reach is no reason not to try.

Dynamic clothing is  a step closer to "perfection" yet it meets resistance because it is not "easy" enough.

Perfection is not out of reach, it is just more expensive and time consuming (at the current technological level) than many people are willing to accept.

so..there's no perfection anywhere. There are a set of tools, of which Poser is 1. Without going into the 'postwork' thread, you have a tool in Poser, and it does what it's designed to do. You can accept it with it's limitations, or you can actually use those limitations as a template to go beyond what it can do by using it in new and unique ways (truth in advertising- I'm nowhere near figuring out it's limitations..;)

I commonly use a minimum of 3 programs (Bryce, Wings, Mojoworld, or Topmod/Blender) just to get to the Poser stage of my pics, and another to make the thumbnail (Gimp..;). You can take other's characters to make what you want, or you can try making your own things, or mix it up.

No one is a greater critic of an artwork than it's creator. There's always something you wished you'd changed, or done differently, or seen after you've posted it..;) So don't sweat it; if Poser does what you want it to do, then fine. If you need more, it's out there, it just may not come from Curious Labs (or Metacreations, or Daz Studios...yada yada..;) Now assembly the wood there, the stake here, and let the flaming begin..;)

Although I agree with much of what you(leonardis) say I wonder if you aren't somewhat contradictory.

I certainly would love to see them focus on animation and making better tools so amatures can animate.  The GUI is very difficult to get the hang of.  Even then I find it very very awkward (like you say no ability to resize windows is next to criminal)  Moreover the animation features are quite lacking and I wish they would do more here to add features and to make the current features more accesible. 

But it appears to me that they are indeed moving in this direction.  They are including lip syncing.  They have worked with the render engine so it can create renders quicker if you have newer hardware.  Sure we woudl all like the rener time to be 1/1000th of the current time on our current hardware.  But how hard is that and what can we expect at poser's price point? 

My hunch is that perhaps we could expect allot more.  Sure poser costs 1/8 the cost of other programs but then again I wouldn't be surprised if they sell 8x as many copies.  But this sort of price point and development cost benefit is not my business.  In the end I really don't have the ifnormation needed for those type of business decisions.

Where I think your perhaps a bit contradicory is where you are asking for better figures.   This is personal preference, but the last thing I need is another figure.  Unless this figure is really  going to bring allot more to the table I say don't waste resources on designing another.  Make the Animation software better.    Make better effects, easier to use, more realism, shorter render times etc.  I don't see how making yet another figure really applies to the goal of making better Animation software.  But we shall see.  Are the new figures really something or just another figure?

I use lightwave as well as Poser and I have never been tempted to transfer and render in Lightwave . The animation tools in Poser are not at all bad once you learn the basics and they provide a hobby user with some nice tools.

The renders I get out of lightwave are horrible.

The walk designer is not a bad way to get a nice walk cycle going , again , if you are using it properly and dont overdo the options. (remember to load the cr2 you are building the walk for ) Tweaking it a bit in the timeline editor will help.  Compare that with doing a biped walk cycle from scratch.  If you want real movement you can always load up a BVH file from a motion capture .

I cant think of any similar priced apps that render much faster than Poser 4 render or firefly for that matter. I have Bryce and Carrara 5.

I think for the money spent Poser gives you some nice tools, a fairly fast learning curve and figures that allow you to make decent pictures with an application out of the box.

As a very amature user of Poser, I tend to agree that the characters seem to be a dissapointment. However, if it wasn't for the dissapointment that causes people to either alter them to achieve a better look or to even create improved looking characters, we would all be seeing huge numbers of identical renders with the same boring characters in them. As I have stated I'm simply an amature user and this is my simple opinion.

