Hi
as of late December Blender will include a brand newGPU  based nearly realtime unbiased render engine

This is a new Engine built for blender not related to LUXBlend
it will be integrated into blender
This could be  a good option for poser users if someone built a Direct poser to blender plugin with python as blender is heavily python based
Check it out
HERE

Cheers

Wolf that is very exciting!

The only person I know who is actively making Poser<->Blender scripts is Reddog9. His thread is here.

the script works well for props (not checked back on it for a while ) he is working on it doin figures as well

the cycles render engine is awesome way faster then lux if its working of the gpu, my current card only has 12 cuda cores but plan on buying a new card this week that has 196 cuda cores

PS as far as I know this ONLY works with nvida cards but cycles will work of the cpu too so peeps with some other card can still use it

Wow, that WOULD be awesome ;)

If it's just for Cycles, you wouldn't even need a full Blender export. Unless they've changed it, Cycles can be build as a standalone renderer that uses an XML scene format. An export similar to Pose2Lux should work just fine then.

just to say, i'd love a Blender Fusion plugin in Poser Pro, the way there is for other 3d studio apps.  and there's lots of reasons to bring a scene into Blender besides the renderer.  at the very least, it would be good for adding and adjusting area lights.

But with IDL, you can have area lights in Poser too.You just need a geometry whith very high ambience.

 Are the lights that much better or faster in Blender?

"But with IDL, you can have area lights in Poser too.You just need a geometry whith very high ambience.

*** Are the lights that much better or faster in Blender?"***

You seem to be missing the point
Did you not visit  the link, in my first post, to the NEW cycles render engine coming to blender 2.6.??
Thats why we are discussing a direct poser scene to blender option.

Cheers

My posting were in response of Kobaltkween. Although I would love to see a Blender Fusion plugin as well, the more possibilities, the better.

Is Cycles fast enough for animations? Is the material system good enough for more than plastic, glass and metal, is there a good skin shader?

Quote - My posting were in response of Kobaltkween. Although I would love to see a Blender Fusion plugin as well, the more possibilities, the better.

Is Cycles fast enough for animations? Is the material system good enough for more than plastic, glass and metal, is there a good skin shader?

 

As to your animation question, I really don't know. As to Blender's material system, it's very powerful. You can do all sorts that look real if you know how. I'm not sure if Blender's native material editor will work with Cycles at this point or if it's more like Luxrender where you have to make a shader FOR Luxrender. Perhaps someone that knows can answer that ;). Andrew Price at Blender Guru just did a video on Cycles if you'd like to take a look. Those doughnuts look good enough to eat...lol.

edit: Materials do have to be made just for Cycles.

Laurie

I'm no expert, but I've read that the material system is very different from Blenders native render engine. Everything else would be a big surprise, since Cycles is very different from Blenders internal renderer.  

I've seen some videos, (cannot see your video from here at the moment), but what I've seen is mostly plastic, shiny metal and matte - things which are easy with an unbiased renderer. Everything else did not look photorealistic to me, just with realistic lights. I've seen a very quick render in the main demo, but then, there was not much in the scene, just two planes and Blenders apehead. A simple scene like this will not need many samples in Lux to get clean, IMHO, so I cannot really judge the speed. Yes, it's faster than Lux is, the renderer works with RGB values instead of wavelengths, so it trades some realism for speed.

Every render engine is different. Learning what works and what not takes some time, I want to know where the benefit is. I've started with Lux, I have experiences with Firefly and Vue's render engine. I don't have much problems with Lux's rendering speed, since I have to sleep and go to work - so I have at least 14 hours render time on a normal working day. If Cycles is fast enough for animations, it may be worth it, but for stills, I doubt that I want to learn how it works. I haven't mastered Vue yet, and even less Lux. I don't want to learn another engine.

 If it's really "nearly real time" with the hardware I have (no idea how many NIVIDA cards you need for that), it may be worth it. But then, where would be the benefit in needing blender as a bridge? I mean, then Pose2Lux would be obsolete because we could still use Blender as bridge? If Cycles eats XML, why not a Pose2Cycles?

The Blenderguru video is not safe to watch if you are hungry :biggrin:

Quote - Materials do have to be made just for Cycles

...as it happens with any rendering engine.

Interesting background tale: the guy who is developing Cycles (Brecht) stopped contributing to Blender and went to work for Refractive Software (Octane). After less than a year, suddenly, without any explanation, he left Refractive and went back home. No explanation about the reasons of the breakup came from any of the involved parties.

A few months later, Cycles is announced. An unbiased renderer, like Octane. Free as speech and as beer, unlike Octane.

On Blenderartists forum there has been a few speculations about the story and... well, I love the smell of revenge in the morning. At least, it (revenge) guarantees unfaltering commitment.

Bye.

As long as Octane does not sue him for Cycles, I have no problems with that. As it seems, this isn't much of a problem up to now. 

