I think I posted this in the wrong place before, so I'll ask anybody here.... Just found a problem I'm having in P6 and P7 with being able to parent props (hair, clothes, etc.) to figures. This just started happening within the last week. Could the program files somehow have been corrupted? I can go in and open saved PZ3 files that use characters with parented props, and have no problems.

Right now I can't parent hair or anything else and get it to stick. What's up with that?

Hair should parent to Head , and so forth. The heirarchy editor should show the relationship properly.

Quote - Hair should parent to Head , and so forth. The heirarchy editor should show the relationship properly.

Hi there,

It's showing everything it's supposed to be showing. It just ain't working anymore. I have tried everything. I made some model poses using the same figures and props that are stored on the program. The stored PPZ files work, the new ones don't.

I'm clueless as to why this one feature stopped behaving the way it's meant to work. If anyone out there has run into this problem before please let me know. I've almost given up trying to get some animation going.

What happens if you save the scene, and load it as a new file ?  

Its odd if its happening in P6 and P7 on the same machine , two corrupt programs with the same corruption is wierd.

Quote - I have tried everything.

Have you brought up the Hierarchy Editor and looked? Is the Hair parented to the head?

When you say you tried everything....

Quote - If anyone out there has run into this problem before please let me know. I've almost given up trying to get some animation going.

I have. Been there. All of a sudden, teeth and hair go independent, and you're looking at "Dawn of the Dead 2". It wasn't until someone suggested having a look in the hierarchy editor and checking out where the hair is placed... btw, which hair are you using? Is it a figure or a prop?

Quote - > Quote - I have tried everything.

Have you brought up the Hierarchy Editor and looked? Is the Hair parented to the head?

 
Yep, that's another strange thing..... the hair (or other prop) that is parented to the figure, which would be the head if I'm working the hair prop, doesn't show up as being parented to anything. It's like this: Vic4 loaded, give her some dynamic hair or just a hair prop (not talking about hair figures right now), parent it to the head by setting the parent thru the Hierarchy Editor, hit 'OK', then try a pose. Ooops, the hair slipped off! When I go back and look, it doesn't show up being parented. Even if I parent the hair to the head, hit 'OK', exit the editor, then go back and look. It's not showing up. I tried to parent a vase to a simple box. Did a 30 frame animation to move the box in a strtaight line. The vase stayed where it was. 

This is something that just started occurring in P6. I got P7 to hold onto some Koz hair for V3 and ran a BVH pose file. Nothing fell off that wasn't meant to drop. So P7 was doing it, and now looks OK so far. I keep P6 for other uses and would like to see it up and going.

Just as a let-you-know note, I've been searching all over the web for any reference to this glitch.

Thanks for responding.

JP
 
edit - - - I'm using both kinds of hair (figures and props). Some do fine, such as Grace Lion Hair and Sassy Hair. Allura Hair (DAZ) isn't behaving well at all. I tried using the head, the figure, body, chest, and everything else to use as a parent. No joy.

i don't know if this is the same or a similar problem.....

i am generating clipart for another program. i make a base character and use a script to generate a new scene file and render for  a set of poses added to the base character scene. it has been working well until recently.

i experienced this with v42 with juni hair and i believe aiko3 with xinxin hair. some prop hair seems to get parented by itself, but i manually parented the hair to the head to be sure. i used poses from different sources. when i looked at the renders, the hair was missing in some cases and not others.

examining the scene files, i found the parenting to be correct but when i looked at the parameter dials, i found the hair had  offsets. when i zeroed them, the hair returned to position. ???  i am adding a zeroing function to my script to adjust but something seems to be different about some poses.

i hope this information is related to the mystery you are experiencing....

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - I have tried everything.

Have you brought up the Hierarchy Editor and looked? Is the Hair parented to the head?

 
Yep, that's another strange thing..... the hair (or other prop) that is parented to the figure, which would be the head if I'm working the hair prop, doesn't show up as being parented to anything. It's like this: Vic4 loaded, give her some dynamic hair or just a hair prop (not talking about hair figures right now), parent it to the head by setting the parent thru the Hierarchy Editor, hit 'OK', then try a pose. Ooops, the hair slipped off! When I go back and look, it doesn't show up being parented. Even if I parent the hair to the head, hit 'OK', exit the editor, then go back and look. It's not showing up. I tried to parent a vase to a simple box. Did a 30 frame animation to move the box in a strtaight line. The vase stayed where it was. 

