Kerkythea is free. We don't have to pay for it, but it isn't integrated with poser. My point is, the developer probably wouldn't mind licensing it to a company that wanted to use it.

Quote -
I've lost track of the idea we're talking about here, with regard to bringing Poser "up to par".

Well I didn't just mean the render engine, but that's a good point too. There are a thousand little things that Poser could stand to have fixed or updated, some things which are really dated and annoying.
Bear in mind I don't have Poser 8 yet, so some of those things may have been taken care of, but there are a few that I've gleaned from the forum that haven't been, so it leads me to believe probably a lot of it is still in there.
I can't think of too many examples off the top of my head, but the archaic color picker is one of them. Probably not a big deal to many, but it irritates the hell out of me, and always has.

But I'm not nitpicking Poser here, don't want to, and am tired of bashing it. For all its little irritations and limitations, I find Poser Pro to be an overall great product, the more I get to know it.

But back to rendering, yes, raytracing takes time, but there are som apps out there that just fly through it. I mean, seriously fly, even with GI. So that would be one of those things they could stand to improve on of course.

But you're the one who finally made me see the light; to finally appreciate why I don't and probably won't have my UberPoser any time soon, and I've accepted that.. kicking and screaming, as it were. ;-)

It is nice to know though that with the new python, there may very well be 3rd party plugins to deal with Poser's shortcomings, and I for one will be watching out for them

aah I see.... yup thats why they branched the development of Kerkythea. they now have a commercial version - Thea Render...

I don't like the color picker either, but you don't have to use it. You can use your OS picker. Maybe that one ain't so great either, but I like it better.

Alt-Click or Ctrl-Click on a color instead of a simple click.

Quote -

Alt-Click or Ctrl-Click on a color instead of a simple click.

Oh jeez, how long has that been in there? That's the main thing that's bothered me, is that that little teeny gradient picker opens first.
Thanks for the tip, I never would have thought to try that.

But yeah, the Windoze picker sucks. Please see if you can get them to build a new one. ;-)

That's a cool one.

Did you know you can pick from anything on the screen using the Poser color picker? You don't have to click on the stupid gradient it shows. You can keep a window open with any image, click and pick.You can sample anything - web page, images, other colors already showing in your render or in other material nodes. I do this all the time. When I want white, I click and point at something that's already white. That's the most common case. There's always a node around that has white in it.

It occurs to me that with the new P8 wxPython GUI, we can make a color picker that is always open, then you click and pick. Hmmm.

Quote -

Did you know you can pick from anything on the screen using the Poser color picker? You don't have to click on the stupid gradient it shows. You can keep a window open with any image, click and pick.You can sample anything - web page, images, other colors already showing in your render or in other material nodes. I do this all the time. When I want white, I click and point at something that's already white. That's the most common case. There's always a node around that has white in it.

No I didn't know that, actually. I'll have to try that. I knew about picking stuff on the screen in Poser but never even tried it on something else.
Once again, thank you, BB.

I think I should put that last line in my signature. ;-)

LOL

Quote - It occurs to me that with the new P8 wxPython GUI, we can make a color picker that is always open, then you click and pick. Hmmm.

While you;re at it, don't neglect the power of the direct input.
In that picker above, you can enter a value in R, hit TAB, and it will switch to G, enter a value, hit TAB, and it will switch to B. At any point you can hit ENTER or return and it simply takes you out. Same with the HSV and all the other input fields.
That also drives me crazy about the Windoze picker - you can't TAB from one input field to another.

Oops, never mind, I guess you can do that with the windows picker. doh.

Yes you can. I do it all the time. That's why I don't mind it - it's pretty easy to type in the values you want. I also make extensive use of saving a color in custom colors, so I can pick that again elsewhere.

Funny, I had it in my head it couldn't be done for some reason and all this time I've been clicking from one field to another. Go figure.

Please see sig line, as I'm getting tired of typing it. ;-)

Hey BB....!

Do you have any idea how well your library work  will behave on a RAIDed system? I'm starting to assemble the rack (and upgrade the current renderboxes; one is formatting its RAID 0 for an XP64 install....can't wait to see how fast -that- one boots to desktop...).  Anywho, I have the new graphics box built and a simple Vista 64 Ultimate install on one HDD. But with nothing installed, I'm considering adding another drive and striping my boot drive (as there will be no apps on C:, or stored data, for that matter, I'm not too worried about fault tolerance. I -might- 0+1 it, just because small drives are cheap-cheap, right now)....but I have heard from somewhat clueful folks that some graphics apps do not play nicely with some forms of RAID......only they had no specifics, and so far I haven't  found anything, either.

