Quote - > Quote - However, all that hardware has to hew to common software APIs, which has been far more stable over time than you suspect...

I didn't even read the rest. I have to cry bullshit, because I am right in the middle of that bogus belief system right now.

I did type it wrong, but let me ask: 

The hardware is made by manufacturers, who either make it compatible to the OS(es), or they don't sell their product... true or false?

Quote - I've worked an extra 3 f'ing weeks on Poser 8, trying to make the UI mouse clicks and wheel events to work the same in PC and MAC. I'm programming in Adobe Flex/Flash, which means I'm not even dealing with the OS from different vendors - I'm dealing only with the Adobe standard UI interface API.

Err, - WTF? You're using ...that for building the UI? 

I will admit to not using the language specifically, but judging by their products these days Adobe is frickin' synonymous with bloat.

Using any product these days from Adobe is like watching a fat chick to do lead on Swan Lake, FFS... and they're making parts of Poser out of it!?

Quote - And if Smith Micro would just tell you Mac f'ers to go to hell, my life would be a lot simpler. I am busting my balls trying to making the God DAMN Macintosh work like it is supposed to. We're talking about simple things like Mouse Down, Mouse Up.

...my point stands (ab't Adobe being crap, that is. The other one sort of jumped the rails at this point because quite frankly I'm too busy trying to stifle a laugh to think straight right now. I promise I'm not laughing at you - I actually like and respect what you do. I am however laughing at whatever cosmic-crack-pipe-hit led to the decision to use Flex to build the frickin' UI...)

Quote - I've had a much easier time when I wrote my own GUI in assembly language directly to the hardware.

Considering what you're using, you still would...

Dude, I wish you luck.

I agree there are some serious things to give one pause before deciding to use Flex.

But there are some elements that have made that decision a winner, even taking into account some of the gotchas I've run into. For example, the Poser library now starts up with the same alacrity whether you have 2 megs or 200 gigs of content. I'm not hyperbolizing there. This is because AS3 is really well set up for asynchronous loading of content from a server.

In the new UI, I often have 40 or 50 things loading in the background with no hiccups whatsoever. Some of the testers who have huge runtimes (500 Gig) are pretty darn happy about how it works now. And you can find your content in seconds - seconds I tell you!

I also was able to allow the loading of any item in your runtime with just one click. Anywhere. I don't care how deep it is or how many runtimes you have, you can find and load an item with one mouse gesture.

Also, I have to say I that while I hate the occasional wierd behavior bugs in the Flex GUI components, all in all I was able to implement some pretty amazing visuals that look good, are very user friendly, support Japanzese and Korean and German and French without any headaches, and do their job very fast. I have a lot of experience with many different GUI libraries. When you net it all out, the Flex toolkit gave me the freedom to arrange content dynamically in a way that would have been 10 times more development work with most of the others kits. The only kit I think could have done an equally good job with the more esoteric visual stuff and all the dynamic background loading activity would be C# and .NET but that simply was not an option, unless we were willing to abandon the Mac users.

Quote - The hardware is made by manufacturers, who either make it compatible to the OS(es), or they don't sell their product... true or false?

True true!

But... we're in a situation where there are many components, many layers, interacting here. I don't want to completely describe the architecture, but I can say that there are 5 new pieces of the puzzle that have never been assembled in this way before. The system as a whole is not just Adobe, it is an amalgam of stuff (beyond just the OS) from Apple, Microsoft, and several open source projects, as well as the Adobe stuff. It's really a joy to have all this new power to build on the work of thousands of developers as part of the Poser solution.

But it's not without some system integration gotchas. If I were to go to Adobe and say "The mouse up event from outside my window is not reaching my Flex app on a Mac, but it does on a PC" they would say it is the fault of one of the other components. When I said earlier that I know my job, I meant that I understand (despite whatever gripes I vented) that it is my job as integrator to make this work. If there is a finger to point somewhere, then it's my job to find a specific thing that violates the spec and only then to ask the author to fix it. At the moment, it's not at all clear what exactly the problem is, but it is certainly my problem to figure it out first. I'm very confident that I'll find the cause and also I'll find a way to work around the integration problem.

