Quote - That says more about us then about the product. But, I agree it could be more user friendly.

Before Poser8 and PP2010, a lot was "faked" in the material room.

Poser8/PP2010 brought IDL and GC. Poser9/PP2012 brought SSS.

Unfortunately, most end users continued with their older material room  ***"faking habbits".

---

Plus all products they bought before Poser8/PP2010 had those "faking materials" inside.

Now they render in newer Poser versions, try IDL and GC and SSS, with all those OLD AND FAKED material settings, and THAT simply does not work.
If you use an older product, you have to adapt it to the newer Poser versions.
It is as simple as that.

The only thing you need in the newer material rooms is the diffuse texture.
All the rest from Specular over Blinn, to Bump and Displacement can be build inside the math room, as some of us have been showing over and over again.

When you load a product build before Poser8/PP2010, the fist thing you should do is clean out all the "old and obsolete faking" in the material room.

=> But, that is NOT an error SM made.
=> That is not a Poser error either.
=> Do not blaim the pianist.

Every older product that includes "older material faking setups in the material room" needs to be adapted to the newer material room and render settings.

Happy Posering
Tony

So how do we adapt that older material?

I am not being snarky with this - I really want to know how I can fix my materials - I have already tossed nearly every light set I have, because I know they aren't set up to user the newer lighting system. 

I still use older characters - my oldest ones are DAZ Gen 2 figures - I know the materials are crap - what I don't know is how to fix them.

I am like a number of people here - I want to move forward and leave Poser 4 standards in the ashbin, but I am really having trouble figuring out what has to be fixed vis-a-vis materials (and how) and how to use the new lighting system.

It I have converted all of my material .pz2s to mc6s thanks to Netherworks, but I don't REALLY understand how to convert older materials to take advantage of the current set up.  I have EZ-Skin2, but I don't like the results so far, because I don't know how to set up my lighting to keep the new materials from looking horrible.

BBaggins has written a lot of posts, but they are scattered in multiple forums I don't know where Poser 9/2012 information starts - I would pay good money to get a step-by-step tutorial on how to use EZ-skin2 & the new lighting system in tandem.  I don't have a photography background, so most of what is written in the Poser 9/2012 users manual is gibberish to me.

The examples I have seen so far don't address the parts I am trying to figure out - I need to light up interior scenes (offices, corridors, waiting rooms, homes etc), with things like bad florescent lighting - I am not setting up portraits, so most of the examples I have seen aren't very helpful.

I'd start off simple, using not the inbuilt diffuse and specular channel - which does elaborate maths with each light in the scene - but a diffuse node (with the value set at .85 or so) and your texture map. Plug the texture map into the color channel of the diffuse node, and the output of the diffuse node into alt_diffuse channel of the main poser surface node.

That's where to start.

My desktop is down atm with a dead graphics card, or I'd put up some screenshots for you.

Lighting: keep it simple. One of the main issues with older materials is that they don't play well with the newer lighting modes, like Gamma Correction and like that. A simple material like the one above, one sun light, Iindirect Lighting and you should have a significantly improved render. Poser now handles internally what an elaborate node-kludge-set endeavoured to do in the past, with varying degrees of success.

But this is just the basic, basic beginning. From here, you can assemble an entire library of node sets offered for free by BB and others for most if not all of the main materials you'll ever need. Within the limitations imposed by the renderer itself - which are significant - you can render some amazing stuff.

Everybody has a different monitor setup so what looks good on one person's screen might look too dark, bright, washed out or colorful on someone else's.

This is V2 and the EZSkin generated skin looks pretty much perfect to me on the ancient CRT I use as my main monitor.

It uses all the default settings except that I set "saturation" to 1.05 for a little more "pop".

Light is a single infinite light for shadows and specularity plus a white IBL without a texture linked to it as a "filler"so that I don't have to use full on IDL in every render.

Gamma is 2.20, of course.

Eye and teeth shaders are tweaked a bit by me to better match the textures I use.

Basically, EZSkin isn't "a" skin shader but just a way to get the SSS functionality into the skin shader you want. (Plus some added enhancements for body hair.)

The default settings are quite good, but not perfect for every texture. And some textures are just beyond help because they tried to fake an SSS "look" for older versions of Poser without actual SSS functionality.

In short, the more "neutral" the texture without painted on highlights, shadows and fake SSS, the better.

Quote - > Quote - It also allows you to work around many of the issues present in the Firefly engine

 This is the sort of apologetics that drive me up the wall.

 Why should we design a room to work around a faulty render engine???

Why not throw away firefly altogether? 

Why did anyone ever consider firefly a good idea in the first place?  It was balls from day one, IMO, not much better than Poser 4 rendering engine. 

