Quote - What I'm considering here, Peng, is if FaST works as RD is intending, then Poser content moved into FaST would most likely adopt an internal runtime structure that would be optimized for FaST. If that were the case, then dynamics would be the province of the FaST modules, not Poser's. If E-on and SM can get the SDK issues between Poser and Vue hammered out once and for all, great. As it stands now, I'm leaning more and more towards untextured or minimally textured Poser exports with same being done with SkinVue. What I'm -hoping- is that the FaST project provides more modern dynamics and strand based hair for animating, and an animation suite that includes some of the goodies we've been asking for for years. If it can do that and export it in a poser-readable format (or a format close enough to Poser's that those external proggies can read it), I'd likely retire Poser as my figure animation app (or if Modo gets better animation controls, hair and cloth, and the beta Poser import app that Opera mentioned works as hoped, then it would be Modo....with lots of nudges to get it talking to Vue Infinite as well). There isn't a whole hell of a lot left to do regarding Poser and single pose figures (except better lighting). Animation is the growth area, the one that needs the most attention. Oh, and you forgot the lonely bone off to the side that sends the import app into apoplexy in the dirty little secrets list.... :P

My plan is to support Posers original runtime structure and file format, however FAST will also have it's own native file formats that you can convert to should you decide at some point to replace Poser entirely.

The reason for this is that Posers file format does not support some of the features I'd like to include - so the FAST specification will have some things in it's file format that Poser file format just wouldn't understand.

However I plan to make it "backward" compatible with Poser's runtime structure so that you can still run Poser and FAST side by side, should you so choose.  Vue compatibility, however, might be a bit rougher.

If view understands a file format that is well documented, like collada, that will help.  However after reading throught the above postings I see something else I hadn't considered, how do you get view to switch from the preview textures to the full textures when it comes time to render?

In essence what you would need to do is export from FAST, import into vue, do what you need to do with vue and then export the new information back to FAST again and allow FAST to do the rendering.

Either that or perhaps an external utility, one that rewrites the references in the FAST exported file from the preview textures to the full textures, but again you'd be looking at having to save the VUE file into a file format that could be understood by the utility, run the utility, then reload into vue to make this work, assuming Vue doesn't have some of internal scripting language that would allow you to switch textures on the fly - I don't own a copy of Vue so I'll have to see what I can come up with, but again not something that has a huge priority at least for the intial release.

Eventually I'd like FAST to evolve into an entire set of tools not just for still renders but for animations as well, tools that allow you to sync an audio layer and automate a characters facial movements, for example.    The final goal will be to make it so you can setup an animation quickly and easily, render it (in background, over a network, or even to a cluster of machines if you so desire), add in any other portions of an audio layer you'd like, sync it to the video, and output the final video in standard formats like mpeg and possibly even .swf or other formats for web or game programming venues.

A lot of the external tools that are now available, like software to alter your voice, are things I'd like ot make as add on modules for FAST, so that it becomes more or less the only tool you need to do such animations.

I'd also at some point like to integrate a lot of the "gimp" code into fast, giving you the ability to composite and edit still pictures, do things like comic book pages quickly and easily, output them to either picture format, html or even PDF if you desire.  And at some point I'd really love to give fast the abiity for you to texture 3d items in 3d - painting on them directly so you can see exactly what your doing quickly and easily.

Ok, now granted a lot of these capabilities are going to be much further down the road than the initial development, and all will be available as "plug in" modules so if it's not a tool you need or want you don't need to take up drive space for it.  But these are just a few of the ideas I have in mind for further development of FAST, once it's past it's initial release phase.

All in all I know it's a pretty ambitious project, but doable - a lot of these features already exist in other open source programs, it's just a matter of coding something with a decent interface and putting it all together in one suite of tools that are user friendly and designed to work with one another, so hopefully at some point the days of importing one file format to a program so you can do this feature and then exporting to another to do that feature will be a thing of the past.

No gaurantees, of course, but that is the eventual goal I'd like to accomplish with FAST.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...