This is something that just started occurring in P6. I got P7 to hold onto some Koz hair for V3 and ran a BVH pose file. Nothing fell off that wasn't meant to drop. So P7 was doing it, and now looks OK so far. I keep P6 for other uses and would like to see it up and going.

Just as a let-you-know note, I've been searching all over the web for any reference to this glitch.

Thanks for responding.

JP
 
edit - - - I'm using both kinds of hair (figures and props). Some do fine, such as Grace Lion Hair and Sassy Hair. Allura Hair (DAZ) isn't behaving well at all. I tried using the head, the figure, body, chest, and everything else to use as a parent. No joy.

Ok, I know this is going to sound really, really strange but I have a possible solution for you.  I'm assuming your running Poser under some manner of windows.  If so, run check disk on and then defrag your hard drive.

I know that sounds really weird, but here's the deal.  Poser is a serious memory pig - it gobbles up more memory than applications with 10 times it's memory requirements should.  As a result Poser makes very heavy use of Windows "virtual memory", which in truth is really little more than a big swap file that is written out to your harddisk.

If this file becomes corrupted it can cause some really strange things to happen inside of Poser when it runs.  So first try closing all your applications and schedule a disk check for whatever partition you run poser on, I'm guessing it's probably C drive.  Reboot your machine and allow chkdsk to do it's thing.

This can take a fair amount of time, especially if you have a big drive.  But once that's done defragement the hard drive, start Poser again and see if that doesn't do the trick.

Quote - i don't know if this is the same or a similar problem.....

examining the scene files, i found the parenting to be correct but when i looked at the parameter dials, i found the hair had  offsets. when i zeroed them, the hair returned to position. ???  i am adding a zeroing function to my script to adjust but something seems to be different about some poses.

i hope this information is related to the mystery you are experiencing....

Yep, I noticed the same thing, although not with every hair prop I was testing. Thanks for the info, Dennis.

Ok, I know this is going to sound really, really strange but I have a possible solution for you.  I'm assuming your running Poser under some manner of windows.  If so, run check disk on and then defrag your hard drive.

I know that sounds really weird, but here's the deal.  Poser is a serious memory pig - it gobbles up more memory than applications with 10 times it's memory requirements should.  As a result Poser makes very heavy use of Windows "virtual memory", which in truth is really little more than a big swap file that is written out to your harddisk.

If this file becomes corrupted it can cause some really strange things to happen inside of Poser when it runs.  So first try closing all your applications and schedule a disk check for whatever partition you run poser on, I'm guessing it's probably C drive.  Reboot your machine and allow chkdsk to do it's thing.

This can take a fair amount of time, especially if you have a big drive.  But once that's done defragement the hard drive, start Poser again and see if that doesn't do the trick.

You got THAT right! But I went full toot, did a disc check, defrag, virus scan, spybot and adware scan. I'm not paranoid, but something was killing me on this one program. Whatever it was, it seems to have cured itself partially in both P6 and P7. I still can't figure out the cause, which is my main concern now. I applied a BVH to V3 with some wild moves, using dynamic hair, and it all stayed in place! OK, one-for-one, so far.

Now if the 'Drop Figure to Floor' was a function built into the keyframe editor ....

Thanks a bunch for the replies from all whom responded.

JP

Quote -

You got THAT right! But I went full toot, did a disc check, defrag, virus scan, spybot and adware scan. I'm not paranoid, but something was killing me on this one program. Whatever it was, it seems to have cured itself partially in both P6 and P7. I still can't figure out the cause, which is my main concern now. I applied a BVH to V3 with some wild moves, using dynamic hair, and it all stayed in place! OK, one-for-one, so far.

Now if the 'Drop Figure to Floor' was a function built into the keyframe editor ....

Thanks a bunch for the replies from all whom responded.