Quote - Excse me, but I think that Judy is MUCH more realistic looking than V3 even on her best day.  Judy is Jane, while V3 is nothing but Cheetah's wife.  David P. Hoadley

There's my laugh of the day. Thanks Dave. Yeah the P5's really deliver out of the face room. The mesh is anything but elegant, the eyes fit poorly in the head and they break down badly when extreme expressions are applied, but they are still the easiest, most versatile of all the figure sets.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1321956&member

Actually, I tend to work more with the Hybrid Neja version of Judy.  Neja is one of Pitklad's contributions to the Poser community, and the one in which he cloned Judy's torso, along with NEAena's Head.  He also replaced Posette's eyes with those of Vicky's.  All in all, I'd say its that she's a smartly, a VERY versitile frigure.
Yours truly.
David P. Hoadley

Quote -

The renders I get out of lightwave are horrible.

What problems are you having? I use LW a lot for rendering poser figures and I find it renders very well. As a matter of fact, Lightwaves' renderer is know throughout the industry as one of the best.

Lightwave's rendering is lightyears (hehe) above Poser's (name one place where it isn't).  Let's tally the votes (as Jeff says): Poser in studio production films - nil.  Lightwave in studio production films - many.  Hmmm....

Can't blame the tool for the ineptitude of the user.

For $300, you get a lot with Poser - a lot!  If you want "Perfect" figures, "Perfect" Dynamic Hair, "Perfect" Dynamic Cloth, "perfect" etc., you'd better be willing to pay for it (about $500,000 is the going rate for 'perfect').  For $300, stop complaining and keep requesting.

Sheesh, some people want everything for nothing.

Infinite undos?  Name one application (in existence) that allows 'infinite undos'.  Even the PROFESSIONAL, HIGH_PRICED (as in, I spent several thousand dollars) applications don't deliver that dream-state of a vision.  Good luck.  Have fun.  Snap out of it!

Oye.  I give up on this unrealistic rhetoric.

I've pre-ordered the physical shipment of Poser7.

The new content wasn't a big incentive for me. I deleted 100 % of Poser 5 content and most of Poser 6 content. but the Multiple Undo/ReDo, 2 mouse click lighting, and improved rendering are things I really want.

I really wish Poser had had a project guide when I started. Maybe it wouldn't have taken me 2 weeks to figure out how to keep Mike from running away everytime I tried to put a pair of pants on him ;) I was about ready to e-mail DAZ to complain about them selling me a nudist!

Isn't this E-Frontier's first time starting a Poser from the begining? I had thought they got Poser6 when it was ready for release? Or am I mis-understanding it?

e-frontier acquired Poser at version 5.  They did some upgrades with Poser 6, but nothing extravagant.  With version 7, they are bearing fangs and ripping deep into Poser's flesh to modernize ths now archaic beast.  Kudos to them!

Content is content - you either hate it or you love it.  I don't care either way - I just have to support it (long story).   The main concern is modernizing the application.  And e-frontier seems to be genuinely engaged in this process.  Mulitple undos alone shows their conviction!

Now, it is possible that there are two roads for Poser at this stage (either or both are possible).  e-frontier may decide to ramp up the possibilities with a new version that is 'state-of-the-art'.  This would probably cost more like $800 new and have modern features (that is, they'll optimize the code for performance and update other areas beyond what they are accomplishing now).  They could also keep updating the basic version while keeping the price low.  And they may diverge these two into separate versions (a basic and Pro versions, for instance).

Personally, I think that a divergence is a superb solution.  Keep the hobbyists happy with a basic version without all of the 'power optimizations and features' and lure in a new group (and those from the existing group) with a power version that lets Poser not just pretend to be an application - but makes it one of reckoning.  Despite my entanglements related to Poser, I have no qualms with this approach whatsoever.

Let's hope that the Japanese owners are reading this. :)

Quote - Infinite undos?  Name one application (in existence) that allows 'infinite undos'.  Even the PROFESSIONAL, HIGH_PRICED (as in, I spent several thousand dollars) applications don't deliver that dream-state of a vision.  Good luck.  Have fun.  Snap out of it!

