Hello all! My name is Lee from Hawaii and I am fairly new to the community.  I've been looking around here for ohhhh a week now, and have been  over the beautiful art that graces Renderosity.

My friend had poser and on her computer and I got to play with it for about 2 weeks (approx 2 years..maybe 3 years ago) told myself when I got my computer outta storage, I would make that my first purchase:biggrin:. Sad to say with all the beautiful art that I've seen, I am almost embarrased to attempt to try it . Well I got poser, just haven't installed it..then when I mustard up the guts to do so, I got a message telling me that I don't have enough disc space  typical eh? :glare: I had a whole 100 MB remaining on my drive :rolleyes: Kids got this Ipod and went to town :unsure:

So with that said, I hope to get to know many of you in the years to come. 
Thank you to wheatpenny for allowing me to post an intro.  I didn't want to make my first post me yelling my head off like some nut, screaming for help.:woot:

So any link for this newbie to read that would be helpful? or please point me to poser for dummies :biggrin:

Welcome! And if you are going to play with Poser..you best go buy yourself another large capacity HDD :laugh:

Welcome to the mad house!
Hope you have a big wallet, you'll need it [LOL], just kidding!!

Welcome and don't be afraid to ask for help...I hate to say how long I've been here and I still ask and still get great answers.

Welcome to your new addiction ;o)

Welcome!!! :)

I compiled information that is beneficial to a new user, here it is:

A picture to show you the file structure of a Poser Runtime can be found here:

http://www.daz3d.com/support/faq/index.php?id=94

Unfortunately the above link no longer works. Daz seems to have removed it. I have contacted them and have requested that they put it back, but I haven't heard back from them as yet.

Basically, what it boils down to in a nutshell:

If you are looking for a Character or a piece of clothing/shoes, in Poser you will find them in libraries/character

If you are looking for hair, you will find them in either library/character/hair OR library/hair

If you are looking for character texture addons, hair textures, clothing textures, you will find them in library/poses. Sometimes on the rare occasion, a merchant will package their textures so that they go into the "Camera" folder (.cm2 files). If that is the case then you can either apply them from there, or do what I do and change the file extension to .pz2

If you are looking for props, they are located in library/props

Sometimes you will find clothing and hair or shoes in library/props too, depending on whether the item is actually created and saved as a figure, or it was created and saved as a prop.

Figure items are "conformed" or "parented"

Props are parented.

If you are just starting, it's best to get started on the right foot. DO NOT just install files into the runtime! That will only lead to frustration because you won't be able to find anything, and not all files are packaged equally and land up all over the place.

Here is a link to a tutorial on using multiple runtimes.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=9060&start=0

Another tip is to never just unzip or install anything directly to your runtime. Always unzip or install to a separate folder. Then browse through the folder to have a look at the structure of where things are going and make sure that it's in "proper runtime structure" so that when you move it to the runtime, they get into the proper folders.

Once you get your files installed, the next thing you want to do is to start making things :)

Here are some great newbie tutorials that will get you through the bare basics. They are for Poser 5, but it is still the same in newer versions:

http://trekkiegrrrl.dk/tut1.htm

http://www.poserguide.nimprodaction.com/issues/issue2/cover.htm

http://www.poserguide.nimprodaction.com/issues/issue3/cover.htm

http://www.poserguide.nimprodaction.com/

http://www.canary3d.com/tutorial/3d-intro.htm

http://www.ebonshire.net/tut-posb/index.php

http://www.cooltuna.com/poser/poser-tutorials.html

Dr. Geep Studios ( Basic to Advanced Tutorials. Periodically offers free classes for Poser)

http://www.anniescorner.net/posertuts/GettingStartedinPoser5.htm

If you don't have the Daz  V3 or the V4 figure, you should pick one or both. I'd personally suggest that you go with the V3 one as it's been around for years and there is a TON of freebies around for her, as well as a TON of stuff in the various Poser stores.  It will be a couple of years before V4 catches up with clothing content and stuff  and  V3 stuff won't work on V4 because they are different figures. There are work arounds to getting clothing from a figure to fit another figure. I've included information on that further down.  which is a popular figure, you should get it. 

Victoria 3

3D Models Pack  Free from Daz at Download.com

Victoria 4

But if you want to change the look of her face and body, or use any of the available character addon packages, you need to buy the head and body morphs.

The V3 head and body morphs are here:

http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=3008

There is also "Michael 3".  He is available free at the link above at download.com.  Again, like Vicky, you need the head and body morphs to change the shape of his head and body. Those can be found here:

http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=3009

If you have both figures, you can get both of their head and body morphs in one package, here:

http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=3010

NOTE:  You can use the textures from the character addon packages without having the head/body morphs. 

If you want to change the look of the head/body and have the head/body morphs, do the following:

Install the head and body morphs. 

Locate the morphs you want to use in the "Poses" folder.

Find the set of morphs you want to inject IE:  Full Body, Full Head.... or just certain parts. 

Left  click the picture

Click the Single Checkmark at the bottom of the page.

Go to your Parameter Dials and start turning dials.  (make sure that you have the part of the body you want to adjust as the active one IE:  Morphing the ears, make sure you have the had selected.

