prixat posted at 2:30PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318765

Thanks, that was what I was asking, could all of ssgbryan's Star Trek characters have been morphed from G2 Jessi for example? ...and why weren't they?

That would be an awful lot of work to get the same result (TCO fail for me). My goal isn't to be a modeler. That's why Poser is a major part of my workflow and Zbrush (and DS) are helper programs.

It is faster for me to load a mesh, load a figure, make changes, and go. Go look at any storefront. Most character vendors are in a rinse, lather, repeat mode. After a couple it's pointless, unless you are harvesting skin textures.

My methodology is faster for what I do - telling stories. If my goal was stand alone, single image stills, that had no relationship to each other, then my methodology might not be the most efficient, but that isn't what I do.

Using Poser/DS content, I spend a bit of time on the front end, correcting everything that storefront QA's miss, along with bringing order to the chaos that is a typical vendors' runtime. Since I have to do that anyway, what is another few minutes deleting unneeded character morphs from clothing and running it through the fitting room?

Which is another selling point for Poser with me - with DS content, product clean up is several orders of magnitude more work than a typical Poser product.

DreaminGirl posted at 2:38PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318775

Oh I agree, it's just that it seems so many doing the 'pulling' are people who don't even USE Poser. Like so many have said before, if Poser becomes a DS clone, what is the point of Poser?

We see concern trolling by DS users and vendors in the Poser forums every time a new figure for Poser comes out. If they truly believed that they made the right choice, they wouldn't spend so much time here - they would be up in the DS forums (which they don't seem to spend much time in - funny that).

I expect them to be out in full force once Project E rolls out at Xmas.

BTW, SM would have to cut a lot of features out of Poser to make it a DS clone.

How do you harvest skin textures? I thought there were only a handful of TC-supported figures. Like V4 to Dawn, M4 to Dusk, etc. I've thought about getting it myself so that I can make a conversion for my figures, but I don't know what the restrictions are on that, and I'm not quite ready for it yet but would be good info for when I am.

I've never tried but seems like the tools in zBrush, Max, Substance, Unity or something would have the tools to transfer a textures or a skin . There's no tool for that in any one the apps ?

AmbientShade posted at 7:41PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318843

How do you harvest skin textures? I thought there were only a handful of TC-supported figures. Like V4 to Dawn, M4 to Dusk, etc. I've thought about getting it myself so that I can make a conversion for my figures, but I don't know what the restrictions are on that, and I'm not quite ready for it yet but would be good info for when I am.

Texture Converter modules I own: Miki 2, M3, M4, SP3, V3, V4. I don’t own the Skye plug-in or the Laura plug-in. TC is on a netbook I have.

Texture Transformer (female textures): V4 to Dawn/Dawn to V4, V4 to Roxie, V4 to g2f/g2f to V4, g2f to g3f, v4 to g3f, V4 to Pauline

(male textures): M4 to Dusk/Dusk to M4, M4 to Paul, M4 to g2m/g2m to M4, M4 to g3m, g2m to g3m,

M4/V4 is the lingua franca of DS & Poser.

TC lets me go backwards (V4 to V3; M4 to M3), TT lets me go forward (V4 to Dawn/Pauline; M4 to Dusk/Paul).

Dphoadley remapped Ty2, Miki 2, V2, & V4 to take V3 textures (RTE encoded) The V2 to V3/V3 to V2 remap is no longer for sale at Content Paradise, but the others are.

I can swap female textures between: Dawn, g2f, g3f, Miki 2, Pauline, Roxie, TY2, V2, V3, and V4

Male textures: Dusk, g2m, g3m, M3, M4, and Paul

From what I remember, Miki 2 is a 90% scaled Sydney w/Miki 1020’s head. I should be able to move any Miki 2 conversion to the SM g2f figures. I’ll experiment after the holidays. I’ll bet it wouldn’t take much.

I really wish 'Rosity would make more TT modules for the legacy SM figures and Apollo Maximus (or SM would fund development for them, along with Lyrra's fit room magnets).

RorrKonn posted at 11:22PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318847

I've never tried but seems like the tools in zBrush, Max, Substance, Unity or something would have the tools to transfer a textures or a skin . There's no tool for that in any one the apps ?