Well if you define 'infinite' as 'to the limit of available RAM' (which is what i think the OP meant) then many apps do have this feature. Not that im complaining of course, cause anything more then single undos is all for the better IMVHO :p

Anyway what i find strange is why some people are so gung ho about animation in poser... The fact is poser is not and has never been an animation app (no matter what they market it as) It has always been an artist's 'dummy'/ref app, sorta the virtual equivalent of the wooden ones you can buy in art shops. Its primary market, as EF well know, is tills/illustration, and you dont have to take my word for this either... A quick look around will show you that for every anim clip done in poser, there are 1000s of stills. So to expect them to abandon their userbase and suddenly switch to RnD in animation is kinda naive IMO. Remember that after all EF are a relatively minor player in the 3D industry, and they sell poser at a very low price to a conservative userbase. So they will think twice before taking any kind of major risk in the features they add/change.

Plus its not like you cant get awesome animation apps for cheap these days. Blender, a very decent little animation tool is free to download. XSI foundation at $499 has animation tools that make even Maya and MAX break out in cold sweats. For a little more you can get Lightwave, another very well rounded app that doesnt cost the earth. And if you only wanna do the anims for fun or learning, you can get free or educational versions of every major pro app for pennies like XSI mod tool, Maya PLE, Houdini apprentice etc (all 3 of which can be freely downloaded from the respective sites). If anyone is serious about animation, then these are the apps they should be aiming for cause not only are they quite capable, but they make animation fun and intuitive. There is no point in struggling with poser for this.

Well, 100 undos (with Poser) is close to infinite. :)

As I've experienced with my interPoser Pro plugin, there is a limit to the amount of undos that 32-bit memory can support with the size of storage required.  A single morph undo may comprise several KB of memory.  A load process may comprise several HUNDRED MB of memory.  This takes a toll on available address space.  With 64-bit support, unlimited undos would be close to a reality. :P

As for animatoin, I agree wholeheartedly.  But if only animation support for Poser stuff was more ubiquitous!   BodyStudio is one approach - but an expensive one - and you still need to do the animation in Poser.  Vue appears to be the best bet - but I haven't had a chance to test that yet (Vue 6 I).  My solution is to let you do animation in the target application (Cinema 4D).  Now you don't have to fret about doing the animatoin in Poser.

I guess that my point is that although Poser wasn't designed for animation, it is a goal for many users - animate figures to achieve those 'cool' results seen in other apps or films (to an extent).  Poser surely isn't up to this level, but that doesn't mean that it can't be targeted to it or be achieved in other ways (using other applications).

Again, it is a matter of goals and tools.

personally, I think the slogan is misleading:
"The premiere 3D Animation and Figure Design Solution"
Perhaps it could have been that, had it had better direction in the past, but there is very little it can do along the lines of animation to compete with the likes of Autodesk, for example, and as far as "design" is concerned, most of that is done by other people with other programs who export it and make it available for Poser.

Perhaps E-frontier will change that, but it's not likely to stay under 300 bucks if they do.

"I guess that my point is that although Poser wasn't designed for animation, it is a goal for many users "

