Hello,

I am looking into upgrading from Poser 6 to Poser Pro 2012 or Poser 9 (Windows). I have a few questions.

1. The new morph brush. Does it act on the underformed mesh or are any applied morphs added to the deformation? Can the deformation be saved as a morph? Can it be applied to any mesh on the scene? Can it be applied to a posed figure or does it work on the zero-pose figure only?

2. Can the content be organized in an arbitrary way? I do not use Poser's default organization since it does not make any sense to me. For example I place the materials for a prop under the prop's folder. Same for each character and any related content. Everything is grouped several directories deep. (I use P3do explorer but I would prefer using an improved native browser instead)

3. Is the Victoria and Michael 4 installation still broken with files required to be in Poser's installation directory for them to work?

4. Any significant changes in dynamic clothing from version 6?

5. Can morphs be finally deleted from within Poser (parameters window)?

6. Can the actor parameters/morphs be searched by name?

I have more questions but these are the most important. I am not emailing Smith Micro with these questions since the last time (for Poser 8) I was given the wrong information. Hopefully users here would be more knowledgeable.

I looked into installing the demo but it charges full, instead of upgrade, price if not cancelled within 30 days. I would prefer to purchase it as an upgrade and not within a preset time.

thanks for your attention,

FlyerX

I use PP2012. To answer your questions, a caveat: this is my experience. YMMV.

Key to understand is that things like morph brush and just the whole PP2012 experience depends a lot on hardware. PP2012 runs really well in a 64-bit environment. People do run it in 32-bit Windows, but it isn't anywhere are quick. That said: it did run faster than PP2010 in the same environment.

Quote - I am looking into upgrading from Poser 6 to Poser Pro 2012 or Poser 9 (Windows). I have a few questions. 1) The new morph brush. Does it act on the underformed mesh or are any applied morphs added to the deformation? Can the deformation be saved as a morph? Can it be applied to any mesh on the scene? Can it be applied to a posed figure or does it work on the zero-pose figure only?

It acts on all and any mesh in the scene, posed or not. The morphs can be saved. The morph brush still needs a few refinements: it tends to change mesh selection mid-morphing, which is really annoying. If this is a key reason you're getting PP2012, I wouldn't. Still has a way to go before it's a really truly refined tool.

Quote - 2) Can the content be organized in an arbitrary way? I do not use Poser's default organization since it does not make any sense to me. For example I place the materials for a prop under the prop's folder. Same for each character and any related content. Everything is grouped several directories deep. (I use P3do explorer but I would prefer using an improved native browser instead)

Poser doesn't care where you put materials (I'm assuming texture files) as long as the path in the pp2 is correct. is that what you're asking?

Quote - 3) Is the Victoria and Michael 4 installation still broken with files required to be in Poser's installation directory for them to work?

That's been fixed.

Quote - 4) Any significant changes in dynamic clothing from version 6?

Quite frankly, I can't remember back to Poser 6, but the whole dynamic cloth experience is HUGEly dependent on your hardware. That has been my experience. I run Win7 HPremium 64-bit, an i3, 4 gig RAM and dynamic cloth works brilliantly well: the sims take a very reasonable amount of time to finish for even hi-res mesh.

Don't have an answer to the last two questions.

RobynsVei,

Thanks for your reply. 

As I suspected the morph brush is just for light retouching of the mesh. Not great for creating a complex morph.

As for the organization I was asking about the poser content files. Not the resources (image maps, geometry files, etc). I wanted to know if the content files could be organized such as in the attached image.

Morph dials can be deleted from within Poser.
You can not yet delete full body morphs.

The cloth Sim runs quite a lot faster now as it uses all your cores if you have a multi core CPU.

I organise as follows. (knowing that any sublolder in Poser can now house anything.)

I make a new figure; I create a folder : "My new figure".

ALL goes in that folder.
The obj
The Cr2
The textures
The mat files, ALL go into the same folder.