We will see how Cycles handles the weaknesses of Octane, though. From what I know, Octane has big problems if a scene does not fit into the VRAM of the graphics adapter, textures included. No idea if Cycles handles that better. I mean, it's one thing to have some doughnuts and a table, and another to have a couple of clothed Poser figures with big textures for head, body, hands and clothes. Especially if you don't have procedural shaders yet. 

I mean, then Pose2Lux would be obsolete because we could still use Blender as bridge? If Cycles eats XML, why not a Pose2Cycles?

Well at this point cycles is only available as an integrated renderer of blender 2.6
So there is No "stand alone" version that accepts XML files and I know of no plans to release on from the Author of Cycles.
I personally think a Blender based plugin that reads the PZ3 format would be the best solution as this is what we have with the
INTERPOSER PRO
plugin for cinema where I just access my runtime and load ALL poser  directly from within Cinema4D and from there repose ,remorph ,recloth etc. and render it in C4D's native AR3,Vray or even Maxwell.

Cheers

Quote - I mean, then Pose2Lux would be obsolete because we could still use Blender as bridge? If Cycles eats XML, why not a Pose2Cycles?

 

 

Well at this point cycles is only available as an integrated renderer of blender 2.6
So there is No "stand alone" version that accepts XML files and I know of no plans to release on from the Author of Cycles.
I personally think a Blender based plugin that reads the PZ3 format would be the best solution as this is what we have with the
INTERPOSER PRO
plugin for cinema where I just access my runtime and load ALL poser  directly from within Cinema4D and from there repose ,remorph ,recloth etc. and render it in C4D's native AR3,Vray or even Maxwell.

Cheers

I agree. A direct Poser scene to Blender would be awesome. And since both programs use Python, I don't see a reason why it can't be done well. Shame I'm no programmer ;).

Laurie

Quote - > Quote - I mean, then Pose2Lux would be obsolete because we could still use Blender as bridge? If Cycles eats XML, why not a Pose2Cycles?

 

 

Well at this point cycles is only available as an integrated renderer of blender 2.6
So there is No "stand alone" version that accepts XML files and I know of no plans to release on from the Author of Cycles.
I personally think a Blender based plugin that reads the PZ3 format would be the best solution as this is what we have with the
INTERPOSER PRO
plugin for cinema where I just access my runtime and load ALL poser  directly from within Cinema4D and from there repose ,remorph ,recloth etc. and render it in C4D's native AR3,Vray or even Maxwell.

Cheers

I agree. A direct Poser scene to Blender would be awesome. And since both programs use Python, I don't see a reason why it can't be done well. Shame I'm no programmer ;).

Laurie

When the Poser to Lux was proposed, I sugested that a Poser to Blender would be more apropiated since once in Blender there would be a lot more posibilities (Lux, Yafaray, Blender internal, POV, and so on) I asked people to test Blender to see this  posibility and some people almost kill me :-S don't you remember that Laurie ;-) I'm really happy that your allergy to Blender got better. LOL

"When the Poser to Lux was proposed, I sugested that a Poser to Blender would be more apropiated since once in Blender there would be a lot more posibilities (Lux, Yafaray, Blender internal, POV, and so on) I asked people to test Blender to see this  posibility and some people almost kill me"

IIRC one of the participants(combatants) in the ill fated "LUXPOSE"   project said he had made his own plugin for blender to render poser files in his final farewell post on the subject. so apparently it is possible it seems.

Cheers

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - I mean, then Pose2Lux would be obsolete because we could still use Blender as bridge? If Cycles eats XML, why not a Pose2Cycles?

 

 

Well at this point cycles is only available as an integrated renderer of blender 2.6
So there is No "stand alone" version that accepts XML files and I know of no plans to release on from the Author of Cycles.
I personally think a Blender based plugin that reads the PZ3 format would be the best solution as this is what we have with the
INTERPOSER PRO
plugin for cinema where I just access my runtime and load ALL poser  directly from within Cinema4D and from there repose ,remorph ,recloth etc. and render it in C4D's native AR3,Vray or even Maxwell.

Cheers

I agree. A direct Poser scene to Blender would be awesome. And since both programs use Python, I don't see a reason why it can't be done well. Shame I'm no programmer ;).

Laurie

 

When the Poser to Lux was proposed, I sugested that a Poser to Blender would be more apropiated since once in Blender there would be a lot more posibilities (Lux, Yafaray, Blender internal, POV, and so on) I asked people to test Blender to see this  posibility and some people almost kill me :-S don't you remember that Laurie ;-) I'm really happy that your allergy to Blender got better. LOL

I wasn't for it at the time because Blender's render engine is, frankly, not that great. I'd never used Yafaray but knew Luxrender was rather easy to understand. I don't remember killing anyone, but whatever....