In ZBrush you can project texture info from one model to another, if the models are exactly the same shape, but that's only useful for personal work, and requires zbrush. Texture Transformer converts texture maps to fit another figure's UV maps. They don't have to be the same shape. So as long as someone has TT and the correct plug-in for the figures they want to convert from/to, then they can convert their own textures, without needing zbrush or some other projection painting software. I don't know if a figure artist (like myself) can use TT to create their own plugins for it or not tho. Never tried it in Max. Unity doesn't have projection painting that I know of (haven't used it in a long time so maybe they've added something). Substance allows you to load the same model with a different UV set but that's not quite the same thing.

ssgbryan posted at 9:26AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318494

Using a g figure/DS comparison is a good way to get a flame war going.

...then perhaps it's time for all of us to stop emoting and start looking at the 'why', instead of the 'what'?

We have in-app, simple to the customer, means of utilizing every bit of clothing made in the last 12+ years. It's called the fitting room. Before that, we had Wardrobe Wizard and/or Xdresser. The tools are there - it is up to the end user to use them. It's like the cloth room - once you muster up the courage use it, you kick yourself for not using it sooner.

Question - is this automatic, or does it require the user to get in and beat things up to make it work? I'll go look it up, but if the latter, that's gonna be a disadvantage for most folks (not for the prosumer crowd, but for the consumer crowd).

If you are in a hurry, (or need to convert 50+Gb of V4 content) Lyrra made the Fit Room Magnets for Dawn, Dusk, Paul, and Pauline (I am hoping for more when Orion, Venus, and Project E are launched.), they automagically position the clothing so that a fitting room session is 30 second process instead of a 60 second process (On my computer, anyway). It isn't rocket science. It does however take 3 or 4 clicks. Which apparently is much too difficult for some users.

1. Magnets. Ugh. (Don't move your knee just yet; I detest D-Form just as much, no matter how useful either one may be.)

2. 30-60 seconds... compared to 5-15 seconds. Forget preferences and it's not bashing - the comparison is to point out what SM is up against. Maybe moving it to a dev rig isn't a bad idea after all? On the flip side it does remove a lot from the prosumer user.

My prep workflow is "convoluted" because too many vendors are still living in Oct 2007. They are unwilling to leverage any post-Poser 7 feature, even if it would make their lives easier.

The reason why is that vendors (at least the business-savvy ones) don't want to lock themselves into one market, when they can make something that will sell in two markets.

I promise, from this side of things, I get irritated that something cool still comes in only .cr2/.pz2/etc format, instead of .duf/.dsf - however, I fully understand the reason why, and as a result I still keep a small(-ish) Runtime-style directory hierarchy in my on-disk DS dir structure.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors drop character body morphs from clothing for example - it would make life easier for them and easier for the me. The reason they don't is because they cater to the rank beginners and folks that are aggressively uninterested in learning how to make the software go. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors at 'Rosity actually follow the sales guidelines for materials (material files in the materials subfolder, .mc6 required, .pz2s optional - Poser native PCFs for g content. DSON is a kludge); They don't, again because they cater to the folks that are still using a Poser 7 workflow, instead of leveraging the power of the current version (Even though 90+% of us are running Poser 9 or later) . This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

As alluded to earlier - the underlying reason isn't laziness, it's maximizing sales to more than one market and minimizing time spent doing that. Vendors aren't dumb, and unless they can get enough ROI on such changes, 'good enough' is going to be as far as they want to get. Make things easier on them programmatically, and problem shrinks.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors leave DOS naming conventions behind, so I don't have to restructure/rename nearly every d@#$ed file and folder (and as an added bonus, the search function in Poser would actually work). This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Heh - that ain't just a Poser thing (why do you think there's an actual Postgres DB (for CMS) involved on this side of the software fence?

This is something that's more akin to the honor system than anything you can enforce, and the moment you make it too onerous for the vendor (subjectively, from the vendor's POV), the moment they decide that one market (or the other) might not be worth catering to.