Really?...If not, I better get my money back, because on the Box, it is written: P5- 3D Character Animation and figure design made easy....and P6- The Premiere 3D Figure Design & Animation Solution. That is why I purchased poser. 1:) To make little videos. Learning level software most are told. 2:) Because I was known for Poser to have human characters already made, and you have to enhance the characters, textures, outfits...etc.. Now, for someone who didn't know about making animations, I come to figure out using Poser, it is darn fustrating. I was mislead by ads for example: 3D  character animation and figure design made easy, and great for beginners. I knew their was advanced programs, but at the time I didn't know what they were. So, poser was my beginning level of knowledge. Maya is the one of the leading roles for character animations, but I do not have a few thousand to spend. Maya is out of my luck,...way off my luck, unless I win the lottery which will maybe happen in my other lifetime if it happens. 2:) Yes, I can make 3D characters very realistic now, but if I were to make a little video, it will have to be on a flat square surface. I have yet to see large landscapes for example: Mountains, hills, land to compensate using backgrounds, to make scenes. I have purchased landscapes, but they are small. One hill there, and another over there. Then make a flat surface and grid the land with one texture, by tiling. It is hell. Today I made a render that took 9 hours. Yes, looked awesome, but without ground shadows later realizing at the end, wasted my day to fix it. I am happy to own poser now for some good reasons, but I am not happy that I am not able to do, like I want to do with it. Also, IK doesn't do that well in poser. People make these characters for poser, but do not make animation kits to go with em. So us buyers, have to make our own, and when using IK, you find out later, your character is sliding along with a walk. The walk cycle window doesn't fit all made characters, only the ones that come with Poser. That doesn't include walk cycle for the animals, that come with poser. The dinasours do not work in the walk cycles, so you have to make your own. And it is a pain, time consuming when a life has your time... Oh..I gtg..family...

Quote - As for animatoin, I agree wholeheartedly.  But if only animation support for Poser stuff was more ubiquitous!   BodyStudio is one approach - but an expensive one - and you still need to do the animation in Poser.  Vue appears to be the best bet - but I haven't had a chance to test that yet (Vue 6 I).  My solution is to let you do animation in the target application (Cinema 4D).  Now you don't have to fret about doing the animatoin in Poser.

Agreed, which is why i would love to see them start supporting proper open file formats like COLLADA or FBX. That alone will make it a lot easier to use poser alongside other apps for animation and rendering. Well 3 'reasons' left to go, so one can hope...

'Animation' is the only thing I’m looking for in Poser now. Although nice renders are good I really have no interest in the fancy render settings (I feel this side of Poser is pretty mature now). Poser 6 was a massive disappointment to me as the improvements were all render based. I occasionally use Poser professionally and when I think back to some of the work-a-rounds I had to do it was unbelievable – so much so I have no intention to repeat the process (it was a p5 cartoon character I was using). I desperately need Poser 7 to have moved on a light year in the animation department because I have a future project that could make use of an enhanced Poser. And for goodness sake e-frontier give us some well made (well rigged) traditional stylised characters – I’m sick of looking at insipid plastic people that have little use other than pouting.

The best Poser animation film: http://www.auroratrek.com/

It delivers, and was done in poser.

Proofing excactly the point that's being made about animations in Poser. Wihile the animation film is quite something to have been achieved with Poser, the movements look very unrealistic.

With all due respect, rigging and modeling are skills that you can learn. If you arent happy with the incredible value in storytelling that Poser gives you, then move on to a higher powered application. MAX, Maya, Lightwave, XSI, and Cinema 4D are all extremely capable packages. Just be ready to wait a (long)while before you are creating characters, textures, and lighting that rivals Poser "Out of the Box". For value it cant be beat. And it comes down to this: If you have no story, then great renders wont mean a thing animation wise. I watched Final Fantasy:Advent Children. The animation is nothing short of amazing, but the story, is hollow. It is time for people to complain about their own limitations. I mean Poser cant improve itself, but you can.

BTW Robert's Interposer for Cinema 4D is superb.

Well... you COULD use Naturalmotion's Endorphin and XSI 5. :/
You're asking for quite a lot, and unfortunately that lot can be done yourself through own modelling/Zbrushing/rigging/UVing/shader programming/animating.

You're paying for convineince and convergence of interfaces, not bleeding edge features.

Quote - The best Poser animation film: http://www.auroratrek.com/

It delivers, and was done in poser.

Proofing excactly the point that's being made about animations in Poser. Wihile the animation film is quite something to have been achieved with Poser, the movements look very unrealistic.

I've seen animation done on high end software that's unrealistic as well.  What's the point?