Also, you can find many, many free morphs and textures for Vicky, and Aiko, and some even for David and Michael.  So you don't have to turn any dials if you don't want to.  Here are a couple links to get you started.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?user_id=55140

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?user_id=178490

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/index.php?user_id=105158

Using ready made character addons is pretty easy.   You need to have the figure and it's head and body morph packages installed.

Load up the figure IE: Vicky

Go to the Poses folder, and instead of looking for your morphs from the packages, look for th character you want to use.  Left click the image that has INJ, click the SINGLE checkmark at the bottom and the morphs for that character's look is injected into your figure.  No dial turning necessary.  Of course if you want to tweak the settings you can, but that's not mandatory.

Next locate the textures (if the package has some). They will be usually in the same library menu as your INJ that you used.   Left click the image for the texture and use the SINGLE checkmark to apply it.  If you don't like that texture, apply another one overtop. 

You can even use a texture from another package.  IE: Morphs from package A  and textures from package C.  Or morphs from packag A, texture from package C, eyes from package D, lips from package E.  the combinations are endless :)  If the packages have their head morphs seprate from the body ones, you can mix and match morphs too. IE: body morphs from package A with head morph from package D.  That allows for even more versatility.

There are lots of sites out there that has free V3 character addons, and some that have for Aiko, Michael and even David.

Hair, clothing and textures are all figure/item specific, which means:

Michael 3.0 needs hair and clothing and textures made for Michael 3.0
Victoria 4.0 needs hair and clothing and textures made for Victoria 4.0
Victoria 3.0 needs hair and clothing and textures made for Victoria 3.0
Victoria 2.0 needs hair and clothing and textures made for Victoria 2.0
Aiko needs hair and clothing and textures made for her.

Like figures, a texture made for one hair style can only be used on that hair style.

Clothing is also specific when it comes to textures. A texture for a pair of pants, won't fit all pants... just the pants that it was made to fit. Same with all clothing items.

Sometimes you can manage to  clothing item to fit another figure by tweaking of dials and increasing or decreasing the scale percent, but that doesn't always work. Sometimes a clothing item for Victoria 2 will fit Victoria 3, but their joints are different so posing a figure wearing clothing not made for it specifically will be hard.

Some figures can share items more easily than others, here is a link that will help sort that out:
http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2682279

There are 3 types of clothing:

Dynamic:  This is clothing that you use inside the Cloth room. It takes longer to work with and there is a bit of a learning curve, but it's not too bad, but the results are more appealing in that the clothing actually looks more natural instead of "posed and stiff".

Confroming- Non Morphing:  This is clothing that you conform to a figure. The clothing is made to fit the base figure.  If you change the shape of the figure you will also have to refit the clothing, which isn't always easy if there aren't any corresponding body morphs in the clothing.  Plus posing a character in positions where they are not nearly upright is difficult.  But many prefer this type of clothing over dynamic.

Conforming-Morphing: This is the same as conforming-non morphing, only there are morph dials that you can turn that have corresponding body morphs for easier fitting.  This is the preferred type of conforming clothing because it's easier to fit.

Using a clothing item on a figure that it is meant to be used on, after you have added morphs and adjusted the shape of the body can be problematic because the clothes are made for the default figure shape and not the new morphed up shape. So the clothing no longer fits and you get parts of the body showing through the clothing after you add morphs and change the shape of the body.

There are programs that can help fit clothing from one figure to another, or even from the same figure to one that has been "morphed up" using their morph packages.

The Tailor, which can be bought here:
http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=677

Wardrobe Wizard (I use this one and it's great). It can be purchased from PhilC's site here:
http://www.philc.net/WardrobeWizard.htm

Clothes Converter, which can be bought here:
http://www.daz3d.com/shop.php?op=itemdetails&item=3069&cat=131

Things like hair can be used across all figures just by tweaking the scaling and trans dials and then parenting the hair to the figure.

Poses are something else that can be used across most human-like figures with just a bit of tweaking to dig out a hand, or fix a shoulder.

These are all things I learned along the way and found to be valuable, so I try to pass them along because I know how frustrated I was when I first got Poser.  Hopefully you will find the information helpful.

bookmarked
  - well done Acadia!

Hi wildessence :)

Hi, Lee and Happy 4th...Welcome to the most wonderful place in the world....Poser land....

Acadia
 Thank you for the list!!!  There are ALWAYS more and more out there to see and wonderful artists just offering their awesome things for free...there are also awesome sales, as well.

This 4th of July sale here is wonderful!!!

Great list! I'm going to go over it myself...you can never stop learning.  

geoegress Paris Hilton served what the law said she should serve for what she did, getting so tired of hearing about her. Her claim to fame was a video of her and her boyfriend and then the media took it and rolled with it. I don't even think she or the other girl are pretty and neither have any class no matter what their background. Sorry about the rant but their are more interesting things to talk about. What does this have to do with Poser? Nothing...but he brought it up with that inane comment so I'm adding my inane comment....lol

WOW! thank you all for the warm welcomes & warnings LMAO!

