I know that is a bit of an open questions, but I was trying to be concise in the title :)

What feature have you dreamed up that would make your life much easier.

For me it would be a new clothing system that took the best of conforming and dynamic.  Or a hair system that made hair look like errrrrr hair :)  Even a scissors feature in the hair room would make it much more usefull.

John.

Get rid of the old rotation system and, therefore, gimbal lock ;o). The 3D world's been past that for years. I speak only for Poser here...I don't use D|S.

Laurie

Quote - Get rid of the old rotation system and, therefore, gimbal lock ;o). The 3D world's been past that for years. I speak only for Poser here...I don't use D|S.

Laurie

just to ba able to navigate on the mouse like I do in every other package would be good :)

John

     An image array node, to replace the lost function of the movie node in 64bit FireFly.

     The problem is that the AVIs generally available for use as animated textures use a 32bit codec;  without a corresponding 64bit video codec, Poser's movie node can't read the AVI.  I have not succeeded in re-saving AVIs in 64bit;  none of my programs offer the option as far as I can tell.

     My suggestion was to add a modified image node -the image array node- which has a frame/image number input and which will read a series of pics with numeric suffixes.
     For example, you put a folder of sixty pics in your texture folder.  The pics would be named Lightning001, Lightning002, Lightning003, etc.   During an animation, Poser would read the image which corresponds to the frame number input.  The node should have a loop checkbox so that in frame 61, FireFly will read Lightning001 again, if desired.

     Of course, it would be icing on the cake if the image array node could read PNG with alpha.  :D

Quote -      An image array node, to replace the lost function of the movie node in 64bit FireFly.

     The problem is that the AVIs generally available for use as animated textures use a 32bit codec;  without a corresponding 64bit video codec, Poser's movie node can't read the AVI.  I have not succeeded in re-saving AVIs in 64bit;  none of my programs offer the option as far as I can tell.

     My suggestion was to add a modified image node -the image array node- which has a frame/image number input and which will read a series of pics with numeric suffixes.
     For example, you put a folder of sixty pics in your texture folder.  The pics would be named Lightning001, Lightning002, Lightning003, etc.   During an animation, Poser would read the image which corresponds to the frame number input.  The node should have a loop checkbox so that in frame 61, FireFly will read Lightning001 again, if desired.

     Of course, it would be icing on the cake if the image array node could read PNG with alpha.  :D

Sounds like an idea :) though my mind is screaming at the memory 60 odd images would gobble up :)

I wish I could get rid of footsliding.I don't mean phyton workaround tool,but an animation tool that have a foot / floor detection , preventing from sliding or from going through the floor. Poser' s IK is not the best solution.

To add a three-in-one gizmo for posing the arms and legs, etc, and to use counters instead of dials, and a right click to zero on all the parameters.
dph

Poser:

Every new release seems slower to respond to user input, especially through the parameter dials, making them virtually useless in may instances. Higher end, far more system resource draining 3D modeling and rendering programs don't suffer from this fault when making adjustments. Of course, the dial system is practically unique to Poser and a feature I love when applying figure morphs, so I wouldn't want to see it abandoned.

Get rid of Firefly. It's too quirky and unpredictable.

The hair room has never fulfilled its fantastic potential. Compare the results it delivers to what can be achieved in similar programs.

Appoint PhilC Poser development Czar with a fat salary and absolute authority. Within a year, Poser sales will triple.

My first thought was a "Make Art" button, but that of course was added In Poser 8. 

I'd like caustics.

Quote - ...my mind is screaming at the memory 60 odd images would gobble up :)

Comparable to the 60-frame AVI, assuming you use JPGs with a modicum of compression.
~  Animation costs Kilobytes  ~  seachnasaigh

Quote - My first thought was a "Make Art" button, but that of course was added In Poser 8. 

For those who missed it:

A fair few things, like mouse-based navigation - seems ironic that I can zoom with the mouse-wheel in a free app like Blender and yet have to use the gizmo in Poser... even Poser 8! - but most of the stuff is in the material room.
Caustics, a variety of colour-correction methods with GC as the standard (but not the only method), true Fresnel and most importantly, a User-Defined material-making node, where you can embed a whole bunch of stuff in one node.

Oh, and a pony. Always wanted a pony... :biggrin:

Quote - Get rid of Firefly.

Yeah, and lights, and cameras, and materials, and stuff like that. Too quirky and unpredictable.
Hell... just get rid of Poser.

