Hello Renderosity folk.

I see all is still going here :) Thought I would stop in n say hello long time no see.

Been cautiously dippin my toes in the 3D pond again mostly with mesh n anims for Skyrim.

Cheers,

Mike.

Hi, and welcome back! It has been awhile...

Hi Rokket.  

Yes, has been quite some time.  Been so long I dont know which Poser is the latest, lol.

Did they fix the symetry function on the weight mapping tools? 

So, what you all been doing? I imagine Cage is still scripting in python, mayhap I can getem interested in some papyrus.

cheers,

Mike

Welcome back.  We're up to Poser 99 and they only managed to fix the undo feature after breaking everything else lol.

Poser 99!!!

I will have to run right out n buy it. The undo function works now! Awesome!

Good to see you hborre.  I see Scott is still around, hi Scott :) Meatsim, WandW,  RorrKon, EClarke. LesBentley?

Trying to figure out a good pipeline from Poser to max and be able to keep the WM info. PhilC has a porter to Milkshape, I should be able to get to Max from there. Want to do some animation in Poser too and convert to .hkx we shall see.

The new Max is free now for personal. Lovin it.

Cheers,

Mike

Great to hear from you, Mike!  :wub:

..WAIT; MAX is free??? :blink: Where??

Hi WandW :)

Ya Max is free for personal use (at least it was about a month ago) You have to fill out a little questionaire but they send you a fully functional registered serial.

 Its good for them cause the future professionals will already be used to using max. Once you go pro then you have to pay. Still very nice of them.

http://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/all

good for three years after activation.

Dont know if anyone else is interested in game modding but all your Havok tools are free too.  http://havok.com/try-havok

I am trying to use Poser for weight mapping and animation and then get that into Skyrim. Not easy but I think it can be done.

Very low poly mesh compared to most Poser mesh. My current figure is hovering right around 4k quads.

Using 3DCoat for all the textures n such.

Hi, nice to see you back.

Yep, im still here. Good to hear from you.

WOW!

You're back on the boards and Max is free.

It's a good day...

Yay!  Mike is back!  :thumbupboth:  :woot:  :woot:

Hi BluEcho :)  Scott Good to see you too, you still working in Blender?

Cage!!! How you been buddy? My favorite online friend. You still working in Python? Ever hear of papyrus scripting engine? Its for games Skyrim etc.

Good to hear from you all. Miss the old team. Mayhap we can put something together again.

cheers,

Mike. 

Quote - You still working in Python? Ever hear of papyrus scripting engine? Its for games Skyrim etc.

This is the first I've heard of either Papyrus or Skyrim.  :lol:  If it's the same Papyrus, I found a Python package of that name which seems to enable working with geospatial coordinates somehow.  :unsure:

Still do a lot with Python, yes.  I'm currently finishing up a Python project with Panda3D.  Hopefully I have only a day or two more with this one.  :unsure:

What's been up?  :laugh:

Not alot been going on with me. I have been running on the treadmill and lifting weights. Diabetes is well under control but I still need to be carefull.

I have been dabling with modding Skyrim and using Poser for the weight mapping and animations. Animations are easy to convert for the game from bvh but the weight mapping is problematic.

I bet the papyrus for python is indeed the same. I have been dabling with the papyrus scripting and it seems alot like python.

Skyrim is a game by Bethesda. Its really pretty awesome for a game. Bethesda always leaves it open for the comunity to mod the game and even supplies tools. My main focus has been building new better rigged player figures to use instead of the default game figures. Better bending and movement as well as better looking.

Hey Mike!! Nice to see you're out and about :)

Hello and welcome back!

Is there much content around for Skyrim?

Love esther

Quote - you still working in Blender?

Yep, they redid Blenders interface again and I don't really like what they did to it.

Still dabbling in Houdini as well.

How about that.  I've been doing Skyrim modding and such myself.  Nothing really huge or published, just toy around with spell or companion design, re-worked  some of the city assets and so forth.

I've used Poser to re-sculpt custom faces by exporting/importing via niftools.  I've been playing around with body and hair physics.

I had no idea you could transfer weights and animations from Poser.

Skyrim is a LOT of fun to toy with but again I'm really just dabbling.  There is a TON of content for it.  Google "Skyrim Nexus" or "Skyrim Loverslab" (latter is adult content for the most part)

Quote - Its good for them cause the future professionals will already be used to using max. Once you go pro then you have to pay. Still very nice of them. http://www.autodesk.com/education/free-software/all

good for three years after activation.