Arg.

Please show me a render engine without flaws.

And I wasn't apologizing for anything.

"Apologetics" somewhat different than a straight apology.

If there are render engines with a few flaws, I'd gladly take them over the one (firefly) with 100.

Surely you can't argue that better isn't actually better?

Let's band together and expect something better instead of defending what is inferior, yes?

Yes.

God - I left the forums a bit because of whining. I start to come back and there it is again.

Dude - they have like three engineers to build the whole thing including UI, not just the rendering engine, and these guys don't make $200K+ like I do. If you want a great renderer, PAY for it.

Bye again.

"Let's band together and expect something better instead of defending what is inferior, yes?"

I completely agree that given what is possible today, Poser is way behind the curve.

We have 100% photorealism in feature films and real-time "almost" photorealism in games.

Still even with hour long render times in 99.9% the vast majority of Poserrenders are immediately reckognizeable as exactly that: Poser renders.

While skin shaders and lightning are "fairly" good by now, we need much better figures, much better clothing and much better hair.

And a render engine making use of modern GPUs so that we can have 100% photrealism in minutes and "OK" quality in seconds.

But most Poser users only want to play virtual "dress up dolly" anyway, so most improvements are actually wasted on them.

So in the end Poser X will be like the last couple of versions with a few "new features", some useful, some not, but a general feeling of "too little, too late", at least for me.

I am certain that Firefly is not the best render engine out there.

But, in my opinion, it's not that bad.

I've got some pretty decent results from it. I consider myself to be quite a beginner, but I find that, with practice, my renders get better and better. I'm shooting for "photorealism" (whatever that is), I'm still a long way off, but as I learn more, I get closer. Some other artists (Carodan springs to mind) are already pretty much there, although they use Firefly.

Nevertheless, I would welcome some alternatives. Indeed, I achieved some stunning results using Luxrender and Pose2Lux, it's just that the render time is a bit of a killer (especially with my only interest in Poser being animation).

I've tried MentalRay in Max, it produces good results out of the box, but I find it a lot more difficult to tweak materials than in Poser's Material Room.

Keep in mind that one can buy Poser 9 for less than 60 bux right now.  If one needs more features, there are other options, but (except for Blender) you ain't going to touch one for ten times that, if not fifty times...

"Dude - they have like three engineers to build the whole thing including UI, not just the rendering engine, and these guys don't make $200K+ like I do. If you want a great renderer, PAY for it."

Bill, yeah, that sucks, but the customers don't care.

Studio 4 PRO is almost as good as PP 2012 (and in some aspects even better) and new user won't shell out $500 for a new PP 2013/14 if they can have the same for free and better figures on top of that.

People paid for Poser because it could do a lot more things than Studio, so it was the only game in town to create content.

Not anymore.

I'd really like to see Poser survive, but they really have to bring their A-Game this time.

Quote - I just wonder why you are that frustrated but stick with it?  If I was that frustrated with figures, technologies, materials and rendering engine (at least it appears that way), I would.  Not trying to start anything, honest, just curious :)

Well, about every 5 years I do get frustrated enough to throw up my hands and leave it for a few years....lol. I guess I'm close to the 5 year mark ;).

Laurie

"But, in my opinion, it's not that bad."

Firefly is way, way too slow compared to what even my lowly I5 laptop with its NVIDIA GeForce is capeable of.

I'm not too unhappy with the current quality, but hour long renders just for a few figures and props in 2013 ?

Yes, most renders I do are finished under five minutes, but I use a lot of tricks and make compromises in quality, but Firefly is very easy to overload even in simple scenes.

Try render a meadow with actual grass and weeds and it'll easily slow down to a crawl with even a single figure.

Criticism of Poser = Whining.  Got it.  Thanks.

Thanks for coming down from high on Mount Olympus to put us all in our place, BB.  Please let us know when it's okay for us  to discuss Poser problems.

Just for the record.

I don't actually blame so much the development team for the current state I think Poser is in.

I'm pretty sure they tried to do the most with the resources they had, even though I'm not that happy with some decisions that were made.

The one I'm angry with is SM who need to invest a lot more $$$ into Poser if they want to continue to compete with Studio.

If BagginsBill is going to desert the forums over whining, maybe we need a whine advisory flag? That way we can skip a thread that contributes little to the generally positive nature of the forums?

lmk

Quote - "Apologetics" somewhat different than a straight apology.

Yes, an apologist is someone who defends something or another. 

Quote - The one I'm angry with is SM who need to invest a lot more $$$ into Poser if they want to continue to compete with Studio.

I don't think too many new users are buying Pro unless they are using it to get content into a higher end app, in which case, they are rendering with something else anyway.  For them the cost of Poser Pro is trivial compared to the time saved.