JP

Glad your problem is fixed - I know it's not the first thing anyone would think to do, but strangely enough whenever I have stability problems or strange things showing up like this in Poser I've found a disk check followed by a defrag tends to fix the problem.  Weird, but effective :)

The cause, as near as I can tell, is crosslinked files or a heavily fragmented Windows virtual memory swap file.   Poser relies heavily on this swap file, because it is such a huge memory hog.  No matter how much ram you seem to have in your system, Poser always wants about 10 times more than that to do pretty much everything.

So if you get something crosslinked or jinked up in your virtual memory swap file, or it simply gets too fragemented to be read quickly enough, Poser starts to get - well, hinky to use the standard professional terminology of us programmer types.

In short the major contributing factor to problems like this are generally the fact that Posers memory management sucks - bad.   Again, apologies for the overwhelming use of technical terms in the explanation. :)

renderdog2000:

that's a really good tip. despite your negative comments about our favorite program, thank you.

i haven't defragged in a while and will give it a try.

Lol - well, my apologies if you've taken anything I've said about Poser as "negative", the truth is I use Poser a great deal and I really like the application.

I do have some problems with the direction in which Smith Micro has decided to proceed with Poser development, personally I think there on the wrong track, but since I don't own any stock and I doubt they'd listen to me anyway not much point in getting into that discussion yet again here.

As to Poser itself, it's a really wonderful program that has brought me a great deal of enjoyment, but it does have some issues, and memory management is one of the biggest among them.  But I guess when it comes to things like this I tend to think like a programmer, if something in my code is causing problems I want to know, because I just want to get it fixed.  If nobody ever says anything then I don't know where the problems are and I can't fix em. 

I don't take it personally, and I don't assume that most other professional developers would either.  We get paid to code.  Dunno, maybe I spent too many years beta testing - I just don't consider bringing issues like that to light as a bad thing.

But rest assured I do really like and use Poser, even though at the moment I am at the beginning stages of working on an open source replacement for it.  Again this has more to do with what I feel are major problems that are going to arise with future development rather than any personal, deep seated grudge against the current incarnation of Poser.

So I hope that little tip works for you, it seems to do wonders for most people who are experiencing strange problems with Poser running under Windows (any version), and it's such an oddball fix - it's not something I think that is documented anywhere else to my knowledge, so I share it whenever I can.

i was just joking...

to tell the truth i really hate the interface and even made my own windows interface that talks to poser via tcp and doesn't go to sleep when poser is rendering. it makes finding content easier and has the commands i use in plain view. it even has a kill button in case poser acts up. sometimes i just push it to get even.

i was curious about what types of programs you create?

Well, the last few years I've been working with mostly C++ and Java, though mostly C++ - I've worked on a pretty wide variety of projects over the years, most of which were commercial of course, and I've even dabbled a bit with PHP and AJAX though I don't really enjoy web design as much as i do "pure" coding.  In my spare time I've done a bit in Python, just little timesavers for Poser mostly.

The project I'm starting now was actually born out of that, like you I created a tcp server in python that would allow me to call any poser method that python could access from inside poser and I was in the process of creating an API for C++ - my goal was to be able to tie in some good open source rendering engines, replace Posers godawful library system with something more usable and implement a few other features that I'd really like to have when I realized that maybe I was on the wrong track.

After SM announced it's new pricing scheme and release Poser Pro I got the distinct impression that their plans for Poser and the features I wanted to see in new Poser releases were widely diverged, and the future didn't look that bright.

So I gave some serious thought to the app I was developing and after the poking around I did on sourceforge it occurred to me that my best bet was probably just to go ahead and start working on an open source app that would replace Poser, rather than trying to work around limitations the current code has by using an external app.

A lot of what I want to do is already out there in one open source project or another, so most of hte groundwork has already been laid out.  There are a ton of API's available, and provided I can get another developer or two interested in the pre-alpha stages I think this thing really has a chance to take off.

Blender is doing great despite the fact that it's user interface could probably best be described as "cryptic" if you prefer the kind version, or "downright hostile" if you prefer something closer ot my true feelings on the subject.

Probably the hardest part of this whole project is going to be getting it to read Poser and Daz Studio's file formats natively so any Poser or Daz Studio content will work in this new app.  After that there are so many great C++ libraries out there that handle most of what you need in a 3d app it's not even funny, so really it's just a matter of getting a good UI going and start plugging in features.