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors actually THINK about how their product will be used by the end user. Example - hiding everything in an ego folder insures the customer can't find it. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

Again, nothing new here, and nobody has a monopoly on avoiding that. This (and the fact that OSX is still, eons later, bitchy about auto-merging files) is why I normally install stuff by hand when I can, renaming or rearranging as I go (and when I cannot, I dump it into a dummy folder, copypasta wholesale into my main dir structure, etc.)

Tools are there, but for some, it is easier to whine than learn to use them.

Perhaps, but remember: The customer may not always be right, but they're still the customer.

-Timberwolf- posted at 10:03AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318718

Let's say, that Poser is the best programm ever. It still doesn't have one single good figure - yet. But there is hope. Looking foreward to christmas.

I'm kind of curious about this as well. Fortunately (and unlike a previous coughrendacough attempt) it's actually made from clean mesh, which I'm really interested in seeing.

Been a long time since the project was first mooted...

RorrKonn posted at 10:10AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318833

Competition is best for us as long as app's are competing for us .CGI won't stagnate. As long as it keeps growing and getting better I'm good n I so do not care witch company provides me with killer tools as long as there wicked.

Precisely. Last thing I want is for either application to reign supreme and then stagnate.

Penguinisto posted at 1:27PM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318904

Nothing would make me happier than to see vendors drop character body morphs from clothing for example - it would make life easier for them and easier for the me. The reason they don't is because they cater to the rank beginners and folks that are aggressively uninterested in learning how to make the software go. This is why my prep workflow is "convoluted".

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

That's how you get boob socks and clothes that behave like cling wrap. Unless you're using dynamics (which the majority of customers do not) ERC and body morphs in clothing are still a requirement in both apps if you want your clothes to actually look and behave like clothes. People no longer including them does not mean that the tech has advanced to the point that they aren't still required, it just means that content makers have gotten lazy. There is no algorithm currently available that tells a shirt to automagically create movement wrinkles and folds or fill in the gap between boobs or butt cheeks. And if you're relying on an algorithm to shrink pants from a size 28 to a size 58 you're getting stretched pockets and buttons. All that stuff still has to be corrected by hand, in DS and Poser.

AmbientShade posted at 1:48PM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318914

There is no algorithm currently available that tells a shirt to automagically create movement wrinkles and folds or fill in the gap between boobs or butt cheeks. And if you're relying on an algorithm to shrink pants from a size 28 to a size 58 you're getting stretched pockets and buttons. All that stuff still has to be corrected by hand, in DS and Poser.

Just a sec - first up, I was talking about character morphs, not movement or aesthetic ones (such as wrinkles). Solving the cleavage problem is also not a character morph, but I know that DS has it solved nonetheless (albeit via 3rd-party in-app morphs such as Fit Control.) I believe Poser has similar (also 3rd-party in-app?) solutions, so that's not much of an issue either.

I suspect you're always going to get deformation in fixed-point mesh regions on clothing (buttons, pockets, etc), though that's not going to be solved by keeping character morphs around (at least I don't think so.)

In any event, that's kind of why I went with suggesting an option to have the user click-remove morphs as he or she desires. Wanna keep 'em? Go for it. Want 'em gone to make things load faster? Go for it.

Penguinisto posted at 11:55AM Wed, 29 November 2017 - #4318904

Question - is this automatic, or does it require the user to get in and beat things up to make it work? I'll go look it up, but if the latter, that's gonna be a disadvantage for most folks (not for the prosumer crowd, but for the consumer crowd).

3 or 4 clicks. OTOH, that may encapsulate the difference between the two user bases. One doesn't become a painter by only painting by numbers.

1. Magnets. Ugh. (Don't move your knee just yet; I detest D-Form just as much, no matter how useful either one may be.)

2. 30-60 seconds... compared to 5-15 seconds. Forget preferences and it's not bashing - the comparison is to point out what SM is up against. Maybe moving it to a dev rig isn't a bad idea after all? On the flip side it does remove a lot from the prosumer user.

