Quote - > Quote - The trouble being that I get the sense that Poserdom is moving in the GC direction.  How many updates before GC is the only option, with "normal" rendering removed, just as old P4 rendering was?  That may be the day when I walk away from Poser, or I may be forced to finally work with it.  Maybe.

Poser is dumbed down in so many ways, but here it tries to force people to do it the smart person way.

I'd say it would be best to work with it.  It was added for a reason, because too many things in Poser were dumbed down or hacked and it was ultimately holding everyone back.  When Pro was introduced you can see the trend of trying to do more things right rather than simply, and these changes really had to be made to both versions of Poser as they share content.  My experiences have shown that since GC was added everything I've made from scratch looks better.  Unfortunately that means all of my old stuff does look worse.  GC just requires a different set of assumptions about how things will ultimately look, but similar results seem possible.      

 

I'm all for Poser ending the dumbing-down, in most areas.  I would prefer it, generally.  In this case, not so much.  How many of us can throw around the math that bagginsbill makes seem so simple?  I know I can't.  If mathematically "correct" shaders are to become a requirement, there needs to be a tool to make them accessible.  And some damned better example shaders in the library.  The examples in there now?  Not correct!  Buzz, wrong answer.  And a manual for Firefly.  Seriously, right now we get the RTFM attitude from certain quarters, when there's no manual.  Right now we learn from a slew of forum posts (when the links aren't dead), strewn across two, maybe three forums.  Forums with dodgy search functions, some of which don't mind breaking their links and leaving you without the images and examples you need in order to make sense of a materials-related discussion.  That's no good.

So I've been having a hissy fit about this.  Had a few bad days, this is badly timed, sure.  Yet from my perspective, I think I have a pretty good reason for it.  Stick me in a contradictory situation, I react badly.  Why is my lighting screwy, I ask, and away we go.  Hey, you now need to use GC now to have proper lighting.  Great.  But using GC breaks your shaders.  They don't represent what they're supposed to anymore, no longer say what you meant them to say.  Simultaneously, using GC breaks the WYSIWYG principle of the Materials Room.  Try repairing a broken shader developed by eyeballing it, because you aren't bagginsbill, while you can't see what you're doing, colors don't mean what they should, attenuation behaves oddly, falloffs are screwy, and you can't quite see what you're doing.  Meanwhile, GC fights your every effort to restore your desired effects.  So you have a complicated, broken shader, and the tools you need to fix it have been taken away.  And, remember, you aren't bagginsbill.  And you can only turn off the effect globally, but that breaks the lights, so don't do that.  And everyone is pushing GC like it's the greatest thing ever, prompting you to use it, ignoring the fact that the use of it creates an unworkable mess in the Materials Room.  No problem here.  I found it easy to adjust.  You will, too.  Oh, but all my shaders are pretty simple, I never really tried to push the Materials Room much, and all of my shaders were a piece of cake to fix.  Yep.  And the proposed solution is backtracking to rebuild everything from scratch.  Step back ten years and start over with simple stuff from the Dawn Age of Firefly.  Sorry, that's a crap situation.  Absolute pants.  Rubbish.  That's situation resulting from a feature which isn't fully ready yet.  Poser has a long history with those.  How long did it take the Morph Brush to be stable and reliable?  And the Hair Room still sits there, waiting to be put into a useful state, 10+ years later.  I don't mind Poser's unfinished features, largely, but then Poser and Poserdom don't try to force me to use them, generally.  Sit back, wait a few versions, maybe the gamma correction will be properly integrated with the Materials Room, WYSIWYG restored, and I can work with it.  Until then, it's tacked on, with only the surface functions working as needed.  Unless you're bagginsbill or a reasonable facsimile, or you're one of the programmers, or you're using simple materials, or you're working from a recipe.

If I can disable it when needed, I will use it where it is useful and shut it off where it isn't.  I mean what I say, when I tell a shader to do something.  Those colors I plugged into that node?  Those are what I actually want.  That overblown highlight?  Intentional.  That exaggerated darkness around the edges?  I meant to do that.  I don't want some automatic feature changing it.  Alternately, if the Materials Room once again lets me see what I'm doing so I can fix things, I will be ready to experiment, with an eye toward using the feature if I can get the results I need.  So far my experiments show that I just need to shut the thing off.  As Stewer points out, I can do that, so sit down and shut up, me.  Oh, except that breaks the lights, doesn't it?  Yeah, forgot that.  You can turn it off, anyway, until it's made an actual requirement, and it looks like that's not unlikely.  And you can't ask materials-related question at the forums any more, because the main answer will always be that you need to use GC.  That's you're problem.  hey, you're not using the GC.  Hey, finish it and I will perhaps use it.  Until then, I seek an off switch, whether global or specific to select materials.  I honestly don't need it.  I'd like lights that work properly, but, hey.

Poser has some great things to offer.  If I'm going to struggle with something, it should be a feature I like, not an effort to re-learn the Materials Room for no really good reason.  Again, phooey.  Also, phooey on articulate responses with sensible paragraph structure.  Bah!

Cage is an asshat, and stubborn, and doesn't have much patience for some types of nonsense.  Fair enough.  Just be glad you don't have to live with him all the time.  It's no picnic, lemme tellya.

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.