Quote - I dont know if we will see anything quite like the poser place projects again.. my gut says no, but maybe thats just me being jaded.  It was sure an amazing experience though, I just wish that I had more skill at the time to contribute more... it really did change the way I look at figures, modelling and poser in genreal

Those were indeed fun times, and I learned so much.   In retrospect, the downside was that it was tied too much to one person; it was Mike's goal to teach people to create content to have them fully in the loop, but his health and website problems intervened before that happened, and it faded away.  I think for such a project to be sucessful, several principal players are needed, but they need to come to a consensus on certain things, and but as seen from the discourse here, that is not an easy thing...

> Quote - Just wanted to add this: "Ghost bones" are as bad an idea as joint smoothing magnets are. Every additional actor slows Poser down, adds complexity to the cr2 and the weightmapped ghost bone is still not nearly as versatile as a simple JCM is.

I have to disagree with this for a few reasons, How many meg does the average Poser Character consume when you load it?

It is usually a few hundred meg right off the bat depending on the number of morphs.

What if you could load a character that was only about 50 and did not have a single morph in it? What type of character is that? A Blend shape one. Yeah they are not for everyone, simply because it is far easier to use Dynamic clothes with them.

As far as G3 is concerned, dunno if that will ever happen or not. I have more than a few versions of G3 that I have been playing around with. One in particular takes size reduction to extremes by using some interesting tricks to reduce the size as far as possible.

It all starts with a lean and clean object file.
Edgeflow and topology are WAY more important then brutal poly count.

Then try to keep the cr2 as lean and clean as possible too.

The more stuff you put into it, the less end user friendly it becomes, and the more prone to errors it gets.

Some figures do have good meshes, but the cr2 completely ruins them.

From Poser 1, and that has been a long time, I have been:

• Corecting object files

• Deleting unwanted stuff; Magnets, JCM's, Material zones; You name, I delete it.
  Never-ever seen symmetrical ones, so out they go by definition. I do not even look at them any more.

• Allow me to add : Deflating balloons into breasts that look like breasts.

HUGELY IMPORTANT and highly underestimated: DELETING or MERGING material zones.
Why, oh why so many material zones? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

They are also a pollution in a DEFAULT NATIVE Poser figure.

If some end user wants extra material zones?
Its a piece of cake to make them from inside Poser.
But, once you have them?
Poser has no native way to delete them.
It is technically impossible as they are in the object files and int he cr2.

Bone driven expressions.

Bone driven breast, muscles, etc...

The cr2 is under 4 meg......

None of the additional bones need to be selected unless you want to edit something. There are dials for all of them.

I have a lot of characters that are set up this way, and I can honestly say that they are far faster to work with than any traditional cr2 is.

Yes, clothes can be an issue, no doubt about that. Last time I checked there are only 2 programs in my stable of programs that use conformers. All the rest use dynamic, because that is the 3D standard for clothing 99% of the time.

These blendshapes might work well for animated toons and characters without much body detail, but you can't get as detailed a deformation from a single bone (Or a combination of several) than you can get from a morph. You also destroy the whole infrastructure people built around "conventional" cr2's. I also find it hard enough to navigate a standard cr2. I rather not imagine how convoluted it gets with all those additional actors. ( I think I opened V4's once in a text editor, recoiled in horror and never touched it again) And of course I want to select ghost bones, as they often need manual re-adjusting for complicated poses. At least with the figures I've worked with so far. Poser simply is not the same as professional 3D. Maybe this will make my point clearer: Of course a fuel injected, computer controlled engine will be more efficient, run faster and be all around "better" than an old fashioned one with a carburettor and a simple mechanical ignition. But if even the slightest thing breaks with that modern engine, you're SOL without professional help because it's way too complicated for the average layperson to repair. But the conventional engine can be easily fixed with a handbook and a few simple tools unless something really serious has gone wrong. That's what I want a Poser figure to be: So easy to "maintain", so rugged that those who are interrested in it can still tinker around with it without getting frustrated immediately. So, sorry, I'll stay with my old fashioned morphs. Poser is built upon object files and morphs, and all the tools were made to handle object files and morphs. BTW, the cr2s of my custom figures are about 5mb each compressed. That includes expression morphs and a couple JCM fixes. It's not that I need a couple dozend JCM's or so for good bending. It's usually a pair for the armpits and a pair for extreme "ankles behind your neck" poses. M3RR's cr2 above is 4.83mb including all his default body and expression morphs with just a pair of JCMs. I don't think you can get any simpler and easier to use than that.