SM is in this to make money.   They know how much they make and thus how much they can spend on development.  If they turn it into LightWave or MAX, it's going to end up costing like LightWave or MAX...

Quote - "Dude - they have like three engineers to build the whole thing including UI, not just the rendering engine, and these guys don't make $200K+ like I do. If you want a great renderer, PAY for it."

Bill, yeah, that sucks, but the customers don't care.

Studio 4 PRO is almost as good as PP 2012 (and in some aspects even better) and new user won't shell out $500 for a new PP 2013/14 if they can have the same for free and better figures on top of that.

People paid for Poser because it could do a lot more things than Studio, so it was the only game in town to create content.

Not anymore.

I'd really like to see Poser survive, but they really have to bring their A-Game this time.

As a customer I do care, but I'm also realistic.... I've paid $70 for Poser Pro 2012, so I'm not expecting a top notch rendering engine. I also do believe that the poser team does bring their a-game already. It may not be be what I want or like, but I don't expect them to do what I like or not. But at times, I do wonder what drives these engineers to focus on certain things and then leave other things alone. How do they decide what we want.... or even better who's influencing them to release the features they do. Why did they invest money into a (most likely expensive) crappy library system many users complain about and replace with better ones, while they could have used that money for really needed other improvements and features. Why do they keep on spending money on crappy figures no one wants to use, they could have invested that money into something better. I'm not against them releasing figures, but at least release something good or use the money for something else.

Quote - Criticism of Poser = Whining.  Got it.  Thanks.

Thanks for coming down from high on Mount Olympus to put us all in our place, BB.  Please let us know when it's okay for us  to discuss Poser problems.

Just ignore him, you're not whining at all, you've got a good number of valid points.

Quote - If BagginsBill is going to desert the forums over whining, maybe we need a whine advisory flag? That way we can skip a thread that contributes little to the generally positive nature of the forums?

lmk

There's no whining here..... except for one person whining about another persons posts..... nothing new.

Well, yeah, it is kind of whiney.  It went from a speculation and fairly happy thread, to a massive derailment (my fault there) and now it's gone to how pitiful Poser is.

I honestly feel that if Poser isn't cutting it for folks any longer that it's just time to move on.  To Blender or higher end, higher priced, applications that are much more on the bleeding edge.  Maybe you guys have been holding all of this inside for a while but it really seems out of the blue. :)

I feel that for what it is and the price point delivered, Poser has really made a lot of strides over the years, from version to version.  Firefly has been built on and enhanced and in comparison, produces far better results than DS' engine, at least to my eyes (and I feel it goes further but will stop there as to not bring the flame wars into yet another thread).

As far as customers go, I wouldn't venture to guess how they feel because all we have is a forum sampling of a handful of dissatisfied folks and from what I understand Poser 9 and 2012 did quite well in terms of sales.  Certainly well enough for them to continue on with future development.

I try to be a realist too and I think there are some valid concerns.  Does the hair room need an overhaul or alternative (or maybe an easier way to produce, save and load hybrid strand/shell hair)?  Sure.  Does the cloth room need to be improved and enhanced? Sounds good to me too.  Does it need lots of tweaks in the animation department with regards to a dope sheet and other things that animators have been asking for?  Yes, quite.

Maybe I've been under a rock for the last 2 months (well, I have honestly) but this is the first time I've seen woes over the material room and firefly (at least in a LONG time).  Not long ago people were excited about all the neat node-based things folks were coming up with and now that's turned to it's god-awful.  Hmm...  Maybe spring will be better when folks are not so cooped-up indoors?

And no, I'm not mad or sad or anything like that but I have given myself a couple of months to step back and really, it's not the end of the world and I'm still a Poser fan (and yes, good for me :P ).

People are way too precious about their "Threads" and oh, the humanity it's been "Derailed" because  a segment of the community disagrees with the Rose-Colored Glasses set.

When you post a thread, it is subject to differing opinions.  If you only want to see posts that agree with you or are happy, huff ether and send yourself an email, yes?

Yes.

I don't know what, if anything, can change, but NOTHING will if only the voice of "Hey, Bros!  Great Job!  Maybe you can change the splash screen for the new version?  Other than that, rock on!" is heard.

Happy enough to wait and see what appears.

No good worrying about something I have no control or direct input in.

All the best.

LROG

Unfortunately Eyore seems to rule here.  Poeple forget that number of Forum Posters are the Rounding Error of the number of Poser users...

It's not whining.

I still prefer Poser over Studio, but without ColorCurvatures' Morphloader I would have been forced to abandon Poser a long time ago.

Without realistic ready made figures available anywhere, full mesh control via reverse deformations is an absolute necessity.