You're required to be a teacher or a student enrolled in a qualifying institution, in order to qualify for the free license. 

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/search-result/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Who-is-eligible-to-join-the-Autodesk-Education-Community.html

~Shane

Quote - Hello and welcome back!

Is there much content around for Skyrim?

Love esther

Skyrim, and previous TES games, have an entire community surrounding custom content. (A lot of it is adult oriented but not all). The games are designed to be fully modable and come with a suite of tools to do so. That's one of the big things that make them so widely popular. 

~Shane

Hi Rose,Esther, Scott, Joe, good to see you.

Tons of stuff for the elder scrolls games.  Tes games are often buggy lol, but loads of fun because you can mod them and the community usually will come up with fixes for any bugs in short order.

Yup Joe you can do almost anything with the game except change stuff thats hard coded, like the slots. The biggest problem getting Poser weight maps into the game is getting them into Max. Once they are in max there are various plugins for the game. I have not tried it yet but I really think if I get the maps n bones into milkshape I can get them into max from there. PhilC has a porter to go from Poser to milkshape with maps n bones intact.

Might turn out to be easier to just weight map in Max. For me though Max has always been so clunky and hard to use for weight mapping and animation. Poser is so much more friendly to use IMO. 

Just dabbling myself, nothing I want to put out. Dont know enough yet. 

Tons of content, alot of adult mods but also plenty of quest mods that extend the game. Or mods to change the appearance of the game world. 

Yeah, buggy is right but it is certainly fun.  I was talking about that a few months ago.  You think Poser has some hangups here and there... until you open the Creation Kit. :)

Caliente's Body Slide can do some weight painting but it's limited to clothes and intended for clothe conversions to new bodies.

What I also found fascinating was how the content available for Skyrim  mirrors our own community.  There is much, much more for the females.  There are a couple male bodies but many female bodies and variations plus variations with breast and butt physics.

I could put out some followers but there's so much of those already, plus none of them are custom voiced, because I'm not getting into all of that.

Lol, no doubt. The CK is horribly bugged, so many error messagess just booting it up, but it does work in the end. Imagine that poor guy who made Falskaar a whole new world space, bet he was pulling his hair out.

I found a little app called Voice Changer 7.0 that might change your mind. With it you can make just about any voice. Like if you wanted an npc that sounded like Bill Clinton, you can get a clip or two of his voice and set up a preset so that when you talk you sound like Bill Clinton. LOL.

I build my own followers too with custom AI and spells n such. Much more fun playing the game with something you have built.

LOL, ya lots of jiggly boobs n female butts, I think thats universal. Funny thing is for me the female NPC's I liked the most used the male animations, just seemed more natural to me while out adventuring and fighting. Didnt care for Lydia though, too anoying. 

I'll check out the voice changer :)

Same here, I build a lot of my own followers.  Give them all Light Foot so they don't set off traps, LOL.  For anyone reading that has no idea, the Follower AI sometimes makes them unbelievably stupid.  I also add spells and perks to them but I'm big on game balance so I try to not overpower them.

I think my two favorite stock followers are Mjoll and Eola.  Eola, I couldn't believe how dark of a character she is.  Don't want to spoil it for anyone but her lifestyle is certainly interesting.  Mjoll is just fun and capable and she has a good AI on reacting to situations.

I've built one Wood Elf follower.  The elf I made some custom spells for because I wanted her to be more of a tabletop D&D ranger (but relying more on spells than bows).  She has custom dialog built from existing dialog snippets.  Fairly decent AI and environment aware.  Face resculpted with Poser's morph brush, just to see if I could.  Still an ongoing project.

Ya so annoying the stock followers set off every trap in the game. Or when you're trying to sneak they r un out n alert everyone.

Poser is gonna be great for quick edits and new figures in the game as soon as I figure out a good pipeline. Complete new skeletons under custom player races with better weight mapping and new mesh. If you have a really good system you could even do fairly high poly since its only for player races n specific NPC's.(my system is not so great)

Custom followers are great. One of my followers I just call Bill. He sounds like Bill Clinton and uses alot of Bill Clinton one liners. He cant fight worth a crap but he has powers. His main power is persuasion, he could talk the devil into heaven. So in a quest that involves lots of dialogue and persuasion options I use alternate actors mod and switch to bill to do the talking. Bill is also so funny even though I know the things he does say, with conditions set for when he might say something I still never know exactly when they migh pop up. Sometimes in the course of the game they're perfect. I laugh so hard my belly aches. I have the canabis mods installed too so bill is always toking but never inhales. Also wants a BJ whenever he gets near a desk, LOL.

