Quote - Yeah, but can it go on forever without crippling progress on the program? Should it? ;)

FWIW, I TOO, like the rest of you, probably have a terrabyte of Poser stuff.

Laurie

What do you mean by crippling progress?

How does having compatibility with older content prevent new content from appearing?

ok how about we DON'T have this row here and have it in a seperate thread where we can all have the fun of yelling at each other....and I can sell popcorn and tickets.

Well, I think maybe the need to hold on to old content may be holding back progress on Poser. Just my theory, and I'm stickin with it. LOL

Laurie

Personally I would like to see GPU rendering options added to firefly DAZ managed it with Studio ok it needs work still but its there , and considering the modern day GPU's are incredibly powerful 3GB plus in somecases with alot of pc's carrying 768MB or 1.0GB cards surely that would be a good thing and really take the stress off the lower end CPU's and surely reduce the amount of memory needed to complete a render and turn speeding things up.

“… new potential users may just go strait to DS …”

And facing being cut off from their huge investment in content, existing users might just as well decide to go to DS – especially if that existing content works in DS 5 but not in Poser 10. If you force people to make a break, there’s no predicting which direction they may break in. If none of my existing software was going to work in the next version of Windows, I might as well consider moving to a new platform. Now some folks have knocked Microsoft over the years for providing so much legacy support but I think that despite any drawbacks, it has served their customers well. They probably would have lost many of their business customers who often won’t upgrade if it breaks their existing applications. Think of the average Poser user’s content as being akin to those legacy applications.

Now ideally, you want to enable people to breathe some new life into their old content using the new features, but at the very least, you don’t want to kill them. I think you have to lead people, not push them. Give them new features that are not so complex that the majority never adopt them – and thus have little incentive to upgrade – and allow them to upgrade without invalidating their existing investment. Whoever enables people to use the most content with the least hassle is going to have a big advantage. Didn’t we just see this movie, with DAZ catching holy hell because one new figure wouldn’t work in Poser? And now we want to have everything going back to Posette not work in Poser – on the assumption that people will just roll over and start anew? I’m not sure how well that would fly, even among the congregation here, much less the unwashed out in the world. It’s not going to do Poser any good to be the latest greatest thing since the zipper if a substantial number of Poser users don’t upgrade or defect to DS. If you want to see the pace of innovation slow to a crawl, cut the revenue stream.

I think that people pretty much do expect things to just keep working. As I said before, if the new technology is compelling enough (and simple enough), people will migrate to it fast enough. If you want to speed up the process then make an easy and affordable conversion solution available. Want dynamic cloth to explode – make a quick, easy, non geek way to convert at least 90 percent of conforming clothing to dynamic – in addition to making dynamic radically simpler to use.

“Well, I think maybe the need to hold on to old content may be holding back progress on Poser.”

That’s been said often. There may be some truth in it but I think it is more likely the opposite. I don’t think for instance, that SM hasn’t improved dynamic cloth because too many people are clinging to conforming clothing. I think that more people are sticking with conforming because they find dynamic intimidating and slow. Just the notion that they’re going to have to tackle animation in some form (probably the first time for many) may be a deal breaker. Obviously, dynamic in most situations is superior. It’s not the old content. People would buy new content – they always have. It’s the technology that needs to improve on its own. Implement some of the ideas outlined in this thread, make dynamic close to conforming in terms of ease of use and make them play well together and then you’ll have more people using it – and not coincidentally, pressing SM to improve it even more. 

For me?

Resume render would be a big bonus!  I like the idea of cloth moving with a figure without having to re-simulate multiple times. The hair room is a nightmare.  Soft body dynamics would be nice for animations. I'd also like to be able to add frames to the beginning of an animation, rather than just the end.

Backward compatibility is important, but I'd also like to see the program move forward. The things I can now do with Genesis have intrigued me.

Too much to ask?

Seems my last wish was short one item.

I'm in the middle of rebuilding lost of runtimes, one has 20,000+ files in it at this moment and I'm still re-building it. Guess what else I'm doing? With a, unfortunately limited, third party utility converting 1000's of .rsr files to .png. And then to open Poser and still see some I've missed and have to drill back down through all those folders yet again to get at them with the utility...GAHHHH! Can you guess what I'm thinking? Can you guess what I'm getting really really really really sick of doing? Can you guess what I really wished Poser still did automatically?

