Quote - Ok, first off let me say wow....just wow, I'm amazed at how this is coming together.  I've been playing with the builds as they come out and having lots of fun, so thank you guys very much for this.

You're very welcome. If people are using it I'd be interested in feedback on the material conversion so far. If it isn't making the right guesses, suggestions for how to influence those guesses would be great. I'll make options and a GUI to edit them on a per-material, per-prop, per-figure basis.

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This maybe too early in the game (and I can always code it in by hand if needed) but have any of you thought of adding the lights as groups yet?  I experimented yesterday with adding each of my two lights as groups and added the sun group as well, and while I couldn't move the lights I could play with the intensity and even shut them off if I wanted all while rendering.

Just a thought/suggestion for future notice and no big deal since I can add it by hand, and thanks again for giving us another tool to have fun with!

Since I'll be working on the light exporter today, timing here is perfect.

We could go two ways. Or both.

1) Name the lights like this: GroupName:LightName. For example:
  Foyer:Spot1, Foyer:Spot2, Foyer:Spot3

Hall:Bulb

Living Room:Lamp1, LivingRoom:Lamp2

This would give you three groups to play with.

2. I make lists of lights in the export configuration file and provide a drag-and-drop GUI to create light groups regardless of name.

1+2) Groups are automatically created from the naming convention, but then can be joined/split through the export config tool.

Be aware that option 2 is a lot more work. It's more parameters to parse and more stuff in the GUI. Also, figuring out how to save that grouping info in the scene is tough.

On that subject, Poser is missing something that has bugged me for a long time. Perhaps I'm just not aware of it, but I can't find any simple way to encode arbitrary plug-in info into the scene or materials or props or figures. I'd love it if every object in a scene (and the scene itself) had a "metadata" property, in XML format. Then I'd be able to add extra info to anything that would be consulted by Python scripts.

My kludge solution for material metadata is that I rename nodes to give meaning. But that has severe limitations. (32 characters is one of them) But that is how I solved the problem of embedding info for VSS in a prop.

I've been thinking about some scheme involving the conversion of text strings into geometry. For example, suppose I made each letter of an "alphabet" be represented by a vertex. Then I can make text strings out of polygons.

Imagine a prop with 257 vertices (256 for ASCII, plus one extra value to indicate a 2-byte Unicode character or something like that).

Then the string "hello" would be a polygon with vertex indices 104, 101, 108, 108, 111.

I could jam that into a prop (one that is not visible). Poser would save it with the scene. A simple Python library would let you read and write these text strings in the prop.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)