Without ColorCurvature, we'd still have exploding backsides, bowling-ball shoulders and flattened thighs in Poser.

Realistic looking joints are simply a "can't do without" thing for me.

(And I guess for a lot of other people, too, given the success of the various "fix it" morph kits offered.)

Sorry, but POSER is about POSING figures.

This is top priority.

All the real time shadows, the fancy library, the hundred node shaders, even the SSS and GC are worthless when the figures still look like a mess because of inferior joints.

Well, ColorCurvature came to the rescue just in time, but that was the point I lost my "trust" in SM and Poser knowing where they were going.

The technology was there because Studio already had it, but Poser just added "features" instead of concentrating on it's core fuctionality:

Allowing hobbyists to add realistic looking humans to their art.

Poser could be a lot more without being a poor man's MAX or MAYA.

But it has to decide what it actually wants.

Unless anyone here is on the beta team (and they are under NDA, so cannot give details), you have no direct influence on the next version of Poser.

You can ask for various new features to be included, but that's all you can do, ask.

So, ask for reasonable features, SM does listen at times, but make sure there is a good reason for that feature.

All the best.

LROG

And to answer the OP, not heard any rumours.

All the best.

LROG

"People are way too precious about their "Threads" and oh, the humanity it's been "Derailed" because  a segment of the community disagrees with the Rose-Colored Glasses set.

When you post a thread, it is subject to differing opinions.  If you only want to see posts that agree with you or are happy, huff ether and send yourself an email, yes?
Yes.

I don't know what, if anything, can change, but NOTHING will if only the voice of "Hey, Bros!  Great Job!  Maybe you can change the splash screen for the new version?  Other than that, rock on!" is heard."

Agreed.

I so wish for a professional Poser forum where adults can have an adult discussion without a mod breathing down their neck and some delicate soul complaining that the "negativity" would drain all the joy out of them.

The problem is not the occasional hair (and beard) pulling, the problem is that some see the Poser forum as their private chat room where they just want to hang out with friends and have happy thoughts.

I seriously think there would be a lot less friction and belly-aching with TWO Poser forums.

One for those just wanting to have "fun", off-topics and perhaps newbie-help, and one for those wanting to have serious Poser-centric discussions.

Well yeah, I realize that you have had strong convictions concerning figure design since the get-go (and I'm not debating that) but I just felt the material room and firefly woes in the thread (not specifically by you) just came out of the blue.

ColorCurvature's script/system is important because it doesn't tie one to Zbrush.  I do think expecting everyone to use "one" solution is a mistake.  There's actually a way to do it prior to GoZ in Poser.  You can just put the bent area on a "layer" in Zbrush.  It isn't perfect or elegant but it works.  However, it does tie one to Zbrush, again.  In that department, yes Studio is superior with its Morph Loader (plus?).  I do think the Poser team should provide a more generic solution or adapt/purchase ColorCurvature's tech, much like WW.  So, I do agree there.  Options are very important.

I don't feel it is superior in the Rendering or Material department but that's only my opinion.  I think a lot of DS renders look flat, as in they lack depth in the lighting.  There are exceptions but in my own experience, it's much more of a stuggle for ME to get depthful looking renders out of it.

I think Genesis is interesting and on a positive note, it's fascinating that they could get DSON to work inside of Poser.  However, I feel it's kind of gimmicky and I have personal issues with "all in one basket" ideals with it.  But that doesn't make it wrong or whatever, just how I think about it.

I'm speaking more towards the "DS has more to offer" kind of thing and I'm saying yes... but really not so much if you aren't buying into the Genesis figure platform.

Quote - "People are way too precious about their "Threads" and oh, the humanity it's been "Derailed" because  a segment of the community disagrees with the Rose-Colored Glasses set.

When you post a thread, it is subject to differing opinions.  If you only want to see posts that agree with you or are happy, huff ether and send yourself an email, yes?
Yes.

I don't know what, if anything, can change, but NOTHING will if only the voice of "Hey, Bros!  Great Job!  Maybe you can change the splash screen for the new version?  Other than that, rock on!" is heard."

 

Agreed.

I so wish for a professional Poser forum where adults can have an adult discussion without a mod breathing down their neck and some delicate soul complaining that the "negativity" would drain all the joy out of them.

The problem is not the occasional hair (and beard) pulling, the problem is that some see the Poser forum as their private chat room where they just want to hang out with friends and have happy thoughts.

I seriously think there would be a lot less friction and belly-aching with TWO Poser forums.

One for those just wanting to have "fun", off-topics and perhaps newbie-help, and one for those wanting to have serious Poser-centric discussions.