Anything I find unclear in the docs for any particular API I've got plenty of other open source projects to peek at the source code for, once I figure out how they did it that should easily clear up any confusing portions of any API I happen to be working with at the moment.

So all in all I think the project is off to a good start, already getting a lot of great suggestions for features to implement and with any luck I can get at least one or two developers to sign on pre-alpha and if so we could probably have something in the alpha stages within 6 months or so.

renderdog2000:

sounds like a cool project to me.

i am not a poser artist. i am using it to make content for a graphics program for kids i've developed. the quality of poser renders is good enough for my purpose. the main reasons i am using it is because it makes pretty nice png's which i need and the fact that it can be programmed. i am generating pz3's from content and rendering in 14 rotations so that i end up with something like 3d in a program that's useable by regular people. believing that it was programmable in the sense that we think, was not true. only through help from forum members have i been able to succeed as far as i have because of the near lack of and incorrect documentation on poserpython and it has taken lots of time and even trial and error. saying that poser is programmable as a sales point is like saying that you can program the computer in your car. yes, it's possible but i consider that it was false advertising since they don't really support it.

i really am not fond of python at all after being spoiled by real coherent languages and good documentation. however i am now able to do most of what i want. there is lot's of content for poser but there are major problems and i am now able to fix most of them with batch processing. i have 5000 base files or a variety of characters and props up from 1000 in december so, i'm picking up speed. with shadows and camera angles and rotations, i end up with 56 png files for each pz3 base file so i now have 250,000+ files at 7.9gb. i am amazed at that actually.

i'll be watching for your new program and wish you great success...

Quote - renderdog2000:

sounds like a cool project to me.

i am not a poser artist. i am using it to make content for a graphics program for kids i've developed. the quality of poser renders is good enough for my purpose. the main reasons i am using it is because it makes pretty nice png's which i need and the fact that it can be programmed. i am generating pz3's from content and rendering in 14 rotations so that i end up with something like 3d in a program that's useable by regular people. believing that it was programmable in the sense that we think, was not true. only through help from forum members have i been able to succeed as far as i have because of the near lack of and incorrect documentation on poserpython and it has taken lots of time and even trial and error. saying that poser is programmable as a sales point is like saying that you can program the computer in your car. yes, it's possible but i consider that it was false advertising since they don't really support it.

i really am not fond of python at all after being spoiled by real coherent languages and good documentation. however i am now able to do most of what i want. there is lot's of content for poser but there are major problems and i am now able to fix most of them with batch processing. i have 5000 base files or a variety of characters and props up from 1000 in december so, i'm picking up speed. with shadows and camera angles and rotations, i end up with 56 png files for each pz3 base file so i now have 250,000+ files at 7.9gb. i am amazed at that actually.

i'll be watching for your new program and wish you great success...

Lol - personally I'm not much of a python fan either - that forced identing thing drives me crazy.  Guess I'm just too old school, if you can't edit your code in a simple text editor then something is wrong.

But since it was the only way to access Poser's internal info and methods, I read through the manual and coded the server for it.  Made a few other little time saver scripts while I was at it, but can't say as I'm a huge fan.

C++ is probably my favorite language, gives me almost all the power of assembly with out all the headaches.  Java's a real breeze to code in and the multiplatform thing is nice, but Java does have some limitations I'm not too wild about.

As to the app I'm developing, my thinking is to have a TCP/IP server already built in, rather than embedding python or any other scripting language.  I'll work up a couple of API's for Python, Java, and C++ and a bit of documentation for anybody wanting to use any other programming language to interface with the app, and that way people can build there own external apps to interface in a language of there preference and always have the latest code and add on libraries at there disposal, no limitations on what libraries are chosen for the embedded script language and such.

I'll make it so the server can be turned off of course, but it will actually serve more than one purpose, the rendering engine will be network aware as well.  I've got a pretty good feeling about this project, I think the biggest hurdle really is going to be the poser file format, the documentation out there for it isn't great and a lot of sections of it still have a lot of references that say "I don't really know what this parameter does but.."  Lol

That's going to be a fun time - Lol