I seriously doubt that P8 itself will be on RAID, unless its mirroring for safety's sake. But if there are any potential gotcha's to be wary of in that regard........

Damn, in the time it took to type this the Athlon64 X2-3000 unit for the renderfarm formatted the last 54% of the RAID and is at 99% load. I couldn't even read the file names as they flashed by on the bottom bar.....

Quote - LOL

BB, master of all that is in the Poser manual or on the Quick Ref card. :-)

*"Stefan has explained to me that the issues are largely technical. In a nutshell, Firefly internal architecture limits what you can do (both from an efficiency standpoint as well as certain capabilities)."

*???... Is the internal architecture of FireFly written in stone? Is the Poser development team unable to, or forbidden to, alter that structure? If for some reason it is not possible or worth the effort to upgrade FireFly into a more capable render engine, then maybe your suggestion to get a new renderer should be heeded. ...Or perhaps they could turn you loose on FireFly's internal architecture. :)

lmk

I keep saying they need to get in on the VRay craze. The latest VRay now comes with real time GPU rendering. No doubt Mr. Cooper noticed that at SIGGRAPH. ;-)

I just got off the phone with SM. The big issues are it takes at least six months to integrate a new render engine, it has to work on Mac (scratch Kerkythea), and shaders would work completely differently and would need an entirely new shader editing GUI. I'm OK with all of that, especially if they would hire me to do all that enormous pile of work. Hehehe. Not likely.

what? Kerky works on the mac!

it's out for Windows, OSX and Linux.
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=select&id=2

Oh - well, hmm. You know, there's nothing stopping us from building an exporter to any renderer. Just have to come up with some scheme to transform the materials. Unfortunately, I have no time to work on that. I thought I'd heard about somebody else doing an exporter, maybe something to do with PoseRay?

yup Poseray exports to Kerky... the latest Beta has been working on that. tho there's limits on the textures - no procedural's

I use Kerky a lot with Sketchup.. so if poser could be brought in as well I'd love it.. I'm just no programmer :(

edit - hell I'd love Sketchup to poser as well..

does it matter if we have to export textures? it doesnt take so much time to upload every texture.
it woudl be great if i can animate in poser and then send this to a different render.

Quote -
does it matter if we have to export textures? it doesnt take so much time to upload every texture.
it woudl be great if i can animate in poser and then send this to a different render.

I think he was talking about the materials as a whole, not just textures. Like trying to find a way to more or less translate Poser nodes into other render engine nodes.
The current Poser exporters only transfer materials insofar as textures and simple shaders. For example, in Maya, they show up as simple Maya nodes with Phong shading and if you want to use the far more advanced Mental Ray nodes with the Mental Ray render engine, you have to manually set it all up.  Same with Lightwave, and I would assume the same goes for 3ds Max.

It would of course also depend on how open the SDK was for other software, and determine if it were possible at all or not.

why would i want to translate materials and nodes if the reason i am going in a different render is because i want better renders.

Quote -
why would i want to translate materials and nodes if the reason i am going in a different render is because i want better renders.

No, you misunderstood me. The Poser nodes would be translated to the closest similar node in the target render engine. Meaning, maybe one of Poser's "fake" SSS nodes could be automatically translated to a real Mental Ray SSS node with the texture already plugged into it.

There's no way the Poser nodes themselves could be transferred, but something similar in the target app could be used.
And then you'd just tweak it as necessary to make it better.

ok i understand this.
but it wouldnt take so long to build the shader from scratch in the new render.

just make it work in a different render and we all win.

Quote -

just make it work in a different render and we all win.

I think that's pretty much the idea. ;-)

But if you're not opposed to starting from scratch entirely, all the programs I know of will import OBJ at least, if not actual animation, and Poser has a real thorough MTL file export at least.

yeah i know about OBJ. but animation? 

Im very sad that all work with morph tool will give a crash and when
i make a morph with a magnet and delete the magnet..i have a crash too.

That makes me crazy here.

Anyone has a clue why i cant load alyson to poser 7 when i :

1. save in poser8 without any compression and pmd as a cr2
2. change number to 7
   Anything i have to do else ?
   Wanna do the morphs in Poser 7 now.

Greets Karth

Have you added the Poser 8 runtime to Poser 7? It will not find it automatically.