When I want to transfer "My new figure" to my second PC, All I have to do is copy that single folder as all is in there.

The morph brush.

I do not know your 3D modeling skills, but see it as a controllable displacement morphing tool.

You work directly on the mesh.
You can create, combine existing, push, pull, soften, to screen or surface.
Quite flexible.
Holding the shft button when working on the mesh will prevent it from switching between meshes if 2 meshes are close together.

Some are very good with the morph brush, some find it difficult.
I would call myself "moderate" but learning.

For your question 6, No not yet.

But you get a dot in front of any dial is not at its "ZERO" position making tracking of what you did a lot easyer.

PLUS????
From Poser6 to Poser9 or PP2012?

IDL worth its weight in GOLD.
SSS
Weightmap
LOTS of improvements.

PS, the new Library is completely rebuild also, and uses a new structure also.
I think you will lke it.

Well, maybe the rendering engine isn't the main reason to update for the author of PoseRay. Just guessing, of course.

1.) The morph brush does affect all meshes, is no longer limited to certain groups, creates saveable morphs and works on the morphed mesh. It's not quite as controllable as comparable functions in external modeling applications like Silo or ZBrush. It's great for small fixes, but not for creating new full boxy morphs. If you want to work with posed characters in an external applications, I would suggest you get Colorcurvatures PML, which can export a (welded) mesh for morphing in an external application and reloading as a morph in Poser.

2.) Short answer: No.

3.) No, that's fixed.

4.) It's faster now, but the quality seems to be the same. Works for me.

5.) Yes, normal morphs can be removed. I'm not sure about full body morphs. Also, you can link several parameters to a single dial now. (Things like bend arm - larger bizeps, even much more complex dependencies are possible)

6.) Not to my knowledge, no. You can search the library, but not the morphs. You can rearrange them in groups though.

Thanks everyone for the answers.

Bantha, you were right, I do not care about the rendering improvements.

Unfortunately it seems that most of the changes are related to rendering. Still it is difficult to properly manage and manipulate content within the program. Strange that it still requires the archaic content organization. I thought that by now it could tell what it was loading by at least file extension. I suppose legacy is sometimes difficult to break.

For my purposes, Poser has not changed much so I will stay with 6 for now and will upgrade when it won’t run in the latest Windows version. Runs fine in Windows 7 (64bit).

later,

FlyerX

Hello :-)

I hope it's okay if I tag onto this thread with a, hopefully, on topic Poser Pro 2012 related question?

I just took advantage of SM's current 50% discount on Poser to side grade up to 2012.

But having installed I find it's created a whole new content folder... fair enough.

So I'm now debating whether to just add the Poser 9 runtime folder to the root folder list, in the library... or whether to meticulously transfer each sub folder / file of my Poser 9 runtime  folder across. For some reason OS X lion doesn't do folder merging, when moving or copying a folder with the same name... it only does a full replace, if you see what I mean.

So the latter might be time consuming! Even with my modest content collection ;-)

I like vilters' point that different files can get grouped in the same folder.

What do other people do around runtime organisation?

 

I use a Windows file manager if I need to "merge" runtimes.

I am sure there must be a MAC utility to merge folders and or files.

And, YES; it is easy to manage if all is together and NOT all over the place as before.

I am in the process of doing the same thing for everything. (All OLDER content that is still in Geometries, textures, etc.....)

Thanks Vilters... yes, you're right... it has now occurred to me that I can use Stuffit to create an archive of my Poser 9 content runtime folder, this archive utility then does a folder merge when it extracts.

Not sure why OS X introduced this particular regression with Lion... there is quite possibly a way round it, that I'm just not aware of.

But still I plan to start reorganising to combine different types of Poser files (e.g. for one character or set) into the same folder as you mentioned... I think that sounds more intuitive.