That's hilarious. :D

There are a lot of fun, wacky mods out there to play with.  I don't play Skyrim all the time but there are days when I just want to fuck around and enjoy the sandbox or cause mayhem in the cities.

I don't know if you watch this but at youtube there's a Skyrim Mods Weekly show that is still going strong - up to week 130.  It's one of the few Skyrim mod shows I can watch.  Not safe for work (or home with small children nearby):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cu3dOwW-A8

It's very silly but I laugh everytime, and it does show off the wild range of content that folks regularly produce.  Some of the armors, even low res, rival Poser content in the marketplaces.

Funny, LOL. So many different mods takes days to go through the lists on Nexus.

Hey Mike is back!

I'm glad you are having success with your diabetes!

V4WM rules-IMHO! :-)

Skyrim. I LOVE Skyrim. Having access to mods is almost enough reason for me to buy a PC-I play on my Xbox 360. Poser, Zbrush, LightWave, Photoshop, Lightroom and Capture One on my Auld Mac Pro.

I started playing Skyrim again a week ago-after taking a year off.I've gone all the way through only with my High Elf male character. I seem to have too much fun creating new characters- so I've 5 or 6 that I've taken to level 40 or so. And 3 new characters to level 10. :-) Then I started replaying with old characters from low level saves.

I would love to see your mods btw! As far as followers are concerned, I've had Lydia, Mjoll, and the Vampire Gal (can't remember her name after one year).

I've made serveral unique Poser characters-with Zbrush. I'd love to export them to Skyrim. Damn. I may just have to get a PC after all.....

Eric

For all the Skyrim fans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL5K09mqwZc

I really enjoyed this one too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSLPH9d-jsI

Hi Eric, good to hear from you. :)  Ya def know what you mean, I have never finished the main questline yet. I like making new characters and modding the game so always end up starting over. I think I have just about found my perfect mix of mods and hopefully will play all the way through this time. 

 I have 97 mods not too many just enough. I am playing this time with alchemy and potions completely removed from the game, so no healing potions. There is still magic but I can only use the healing that takes time to cast like healing hands. With sperg which is a perk mod and ultimate combat, deadly dragons, locational damage, and revenge of the enemies. Those mods make the game super tough. You have to do lots of planning, sneaking and range attacks.

I am taking one custom follower Rory. He will be very good with a bow as he levels up most of his points go to archery. He also has heal spells (healing hands like my player) He is set to non essential so he can die. But able to heal himself and the player. A mod I am working on for this play through has a priest who can resurrect your follower if you get to him within 3 days, but its expensive, very. Plus you have to pack the follower out (his weight value) which means you will likely have to drop alot of loot.

Tons of extra quests loaded too.  Trying to make this play through extra tough but immersive.

Scott, Joe, :)  good music love the soundtrack. 

I'm also using SPERG this time around along with Civil War (which means you can lose the war and enemy cities are hostile to you), I added one of the balanced spell packs for variety.  I always run a number of beautifcation mods (not supermodels, just a lot better looking than the default people), Apachii hair, some weapon packs, one that allows me to smelt down objects and so on.

I usually run with one or two followers, so I play it a lot more loose and less difficult that what you are doing.  Having said that, I still find ways to get myself killed.  I'll go after whole groups of enemy soliders or giants.

I haven't gotten to the end either. I either re-start or corrupt something because I've tried too many mods.  LOL!

I run those mods too the default people were so ugly dirty and depressing LOL. Love the smelting mod. Reasonable too, you should be able to smelt down armor and such to reuse.

It may be too difficult for me to enjoy, so I might have to tone it down. I upped the timescale too to 30 and setav speedmult to 60 so it will actually take longer to do a quest. It always seemed strange that I could run from one end of skyrim to the other in a day. With speed mult at 60 you cant really walk  but run is sort of a fast walk and sprint is a good jog which is more reasonable for a person in armor.

Welcome home, Mike.

