It is now a month that I am playing around with Poser. I work two years with CS2 (now 3) and I am able to get my pictures the way I want them to be.

I discover now that the developers of Poser were not filmers, moviemakers and certainly not professional photographers. Otherwise, they would have aranged the program more logical and better understandable. The togglewheels are not really that sensitive. But maybe I am wrong, I am still a newbee.

What annoys me greatly (an understatement) is that I am not able to lock attachments to a
character so that they remain in place whilst moving. Specifically 3rd parties attachments do have this problem.

The second thing that irritates me is the changing lights. Once I have made my set up, and I import another item/figure all the lightsettings change and destroy the careful set up of the scene.
There should be a way to lock the setting of lights whatever will happen.
Any photographer who arranges his setting, doesn't want any outside intrusion. When a light is set, it should stay there and then. It is the no 1 rule, either in filming  or photography.

I would like to say a big thank you for aal the creative people that are helping out newbee's with free stuff.
It is a great way to find out who produces relaible attachments and who not, keeping in mind that about 50% of the free stuff doesn't work and have to be deleted. Sometimes they cause  a crash and a few hours of work is destroyed.
On the other hand, there is fantastic quality of free stuff.

Yes, Poser is a religion, but has many churches.

there are props which load as props , to whatever position they were when saved , thats position in the scene , not relative to a figure . Then there are props which have been SMARTPROPPED to a figure . Those will load to the selected figure to the same place relative to the bodypart they were smartpropped to. So earrings to the head, watches to the hand , swords to the hand , machine gun maybe to the chest and so on .  If the smartpropped item is loaded to a different figure , or the same figure but which has been morphed then the position may not look correct because the parenting is to the body part center and NOT the skin surface .
Lights should not change unless you have changed them by loading a light set. Lights can of course load from a scene file (pz3) so if you bring a scene into another scene you do it via the import function from the file menu.  

Be careful of changing cameras , that can make it appear that lights change. 

I dont remember if lights can be embedded with props or figures to load automatically. The easy way is to load the item you ssupect into a new scene and then look at the scene contents . You can open figures (cr2) or prop(pp2) with a text editor (wordpad) to check what it contains .

Hi, if you want an object or prop or even a figure parented to something else, open the Hierarchy editor and drag the object/figure to the desired object or subgroup and it will be parented to that object. Another way is when the object you want to remain attached/positioned to another object is currently selected, choose the Object...Change Parent from the menubar at top and select the new parent. Sometimes props have no specific parent which is then the universe and you would need to select a particular parent to retain a spacial relationship you have set up.
When selecting lights, if you choose the 'double checkmark' the currently selected library item will be added the scene lights. If you click the 'single checkmark'. then the selected library item will replace that of the scene. You can also add addtional lights without disturbing your setup  by choosing again from the top menubar selecting 'Object....Create Light....'. This will add an additional light without moving or erasing any lights already present. Also, it's good working practice to save often, just usually a matter of seconds on most scene files. You should also create a folder for personal lightsets which is really simple to do and then save favorite lightsets there. If something happens inadvertently during a working session, it's simply a matter of one click to regain your special lightset. Hope this helps....

Regards....

Thanks gentlemen, ladies for this reply. Yeah,I am a newbee. And yes, I discovered the changes atributed to different camerapositions.  To find out everything is a time consuming process. Grace to your replies I don't have to find out just by experimenting. I can produce now a reasonable quality character, not really super but satisfying. You can really grow old with the quality of this forum.

Thanks again.

A couple of tips you may find handy for dealing with lights:

Change all to spots, (Global lights WILL reposition themselves depending on the scale and location of objects in your scene) and parent the spots to an invisible  dummy figure, then memorize the lights and their parent.

After positioning  each light, this allows you to then to adjust the entire lighting setup - all at once - by rotating, translating or scaling the dummy parent,  This avoids the PITA of getting everything JUST RIGHT,  then deciding to turn  your model's head to the side and having to readjust everything over again.

Being parented to a dummy figure also allows you to save the figure to your library along with all the lights.

Ok, I start to get the point. The crazy thing is that the program changes colours too! At wiil. One
of the reasons that the developers have no idea what's going on in a studio. Revolving and rotating lights are just a nightmare. They could have kept the thing simple by just installing a scene and
when the lights are set up some sort of a lock code, may be a toggle wheel for light intensity.
That stupid little dial in Poser even doen't keep in place.
The strange thing is that photographers must adapt to the crazies of the programmers rather than
that the programmers are capable to do what's useful in a studio.
The same problemI envision in CS2-3 although toa lesser extend.