All the magnets do is position the clothing for the conversion (which is what takes the longest) they are deleted when you delete the original outfit. They don't stay with the clothing. There is very little DS clothing content available for females outside of "clubwear" or lingerie. For males, it is even worse. Platform is irrelevant, all of us are going to be converting V4/M4 content for a long time to come.

The reason why is that vendors (at least the business-savvy ones) don't want to lock themselves into one market, when they can make something that will sell in two markets.

DS has been able to read Poser native content since the release of DS 4 - there hasn't been a need for material .pz2s for over a decade now; that was a hack for Poser 4. Oh, and let me know when DS vendors learn what goes where in a Poser runtime - as I stated before, I have over 1,000 DS packages installed - not ONE has the content in the correct subfolder, not one.

If DS vendors want to maximize sales, maybe they should leave V3/V4 era production processes behind. With all of the lighting advances on both platforms, I still see painted on underboob shadows, or light reflections painted into the eye maps, for example. 8k by 8k textures don't help, when one still has that nonsense to deal with.

If DS vendors want to maximize sales to both platforms, then they should make those PCFs Poser native, instead of using DSON - there is at least 1 that does, so there isn't a technical limitation. It doesn't take much in the way of time (seconds, for the most part).

The question I would ask every clothing vendor There are 10,000 clubwear outfits available today. Why should I buy yours?

I promise, from this side of things, I get irritated that something cool still comes in only .cr2/.pz2/etc format, instead of .duf/.dsf - however, I fully understand the reason why, and as a result I still keep a small(-ish) Runtime-style directory hierarchy in my on-disk DS dir structure.

DS can read Poser native content - you don't even have to Find someone to help you. An actual quote from DS documentation, btw.

That's the funny thing - character morphs in clothing are ancient history from this POV. Unless it's converted-up from V4 or made for a 3rd-party figure, they pretty much don't exist anymore (because it's easier for vendors to rely on Smoothing/Collision to do the job for them.)

Outside of pinup/fantasy art - DS still doesn't have much in the way of native clothing content. Let me know when you can get a week's worth of professional clothing; or winter clothing; or period clothing; etc.

At the end of the day, you are limited to the g figure. And if you want the latest features, as a DS user, you are back on the upgrade train. Poser users aren't - we simply add new features to the characters we like.

...that's a huge part of why I want to see SM go the same route. Maybe they can have something that strips character morphs in exchange for collision/subdivision, or allow the user to cleanly delete morphs from an object if they desire (so long as ERC isn't involved)?

We've had that capability for years. You seem to be behind on what Poser is actually capable of - it is in the users manual. We find that pretty useful. Certainly easier than trolling forums, desperately looking for that Someone to help us.

As alluded to earlier - the underlying reason isn't laziness, it's maximizing sales to more than one market and minimizing time spent doing that. Vendors aren't dumb, and unless they can get enough ROI on such changes, 'good enough' is going to be as far as they want to get. Make things easier on them programmatically, and problem shrinks.

How is keeping a Poser 4 workflow "maximizing sales"? Just out of curiosity, why is it an article of faith amongst DS users that no one that uses Poser started with a version after version 4?

Endusers aren't using Poser 8 or earlier. The only people using Poser 8 or earlier are the vendors - everyone else has moved on. Since you were away, 'Rosity collected some data on who uses what. 90% of us are using Poser 9 or later, so there isn't a need for material .pz2s, there is no need torunallofthefilenamestoghether, or to use 8.3 naming conventions, etc. Go up to the Poser Technical sub forums. Anything below Poser 9 has been dead since they were made.

I've actually had a vendor tell me they didn't have time to learn Poser 9 features While they were making content for Dawn, a figure that only runs on Poser 9 or later. It's all about the laziness.

Heh - that ain't just a Poser thing (why do you think there's an actual Postgres DB (for CMS) involved on this side of the software fence?

That isn't a plus. The fact that a database is necessary is a software design failure. The system architect failed at the most basic level. Telling the vendors Put your characters in the Character subfolder, it why it exists is easier for customers and the storefront's QA.

It would also be easier for everyone if vendors named their products [foo dress] by [vendor] rather than hiding it in an ego subfolder. It would be easier for everyone if vendors that make texture add-ons for clothing named their product [foo addon for foo dress] and used the same files structure as [foo dress], so the very appropriately named DIM installs them together, so the enduser doesn't have to spend time trying to remember the name of a product.