Hi Mike

I am playing on Xbox-so no mods at all. I tend towards "Battle Mage/Stealth" characters. Breton's for their magic resistance. I tried a Red Guard but she was nearly melted by the first dragon combat-yikes! I keep considering a new Mac-so I can run Windows for Games....and Mods-I'd love to be able to Zbrush some new faces! Lydia needs some face work for certain!

Quote - Hi Eric, good to hear from you. :)  Ya def know what you mean, I have never finished the main questline yet. I like making new characters and modding the game so always end up starting over. I think I have just about found my perfect mix of mods and hopefully will play all the way through this time. 

 I have 97 mods not too many just enough. I am playing this time with alchemy and potions completely removed from the game, so no healing potions. There is still magic but I can only use the healing that takes time to cast like healing hands. With sperg which is a perk mod and ultimate combat, deadly dragons, locational damage, and revenge of the enemies. Those mods make the game super tough. You have to do lots of planning, sneaking and range attacks.

I am taking one custom follower Rory. He will be very good with a bow as he levels up most of his points go to archery. He also has heal spells (healing hands like my player) He is set to non essential so he can die. But able to heal himself and the player. A mod I am working on for this play through has a priest who can resurrect your follower if you get to him within 3 days, but its expensive, very. Plus you have to pack the follower out (his weight value) which means you will likely have to drop alot of loot.

Tons of extra quests loaded too.  Trying to make this play through extra tough but immersive.

 

Scott, Joe, :)  good music love the soundtrack. 

Lots of fun either way. I have probably had 8-900 hours of entertainment out of this game.   

I have been reading up that you can use blender to work with game files, so I may just see how far along the Poser to Blender plugins are.

Yeah as Mike said, the default faces and skin is harsh.  I realize that these characters generally are rugged Viking types, but even so, they were all beaten profusely with the ugly stick.

I think you will enjoy Skyrim much more if you have a setup where you are capable of modding it.

There are two side effects of modding though that you have to be careful with.  First is that mods often require a general load order to be applied, particularly if you have many.  There are some tools to automatically sort your mods and it catches most of them.

Another is an issue with scripting.  If you use lots of mods and lots of mods with scripts, first you can get save game bloat because a ton of info is stored in scripts.  Papyrus scripts can make skyrim unstable or corrupt your save games.

You just have to be picky and try to keep some "vanilla" saves as backups.  There are steps to make clean saves but they aren't always 100%.

Skyrim is also fairly bad at memory management.  You get a ton of mods going and there can be instability just from memory issues.  Running an enhancement system called SKSE can help a lot, particularly if you use the memory switches.

I've been modding since last November, so I'm full of useless nerd info.

 Thanks Mike-I've got over 1000 so far! Good thing I don't watch much TV!

Netherworks- Beaten profusely with the ugly stick! HAHA! Too true! I also keep wishing there was SSS for the skin... :-)

Quote - Yeah as Mike said, the default faces and skin is harsh.  I realize that these characters generally are rugged Viking types, but even so, they were all beaten profusely with the ugly stick.

I think you will enjoy Skyrim much more if you have a setup where you are capable of modding it.

There are two side effects of modding though that you have to be careful with.  First is that mods often require a general load order to be applied, particularly if you have many.  There are some tools to automatically sort your mods and it catches most of them.

Another is an issue with scripting.  If you use lots of mods and lots of mods with scripts, first you can get save game bloat because a ton of info is stored in scripts.  Papyrus scripts can make skyrim unstable or corrupt your save games.

You just have to be picky and try to keep some "vanilla" saves as backups.  There are steps to make clean saves but they aren't always 100%.

Skyrim is also fairly bad at memory management.  You get a ton of mods going and there can be instability just from memory issues.  Running an enhancement system called SKSE can help a lot, particularly if you use the memory switches.

I've been modding since last November, so I'm full of useless nerd info.

Great characters. The detailed grass is another give away. Nowhere as nice on Xbox!

Quote - Hi EClark1894, good to hear from you. :)

 

Face was re-sculpted in Poser using the morph brush.  I could have gone with other tools but the heads are fairly low poly.

Nice work Joe. Your Khajiits look fine to me. :) I understand the purests view but think it is ultimately up to the player how their world of Skyrim looks.

Rory and Cory are the two in my pic, the dovahkiin brothers, going to play two dragonborn. lol.

well the Poser to Blender tools are not quite there yet but making progress. Blender has various plugins for export to different game platforms (wise, IMO) One of them is to Skyrim. 