Acadia, many thousand thanks to you for your helpful links! I am forever greatful! With the useful beginners guide, the thread title should change to "newbies start here" LOL you have brought everything I read at random to light! Even the simplest thing like "V3" when I kept reading that, I was searching to see what V3 was LOL.

Whew I got a long road ahead of me eh?

well, don't worry, you don't have to learn everything at once. I've been using Poser for 5 years, and I finally created my first light tonight..;) Hang around, and remember, there are no stupid questions.

Quote - I finally created my first light tonight..;)

Woot!!!! Congrats!!!!

hi there and welcome!!! this community have always been very helpful and no questions are ever considered dumb or stupid so feel free to ask. 

G'day and welcome to many sleepless but enjoyable nights.... like I said to Moses, "Hey man, everybody has to be somewhere".  ask question, post images..... welcome.... now, you are one of us... one of us... :-D

Welcome, Poser takes sometime to learn but the effort is worth it :D

Welcome aboard!
In here, you have to be screaming, or a nut, or both and you fit right in, so pull up a chair, join in and relax :)

Thank you all once again for your warm welcomes =) I have been going through my computer to delete anything and everything I can to make the program fit LOL this is all the room I have left

So I've been busy burning songs onto CDs as well as pictures LMAO! I think it's easier to just buy a new comp eh?

Yeah, I have 40 GB in one "Runtime" and I have 6 runtimes! Total storage for Poser, content, saves and renders....

Are you sitting down?

475 GB Thats GIGABYTES. That's basically half a terabyte.

Get the biggest HD you can cram into that box.

OMMMMMMMMMMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!! LMFAO! ok I am scared! the more I want this, the more I see $$$$$$ cha-chings going up in a transparency mist in the air LOL.  ok ok 1 job for bills and the other for poser LOL

whenever i want to know something the first thing i do is search the forum, because usually someone else has asked it, and Acadia has answered it in the past. welcome, love esther

Don't panic!!!  I started in Poser in Spring of 2004 and had a 40 gig hard drive, and used a 40 gig hard drive for Poser until this past March when my computer died and found it was just as cheap to buy a new one as it was to repair my really old one which would have needed practically all new components to fix.

What I did to survive with Poser and a 40 gig hard drive for 3 years was to use "External Multiple Runtimes".  Those are runtimes that sit outside of the main Poser folder.

I have a runtime folder for each figure's characters, each figure's clothing, each holiday theme, each theme etc.  This allowed me to burn some of the runtimes that I didn't use all of the time to CD (I didn't have a DVD burner).  Burning off content that I didn't use on a daily basis allowed me to free up much space.

Some runtimes that I have are:

Victoria 3 Character Addons (includes the actual figure, and her maps and morphs)
Victoria 3 Clothing
Michael 3 Character Addons (includes the actual figure and his maps and morphs)
Michael 3 Clothing
SP3 Character Addons (as with victoria and michael)
SP3 Clothing
David Character Addons (as with victoria and michael)
David Clothing
Plants
Vehicles
Props
Lights
Hair
Poses
Animals
Christmas
Halloween
Mermaids
Faeries&Angels

I have many more because I find that the more you separate things into category, the easier it is to find stuff when you need it.  Now, while I used all of the content in the above list, there was some content that I didn't need to have on my computer all of the time because I didn't use it often, so I burned the following Runtimes to CD (animals, christmas, halloween,  SP3 runtimes, and David runtimes.)  If I needed something out of those I would put it on my hard drive temporarily and then delete it again when I was finished my project.

For awhile I used a 20 gig external hard drive but it was failing and I lost my files more often than I even care to think about so I stopped using it for my runtimes.

When you download content, download it to a set folder on your hard drive and then burn it off to CD as soon as you can. That too will free up space because once you have a file in your runtime, you don't need to keep the zip on your hard drive, but at the same time you don't want to delete it either in case you need that file again in the future. So burn them to CD.

Also, use a program like CC Cleaner (free on the net) to delete cookies and temporary file that aren't always deleted when you close your browser..

Also, lower the amount of space you allow to your trashcan. I found by reducing the size it gave me extra space to work with on my hard drive.

I would really recommend getting an external hard drive, even if it's only 20 gigs in size. Just that bit will help and you can keep all of your runtimes on it.  Just make sure it's a reliable one. The one I had was used and tempermental.

I also used Poser file compression and compressed all of my files in my runtime folders. Compressing is like zipping and makes the file size a whole lot smaller.  IMPORTANT  I learned though that if you are going to zip the files after they are compressed, to not compress certain  files first.  Zip certain files in their uncompressed state (.cr2, pp2, and .pz2 files).  Those are the ones I had problems unzipping if they were compressed when I zipped them. Now it might have been something on my end with my CD burner, but a "not enough data to inflate" message when trying to unzip something is not a good thing to have.  So now when I zip files I make sure that those particular files are uncompressed and since I've done that I haven't had  a problem.

Quote - Thank you all once again for your warm welcomes =) I have been going through my computer to delete anything and everything I can to make the program fit LOL this is all the room I have left

So I've been busy burning songs onto CDs as well as pictures LMAO! I think it's easier to just buy a new comp eh?