Would be great, but..... around here the people who claim to be pro's are often the ones coming down hardest..... and have the thinnest skins, easlily offended over nothing...... they're just popping in, saying what they think, calling names, derailing a thread and then run of again. As long as that attitude doesn't change, nothing much will change. I've been here a long time and there used to be hefty discussion, but they always were respectful. That changed about 3-4 years ago, when some people starting thinking they're better then all the rest of us and act like that. That's when things got heated and mods needed to step in...... big time. We don't need people to act like gods, coming down on us mortals, we need people who can respect others for what they are and what they say, unless it's really out of like, but then we need mods to step in, which most of them they do excellently.

Well enough...... back to the topic. No, I haven't heard any rumors either, got wishes, but they don't let go much, so we keep on speculating.

Quote - And to answer the OP, not heard any rumours.

Buried in the noise; improvements to animation.  Also, BB is using Poser 10, but had no comment, so no big improvements in materials, at least thus far..

As far as those with criticisms go, there is a Poser feature request thread over at SM's forum.  Suggestions are more likeley to be actually seen there, since Coopa is the moderator....

http://forum.runtimedna.com/forumdisplay.php?263-The-Official-Poser-9-Poser-Pro-2012-Forum

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - It also allows you to work around many of the issues present in the Firefly engine

 This is the sort of apologetics that drive me up the wall.

 Why should we design a room to work around a faulty render engine???

Why not throw away firefly altogether? 

Why did anyone ever consider firefly a good idea in the first place?  It was balls from day one, IMO, not much better than Poser 4 rendering engine. 

Arg.

 

Please show me a render engine without flaws.

And I wasn't apologizing for anything.

Vray:)

Of course, all of us want different things, based on what we are actually doing.  I don't care about Poser's default rendering engine, because, thanks to the modularity of Poser, there are several available - Vue, LuxRender, and Octane, and the Reality 3 plug-in will be along shortly.

I am personally more interested in under the hood changes - I would really, really like to see the python subsystem on it's own thread instead of hogging the main thread.  The ability to run Wardrobe Wizard as a separate background process, like the render engine would be enough for me to purchase the next version of Poser Pro.

Oh, and better memory management - my system gets baulky when I go above 3gb in Poser 2012 - I have 22gb of ram, I want to use all of it.

I very much enjoy using Poser, in its current incarnation. I can appreciate it, for what it is... and it gives me a lot of joy.

I don't have many complaints.

Suggestions... probably a lot of suggestions... for areas I'd like to see improved... sure.

The way I see it though, one of Poser's most powerful features is its user community.

;)

Show me a forum anywhere for any product that doesn't have some criticism or moans about that product?  I doubt there is one, I'm with monkeycloud on this one, there are lots of things I'd like Poser to do , many things I wish it could do faster, easier etc etc, but I haven't got a thousand pounds to spare on one piece of software, so until they intergrate 3dMax into Poser and only charge a few hundred for the combined packaged, and you can run high ended render engines on a laptop or basic system, or cloud rendering is free for life, then I guess I'll stick wiv ol poser for all it's teeth gnashing, finger biting, render crashing mistakes :) and have a lot of fun along the way..........Do I get my free copy now?

Quote - Well yeah, I realize that you have had strong convictions concerning figure design since the get-go (and I'm not debating that) but I just felt the material room and firefly woes in the thread (not specifically by you) just came out of the blue.

...

Nah, I've complained heavily about the material room on many an occasion..lol. Nothing new for me ;).

I guess I was just in a terrible mood and I'm fed up is all. The material room, even after all these years, remains an enigma for me. And the complete and total lack of documentation other than a few lines that really explain nothing in the manual really doesn't help much.

Back to happy thoughts. Maybe I should just keep my thoughts to myself ;).

Happy rendering....

Laurie

There’s actually been a fair amount of discussion/ideas on improving the material room with a two level interface, compared to other applications etc., maybe under ‘node spaghetti’. I don’t know if it met the level required for continued legitimacy – is it like those White House petition things? Sorry, I’m being a bit sarcastic ÷)

“But it has to decide what it actually wants.”

I think there’s truth to that. One of the main problems is that there is no one group to satisfy. Some would prefer a more wizard driven interface, with lots of presets etc. some of whom are called the ‘make art’ (not my characterization) crowd. Some want advanced features, even if they require more effort to use. I don’t see those two as mutually exclusive, but doing both with limited resources, while trying to meet a release schedule that will keep people buying new versions is a huge challenge. One or the other will probably characterize the application. There are probably more, but IMO, if someone came out with a modern streamlined application aimed at casual users (no, not Debut nor DS), that used existing content it could potentially grab a large chunk of customers. That could ‘free’ Poser to cater to an audience more interested in advanced features, maybe adding more integration with Blender, as was suggested, multiple render engines etc.