;-)

Poser 6 may have worked well in Windows 7 using a single core processor. But I recently upgraded to a multi-core system and now Poser 6 only runs with the affinity modifier so it runs with only one core. Without it the system randomly experiences a hard freeze. Besides some of the dialogs do not work well.

So I eat my words and upgraded to Poser Pro 2012. Thanks to another thread, I found out about the 50% discount currently Smith Micro has on Poser.

I also found out that Smith Micro is now posting the Poser Manual online so most of the questions I had were answered.

Thanks again for all the responses.

Later,

FlyerX

Guys guys guys - I know you mean well but, please, stop posting answers that you have not verified, or are just guessing, or you are repeating stuff you heard.

FlyerX,

Content can be anywhere. The people who told you that has not changed are wrong. It has changed. Any kind of Poser file is identified by Poser using its extension alone, not using its path. Your guess was correct that it should have been fixed by now. It was fixed. The others are wrong.

Bagginsbill,

Thank you very much for the clarification. The new content manager is a breath of fresh air. Flexible, fast, easy to navigate and use. I am glad I do not have to use a temperamental 3rd party manager anymore.

 

FlyerX

Oooh - I'm glad you like it. 'Cause I wrote it.

I don't have a basis for comparison with previous versions of Poser to be honest, but it is pretty flexible to use in 9/2012 - thanks! I have only just twigged that I can load the library as an external app component, via preferences... which seems to help everything to run a bit smoother on my sadly underpowered / aged imac.

Bagginsbill, out of interest, what was the rationale for using Flash / AIR to host the GUI for the Library component, if you don't mind me asking? I notice that this is used here...

Because SM also needed a new content manager for Anime Studio.

It was their desire to have a single component be the library content manager for all their graphical apps. A single technology shared by all operating systems as well.

The technology used in Poser is not the same as in Anime Studio nor Manga Studio.

So - given that the authors of the three programs are not going to rewrite to a common language and API, the solution seemed to be to introduce, as easily as possible, a common language engine into all.

That common language engine is Flash.

Later, Flash for 64-bit was not available, but it was possible to build an AIR version with only modest effort, sharing 95% of the code from the Flash version. So I did that, too.

The strategy is not flawless, but I have now upgraded the UI three times and all SM products that use it have been pretty close to seamlessly upgraded in functionality. It has also been translated into multiple languages without touching the code.

Thanks Bagginsbill - that all makes perfect sense... of course... from the cross platform / cross application perspective... and it's a nice GUI toolkit in Flash / AIR to work with, and present, as well of course.

Hypothetically, if I were writing my own community plugin for just Poser alone... and wanted a slick looking GUI, e.g. with a more advanced visual interface than I could get with just standard textbox, checkbox, browse (etc) controls, e.g. maybe a graphical representation of a human figure, built into a control, that was perhaps moveable in some way, would you say this would be a strategy worth considering, looking at Flash / AIR... or would I be better just going down the wxPython route?

At present I have no plans (or time) to do such a thing! I'm just thinking out loud here... but this is all great brain fodder :-)

Sorry... this is totally off the topic of this thread now...

I have been struggling over the past few weeks on a project where I am not allowed to use Flash/AS3. Everything takes longer to build, and is less slick. I make more money (i.e. my client has to pay a lot more) because it takes longer to build. Sucks for them.

 

More money for you at least ;-)

Not so long ago I wrote a PDF viewer control for .Net (just a ghostscript wrapper) because embedding the Acrobat Reader dll wasn't deemed performant enough.

However, fast forward a bit, AcroPDF got an update and suddenly was found to be much faster... we switched the app back to using that.

It was interesting working on the ghostscript viewer though nonetheless... and that provided some other useful code for PDF manipulation.

I guess the moral is, if there's a good framework available, that someone else is investing in maintaining, its generally a good idea to use it! But interesting things can come from rolling your own code too...

Anyway there's far too much good stuff in Poser 2012 already for me to play with using... to even begin thinking much about learning to code plugins for it! Far too much interesting information on these forums to catch up with too... think I'll be a good while just doing that.