Quote -   Maybe this will make my point clearer: Of course a fuel injected, computer controlled engine will be more efficient, run faster and be all around "better" than an old fashioned one with a carburettor and a simple mechanical ignition. But if even the slightest thing breaks with that modern engine, you're SOL without professional help because it's way too complicated for the average layperson to repair. But the conventional engine can be easily fixed with a handbook and a few simple tools unless something really serious has gone wrong.

 

Speaking as someone who works on my own cars, that's a bad anology. Remember the annual tuneup and having to rebuild the carburetor every couple of years?  Or was that before your time?    Not only do fewer things go wrong with a modern auto, I have a $30 box that plugs in under the dash and the computer tells me what is wrong with the engine or transmission if there is an issue.  I spent more than $30 years ago to purchase the dwell meter and timing light needed to set the "simple mechanical ignition" timing annually.....

@ shvrdavid: I really liked Sydney. Is there any legal way I can test one of your advanced "G3" Sydneys ? So curious to morph and pose her and explore her limits.

Quote - @ shvrdavid: I really liked Sydney. Is there any legal way I can test one of your advanced "G3" Sydneys ? So curious to morph and pose her and explore her limits.

Ditto for me; I love Syd and Miki 2...

Quote - Bone driven expressions.

That always intrigued me, Something  similar to Dizzi's Hampelmann control panels for posting figures ( http://neocron.webspaceforme.net/hampelmann/ ) to drive the expression bones would be really useful (and wicked cool!  :biggrin: )

"Speaking as someone who works on my own cars, that's a bad anology. Remember the annual tuneup and having to rebuild the carburetor every couple of years? Or was that before your time? Not only do fewer things go wrong with a modern auto, I have a $30 box that plugs in under the dash and the computer tells me what is wrong with the engine or transmission if there is an issue. I spent more than $30 years ago to purchase the dwell meter and timing light needed to set the "simple mechanical ignition" timing annually....." But taking care of your car and learning how it works is part of the fun of driving a vintage car. So far all the cars I've owned were built between 1961 and 1969, except one, but I hated every second I had to spend in it. Besides, what if the computer chip of your car fails ? And there's no replacement because it's "too old" ? This has already become quite a problem with older "modern" cars. 10 years are an eternity when it comes to computer technology. Nope, I'll stay with vintage cars. If something worked for the last 50 years, there's a good chance it'll work for the next 50 years, too. :-)

Just a heads up for folks interested in bone based expressions - the new toons feature mouth expressions driven by a combo of bones and morphs. Sadly, we don't have weight map support for translations, so it limits what can be done but the cool thing with bone driven expressions is that it's easier to blend morphs together. Try it. Load Freddie into a scene and turn on all his expressions. You should still end up with something useable.

 Also, any bone in the figure should be selectable via the pull down menu as far as I'm aware. Even ghost bones unless made hidden in the CR2 in some way. Good example there would be the glute bones on rex and roxie - they are ghost bones but you can select them via the pull down.

Ok, carry on and like before....

Quote - Way too much to list, as they are all broken beyond repair.

Biggest problem is the badly made mesh topology that ignores anatomical correct muscle and bone structure, so developing new, correct shapes is nigh impossible. On the one hand edgeloops are missing, on the other hand there are tons of redundant vertices doing nothing.

(I've created versions of MIKI-1 that had 30.000 instead of 130.000 polygons and rendered just as nicely as the original long before Poser had SubD.)

Second problem are the stylized, unrealistic bodyshapes that ignore human anatomy. (MIKI -1/2 being the only exception, but her mesh topology is some of the worst I've ever seen)

Third is the bad rigging. Often magnets are used to "fix" problem zones but the results are generally pathetic. It's a spaghetti shoulders and balooning buttocks bonanza.

Finally there is the lack of any support to speak of. No texture convertor to tap into the vast array of Vicky/Mike textures. (Don and Judy being the only exception as they can use V2/M2 textures. Sort of)

There is WW support, but the results are usually not good enough for frontpage work and take way too long to convert.

 

My advice ?

Make a deal with DAZ and licence Genesis 1 or 2. (If we get HD technology in the future, there will be no noticeable difference between them, so I'd actually prefer Genesis 1)

Rework it so that it a) works natively in Poser and b) give it a new default morph it loads with so that Poser has it's own signature figure for marketing reasons. It would still be Genesis, but "our" Genesis.