What remains a mystery to me are the hidden adjustment factors.
I am experimenting with the Victoria 4.2 character and on the way of  playing around I stumbled on a set of complete bodymorph dials/toggle wheels. Including the gen's, breasts, even the size of the nipples. When I tried to recall,  I couldn't find the forementioned adjustments.

What further amazes me is that the Victoria and Jessi character are so functional whilst the later developement of Sydney is practically made of iron and not changeable. I f you try to inflate her basic dimesions the body and legs are disfiguring.
No, Smith Micro is definately not an add on to Poser.
I sincerely hope that there will be separate suppliers of basic high quality characters. Therefore
the one thread about this topic interests me greatly.

Hi and welcome!

Learning Poser can be frustrating, particularly as different merchants package things in different ways; why a readme file is ever positioned inside a runtime folder defeats me!

But there is help at hand; if you ave Poser 7, you can shortcut the learning process by buying Denise Tyler's 'Practical Poser 7'. It's a great way of learning quickly.

BTW, Poser Lighting and renderer are unnecesarily difficult , weird and erratic, and the latter is way too resource hungry  IMHO. Many of the better pics you see in the Gallery have been lit and rendered in a different app.

Have fun!

I don't anyone to annoy with my frustrations. But thanks for your supporting reply. I have still not found something that superceeds Poser, with a not too steep learning curve. I checked on Maya,
ok that will keep me 10 years busy and I am too old for that. Rhino, about the same.
DS has an even more irritating user interface as Poser. So I stay with Poser, whatever the
consequences.

A special  word to the developer of CLARIS! Fix the bug!!!! The character is exactly what I need for
my legends. I will buy it straight away!!!

I would love to show the characters I have already created but can't according to the apparent nudity. My Phaedra character, is made out of Jessi (Poser 6) and 3rd party components.
She walks straight out of Greek mythology.

poser kicks a22 don't give up on it it is super useful
in the dials you can change sensitivity by right clicking on the dial there's a nice little space for that.
you can change light types on the right tab of the light and get spots like a studio, and use the point at feature from the menu if you like
also why not set up the studio and parent all of the lights cameras etc to the floor of the studio and save the whole thing as a prop then you get a nice fast load
really there is nothing like this program out there.  be patient you will like it

Hoi dorcmcgork,

I am just learning what "parenting" is, about the dials I did not know and will certainly follow your advise. Parenting the lightset to the floor is a splendid idea. Would never had thought about that
since I suppress all on screen information.
Thaknks for your most welcome advise.

Quote -

What further amazes me is that the Victoria and Jessi character are so functional whilst the later developement of Sydney is practically made of iron and not changeable. I f you try to inflate her basic dimesions the body and legs are disfiguring.
No, Smith Micro is definately not an add on to Poser.
I sincerely hope that there will be separate suppliers of basic high quality characters. Therefore
the one thread about this topic interests me greatly.

Actually I find Sydney far easier to use compared to Jessi, and Sydney G2 was not a Smith Micro creation FYI.

There are a variety of characters you can use in Poser, try some out, check out the galleries.  Granted for females it tends to be DAZ based, although I do use CP characters as well, especially the g2 males.

Lighting in P6 was definitely different, always seemed darker than it rendered as, but you'll get used to it :-)

@3-Darena - You are right and I was wrong in the issue of Sidney. Meanwhile I discovered how
to manipulate the character. Day after day I find new female morphs, those which work are great,
like Sara, - Farah makes a beautiful mature lady, "Star Quality" is a beautiful asset. There are also
many that do not work at all, might be caused by what? (Aeronna, Julianne,)  and also a few that
causes an immediate bug of which you can find more in this forum (Windows failure report no disk)

One of the biggest ptoblems is the hair. Only very few hairsets work correctly, the best of all:
Kozaburo - that one gives me the least problems. Most of all the "universal" hairsets fail more often than once to open, some causing an immediate crash.
Maybe I am a little bit careless and should read the "Read me's" first.
For the opening of 3rd party attachments, I use the (un)zip button in the content section.
Maybe I should not do that.
Certainly I have to learn is how to administrate all the props, characters and last but not least  my own creations.

Day after day I learn more and I certainly come to admire the overwhelming creativity around
the international audience that plays around with Poser.
One day I hope,  I should be capable to add my own characters to the freebee section.