All this procedural shader stuff is just fantastic... I love the idea that it seems to be possible now to create realistic looking human skin textures (and indeed any less uniformly patterned textures) without using photographic / painted images.

Where's the best place on these forums to catch up with that sort of thing?

:-)

The forum called The Node Cult at runtimedna has concentrated a lot of info. But there are tons of threads packed with shader info here, too.

But, a lot of it is rather old. If you want to see what the latest techniques are with Poser, look in the P9/PP2012 demos and tutorials forum at runtimedna.

http://www.runtimedna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?273-Poser-9-Pro2012-Demos-and-Tutorials

 

Sorry it is not a link. I am in a hotel with just my ipad and it sucks for editing posts.

 

***edit : made clickable, Bantha.

Excellent. I'll start there then... many thanks :-)

Just got Poser 9 and, though I have searched the manual AND the forums and tried all the sugggestions I've found so far, I still cannot solve my problem. The library -- and the dials too -- are all too small, very hard to see as compared with Poser 8/Debut on my machine. Adjusting the icon sizes in Poser does not help very much and when I adjust things in Windows 7, only the tab labels get bigger, not the font sizes in the library panel or on the dials. They are still very difficult to see. Having an eye problem does not help but at least in previous versions I did not have to resort to a screen magnifier. :-(

Here are some screencaps to illustrate. Same scene, the first is my old Poser that I can see things properly in. Second one is P9, where I feel like the proverbial bat every time I venture. 

At the top of each screencap I can see that your screen resolution is different - I believe this because the bits of desktop icons I see have changed size and moved farther apart.

Are you just joking with us here?

For me all the dials and the library are the same size between P8 and P9

But I am wondering if in your case P9 uses the wrong UI preference which is different for each screen resolution.

The one it uses is in c:usersAppDataRoamingPoser9English

In my case it is Poser UI Prefs_1920x1200.xml

If this is the case maybe Poser gets confused by something in your configuration (second monitor or something similar)

In this case you best contact Smith Micro directly so they can help you figure what is causing this

 

I only wish it were a joke. My screen resolution is 1920 x 1080, which is the recommended one for my monitor. I only have a single display, the monitor is a Dell U2311H widescreen and I have not tinkered with anything in those settings. But I will take a look at my UI preferences and see if that might be the problem. 

The desktop is indeed different between to the captures. Maybe you used a different DPI setting for Windows?

 

Okay, I checked the Preferences. In the Poser 9 English folder are two files: Poser UI Prefs_1680x1050.xml and Poser UI Prefs_1920x1080.xml. But in my Poser 8 English folder there are Poser UI Prefs_1920x1080.xml and Poser UI Prefs_1280x720.xml. If I copy the preference file that works from P8 into 9, might that fix it? 

I don't know, but make a backup and try

Poser should pick the right one when this folder is empty - maybe you should try that first

 

Well ... no joy there. I backed it up, then emptied the folder & restarted Poser. Except for the fact that the panes I'd previously left floating were now docked, nothing changed. And when I went back to the Preferences folder to check, sure enough it had put new copies of both Poser UI Prefs_1680x1050.xml and Poser UI Prefs_1920x1080.xml in there.

I'm at my wits end. Maybe a reinstall is the only way to fix this.

A reinstall is certainly worth a try. Be sure to check the "delete preferences" option.

Uninstall P9 first. It will leave the contents of the library alone. Then install again. Should take you only 5-15 minutes depending on your system

If that does not work - contact Smith Micro and attacht the screencaps to show what the difference is.

Have you by any chance turned on the "Color Blind accessible" option in General Preferences - if you did, have you turned it off? It should not matter, but it is something which changes the UI

 

No Color Blind accessible box checked, though I did try that too just to see if it helped. Did nothing only switch the colors like it should for color blind people. :sigh: I am going to get supper & then do a fresh install. Wish me luck!