I'll be using P7: and I'll be enjoying it.  I'll be enjoying Lightwave 9 and Vue 6I, too.  Oh, yeah -- I'll even be using the DAZ Mil figures (and liking it).  gasp 

As for the unhappiness of the rest......I leave others to it.

I suspect that the vast majority of Poser users share similar feelings on the subject.

BTW - the default Judy sort of reminds me of a young Bette Davis.  Bette Davis never was one of my favorite actresses.  But Victoria in her various incarnations is one of my favorite Poser figures.  And I'll keep right on using her - until something better comes along.  Like V4.

I agree that the animation support in Poser is sub par. I think there are numerous reasons:

1. Poser has been through multiple owners, and none of them have been fabulously well-to-do as software houses go. They've had to be stingy with resources and they've put them elsewhere. That was their choice. Poser does have the walk designer. The idea behind this is kind of obvious: let the users create & share (sell?) their own content, so we don't have to pay to make it all ourselves. Unfortunately WD isn't up to the task... or the user base isn't. (Just joking!)
2. Creating a good animation app is REALLY REALLY HARD. Part of the difficulty (non-resizable windows aside) is mapping what goes on mathematically behind the scenes to an intuitive interface in the front. Poser gives you access to a lot of the guts you need to do animation - but nobody likes working with guts. Guts are messy. But for programmers they are easy - just put 'em out there and let the users struggle up the learning curve. This at least provides a powerful solution, even if it's one that's not easy to learn or convenient to use.
3. On the other hand, what would an absolutely awesome 3-D animation inteface look like? How would it work? I'd bet you could ask 20 people here and get 20 different answers. Partly this is not a tech problem, it's a creativity problem. It's all well and good to say "make it easier!" But the devil is in the details. HOW can it be made it easier? 3-D onion skinning? Physics-based bone structures with weight balancing? Integrated mocap? Nobody - not even the big boys - have really solved the 3-D animation interface usability problem yet. And the answers that they have come up with are either highly processor intensive (simulation), hardware intensive (mocap) or have a learning curve at least as steep as Poser's animation system.

I'd love to see a topic brainstorming on what an Uber-WalkDesigner replacement might look like (with proof-of-concept illustrations and public domain code samples!) May EF would see some good ideas & get inspired.

Quote - Poser recommends NON raytraced shadows, and quite right because they are jagged, So we use mapped shadows which NEVER line up with feet or ground contact points in Poser rendering.

Raytraced soft shadows are a viable option, y'know.

Or maybe you didn't ....

"Raytraced soft shadows are a viable option, y'know. Or maybe you didn't ...."

Little Dragon:

I have seen this mentioned, but at no place can I find out how to use soft shadows in Raytracing. Do you know of an available tutorial?

LMK

"Raytraced soft shadows are a viable option, y'know. Or maybe you didn't ...."

Little Dragon:

I have seen this mentioned, but at no place can I find out how to use soft shadows in Raytracing. Do you know of an available tutorial?

LMK

You can increase the Shadow Blur Radius in the light properties to get a soft edged ray-traced shadow.

Somehow it doesn't sound like ANY of you have gotten the latest CP newsletter?

I just think it looks better and better. ALSO for animators.

And all you people who bitch and mourn that Poser isn't Lightwave or 3DSMax or Maya or whatever... well.. if you can afford to cough up the money for one of those proggies, what are you waiting for then? Buy that and stfu. Some of us actually LIKE Poser. And personally I vastly prefer Poser's interface to something like Lightwave.

Quote - Somehow it doesn't sound like ANY of you have gotten the latest CP newsletter?

is there another one out today?

I just saw that reason #5 and it does sound like they've been paying attention to the forums. Layering animations individually and being able to reuse specific parts of animation certainly sounds like a big step forward especialy combined with the lip synching capabilities.

I wonder what the other 2 reasons will be to silence the critics after this and the multiple undo?