There are also limits to what the team can accomplish, at least in the near term. Historically, many of the new features have at least started with the acquisition of 3rd party technology – Firefly being a case in point. Sure, there is better stuff out there e.g. sophisticated hair modules used in Max etc. The question is how much would they cost in money and integration effort. Expecting Poser’s programmers to do that stuff from scratch is probably even less realistic. I think that overall, they’ve done a pretty good job keeping the program going. A lot will depend on how long they have the great luxury of only middling competition. Personally, I’d want an whole different team working on the next generation from a clean slate, but Poser is only one cog in the SM wheel and I doubt that would happen.

Rumors? Check SMSI’s SEC filings, stock rumors etc. as likely to point to anything as reading the entrails of the Poser Forum I imagine.

Quote - Back to happy thoughts. Maybe I should just keep my thoughts to myself ;).

Nah, I think you make pretty reasonable points Laurie.

Personally I'd hate to lose the advanced mat room, with its node format.

But... I'd be all for adding a layer on top of that. Something that is, of course, way more configurable than the current basic mat room. But that hides the node soup necessary to define say a base metal... lets you just tweak a set of parameters defined for that base metal (by the programmer who created the underlying base metal definition).

They could simply add a specific Parameter node to achieve this.

The new intermediate interface could automatically read the Parameter nodes in and build a nice GUI from them. There could be presets to these parameters too... that could be saved, redistributed, too... separate to the underlying node network, base shader.

So a base metal shader could perhaps be tweaked to be Iron, Steel... etc.

Although I'm thinking refined beyond that.

There'd be scope for skilled texture artists to fine tune... create new, refinements and redistribute.

The base shaders could also be sold, or given away, by those skilled enough to create them.

Although SM might also bundle some, as standard.

That's be my suggestion for the mat room. 

=== Material Room Thoughts ===

At the risk of fanning flames, I think the current inception of the material room is limited by the lack of means of creating your own shader node. Or group node. I'm of course thinking along the lines of OSL and the current Cycles node approach.

Pipe dream? yeah, probably. But for the Lauries and the - well, sheesh, the bulk of Poser users! - wouldn't it be awesome to have a BB-designed node that just does skin. One node, with multiple outputs and channels where you can enter values. And a means to replace just the P4-P7 node sets with one click: the kludges go away, the textures are preserved, and one (highly configurable, yet with excellent defaults) node takes over.

Allow me to show you what I've done in Blender:

The Skin.Torso is a node group - the Shader.Body is a node group. The material Output would be like PoserSurface. Look how simple it all looks. And believe me, it's as easy to use. Is the shader elegant? um, no. Rudimentary. Ordinary. Underwhelming. But, as proof of concept, it really shines.

And the skin looks reasonably okay.

ETA: the '6' between the Skin.Torso name and the 'F' signifies how many material zones use this node group. The key here is re-usability. I can use Shader.Body for V4, Antonia, whoever I want... and if I link and not append, then the reference is to a shader "object" stored in a material library: if I enhance/update/improve/whatever that material library, it trickles down to any figure that happens to use that shader.

I hope my suggestions will be seen not as a "bagging-Poser-development" sort of comment: I've had the privilege to see how other programmes approach a problem and very humbly, very respectfully submit that the material room could benefit from concepts I see employed in other apps.

The above-mentioned solution would work for not only the hackers/tweakers/developers who want to have control over all minutiae, but also those who loathe and dread the mat room because of all those baffling features that excite programming/mathematical minds (I'm not one of those, of course). Those clever people - again, not me... I'm definitely not clever - could put together a solution that could at the same time lend itself to tweaking and modifying and enhancing but - more importantly - ease-of-use for those who just want to get on with creating their scene.

Quote - I completely agree that given what is possible today, Poser is way behind the curve. We have 100% photorealism in feature films.....

I was going to say that you are comparing apples to oranges, but that wouldn't even cover it.

Render times in CGI movies are about 40min a frame step at a minimum. And they are crunched on massive networks. I wouldn't even want to think of the money invested to design those engines, let alone the OS mods required to support network render engines that large.

No one here can afford that technology, and the software used is not for sale.

Yes you can get Houdini, Cinema4D, etc that are used in a lot of them. But you are not getting the plugins. Your not getting the render engine mods either.

Comparing CGI to Poser or DS is like comparing your rollerskates to a Bugatti...

We should be at about the level of "The Phantom Menace" by now, that's 14 years between CGI and Desktop. 

How much has the Desktop computer grown in capability in 14 years?

Quote - How much has the Desktop computer grown in capability in 14 years?