God I wished Poser still automatically did it's own rsr to png real time....this is gotten so bloody painfully horrifically tedious to deal with I can't even begin to tell you how much so...

 

More control of the curves in the animation palette.  Other 3D programs give this option, like the pen-tool in Photoshop, there are two handles on each side of the keyframe and you can pull each handle to adjust the way the curve goes from the previous keyframe to the current keyframe to the next keyframe, and so on.

Fine control over the interpolation!  I needs it, precious!  :)

(See attached image to see what I mean.  From Blender.)

I think stay compatible with the past versions don't keep the tool go forward, an example of this is the material room. Since Poser 5 there are nodes and many other things but you can still  use materials you used in Poser 4.

 

Another good addon would be more control the way you use the morphs and their dials.This has been improved a little in Poser 2012.

i agee with blackhearted too,those really need updating,also considering poser is about figures and posing, kinect for poser seams logical and would be a a lack of forsight not to be included.

Quote - God I wished Poser still automatically did it's own rsr to png real time....this is gotten so bloody painfully horrifically tedious to deal with I can't even begin to tell you how much so...

rsr's were left over from Poser 1 when it was for Mac System 7; they should have been eliminated over a decade ago.  I just let the converter run recursing subirectories whilst I'm doing something else or overnight after I install stuff......

Quote - For me?

Resume render would be a big bonus!

my renders (PP 2012) resume automatically when my computer wakes from sleep.

Quote - my renders (PP 2012) resume automatically when my computer wakes from sleep.

 

Yes, but you can't start rendering a big scene and shut the program down, then resume, like you can in Vue.  For big projects and animations, that would be a bonus!

Quote - Oh, while they're at overhauling the rigging and figures they can remove the ridiculously small scaling ;). 

Do you mean the "Poser Native Units" thing? If so I agree wholeheartedly.

In 1995 the original 'poser figure' was a desktop artist's mannequin so maybe the stupid scale had a reason, but almost all poser content since then has been real world life-size objects, and still we cling to the stupid scale. Add to this the fact that poser relies on .obj file format which contains no unit information, and poser's idiotic import scale option (the only option) "should this object arrive bigger than a person or smaller than a person?" - in a "Pro" application which claims to pipeline well with the big boys? Are you kidding me?

At the very least Poser should have scale options on import/export so that we can scale models to/from the real world units that most other applications use internally (like metres for modo, inches for sketchup and so on. This could be a list of units like sketchup does it or a list of applications like DAZ does it (so you don't have to know what the internal units of the target app are).   

** "More control of the curves in the animation palette.  Other 3D programs give this option, like the pen-tool in Photoshop, there are two handles on each side of the keyframe and you can pull each handle to adjust the way the curve goes from the previous keyframe to the current keyframe to the next keyframe, and so on.**

Fine control over the interpolation!  I needs it, precious!  :)"

??????..... HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA
 HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA !!!

Cheers

Quote - > Quote - Oh, while they're at overhauling the rigging and figures they can remove the ridiculously small scaling ;). 

Do you mean the "Poser Native Units" thing? If so I agree wholeheartedly.

In 1995 the original 'poser figure' was a desktop artist's mannequin so maybe the stupid scale had a reason, but almost all poser content since then has been real world life-size objects, and still we cling to the stupid scale. Add to this the fact that poser relies on .obj file format which contains no unit information, and poser's idiotic import scale option (the only option) "should this object arrive bigger than a person or smaller than a person?" - in a "Pro" application which claims to pipeline well with the big boys? Are you kidding me?

At the very least Poser should have scale options on import/export so that we can scale models to/from the real world units that most other applications use internally (like metres for modo, inches for sketchup and so on. This could be a list of units like sketchup does it or a list of applications like DAZ does it (so you don't have to know what the internal units of the target app are).   

 

actually poser has been able to handle proper scales since poser 6. it's just convention to old content that keeps it all tiny...

You guys are thinking too small.

 

 

P10 needs more temples for all the nude vickies to visit.  A make temple button would be nice.

