Hello everyone,

I want to start learning Blender and I wondered if there was any point in getting a citizen membership from Blender cookie. I went through some of the free tutorials and they seem pretty good but wondered if it continued like that.

Also, is it easy to import Poser figures to Blender? As I will probably not start by creating characters and would like to have some in my renders.

Many thanks,

Andro

Andro, here's what I would do... start working with Blender 2.6x first. See if it suits your style of modelling. Some people never quite acquire a taste for its weird ways. (Me, I'm weird, so it suits me perfectly).

:biggrin:

If indeed it does work well for you and you have decided that you want to invest a lot of TIME with Blender, then absolutely, BlenderCookie is the very best investment you could make.

I don't subscribe to much, but I do subscribe to BlenderCookie. Incredibly cheap for what you get!

:woot:

is citzen worth it YES

is it easy to export from blender to poser? not normaly because they are majorly seperated formats

with some time you will learn the tricks of groupind and material zones

on cookie the free tuts are good but the memebrs tuts are more involved

Ok, thanks a lot ;)

It's been quite some time now that i've wondered about starting blender and as I heard the interface got a bit simplified, now might be a good time :p.

I'll start playing with it with the free tuts and see afterwards ;)

Andro

Quote - is citzen worth it YES

is it easy to export from blender to poser? not normaly because they are majorly seperated formats

with some time you will learn the tricks of groupind and material zones

on cookie the free tuts are good but the memebrs tuts are more involved

I generally don't have much of a problem with going from Blender to Poser IF I keep in mind that Poser's native unit are teeeensy-tiny, and so I tend to size everything up tenfold before working on it in Blender, and then you have to scale everything back down when you export. Reddog9 was writing an exporter/importer Blender <-> Poser but it sort-of stalled there a bit. I think it's open-source, though, so anyone with a bit of Python knowledge could probably run with the ball - not sure how Reddog9 would feel about that, though.

I actually do a fair bit of modelling for Poser in Blender. And pose models in Poser to render in Blender Cycles. It would be nice if the programmes worked a little more seamlessly, but with a bit of tweaking, you can get stuff to work okay.

I think you a better off modeling in Blender than take it to Poser for rendering.  Its not that Poser's native render engine is better than Blender's, its just that the learning curve for everything in Blender is a bit steeper.  Blenderheads can get over technical when explaining things.

Is there a way to render Poser scenes using Blender's Cycles?  I imagine the scene would need to be exported as a Collada file (using Poser Pro 2012).  Or would the scene need to be exported object by object and then re-assembled within Blender?

Attached Link: http://www.tightbytes.com/Blender/Cycles/CyclesHair15.png

Collada support in Blender is iffy (my experience only) so I've been exporting the posed scene to Blender in wavefront obj format. All that is about to change, though, since I'm finally getting my head around rigging figures in Blender so I'll be able to pose Poser figures in Blender. There are still aspects (like dialing morphs and expressions) I might let Poser manage for now.

Rigging is not a trivial thing, btw... but fortunately Blender does support weight-mapping so it should yield a fairly decently-deforming character, eventually. And I do like Cycles hair.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no legal issues using V4 in Blender and even Posing her. Sharing the posable (rigged) figure is a problem, but sharing the rig isn't.

Sound right?

riggify is pretty neat RV an works quite well with the auto weight paint but be prepared for some tweaking, getting poser morphs into blender maybe tricky, have to let me know how that works out, for expressions I have been peeping at the facial rigs that are knocking about, did try s3 and made face bones but she looked like a train wreck

@ anim8ter, is a couple of ways to do it, can get the poser plugin,will need the right blender ;-) dont think it works in the new blender :-(

is a plugin for DS that exports a full scene, again I dont know if it works with the latest blender and poser to DS to blender is a bit much

easy way is to use "collect scene inventory" in your poser python scripts it will export all figures and textures to a folder, still a bit of messing about in blender but having all the textures in one place saves a lot of grunt work

Quote - ... [A]  @ anim8ter, is a couple of ways to do it, can get the poser plugin,will need the right blender ;-) dont think it works in the new blender :-(

[B]  is a plugin for DS that exports a full scene, again I dont know if it works with the latest blender and poser to DS to blender is a bit much

 

easy way is to use "collect scene inventory" in your poser python scripts it will export all figures and textures to a folder, still a bit of messing about in blender but having all the textures in one place saves a lot of grunt work

[A] No, Reddog9's script doesn't seem to... hope he sort-of gets back to working on it.

[B] The Export to Blender script featured on the link should work, but I basically use the Collect Scene Inventory Python script Hedd referred to when I do an export to OBJ... but then, also explicitly export the figure, clothing, hair, jewellery and props each on their own as OBJs. When I import, I don't import with 'image search'.

Quote - riggify is pretty neat RV an works quite well with the auto weight paint but be prepared for some tweaking, getting poser morphs into blender maybe tricky, have to let me know how that works out, for expressions I have been peeping at the facial rigs that are knocking about, did try s3 and made face bones but she looked like a train wreck

Yes, I'm finding that out, Hedd... no such thing as a free lunch :biggrin: - still, it does make short (er) work of setting up all the bones and stuff. So, I should have at least a pose-able Antonia - with eyelashes, eyebrows and hair!! - by some time next week.

And since she's GPL2 OSS, I can At Least share the rig, eyelashes and brows and hair, if not the figure itself (I'm using a_'s Poppy morphs, which aren't free).