Ever since Blender switched to 2.5 it is much easier to use than any versions before that...2.4x was absolutely dreadful. It'd scare the pants off anyone new to modeling.

Laurie

Interesting. Blender has always looked like a very versatile and powerful app. Its main negative has always been a somewhat 'unique' interface. I don't know how the new one looks or works. Hopefully it leans toward a more familiar 3D application GUI.

Using Blender seems like overkill if all you want is to access a render engine, but if it's the most direct way available at the moment, you go with what you've got. If Blender offers multiple render options, so much the better. Once you're in Blender, you may even find reason to use other aspects of that program. It does seem though that even experienced Blenderistas will may have to learn a new material system. People who've never used Blender would have that plus learning at least the Basics of Blender I would think.

What I would love to have is something like PoseRay with a plugin architecture - call it RenderHub :-) With the .obj/.pz3 import, GUI, etc. already done in the core application, hopefully people would write plugin exporters for some of these great new render engines/programs. The level of feature support might vary e.g. PoseRay has extensive support for POVRay lights, cameras and materials, but it presently supports only Kerkythea mesh export. Even the latter is very helpful though. It would be even better if the plugins all supported a small common set of materials like glass and at least a decent basic human skin in their respective rendering applications. You'ld only have one interface to learn, and if you were content with bitmaps and the 'universal' materials, you wouldn't have to worry about different material systems for the supported render engines.

Quote - As long as Octane does not sue him for Cycles, I have no problems with that. As it seems, this isn't much of a problem up to now.

Cycles is not derived from Octane. My personal theory is that Cycles is what Octane could have become had not Brecht been pissed of by Refractive Software "El supremo".

B.t.w. RS (Refractive Software) forum makes another forum look cozy: imagine that people that have been banned from there (quite easy as I read) cannot get the new betas, something that even a certain firm which I shall not name does not do. Whenever you think that you have reached the bottom, somebody gets a spade and shows you that you were wrong.

I think that a Poser to Blender bridge would not be terribly difficult to do if one went for this workflow:

1 - From Poser, export the OBJ and the bitmaps, collected and put into a single directory;

2 - From Blender, run a script which loads the OBJ and parses the PZ3, creating Cycles shaders and Poser compatible lighting.

Another possibility would be a Matmatic for Blender.

Anyway, cosidering that Cycles is still under heavy development it is premature to think about automatic procedures.

Last news about Cycles: as reported here, Cycles should be merged into trunk in a couple of weeks, making it a sure feature for 2.61, due just before Christmas. Santa is busy, isn't he?

"a certain firm which I shall not name"

I really appreciate that. I know that the act of self-discipline must have been difficult for you. 

have never used octane so cant comment on that, have used lux and cycles is much the same in that mats etc need changing, now I never made a mat in lux (used ones put out by Snarly an others in the forum) but making the mats in blender for cycles is pretty easy, its a node based system and while not the same as posers its very similar.Not tried to do an animation in cycles but can see no reason why it wouldnt be do-able.If you have a nvida gpu it will run off that with however many cores the gpu has (my new card has 192(not 196 as I said up there somewhere) so I expect it will fly once thats in (if you want to check how many cuda cores you have- nvida control panel then system info and it will tell you)

I wouldn't want to start a fight over which render engine is best!! they all behave a bit different but I do like having a choice and cycles has added to the choices I can make

We already have several options to get content into Blender. Export to OBJ should work if you just want to render. I don't know if Collada is much better, but I would give it a try, at least it can export rigged figures. I don't know how usable the joints are. But I assume just for rendering with Cycles, you would not need a plugin.

If you want to re-pose your figures in Blender, things could get more complicated, though. Posers old joint system is IIRC quite unique, the math behind it was never published. Kuroyume did quite a lot of reverse engineering for his Interposer Pro, again IIRC. So, if neither Smith Micro nor Kuroyume will do a plugin, there may be problems with joint blending. No idea if there is any possibility to bring Posers new Weight Maps into Blender - if that works, the main functionallity would be there, IMHO. We would need just a script for the morphs.

Hi versions of blender 2.5 or higher have interfaces designs very much like standard professional 3D suites now..THANKFULLY!!
here is Blender 2.56  compared to my seat of Maxon Cinema4D Studio( attached pic)
Very similar IMHO

"I don't know if Collada is much better, but I would give it a try, at least it can export rigged figures."

My experience with Collada Export of poser /DAZ figures is that its "usable with SINGLE MESH or naked Figures but when you Export a Figure with several conformers( shoes,pants,shirt ,coat), you get an unusable mess in the target app .
at least with exports from Daz studio.
A dedicated blender python plugin that parses the PZ3 Format would be great if some clever coder would do it.