It depends on how you look at it. If you compare a 386DX to an I7 Extreme, it is theoretically about 1800 times faster. But theory and real life show that it isn't that extreme because a lot of the supporting stuff has not sped up at the same rate. Things like hard drives, memory, and buses have not sped up anywhere near close to what processors have.

Servers have an advantage over desktops because the primary support for the processor, the ram gig per second, is far faster on a server than a desktop. They also have other advantages such as scalability. IE, 1000s of processors ganged together with massive amounts ram.

Weta Digital's server farm has about 40,000 processors.

(Thats about 4000 Blade Servers ganged together...)

Here is a quote they released on Avatar.

".....it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Often each of Avatar’s frames took several hours to render..."

Thinking we should be able to do that now on a desktop, even a single frame, in less time with better detail is a pipe dream.

Quote - > Quote - Well yeah, I realize that you have had strong convictions concerning figure design since the get-go (and I'm not debating that) but I just felt the material room and firefly woes in the thread (not specifically by you) just came out of the blue.

...

Nah, I've complained heavily about the material room on many an occasion..lol. Nothing new for me ;).

I guess I was just in a terrible mood and I'm fed up is all. The material room, even after all these years, remains an enigma for me. And the complete and total lack of documentation other than a few lines that really explain nothing in the manual really doesn't help much.

Back to happy thoughts. Maybe I should just keep my thoughts to myself ;).

Happy rendering....

Laurie

Nah, it's all good. :)  I wasn't trying to single out anyone exclusively either.  It just felt like.. whoah where is all this coming from (as a general look at where this thread went).

Okay, here's my idea.  I think the Material Room and the Manual could use more "recipes".  In fact, there should be a materials "recipe book" included with Poser.  Something that gives you examples and breaks down "why" those particular nodes are used and connected the way they are.  That way people can LEARN why things go together the way they do.

Don't just give a sample library of metals and pearls and whatnot.

Sure, trial and error is another way to do it but the nodes can get very complex and after a while it just becomes a tangled mess.

I think the manual does now give a good overview but I would like to see recipes.

As far as the render engine goes.  I can get good results with IDL and a sphere (I use colm's set) or bouncing things off of planes and using a maximum of 3 lights, usually 2.  But maybe we need some better examples of that kind of thing and samples that aren't just "here are some light sets" but here is how you set it up.

I think some things lack guidance and people want to learn and that's what is frustrating.

Am I off base?

Well, as long we're Pipe Dreaming:

I have a dream, a dream of a Piece of Software that is metered in cost.  Something I can install for about fifty dollars, but have to log in to use.  Let's say that ongoing participation in the software costs a flat-fee of 15 dollars per month, with the additonal option of renting content on a per-use basis.  This is not that much to ask, and is about in-step with Online Video Games, which I do not play.

When I am online and logged in, Everything that exists is at my fingertips if I'd like to use it.  It loads from this Cloud, if I'm using the term correctly, into my scene.  I imagine a useage fee of 50 cents per item, depending on the complexity and bandwidth of the item, not to exceed 1 dollar.  You could save your scene as long as you need to, change it as much as you like, and keep rented items on your pallette for that scene even if you decide to delete them for the time being.  You could remove items from the pallette permanently, to avoid a rollover-recharge on a monthly basis for these items.

Stock figures would be realistic to my specifications, versatile, and bend properly using whatever system is state-of-the-art. 

Lighting would be handled by a wizard.  "What kind of lights would you like?" and they would perform like you'd expect lights to in the real world.

Maneuvering in the preview window would be done via mouse...scroll wheel zoom, right click rotation on axis, etc.

A system like PoseMagic would be built-in to the figure, so that the figure would respond to simple directions via control dials the way a body would normally do, in unison of parts rather than part by part posing.

Figures would detect collisions with other figures and react with soft-body dynamics in real time, rather than pass through.

All clothes would be dynamic in real time.

All hair would be dynamic in real time, with a variety of handling modes.  Strand, Strip, Geometric Shape.

Layered direct painting on to the figure, direct morphing tools.

Particles, Liquids and Gasses behaving as you would expect them to in simulation.

Real time rendering that uses available technology

State-of-the-art Rendering Engine that uses every computer that is logged into the server in a Torrent-like system of job processing, including a suite of computers from the server dedicated to this process.

Actually, if you are speaking of MMOs, the monthly-fee thing is archiac now.  World of Warcraft is probably the only one that can still pull that off because the fanbase is conditioned to do it (and they are rabid - they love their game and their characters).  The better modern-thinking MMOs (Dungeons and Dragons Online and Guild Wars 2) are without an ongoing fee and are not pay-to-win.  There are item shops but it is very feasable to "work at it" and never spend a dime.  In GW2, you can convert in-game currency into "gems" which are used for the online store.