Quote - You can increase the Shadow Blur Radius in the light properties to get a soft edged ray-traced shadow.

I used soft raytraced shadows in this gallery image:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1272828

Observe how distant shadows are automatically blurrier than near ones.  This is particularly noticable on the refrigerator door.  For instance, the shadow of Owen's right hand and arm is sharper than the shadow of his head.

I like reason 5 as well.  In fact I think all the reasons have been great except the one about more content.  Poser 7 seems quite compelling - if it actually works. :)

Everyone has a different hot button.
When people's hot buttons have not been pressed they tend to post threads with "underwhelmed" in the title. I am impressed that EF are addressing many of the complaints so far. Excellent!

Before screaming hurrah, I will wait to see the quality. P5 sounded really good in California Dreaming too, but fingers crossed P7 might just deliver.

Well I think the demo they put up shows more promise than what they said the improvements were before the Poser 5 release

http://www.e-frontier.com/images/poser/lib/animlayers.html

It sort of looks like the timeline layers in Final Cut, Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Flash which would be a big help in moving around and reusing animations to fit what you wanted.

The hard part to figure out beforehenad is what kind of memory both RAM and VRAM it's going to take to render complex animations like that. What usually happens is, it'll act differently depending on your system configuration and some will have more problems than others with it

One very basic thing about the animation is will we be able to control the spline curves better? In Every other animatable app I use (After Effects & Lightwave) I can control the curve through the use of bezier handles. I can adjust the ease in and ease out as well as the overall shape of the curve very easily. I can have different the curves on the different axes - or just place a single keyframe on a single axes while leaving everything else alone. With Poser, I have to set new keyframes to control each of those things and it can get very confusing when there are a zillion keyframes. I'd also like to be able to hide the things I'm not animating so I can navigate up and down on the animation timeline much quicker and find things easier.

Quote - personally, I think the slogan is misleading:
"The premiere 3D Animation and Figure Design Solution"
Well that was my original point really....that Poser cannot get away with such poor animation tools with a title like that! And yet it does, presumably because its users have sheepishly got used to accepting this fact.

I never proposed that Poser should be perfect for its price, nor was I really suggestion infinite undo's literally, but certainly enough to make having them worthwhile, and that means a great deal more than 1.

A simple animation enhancement for instance would be a similar tool to the static symmetry tools, like left to right, swap left and right and so on. This would greatly help walking animations. Yes e-frontier, the body does often move symmetrically! Or perhaps they hadn't noticed.

Leonardis

 

Quote - I agree that the animation support in Poser is sub par. I think there are numerous reasons:
...snip

Creating a good animation app is REALLY REALLY HARD. Part of the difficulty (non-resizable windows aside) is mapping what goes on mathematically behind the scenes to an intuitive interface in the front. Poser gives you access to a lot of the guts you need to do animation - but nobody likes working with guts. Guts are messy. But for programmers they are easy - just put 'em out there and let the users struggle up the learning curve. This at least provides a powerful solution, even if it's one that's not easy to learn or convenient to use.

Quote - Yes, but that's a bit like proposing that Photoshop is acceptable written and presented in machine code, with the user having to write hex commands to increase brightness or contrast. The whole point of a usable programme, however modest, is that the user is presented with CONTROLS which transfer the usability to the customer, otherwise why bother. Software like this should provide a user interface that really IS intuitive, and that includes commands and macros for doing commonly used functions, which for instance the walk designer singularly fails to do.

It is in my view a myth that software has to be difficult to use in order to use in depth. A great example of usable software is the award winning Sibelius, which takes the drudgery out of scoring and allows the composer to get on with that skill. Before Sibelius (which is not by the way particularly expensive) composers were persuaded that no software could ever help them without learning the mechanics of software based notation, as demonstrated by scoring software prior to Sibelius's appearance. The key to Sibelius's success is the intelligence of the designers behind it, not its cost or price.

Leonardis