LMK

Sudden crashing while posing or morphing is usually fixed by updating video drivers. Poser 8 pushes the display hardware a lot harder than Poser 7 did, and exposes bugs in the display drivers that didn't used to matter. Many people have stopped the crashes simply by getting the latest driver for their display device.

If that doesn't help, you can try not using hardware accelerated preview - switch to SreeD mode, where all the preview drawing is done in Poser.

The reason you can't load Alyson is because she uses the new P8 rigging system and Poser 7 doesn't understand it.

Ah...thanks for the answer...very sad that i cant load in Alysong
But then i can stop finding answers and will only load in the objectfile ,if i cant work with Poser 8.
Yes.. i have update the graphiccard driver .
The other settings im not sure..have try so much the last days.
Will take a look.

Karth

I don't know if anyone else does animation, but at the bottom of my animation Palette, there is no Keyframe Scroll bar. I don't know if this is something with my computer or with Poser 8.
All my other Posers editions have it at the bottom. From 1-60 frames it doesn't matter. But my animations almost always run between 120-300 frames. Guesing wrong where it is makes it jump somewhere else in the keyframes, then you have to reguess where the scroll bar is again to find the last location.

I ask this is because I had some other problems that was not a poser promblem but my computer acting up. But the scroll bar never shows up under the animation Palette.

Slowhand..do you search that here ?
Then i have that.
And i can scroll like i want from 1 to 500.

 Karth

Don't go get a new graphics card just yet.

The problem could be a bug in Poser. SR1 is going to come out soon and it may start working. I know from looking at the bug tracking system they are working on random crash problems.

BB since you are following this thread and my question is generic in nature regarding the Library, I will post it here. (the other lib threads deal with problems and so forth and don't think this fits with any of them)

When you launch Poser 8, and it starts to populate the library and replace the ? marks with numbers as in populates the subfolders. Is there an order-sort order that it follows that determines which runtime gets populated first? Then in that runtime which sub-folders get populated next?

Thanks in advance for all you do.

The GUI and the Poser app server interact somewhat asynchronously and the server is multi-threaded. So any absolute concept of order is lost, because the messages flying back and forth get processed at a time when the info is available. For example, the GUI might ask the server to scan "foo" and also scan "bar" and usually the results would come back in that order. But if foo is a very full folder, and bar is close to empty, the scan for bar might complete first. So the GUI would get the results in a different order than it asked. If further deep scanning is required for bar (because you had it open before you exited) then scanning of those sub-folders would be requested as soon as the scan of the parent folder was returned to the GUI. Then, those subfolders themselves might have different sizes and different subsets open, etc. It gets complicated very fast.

So all I can tell you is the order in which the GUI asks for things.

First the GUI asks the server for the names of the categories. Nothing happens until it learns the category names. (Yes Poser only has 9 fixed categories, but the GUI can support any category system, perhaps even be used in other SM applications, so it wants to be told - nothing is hard coded.) Included in the response are category names (language translated, of course) the icons to use for them, etc. The category list defines a category order.

For each category (in order) the GUI sends the message scanCategory to the server. The responses can come back in random order, but usually don't, I think. For each category, the server produces a list of top-level containers, one per loaded runtime. These are listed in runtime library order, as defined in LibraryPrefs.xml. So basically the first pass ordering is Category/Library. The results of each scanCategory response are used to populate each of the nine library trees. (Yes there are nine trees, one per category, but you only ever see one at a time. An interesting idea for people with dual monitors is to show all nine at once on a giant display.)

As each scanCategory response is loaded into the GUI, it sweeps through the top level folders of it to see if any of those is supposed to be open. If it is, the GUI sends the message scanFolder to the server, passing the particular folder name. The response to that will populate the children of a folder, usually in alphabetical order. (If the server delivers scans out of order, the GUI sorts them anyway, but it processes them in the order delivered.)

Each of those calls to scanFolder sends a response to the GUI. This new list is examined to see if there are more folders in there that should be opened, because you had them open in the past. This process branches out like a nuclear reaction, scanning recursively as needed.

Quote -

yeah i know about OBJ. but animation? 

Well in theory you could export an OBJ file for each frame and render each frame out individually then composite them together. It's better to render an image sequence than an animation anyway.
Although that would be a whole lot of extra work, obviously.

Not that that would be much worse than what they have right now. The scene exporters will export the animation, but as far as I can tell there's no way to use the target app's superior controls to adjust it any, aside from the camera and lighting. That is, you can't get at the rigging in a figure, can't adjust joint movement. You have to do that in Poser and save out the changed version, then import that into your host app. Which of course, removes all the better surface data you might have created. So while you free yourself from Poser's render engine, you're still limited to using its rigging.