Yes there are still MMOs that are on the subscription model but they are pretty much dying a little every day.

I could get into your idea though if I had the option to "pay it all up front" instead of going with the cloud service and whatnot.  I just don't like the idea of renting software at all.  If you start renting everything you wind up spending more in the long run.  Rent Photoshop, rent this modeler, and so on... buried :)

Now THAT we both agree on Joe ;). If I pay for software, I want it on my machine. I don't really wanna be nickeled and dimed to death ;).

Laurie

I got suckered into that "pay-by-the-month" thing before... old concept, very effective way of relieving me of my hard-earned. Never again... what if you go off Poser, seduced by - say - modo or Vue or Blender or having a non-virtual life for a while? You're still paying for that stuff, regardless.

MS is (are?) trying this ($100/year subscription) with their latest Office product: no thanks. I know I don't own any software unless I write it myself, but I can chose the licencing terms, and I think in the long run you end up paying more for the cow if you buy it in pieces than if they deliver the whole virtual beast to your front door and ask for that one-time payment.

Oh, I do like the recipe concept, btw, Joe. To some degree, I believe it's where BB was going with it - you could collect 'recipes' of his for different materials off the different sites... but then, those weren't really 'recipes' - unless you got the script so you could see what he was doing - so much as 'take-away dinners', were they?

To enlarge on your recipe notion: they Should be more than just:

-- plug yadda into yiddi
-- plug tweedle-dee into tweedle-dum

...but rather:

-- plug yadda into yiddi
..... the yadda node is what gives the sense of coarseness to the texture... you can increase or decrease coarseness by increasing or decreasing the values in that channel: upper value is 1, lower value is -1, pivotal value is actually .035697... the yiddi channel blah-blah-blah
-- plug tweedle-dee into tweedle-dum [more of the same]

So people would then not only be able to "use the nodes appropriately in a sentence" but could also synthesise this information to create new textures/shaders.

I still think a revamp of the mat room to include UserDefined-nodes (OSL) and node groups and NodeObjects (where you would be able to instantiate your own nodes from your own libraries) would be cool, though.

I guess I'm alone in thinking this, though, clearly. :blink:

No, you are not RobynsVeil, your description is exactly the kind of improvement I am looking for in the materials room - the room isn't bad, the documentation just needs to be updated.

As far as renting software & the cloud - renting software isn't going to save anyone a dime, it's purpose is to milk the customer base. 

And the cloud? Please.

As long as we have crappy connections (cable or DSL) between the cloud & our computer, it is a solution in search of a problem.

Now if it was a loan where you rent the software until you eventually paid it off, that would be one thing.  Yes it would cost more in the long run but you would stop paying at a certain point.  The sub-thing you NEVER pay it off.  Again, yes, that's real ownership versus a license to use it but still...

@Robynsveil: Exactly what I was thinking.  If you dial this part, it does this.  If you want it "milkier" try this and so on.  I know that BB has been very descriptive on some of his knowledge sharing and I for one appreciate it, even though I don't pop into every thread and say so :)

I think User-Defined nodes would be cool.  Something like mini-shaders where you'd create your own components... Like Filter Meister and the old User Defined Adobe Filters?  So if you wanted a hexagon generator instead of a grid generator as a node, you could build that.

@ssgbyan and Netherworks: so, for the existing node system, a glorious new project... Node Discovery. Mind you, Bagginsbill already gave us the tool to do it with some time ago, when he explored the Scatter node's behaviour, didn't he?

Gee, all this exciting stuff happening and it's now that both my desktop graphics card and my backup 1TB drive decide to pack it in. Good job I've got a NVidia 580GTX 1.5 gig on its way from Connecticut - the trace-routing thingie told me it's well and truly on its way here now - but no telling when it will arrive, this being Oz. And the terrabyte drive... need to pop in at the local data recovery centre to get that sorted.

Just wondering - back to OrigTopic - was there anything earth-shattering/game-changing happening to the Mat Room? Anyone know? I'd hate to do this whole Node Discovery thing only to find out all the players have been replaced by someone/something else.

No need for me to defend my pipe dream, but a few lines since it's free.

I think the cost, per year, of my idea would be = or < what you pay for a full version of Poser and all the extras that you buy that just take up space and often only get used one time, if at all.  I personally prefer all this crap off my storage devices, for the most part, I do get very tired of buying new Hard Drives and that whole rigamarole. 

Further, the idea that the render will be EASILY shared on a vast network on the internet itself, rather than bog down my own machine with 100% of it, and that alone would be worth a monthly 15 dollars IMO.

Edit to add:

I have a real time justifying Poser purchase to the Mrs. every 1.5 years.  50 dollars up front and 15 a month goes under the radar.