That however, would require the vendor to look at their product from the perspective of the customer, and we all know that isn't happening.

This is something that's more akin to the honor system than anything you can enforce, and the moment you make it too onerous for the vendor (subjectively, from the vendor's POV), the moment they decide that one market (or the other) might not be worth catering to.

If that is the case then apparently there is no honor among DS vendors.

And more work for the enduser means the customer may purchase from someone else in the future. I have a list of vendors that not only would I not buy from, even if they made the rug that tied the room together, I won't download any freebies they made, just because of all of the work I would have to do to fix their products.

Again, nothing new here, and nobody has a monopoly on avoiding that. This (and the fact that OSX is still, eons later, bitchy about auto-merging files) is why I normally install stuff by hand when I can, renaming or rearranging as I go (and when I cannot, I dump it into a dummy folder, copypasta wholesale into my main dir structure, etc.)

You might want to update your copy of OSX - hasn't been bitchy (in that respect) for a while now. Anyone that is more than a rank beginner on either platform has to have a temp runtime to sort things.

At the end of the day, like everything else, Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to the DS/Poserverse. The difference is Poser's 10% is larger.

So which way is the bus going ?

@RorrKonn

That's a trick question, it has no engine ;)

DreaminGirl posted at 2:25PM Thu, 30 November 2017 - #4318952

@RorrKonn

That's a trick question, it has no engine ;)

No trick ,There really is a correct answer and a explanation

The bus is going to the left side. The doors are on the other side, where the people would get in and out at a bus stop.

KarinaKiev posted at 6:18PM Thu, 30 November 2017 - #4319000

The bus is going to the left side. The doors are on the other side, where the people would get in and out at a bus stop.

A+ KarinaKiev n a gold Star ,to ;)

So apparently Posers going left with E ;)

No, the bus is going to the right, Erogenesis lives in the UK.

This thread is one of the reasons I haven't been on this forum for a while. Tired of the debates and flame wars between Poser and Daz users, the bad bloode between the G3 and V4 users. I havn't read the whole thread so if there is some sort of respectful adult conversation going on here please forgive me. I'm going back to the SM forum.

prixat posted at 11:08PM Thu, 30 November 2017 - #4319012

No, the bus is going to the right, Erogenesis lives in the UK.

Nope ,Erogenesis lives on the far side of the equator .So he's still going Left ,Even if he's driving on the wrong side of the road ;)

It's a paradox ant it.

ghostship2 posted at 2:31AM Fri, 01 December 2017 - #4319014

This thread is one of the reasons I haven't been on this forum for a while. Tired of the debates and flame wars between Poser and Daz users, the bad bloode between the G3 and V4 users. I havn't read the whole thread so if there is some sort of respectful adult conversation going on here please forgive me. I'm going back to the SM forum.

Don't take life so seriously ,No one gets out a live. Just think of these threads as comedy n have fun with them :) You half to admit Autodesk vs Autodesk and the paradox bus is funny ,No ?

ghostship2 posted at 2:23AM Sun, 03 December 2017 - #4319014

This thread is one of the reasons I haven't been on this forum for a while. Tired of the debates and flame wars between Poser and Daz users, the bad bloode between the G3 and V4 users. I havn't read the whole thread so if there is some sort of respectful adult conversation going on here please forgive me. I'm going back to the SM forum.

As stated when I started this thread, its not a debate or flame war or anything to do with Daz, all I asked was where everyone thought Poser was going and perhaps what might be. Its really good to see Project E almost reaching daylight, and will add a nice new toy to play with inside poser. And personally I like how this thread has gone so far. oh and the bus seams to be stationary, lol.

You need to talk to Khai-J-Bach about app's that run on androids.You can find him on this thread. https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2919503

A paradox more or less traps you in a loop that goes no where .So there for ,Logic could dictate that in deed the bus is stationary,But what fun would it be to argue logic ;) Bus is still going west to sunny warm California where we can spend the day at the beach with hot sexy E ;)