Karthaeuserlady

What you showed is the Animation Controls, I'm talking about the Animation Palette. What I have found is if I pull charatures onto the Doc Window with a new scene, the Keyframe scroll bar of the Animation Palette shows up. But, I am making full length movies. I have charactures all set up. when two people talk back and forth to each other. I save the first animation, and just add from the last frame on, and delete all the other frames before, and slide down, and add  the next charactures conversation to the next sceen.
 
If from day to day I close Poser8 and the next day open the last animation to add to it. this is where the problem Lies.

In doing it this way, I have no setup time, and everything is matched up with no glitches or bad body movement parts between the 2 scenes. This is important if you are making a contenuation from the same camera angle. I know you can use the memory dots, or the pose library. Which I do, but as a backup. I find nothing works faster or better than my method I mentioned.

The Animation Scroll bar is important to me, because like to see what the keyframes are doing. I correct different Keyframes to make smoother animations as needed. I can scroll as you mentioned, but if making different body movements, if you don't make adjustments to the keyframes beforehand, you can't control the body movements that you know will overshoot the last keyframe. This is just the way I work, and I like to have very persice control over detail placement and movement. 

If you can open a previous animation that you have made and you see the Animation Palette's Scroll bar shows up. Then the problem has to do with my computer. I'm sure my computer is very different than 90% of the people that work with poser, This is why I am curious before I report it as a bug with my computer system, or something that is happening with other computers.

I didn't mean to get into such a lengthy description, but this is the way I work, and this problem has never happened with Poser Pro. Even on my new computer system.

Can I run Both PoserPro7 and Poser 8 on my Pc at the same time?
I like my Poser Pro 64, but I have 12 gig of ram and I7quadcore
I ask Because most other versions overwrite the Poser Icon

Yes you can have both. I do the same.

Each installs to a different folder. And each has a unique icon.

I also have a lot of stuff in my Poser Pro runtime, and pointing Poser 8 at that as an external runtime works great. You don't have to re-install, or move any files. You will have some duplication, such as the primitives exist in both, but they're actually different, so it's handy to have both.

Thanks BB I am looking at getting it for the render times although I would really rather have PoserPro 8
Is there any allowable word on Poser Pro 8?

 I don´t know why SM picked that naming scheme, but it confuses people a lot.

The name of poser releases are

Poser 7
Poser Pro
Poser 8
Poser 2010

I would had gone with something like, Poser 7, Poser 7 Pro, Poser 8, Poser 8 Pro. Unless the codebase is changed drastically between versions, but that doesnt seem to be the case. To make it even more confusing, there was Poser 4 and then Poser ProPack. But that one was CuriousLab´s idea.

Poser Pro 2010, not Poser 2010.

The products are" Poser" and "Poser Pro" - add a version after that.

Quote - Thanks BB I am looking at getting it for the render times although I would really rather have PoserPro 8
Is there any allowable word on Poser Pro 8?

Allowable? No, I'm not allowed to say. The project is making progress, though. I'm on it.

Hey BB, while you are on it can you tell SM to make the render cache image folder not clash with other Poser installs like P8 and PoserPro do. I regularly use both and find it quite annoying that each version writes the render cache to the same place so that when you open one up after using the other version the previous renders are toast.
Actually, if you could get them to sneak that into SR3 for P8 that would be great! :)

Quote - Hey BB, while you are on it can you tell SM to make the render cache image folder not clash with other Poser installs like P8 and PoserPro do. I regularly use both and find it quite annoying that each version writes the render cache to the same place so that when you open one up after using the other version the previous renders are toast.
Actually, if you could get them to sneak that into SR3 for P8 that would be great! :)

Same Thang happens to me

Quote - Thanks BB I am looking at getting it for the render times although I would really rather have PoserPro 8
Is there any allowable word on Poser Pro 8?

poser8.smithmicro.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2009/12/07#poser_pro_2010_beta

Quote - Hey BB, while you are on it can you tell SM to make the render cache image folder not clash with other Poser installs like P8 and PoserPro do. I regularly use both and find it quite annoying that each version writes the render cache to the same place so that when you open one up after using the other version the previous renders are toast.
Actually, if you could get them to sneak that into SR3 for P8 that would be great! :)

I use Simidues Advanced render settings and I can write to any folder I want to, just an idea...