I'm also pretty stoked about the kinds of things I'll be able to add to the system in the future.

You might wonder why I need a mouse up event from outside my library window.

The answer is drag and drop. Pretty cool feature - you can drag a material or material collection from the library into the pose window directly onto a prop or figure, without going into the material room.

Quote - Is Poser 8 going to have new animals?

For what's it's worth.... all I can tell you is that Poser 8 is one huge dinosaur then some desperately want to keep alive ;-) (Please don't tell them that dinos are extinct.)

There is only one thing I'm hoping for in Poser 8 and that's better memory management.

Quote - > Quote - Is Poser 8 going to have new animals?

For what's it's worth.... all I can tell you is that Poser 8 is one huge dinosaur then some desperately want to keep alive ;-) (Please don't tell them that dinos are extinct.)

IIRC, you were one of them once.  I don't understand why you have to rail on people for either liking or wanting to keep alive a program that they use.  I know you're trying to be funny, but not everyone thinks so.

IIRC, you were one of them once.  <<<

Some of us have very long memories. ;-)

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Is Poser 8 going to have new animals?

For what's it's worth.... all I can tell you is that Poser 8 is one huge dinosaur then some desperately want to keep alive ;-) (Please don't tell them that dinos are extinct.)

IIRC, you were one of them once.  I don't understand why you have to rail on people for either liking or wanting to keep alive a program that they use.  I know you're trying to be funny, but not everyone thinks so.

I'm still one of them....... Poser 2 through to Poser Pro and who knows, Poser 8 also?

That's awesome, and actually pretty supportive...but, like I said, you may have been trying to be funny, but SEVERAL people thought it was trolling. 

Like I said previously...seriously, this is a heated issue for literally no reason.  It's time to just relax, chill, and, heck, let's celebrate the fact that there's even GOING to be a version 8, right?  And, the fact that SOME things are being improved upon!  There are VERY few programs, if at all, have HUGE improvements on ever feature they have upon new release.  Usually, complete revamps take SEVERAL releases.  So, there's a whole lot of speculation on nothin', there's a lot of complaining about something that only people who've signed NDA's have seen (and they're not the ones complaining)...and it all seems kind of silly, you know? 
It's like...complaining that the Rolling Stones are going back into the studio to record a new album, some songs are going to be new, some are going to be revamps of old songs, and some are going to be cover songs....and then saying "well, they'd better do a DARN good revamp of 'Paint it Black', or they're not getting my money!!!"...when no one even mentioned 'Paint it Black'.  I dunno, maybe I'm reaching, but I was trying REALLY hard to find an anaolgy that even came close to fit.  A lot of the speculation is silly. 

Quote - > Quote - ... For example, the Poser library now starts up with the same alacrity whether you have 2 megs or 200 gigs of content. I'm not hyperbolizing there. This is because AS3 is really well set up for asynchronous loading of content from a server.

In the new UI, I often have 40 or 50 things loading in the background with no hiccups whatsoever. Some of the testers who have huge runtimes (500 Gig) are pretty darn happy about how it works now. And you can find your content in seconds - seconds I tell you!

I also was able to allow the loading of any item in your runtime with just one click. Anywhere. I don't care how deep it is or how many runtimes you have, you can find and load an item with one mouse gesture.

my jaw dropped wide open, and then suddenly I was choking....on this next bit

Quote - You might wonder why I need a mouse up event from outside my library window.

The answer is drag and drop. Pretty cool feature - you can drag a material or material collection from the library into the pose window directly onto a prop or figure, without going into the material room.

Some apps may have had features like this for ages, but it's very cool to think this is coming to Poser now, along with who knows what else. I didn't think I'd be interested in much other than materials and rendering stuff, but I find myself very curious again.

*"*Pretty cool feature - you can drag a material or material collection from the library into the pose window directly onto a prop or figure, without going into the material room"

Interesting. Daz Studio already has this feature (with poses too) and it's something I use a lot. Actually, in DS you can drag any content from a thumbnail into the scene to load it, but materials and poses are probably the most useful for this.

I'm itching to know if you can drag materials onto any figure/prop without already having it selected, but I don't know if you're able to answer that.