I look at the various lets play series on youtube, and for skyrim I have seen as many as 3.5 million views. These guys make a living on just playing games and uploading or streaming to you tube.

I just think that if there were a smooth pipeline between Poser and Blender or Max that it would go a long way towards bringing Poser into the mainstream. Poser is great, its easy and fast for certain things but so damn hard to get into any of the major 3D apps. I hope the tools for Poser to Blender get finnished.

Quote - Poser is great, its easy and fast for certain things but so damn hard to get into any of the major 3D apps. I hope the tools for Poser to Blender get finnished.

Are the Poser-to-Blender tools being created as a built-in function for Blender, or as a user-made custom script?  There might be some hope for a built-in Blender function.  They managed Collada, which is apparently a problematic format.  But I've seen half a dozen user scripts which tried to get Poser files into Blender, since I began paying attention (I used to host one such project on my site, years ago).  The trouble with such scripts is (on the Blender end) that Blender keeps changing everything, thus breaking all the scripts.  On the Poser end, the trouble always seems to be joints, and not just with Blender, but with conversion to any format or import into any program.  Poser Python doesn't give us useful joint information access, and you run into other trouble if you try to convert Poser joint data from a cr2.  Collapsing Poser's multiple weight maps into a single map is... tricky.  :lol:  As the effectiveness (or the lack of such) of Poser's native "Single Skin" mode shows.  The zone-based joints are not really documented, so converting them to weights without having Poser do it for you is apparently not easy.  Kuroyume figured out the sphere zones for his C4D I/O program, but now we have cylinders, multiple zones, and even more complications.

I'm noting all of this not to say "it'll never happen", but to voice once again my belief that we need some expanded Poser Python tools for such things.  If they would give us access to the joint information with PPy, we could do a lot.  Right now it's... tricky.  :lol:  If the Poser Team would give us better tools or more information, it would sure help us to help them improve Poser.  :laugh:

Glad to see you back in communication, Mike! 

Well, next game they don't have the excreble 360 specs to limit the game with. -Maybe- we'll start seeing provinces somewhere close to their actual mapped size. Skyrim is better behaved than the other two X centric offerings, but what I'm really waiting for the the XL engine release. The guy who's been coding it has reverse engineered the gameplay aspects of Daggerfall, with modern render capabilities. And he planned the architecture for modding (one project underway is creating decent 3D figures to replace the NPC sprites). At least two people are working on the height maps for the entire continent of Tamriel. I know there are at least 3 projects underway to recreate the same with Skyrim's game engine, but it is more likely to happen with Daggerfall's simpler terrain and codes structure (oh, and the terrain algorithm generates nice, tall, rolling hills, not rough polygon lumps).

Well I guess its about time I knock the dust off of my brain and learn Blender then. Give up on Poser for the nonce and see how it feels to weight map in Blender. I know how to weight in Max but I hate it and refuse to use it, feels too much like work no fun. Hopefully Blender will be more intuitive and less a pain. Animation too. 

Cheers,

Mike.

Oh! Much better!! Looks really good, Never played as a Khajit-too hard to look at! That looks pretty good though!

Quote - Here's what Khajiits look like in my game.  Yes, they are cat girls.  It's my game and I want cat girls! :)  So this is the Dagi-Raht mod that replaces them.  I did a bit of custom work on the face here and this is a custom follower, hybrid caster/light melee.  For anyone that has no idea what this is all about, in vanilla Skyrim Khajiits are cat humanoids and it looks like they just stuck a cat head on a human body - it's pretty awful, IMHO.

Now that would be awesome!

Quote - Glad to see you back in communication, Mike! 

 

Well, next game they don't have the excreble 360 specs to limit the game with. -Maybe- we'll start seeing provinces somewhere close to their actual mapped size. Skyrim is better behaved than the other two X centric offerings, but what I'm really waiting for the the XL engine release. The guy who's been coding it has reverse engineered the gameplay aspects of Daggerfall, with modern render capabilities. And he planned the architecture for modding (one project underway is creating decent 3D figures to replace the NPC sprites). At least two people are working on the height maps for the entire continent of Tamriel. I know there are at least 3 projects underway to recreate the same with Skyrim's game engine, but it is more likely to happen with Daggerfall's simpler terrain and codes structure (oh, and the terrain algorithm generates nice, tall, rolling hills, not rough polygon lumps).