(After all, Dork and Posette were licensed from Zygote which later became DAZ, so I don't see any "ethical" problem here)

---

Other than that, copy Genesis as closely as you can get away with it.

(No ethical problems here either, as DAZ usually copies any new figure development as soon as possible. (T-chest and buttock actors were first introduced on a modified Posette. No buttocks and waist actors were introduced by Apollo and the Poser 6 folks. JCMs and ERC were a Poser "invention". And so on, and so on.)

Everybody copys, so again, look at Genesis and copy it, but raise the polycount to about 50.000 so it will render fine without SubD.

 

Any other solutions or half-hearted "fixes"  will just be a waste of time.

We need a new start, but we have to do it right !

 

 

I second this proposal...unfortunately the 2 companies need to find a way to collaborate

Quote - These blendshapes might work well for animated toons and characters without much body detail, but you can't get as detailed a deformation from a single bone (Or a combination of several) than you can get from a morph. You also destroy the whole infrastructure people built around "conventional" cr2's. I also find it hard enough to navigate a standard cr2. I rather not imagine how convoluted it gets with all those additional actors. ( I think I opened V4's once in a text editor, recoiled in horror and never touched it again) And of course I want to select ghost bones, as they often need manual re-adjusting for complicated poses. At least with the figures I've worked with so far. Poser simply is not the same as professional 3D. Maybe this will make my point clearer: Of course a fuel injected, computer controlled engine will be more efficient, run faster and be all around "better" than an old fashioned one with a carburettor and a simple mechanical ignition. But if even the slightest thing breaks with that modern engine, you're SOL without professional help because it's way too complicated for the average layperson to repair. But the conventional engine can be easily fixed with a handbook and a few simple tools unless something really serious has gone wrong. That's what I want a Poser figure to be: So easy to "maintain", so rugged that those who are interrested in it can still tinker around with it without getting frustrated immediately. So, sorry, I'll stay with my old fashioned morphs. Poser is built upon object files and morphs, and all the tools were made to handle object files and morphs. BTW, the cr2s of my custom figures are about 5mb each compressed. That includes expression morphs and a couple JCM fixes. It's not that I need a couple dozend JCM's or so for good bending. It's usually a pair for the armpits and a pair for extreme "ankles behind your neck" poses. M3RR's cr2 above is 4.83mb including all his default body and expression morphs with just a pair of JCMs. I don't think you can get any simpler and easier to use than that.

What's ya render look like with a bodysuit on or just cloths ?

Left original M3RR with standard rigged clothes. Right M3RRWM with weightmapps transferred over to the clothing.

Of course Poser's weightmap transfer isn't perfect, so with loose fitting and/or unwelded clothing and extreme poses, you would have to manually re-adjust the clothing weightmap.

Or simply keep the old rigging and tighten the fit with the morphbrush. It really depends how the clothing was made, how dense the mesh is, whether it is welded or not, etc. Hope that answers your question.

JoePublic : Thanks for the info :)

Quote - These blendshapes might work well for animated toons and characters without much body detail, but you can't get as detailed a deformation from a single bone (Or a combination of several) than you can get from a morph. You also destroy the whole infrastructure people built around "conventional" cr2's. I also find it hard enough to navigate a standard cr2. I rather not imagine how convoluted it gets with all those additional actors. 

You obviously didn't read what I wrote. It is no harder to navigate than any other CR2, if you loaded the cr2 and stayed in the pose and mat room it would look and work like any other Poser character. You wouldn't even know there were additional bones.

Condem what you have never seen.......

Your analogy of classic cars is fitting....... In ways you may not even realize....

Actually eFrontier invested the money to bridge the gap between Poser and higher end apps.

Shortly after Poser 7 was released, they purchased the Poser Fusion plugins and added them to the first Pro version of Poser. 

IIRC, there is a thread in one of the offical Poser forums over at RDNA detailing SMS's reasons why they made the choices they made.  One of the biggest was that they did not want to tie their app to another companies development schedule.  Another had to do with Triax being trademarked or whatever and SMS choosing to continue as previous owners have with an open file system.  There were others but these were two of the biggest.

Wasn't Genesis supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread to hit the Poser/DS market?  Wasn't it supposed to be the be all end all of all figures? 

That lasted what?  Two years?  Now it's back to the gender split. Two steps forward and then three steps back.