Anyway, hurrah for not having to constantly go to the material room! That was an immensely over-rated pastime, IMO.

mac

Attached Link: http://poser8.smithmicro.com/index.html

Quote - Don't see the poll results at SM's site so curious to see what "improvements" won at the polls

Just bumping this up as a way of refocusing the conversation

There was already a good chance that I would upgrade but what BB has said about the UI changes and effect on workflow, I can say its a done deal. I'm looking forward to seeing this now.

Quote - Not sure if this had been noted (since it was tackled and forgotten on the first page), but the link to the P8 site on SM works now.

Is the girl’s hair dynamic hair ? Does Poser 8 have better hair room ?

Is it usable ?
 
 

After a few hours of slowly reading through this thread, and looking from all angles, I'm going to say this...

Again, there is a lot of word-twisting and people taking things out of context.  From every angle.

Think about it this way...if I tell you that my husband brought dinner home from Taco Bell, and that my favorite thing there were the new(ish) Chicken Burritos, and that I was looking forward to it, would you then assume that I was only excited about the burritos? 

A lot of folks are frustrated that not a lot is being said.  Then, when it is said, in this case by a consultant/freelance agent to the company, he's jumped on for getting frustrated.  You can't have your cake and eat it, too.  Also, laughing at a person's joke, only to shove it back at them and tell them they're rude is....kind of confusing, at least to me. 

Anyway, I'm not going to point out wrong.  Everyone is wrong, everyone is right.  Yin and Yang.  What I am going to say is this:  EVERYONE needs to take a chill pill.  No one, so far, has been ACTUALLY trolling.  Maybe annoying slightly, yes, but that's not a TOS violation.  

I don't WANT to hand out violations.  I don't want to lock threads.  If that needs to happen, so be it, but it would be an absolute travesty if it had to happen here.  So, I pronounce that the rest of this day be CHILL OUT DAY.  If you feel yourself getting riled up over a forum post, take a deep breath, walk away from the computer, and click that red x in the top right hand corner when you get back.  Unless your response is going to be completely civil and non-snarktastic, it's not necessary.  We're getting tidbits of information.  Sorry if that's not enough for you guys, but that's what we're getting.  Not that I wouldn't enjoy his presence around here, but I don't blame folks like Steve Cooper for not jumping in gung-ho into threads like these.  For a guy trying to run anything, this thread itself would be a full-time job.  Or at least one or two full-time assistants. 

So, while snarkiness is sometimes awesome (you know, on your own blog or poking fun at me), can we put it on hold for a while?  Let's just chill, and maybe ask some REAL questions and learn some REAL things.

Jeni

Quote - > Quote - Don't see the poll results at SM's site so curious to see what "improvements" won at the polls

Just bumping this up as a way of refocusing the conversation

The only way to get the answer is to contact SmithMicro to see if they even published the poll results.  Chances are, they didn't, but it can't hurt to ask, right?

Is the Materials Library going to be available from the Pose room so you can drag and drop materials or will we still be going to the material room to access that library? Yeah, Probably can't answer that because of the NDA, but I hope we don't have to go to the material room just to access the materials libraries. That would be a huge benefit to me.

Materials are always visible now. :) Well not always - in the Setup room only figures are visible.

Have they implemented meta data into the library?

Quote - Materials are always visible now. :) Well not always - in the Setup room only figures are visible.

WOOT! That's great news! Thanks BB!

Quote - Materials are always visible now. :) Well not always - in the Setup room only figures are visible.

This is superb!

Can we use more than 3 megs of memory now?

i hope BB will show some renders. i hope noone will piss him off again.

 I assume you mean more then 3 gigs of memory. This is already possible with Poser Pro and Vista 64. Without an 64-bit OS there won't be more than 3 gigs of memory. 

"Materials are always visible now. :) Well not always - in the Setup room only figures are visible."

There seems to be some improvements, as per what BB is said.

I have confidence that the new version will be A-Okay, so I say, let's give it a chance.

JB

Quote - i hope BB will show some renders. i hope noone will piss him off again.

Hey, I look forward to that too, so count me in...