Cheers

Yes, I rather like the new Blender interface. Another plus is that it's also very customizable for those that don't really need the animation timeline window for instance. I would never have touched Blender 2.4x, but I rather like 2.5x. I was even able to delete the default cube, which I could never do in 2.4x. Don't laugh...I'm not alone...lol. But I've modeled a few things in Blender which to me was just mindboggling ;). Bless the BlenderCookie guys...lol.

Laurie

Hey people as RobynsVeil say the script works great now for props, but you can convert the figures to prop with this script:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=50705

saved as prop then imported to Blender with transmaps and everything in place, give it a try :-D 

until the figure importer is finished, if finished sometime.

Laurie, when 2.5 came it was hard for me to get used to it :-S some of the sortcut keys I used was changed and I considered the interface somehow complicated and out of the "simplicity" of 2.4, now I'm not quite used to it, and still use 2.4 for some things, but  2.5 is a great step forward, do you know that 2.4 was not able to set more than 16 material per object? something really bad for most poser characters

Dear wolf359, I didn't notice the Blender screencap you posted; the theme is gorgeous. Is it something of yours or can I find it somewhere?

Thanks a lot in advance!

"Dear wolf359, I didn't notice the Blender screencap you posted; the theme is gorgeous. Is it something of yours or can I find it somewhere?

Thanks a lot in advance!"

Hi  I just went into preferences/themes and started manually changing the colors

A little tedious as you have to go thru ALOT of separate interface elements!!
but for me worth it as it helps me play mind tricks with myself by making my blender look somewhat like my C4D app.

Cheers

Quote - Laurie, when 2.5 came it was hard for me to get used to it :-S some of the sortcut keys I used was changed and I considered the interface somehow complicated and out of the "simplicity" of 2.4, now I'm not quite used to it, and still use 2.4 for some things, but  2.5 is a great step forward, do you know that 2.4 was not able to set more than 16 material per object? something really bad for most poser characters

Only 16 materials? Ach! Way too few. Sometimes I have more than that in a prop..lol ;). I like Blender a lot more now that it's 2.5/2.6. The whole layout is much more inuitive I think. 2.4x: things seem sorta scattered willy nilly with no real rhyme or reason. Maybe that's why I had such a hard time with it. You thought something should be in one catagory and it was somewhere completely different. Of course, the 10 gazillion shortcuts do NOT help...lol.

Laurie

Quote - Dear wolf359, I didn't notice the Blender screencap you posted; the theme is gorgeous. Is it something of yours or can I find it somewhere?

Thanks a lot in advance!

You know you can change the whole interface to colors you like, right? Blender Cookie used to have a tute on it (Jonathan Williamson I believe). I have mine a nice shade of gray blue with soft orange buttons...lol.

I'll see if I can find the tutorial and post it for ya.

Laurie

edit: Ha! Here it is. I found it even before the time was up on editing my post ;).

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/04/27/creating-a-custom-blender-theme/

Quote - You know you can change the whole interface to colors you like, right? Blender Cookie used to have a tute on it (Jonathan Williamson I believe). I have mine a nice shade of gray blue with soft orange buttons...lol.

I'll see if I can find the tutorial and post it for ya.

Laurie

edit: Ha! Here it is. I found it even before the time was up on editing my post ;).

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/04/27/creating-a-custom-blender-theme/

I know that I can create a theme; the question was whether those specific settings were available or not and the answer is no.

Edited by JenX

I probably will give it a shot, as time permits and need arises. As far as i see it, a conversion in general seems possible. The main problems (as far as i discovered them), in my opinion are:

Poser's 3-independent-axis posing system with euler angles vs. blender's quaternion posing. I.e. in Poser you can have different falloff zones for each of the x/y/z axes of a joint, in blender you typically have only one. Does the resulting figure have only one weightmap for the whole joint, or would you simulate the 3-axis bending? What does Interposer do in that case, btw? Also there is a question of whether to reorient rotation axes (blender uses a fixed "twist" axis) or to keep the order from poser (better recognition value if you know the poser figures), or use both.

Materials are very similar between Poser and blender at the time, so a conversion is possible, but if you want to render in cycles anyway (at least in some distant future you probably will), it is probably not worth the effort to convert the materials from one to another. At the current time, alas, cycles is not able to render some of the nice specials of blender, e.g. hair, so cycle's use is limited, so you might want to convert the materials for now to the blender materials, and then in two years throw it away to convert to cycles matials? Hm, much work...

Despite of the fact that each morph is rather easy to import, there is a display problem; In blender you have a single list of shapekeys, in Poser you typically have your morphs in a hierarchy that reflects the parent-child relationship of the parts of the figure, so you can select only the ones you need. With e.g. the Victoria++ morphs (very common), you get a huge list of several hundred morphs, and since blender uses a simple flat list for all shapekeys, you would get a large list of probably over 1000 shapekeys, which would be very uncomfortable to use. To make these usable, there is probably some kind of GUI creation involved.