Oh sorry, something got right up my nose..... I'm okay now.

Quote - Get rid of the old rotation system and, therefore, gimbal lock ;o). The 3D world's been past that for years. I speak only for Poser here...I don't use D|S.

Laurie

Alas! This is where I part ways with you Laurie! The Rotation Ball is why I LOVE Poser, Bryce and Cararra's GUI. It's old home and comfy shoes for me. I don't like how DS rotates or 3D Studio or TrueSpace or Zbrush. Never has felt natural to me at all. Here's an idea though! Give people a CHOICE between both movement systems and let them choose for themselves.

Scissors in the Hair Room! Now there's a concept! How about a comb?

Quote -      An image array node, to replace the lost function of the movie node in 64bit FireFly.

I'd prefer someone get on the tails of those Video Codec creators like Divx and get them to make 64 bit versions! I wasn't aware that you couldn't use any AVI in 64 bit because of the codec it was rendered in but I'm finding a lot of things I can't do in 64 bit mode with Poser 2010 Pro that make me back down to the 32 bit version. Most of them having to do with video codecs.

Quote - > Quote - Get rid of Firefly.

Yeah, and lights, and cameras, and materials, and stuff like that. Too quirky and unpredictable.
Hell... just get rid of Poser.

Oh sorry, something got right up my nose..... I'm okay now.

Quoted cuz you made me laugh!

In a way there's a comb in the hair room. That's what the Style thing does. And to some degree it's a scissor, too because you decide how far you'll pull the hair out. And Dynamic hair looks nice in Poser 8's Firefly.

The three-in-one gizmo David wants.. isn't that the Direct Manipulation tool that has been there at least since Poser 7?  

I'll add a vote for caustics and a user-definable node. And GC included in non-pro versions.

Pulling hair to lengthen unfortunately doesn't Push it back in. Scissors would allow you to shorten length errors without having to start over. As for the style thing? It just doesn't work as a comb. For one reason, the hair doesn't collide against the skull as you push it in any direction with this tool so it doesn't "Lay" right.  I guess with a comb I'd like to see collision detection in the hair room so that you can style the hair without it going and dissappearing inside the head.

I suppose I should have said "replace Fireflly" rather than "get rid of Firefly" to make my intention clearer, but I didn't think that would be necessary. Silly, stupid me.
Something similar to Mental Ray would be great. and It comes packaged with some 3D apps. Vray is great too, but it's outrageously expensive.

I'd like something similar to the Wings navigation system for the pose room.  Seems like Caustics and built in GC would be good to have, too. 

I think SSS would probably be of the most immediate use to the majority of poser users. Of course ideal would be an extensive fastskin style SSS node, but i'm not sure how much they'd be able to copy that, so perhaps something more along the lines of what 3delight has could be enough.

Better animation controls (which could be folded into the gizmo's request).

Soft body dynamics, which is kind of the first step to having things like muscle armatures under the skin for a more realistic figure animation. 

Quote -> Quote -      An image array node, to replace the lost function of the movie node in 64bit FireFly.

I'd prefer someone get on the tails of those Video Codec creators like Divx and get them to make 64 bit versions!/quote]

      Specifically, you would need a 64bit codec which corresponds to the (32bit) codec in which the AVI was compressed.  Else, you would need to have a video editor which offers re-saving the video in a 64bit codec.
     I, too, would like to have the movie node usable in 64bit, but that's not likely to happen soon.
      An image array node could be up and running for the next Poser Pro version.
      Something is better than nothing.

A pose, face, hand camera that is as fast as the main or aux camera.
Changing the bitmap node in material room that it opens to the directory where the currently selected bitmap is stored instead of to the last used directory.

Get rid of camera control widgets and use mouse and keyboard to pan, zoom, rotate, etc.

Add manipulation widgets (rotate, translate, scale) with the ability to select multiple actors at once.

Improve skinning, rigging and animation support.

Add C++ API (to Poser). Some plug-ins may require the performance and integration that current Python API simply doesn't offer. That would help to address my points above by the way and points raised by other posters in this thread.

Poser 8 and Pro 2010 changed the UI to wxWidgets, and provide a full API to that in Python. This means that Python add-ons can completely take over all mouse and keyboard event handling. It is now theoretically possible to write your own handler for preview window mouse gestures and keyboard events and do whatever you want it to do. Not saying it is easy, just saying that a new API already exists.

Whoever wants to give that a go - get going.

I love these "what's missing" threads, because we find out things that we think are not there, but actually are there.