Quote - i agee with blackhearted too,those really need updating,also considering poser is about figures and posing, kinect for poser seams logical and would be a a lack of forsight not to be included.

that's true but at this stage kinect for pc un my mind far too expensive, it would be nice to see it added in poser but I personally dont think its going to happen yet but maybe one day , I would love to say be able to map a real girl's/womans natural movements and then put them into genesis or Victoria.

add that to delevopment costs for Smith micro it would be alot

Quote - ** "More control of the curves in the animation palette.  Other 3D programs give this option, like the pen-tool in Photoshop, there are two handles on each side of the keyframe and you can pull each handle to adjust the way the curve goes from the previous keyframe to the current keyframe to the next keyframe, and so on.**

Fine control over the interpolation!  I needs it, precious!  :)"

??????..... HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA
 HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA !!!

Cheers

Not sure why the laughter, but, okay.

Probably laughing because Poser never had such a thing and likely won't ;)

Laurie

Well, they're running out of things for the still image crowd. With Luxrender and Octane in the wings, that kind of deals with the Firefly limitations. We haven't had any real indicators that the old rigging system and new rigging system conflict, so backwards compatibility isn't an issue. With the new joints and weightmapping we have the chance to move forward a decade or so.....and the two forms of rigging can be used in hybrid fashion, so the options there have increased. Unless you want to get into static effects, that pretty much leaves the animation systems.

 

Kinect is a nice toy, but that is all it really is. A single unit won't do any kind of acceptable mocap job; all the apps out there recommend at least 2. And the granularity of the capture data is so rough that you could easily spend the same amount of time you would have manually keyframed a sequence in just cleaning up the errors.

 

What they should do?

1: Add gizmo's to the pose window, making it possible to actually use the mouse to move a figure part without wrecking things.

2: An improved IK system; being able to designate any point in an IK chain as a temporary 'end' would make animating a lot easier (stick a pin in the elbow of one arm during a ragdoll toss by Poser Physics. That elbow is the end of the IK chain until you unpin it, so the forearm and hand is unaffected by the kinematics.

3: Add an actual animation 'room'. A configurable setup designed for animating needs. A better dopesheet, scaling of the fonts on same. A low res window at the bottom of the dopesheet that shows XYZ trans curves for the selected.

4: An enhanced graph editor. The extra curve controls would be an excellent tool. The ability to have say, up to three graph windows side by side, so you can see 3 different motion curves; either XYZ of one part, 3 seperate morph animations, whatever is selected in each window.

5: A more robust collision detection system, with the ability to set an offset, so that 'collision' of body parts leaves enough space between the parts to avoid trapping dynamic cloth in a joint and crashing the sim.

6: Some form of soft body physics. As there is no chance we'll get a Maya style muscle system, any soft body setup would have to work in zones, and be limited to the more apparent soft body parts.

 

The latter is more dream that hope atm, as it would require an entirely new figure construction (but on the other hand, we have people who are working on figures that have -no- morphs; just bones and weightmaps. Add more bones that end at tissue mass proxies, and the body proxies to keep things from caving in, and you would just have to have a collision/skin clothifying system.). But if they could do it, such figures would have the potential of dethroning all the others (if they were flexible enough to accept a lot of reshaping for figures). 

 

Oh. And the Euler angle flip toggle from Messiah. That can fix so many problems...... 

My biggest complaint with Poser is importing created content.  I spent weeks getting an octangonal tower prop into Poser.   The process is tedious and time consuming.  The OBJ importer would implode.  I couldn't find much documentation on the subject and after trial and error figured it out.

I second the suggestion to upgrade the OBJ importer and agree with Blackhearted about clothing.  I have extreme respsect for the clothing artists who spent weeks preparing clothing for Poser.

> Quote - > Quote - ** "More control of the curves in the animation palette.  Other 3D programs give this option, like the pen-tool in Photoshop, there are two handles on each side of the keyframe and you can pull each handle to adjust the way the curve goes from the previous keyframe to the current keyframe to the next keyframe, and so on.** > > > > **Fine control over the interpolation!  I needs it, precious!  :)"** > > > > > > > > ??????..... HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA > >  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA  HA HA !!! > > > > > > > > Cheers > > Not sure why the laughter, but, okay.

 

My guess would be that you can already do something very similar in Poser.  See my attachment, this was done in Poser 6.  The first is two key frames, one at 100 and the other at 200.  The second side is the same first two key frames with two more at 101 and 102.  Adjusted frame 102 down slightly and end up with something very similar to what you showed in your prior post.