Quote -  I assume you mean more then 3 gigs of memory. This is already possible with Poser Pro and Vista 64. Without an 64-bit OS there won't be more than 3 gigs of memory. 

I stand corrected! Opps yes I ment gigs, however I am running PP and Windows 7 64 bit and it still only uses 3 gigs when rendering and I have 12 gigs and an I7 true quadcore, so if you have a secret please give it up!
 
I wan't the power! yes all the power........

Just checking ... are you using the Render in Background option?  Here's what the manual says ...

If your computer has a 64-Bit Operating System, Poser Pro will use its 64-Bit FireFly Render Engine to access as much memory as possible. To utilize the 64-Bit FireFly Render Engine, you must select Render in Background.

I think that's right, Deecey. I don't have 64-bit OS so I've never been able to try it with Pro. Of course, I've never needed it either, because I do little demo scenes with not a lot of content.

lol. Nice one DeeCeey, never knew that.

I finally have 64-bit but only 4GB, so I doubt I'll be able to tell much of a difference. LOL  And I also fall into that "demo scene" category most of the time.  It's rare that I build a scene that would need 12GB of RAM. In fact, I don't think I ever have!

Quote - Just checking ... are you using the Render in Background option?  Here's what the manual says ...

If your computer has a 64-Bit Operating System, Poser Pro will use its 64-Bit FireFly Render Engine to access as much memory as possible. To utilize the 64-Bit FireFly Render Engine, you must select Render in Background.

nope so I will try this one thanks a whole lot! :), also I use shaderworks advanced render script in PP from RDNA

Yeah, because I model my scenes can become a little bloated :tongue2:.
But I really noticed a big difference right away in how all of my 3d programs operated under x64 bit...much more stable.

That's my new pill push...going pharmaceutical on you. Take the x64 blue pill and be more stable! lol!

8-)

 Is that a poser 8 render or your work area? It looks like a photo!
Love esther

Oooooo......

P8 render. There is no IBL here, just one point light. Observe how the underside of the bowl, underside of the chips bag, and the back of the can are lit, even though the only light source is a point light. Observe also the interior of the bowl is brightly lit, even though the part we're looking at isn't facing the light at all.

No IBL. I need this in my life.

OMG, I need this in my life right now!

 It is a world apart!!!

Saving up now... dang-it - I wasn't gonna get it but... dang-it.

Wow! Such a simple example - speaks volumes. I'm in.
Thankyou for posting this bb.

Quote - Here is how that renders without any of the new features turned on, as you'd get from Poser 7.

Are these "new features" render settings, light settings (properties), or nodes added to the light "material" ?

I ask because i have seen some awesome stuff done with the current version of poser that requires node work that remains beyond my comprehension.

I'll be more impressed with the new feature if it doesn't take a Math PHD to figure out.

Yes, thank you, Bill. Poser is doing finally what it is meant to be doing with a point light. That's worth eating just rice for a month... heheheheh well it is, for me.

Geez, those are compelling images!

Glad you guys like it. These new features were very high on my wish list, and I think you can see why.

@Tyger_purr:

There are two new render settings (click, pulldown, click, done) and a new light setting (pull down, click, done). There are a couple quality settings, which by default produce a quick, low grade test render. I increased them to the maximum, 100.

The bag, bowl, and can are new props that come with P8. I did not touch them at all - just loaded and posed them.

The lamp also comes with P8. I changed the shaders, but you'll probably not believe what I'm going to tell you. The lamp had some fancy shaders that just aren't needed anymore. I ripped them out, and put a single Reflect node on the lamp. The bulb was trying very hard to look like a bulb, self lit and all with some Edge_Blends and other tricky stuff. I deleted all that, and just left an ordinary blank material there. The bulb area looks real because of the new light feature, and the fact that I put the point light inside the hood of the lamp.

The table is just a one-sided square with a wood image I downloaded from some free texture site - can't remember where.

So - totally unlike my usual work, there are no fancy materials, no light shader, nothing you usually see from me. Anybody could make this render.

Geez, Bill, take all the fun out it (making fancy shaders, that is)...

Edit: I know, I'd complain if they hung me with a new rope...

 Wow.