1.  It's not a total package.  You can't do traditional modeling (like subdividing) or uvmapping on it.  You can't directly paint on an object (cause it would be really cool if you could create a mat in the mat room and then paint the result on as needed).

2.  Doesn't come with enough content (which makes 1 even worse). So you can't make clothes and you are stuck with the primitives for everything else.

3.  It doesn't go very far to teach you how to get a good at something, you really need to do a lot of searching on the internet to find out how to make a material, or how to make a figure, or how to write one of those thingies (forget the name, JCM perhaps, they let you control a lot of things with one dial).  I mean the first time I went into the mat room, I didn't know what half the stuff was for (still don't), or how to use any of it well (still don't).

4.  I like to have a cake and eat it too.  Cake is good. 

I don't know if I want poser to be a modeler too....too much stuff, too little functionality to that much stuff...lol.

Laurie

Quote - I don't know if I want poser to be a modeler too....too much stuff, too little functionality to that much stuff...lol.

Maybe there could be  a bridge to Wings or Blender; that way they wouldn't have to develop one from scratch..

Quote - I don't know if I want poser to be a modeler too....too much stuff, too little functionality to that much stuff...lol.

Laurie

I agree... Cararra is a modeller of sorts, and it leaves a lot to be desired in that regards, and also with respect to stability (not sure if it's cause and effect)...

Quote - > Quote - I don't know if I want poser to be a modeler too....too much stuff, too little functionality to that much stuff...lol.

Maybe there could be  a bridge to Wings or Blender; that way they wouldn't have to develop one from scratch..

By "bridge" you mean? I model in Blender and bring that into Poser a lot... pretty straightforward, except for morphs. Maybe that's what you meant?

Quote - Poser 8 and Pro 2010 changed the UI to wxWidgets, and provide a full API to that in Python. This means that Python add-ons can completely take over all mouse and keyboard event handling. It is now theoretically possible to write your own handler for preview window mouse gestures and keyboard events and do whatever you want it to do. Not saying it is easy, just saying that a new API already exists.

Whoever wants to give that a go - get going.

Wish my programming "skills" were up to that - learning OOP and Python but I'm decades away from writing anything useful on that level. As you know. :biggrin:

Quote - Poser 8 and Pro 2010 changed the UI to wxWidgets, and provide a full API to that in Python. This means that Python add-ons can completely take over all mouse and keyboard event handling. It is now theoretically possible to write your own handler for preview window mouse gestures and keyboard events and do whatever you want it to do. Not saying it is easy, just saying that a new API already exists.

Whoever wants to give that a go - get going.

Interesting.  Any takers?

Would be nice to have Poser work more like Wings that way since, after having been in Wings for a couple hours and switching over to Poser, I keep trying to still use Wing's controls anyway...lol. Programming ;o).

Laurie

Quote - Would be nice to have Poser work more like Wings that way since, after having been in Wings for a couple hours and switching over to Poser, I keep trying to still use Wing's controls anyway...lol. Programming ;o).

Laurie

I do exactly the same thing, except I would have been Blenderised. And since so much in Blender is hot-key stuff, there's no way I could expect Poser to have a similar hot-key set.

I thought of something else: faster hair renders.  I tried doing an image earlier and the hair took forever to render.

Dynamic hair or transmapped?

Transmapped.  Turning it off in raytracing is good for a quick test, but not for a final render.

True... and I think there's still a lot of good transmapped hair out there...

Quote - Get rid of camera control widgets and use mouse and keyboard to pan, zoom, rotate, etc.

 
You can do that already.
Space+left mouse = pan
Ctrl+Space+left mouse = zoom
Alt+left moue = rotate

'frame selected' would sure be helpful when working with big scenes..camera navigation in Poser is a chore at the best of times

Quote - Poser 8 and Pro 2010 changed the UI to wxWidgets, and provide a full API to that in Python. This means that Python add-ons can completely take over all mouse and keyboard event handling.

 
The problem here is that it's really just event handling for the mouse. The mouse cursor cannot be captured. That means the cursor will move across the screen even if you'd actually like it to stay in place (like if you click one of the camera controls and then rotate the camera while keeping the mouse button pressed). So the cursor will sooner or later hit a screen boundary it cannot pass. So if one would code the camera controls using wxPython it'd be like this: the user clicks the controls, starts dragging to the left till the cursor hits the left screen border. Then the user has to release the mouse button and move the mouse all the way back to the camera control where he started "dragging"... So you better keep your Python controls far away from the screen borders ;-)
This is due to the wxPython implementation following the Apple UI guide (and sucks ;-)).