 

What I would like added is another spline type that will not exceed the keyframe point.  This would involve taking into account only the current keyframe and the one before or after. That way you would not get overshoot as you do in the third picture.  The two keyframes are circled, however the line continues to raise after going through the point, because it is not at the midway.  I know that you could use a linear spline however that does not have the nice slow start/stop effect.

Could not get thepicture to attach in the last post so here is what I called the third picture.

Actually I was amused by the notion that anyone thinks SM has any interest in people creating animation in poser

Cheers

 

 

Maybe not, Wolf. But again, they are fast running out of things they can do for the single frame crowd; that leaves the animation controls to upgrade. Either that, or pull the trigger for more advances in the figure system (and charge for it....leading to not that many people getting a next version), or diddling around trying to be content creators sorta-kinda with no real interest. And having the same result. At least advances in the animation controls will carry over to the dynamics...and with the right upgrades, would make the single frame pose crowd happier with better controls.

 

Of course I'm also learning my way around Messiah, just in case. And Modo. Slowly, but still..... 

A "Foot Room"? :sneaky:

Quote - A "Foot Room"? :sneaky:

Only if it comes with air freshener.

Laurie

Quote - My guess would be that you can already do something very similar in Poser.  See my attachment, this was done in Poser 6.  The first is two key frames, one at 100 and the other at 200.  The second side is the same first two key frames with two more at 101 and 102.  Adjusted frame 102 down slightly and end up with something very similar to what you showed in your prior post.

Yes, I'm aware you can do something like that, but it's a hack that becomes quickly cumbersome with a lot of keyframes.  I'd rather have the ability to have a lot more control the slope and curve of the in-between frames, especially if you WANT overshooting, such as if a character is pitching a ball, their arm continues a bit from the final arc before coming back to the position.

Quote - Actually I was amused by the notion that anyone thinks SM has any interest in people creating animation in poser

Well, Poser does have the capability of animating, and has multiple tools associated with it.  If they didn't want to deal with animation, they should remove those tools (but I have a feeling if they did that, a lot of customers would leave for other products...like me).

Animation tools should not be neglected, in my opinion, if they're going to have them at all.

 

Radical idea - make the core Poser posing/clothing functions a plug-in for Blender etc. instead of or in addition to trying to throw the kitchen sink into Poser.

Cloth room; addition to having just windforce, a pressure gadget for closed dynamic objects.

Would make a lot easier to make ie. dynamic pillows, balloons and that sort of things.

Windforce is a bit tricky to use with those.

SM have to improve the walk wizard, and give support for quadrupeds too.

Quote - 6: Some form of soft body physics. As there is no chance we'll get a Maya style muscle system, any soft body setup would have to work in zones, and be limited to the more apparent soft body parts.

 

The latter is more dream that hope atm, as it would require an entirely new figure construction (but on the other hand, we have people who are working on figures that have -no- morphs; just bones and weightmaps. Add more bones that end at tissue mass proxies, and the body proxies to keep things from caving in, and you would just have to have a collision/skin clothifying system.). But if they could do it, such figures would have the potential of dethroning all the others (if they were flexible enough to accept a lot of reshaping for figures).

I'd like to see the soft body effects added to the deformers, with the magnet and waves.  It could be represented as a shaded bone inside an outline sphere and would work like iClone's spring solver.  The pivot of the bone would be the center of the spring effect, and the tip would be the end, or area most affected.  The spring should only affect the mesh inside the sphere, perhaps with adjustable falloff "softness".  This wouldn't give deformations against objects, but would make for an easy way to add and animate bounce/jiggle to body mass (breasts, belly, buttocks) and also things like antenna, tails, ears etc.

I`m one of those 'idiots' trying to do some character-animation in poser.

Sure more people would use poser for animation if there were tools that allow them to EASILY create motions, movements, walkcycles.

So i vote for a procedural, footstep-driven, layer-based animation system similar to 3dsmax CAT-Motion/Motionbuilder or something like that.

Want your character walk down a stair? Just place the footsteps on the steps, adjust some parameters like weight, hip swing, timing or even more abstract like aggressive, sneaky, sexy... and so on. And then allow keyframing on top of that. EASY to use retiming tools.

And a stable, jitter-free IK/FK  solution.

Und a Mascherl drum rum,danke!