And now for the freemercial:
Tools for posing multiple actors with Poser 8/Pro 2010 in my free stuff ;-)

how about a manual that is actually useful?

and hair that can be manipulated by other objects such as a torus around the hair for a ponytail.

Years ago, someone suggested a posing “mannequin,” a physical figure that you could hook up to your computer and pose with the Poser figure mirroring the mannequin. I doubt you could sell enough of them to make it cost effective but it would be very cool.

Intelligent, aware figures that could interact with their environment and perform simple scripted commands – walk, sit in a chair, shake hands, pick up an object etc. They would be aware of their own physical characteristics so that a 6 foot tall figure would bend when trying to go through a 5 foot tall opening. I read an article about the game Assassin’s Creed and they are doing some amazing things with physics, crowd interaction etc. in gaming.

Dynamic level of detail, where figures further from the camera are automatically replaced by lower poly meshes.
 

Dizzi, have you tried  wxWindow::WarpPointer(), as in the sample code here?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/293163/how-do-i-limit-mouse-pointer-movement-in-wxwidgets

That was me, and I was only semi-serious. Here it is again...

Quote - Dizzi, have you tried  wxWindow::WarpPointer(), as in the sample code here?

Yes, thanks, but as WarpPointer is said to not work on the Mac, I stopped looking into that as I'd have had to the find out how to hide the pointer, too (it's just jumping around too much otherwise ;-)).

*"I was only semi-serious." *

Ah, but it was a seriously cool idea - Barbie MoCap.

 I may be dreaming up things and mixing in old threads ect.. but I have a feeling that somehting like the mannikin actually exists by now, I'm pretty sure I saw an article about it somewhere. 

Again, I MAY be dreaming. But I honestly don't think so.

As for subdividing, there's already a python script that'll subdivide your model, and Poser's renderer does so on at rendertime with the Smooth Polygons that is a micro polygon subdivision ..er..something (OK I'm crap at all the techie stuff)

I've also seen Dr Geep model quite AWESOME things, incliuding clothes, from the Poser primitives. Sure, Poser isn't a modeler but I wouldn't want it to be either. It's already complex enough to confuse the heck out of practically anyone new to Poser. And IMO Poser's force is that it's NOT a conventional 3D modelling program. Poser is, as the name says, a program where you POSE figures. That's what it does and does best. Anyone can pose a Poser figure without knowing jack about how to add bones or the like. I used max for years and never figured out how to rig anything in that program. I can however rig almost anything quite easily in Poser (with PhiBuilder) - that's not saying it's a perfect rig, but it'll work. and for rigid stuff like furniture ect, it's brilliant and EASY!

I think sometimes people forgets just how many things you actually CAN do inside Poser if only you take the time to learn it fully.

And sure there are things it can't do. You can't paint on the models. You can't UV map (well short of the Perspective UVs you CAN make in Poser) and transmapped hair can take hours to render, especially with IDL.

But it has moved far from the rather primitive pose-a-virtual-mannequin-and-paint-it that Poser was originally meant to be :)

Make every option keyframeable. Switching on the fly between IK and FK would be great for example.
Better animation tools would really be great. Somethings could be copied from Animation Master...
 

Quote - > Quote - Get rid of camera control widgets and use mouse and keyboard to pan, zoom, rotate, etc.

  
**You can do that already.
**Space+left mouse = pan
Ctrl+Space+left mouse = zoom
Alt+left moue = rotate

Which leaves me asking... Why do people keep asking for this feature?!?

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Get rid of camera control widgets and use mouse and keyboard to pan, zoom, rotate, etc.

  
**You can do that already.
**Space+left mouse = pan
Ctrl+Space+left mouse = zoom
Alt+left moue = rotate

Which leaves me asking... Why do people keep asking for this feature?!?

Because you don't have to stop and go and manipulate the trackball thingy. After you get the keys and mouse clicks down, it's second nature - don't even have to think about it ;o).

Laurie

Quote - > Quote - Get rid of camera control widgets and use mouse and keyboard to pan, zoom, rotate, etc.

 
You can do that already.
Space+left mouse = pan
Ctrl+Space+left mouse = zoom
Alt+left moue = rotate

Okay then, how about rotation controls that don't make me seasick, and a finer and more direct way of setting the pivot than via 'point at'?