Messing around with Dawn I see that her waist/hip/leg system has some issues. I'm not up to speed with the bones and weight mapping, I would think the problem could be fixed by somebody knowledgable about these things. Has anyone got any ideas about this? Dawn appears to hinge at the top of the pelvis instead of the hip sockets, and the glutes don't follow the bend, they just hang there. For comparison, a couple quick renders of Dawn and La Femme bending over:

and

Feel free to add any other posing comparisons you notice here, it would be good to see how various figures compare.

** Edited to add a nudity tag**

I tried to add the tag but it wouldn't work.

Well, after messing with Dawn for awhile, here's what I think- one issue is just that what happens when you grab the pelvis is different between the two models- Dawn rotates the whole figure around the pelvis is you do Direct Manipulation, but La Femme bends. It's possible to get a semi-decent leg rotation by grabbing each leg and rotating it, they you have to rotate the figure until the legs point where you want them to. Awkward, but doable. The glutes still seem to behave oddly to me, though. and bending forward at the waist doesn't seem to work right.

Most older figures have a "core" rotation with the hip. Antonia overcame this feature by having a secondary hip where you can rotate the hip and the feet stay planted. It is a feature that I really like in her. I'd like to see future figures ONLY rotate on the body and rotate like Antonia's second hip with the primary hip. Don't know why this has been all these years. Actually, because most figures come into the scene with the hip as the first part selected automatically ... for the first several years I didn't even know that I could pick the whole "body" and used the hip to move the figure in the scene and rotate. Caused all sorts of issues.

Ken1171 has a product at Hivewire that fixes the pelvis problem.

RobZhena posted at 11:57AM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363100

Ken1171 has a product at Hivewire that fixes the pelvis problem.

You beat me to it Rob. I was just going to comment about Ken's goodie over at HiveWire.

RobZhena posted at 12:27PM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363100

Ken1171 has a product at Hivewire that fixes the pelvis problem.

Is it the 'perfect pelvis' package? I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I get a powerful surge of no-enthusiasm when somebody offers to sell me a fix to a problem they created. I haven't explored Dawn very much yet, but I will certainly try to get an idea of how many ten-dollar fixes I would have to buy before she's really useful to me before I spend any money on her.

AFAIK, Ken1171 didn't create Dawn. Dawn's a Chris Creek figure.

SamTherapy posted at 12:45PM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363150

AFAIK, Ken1171 didn't create Dawn. Dawn's a Chris Creek figure.

I don't know how Hivewire works, is it pretty much a sales platform? In that case, I withdraw my remarks. My impression was that it was more like a business that creates content, from the way it has been presented in discussions here. I understand the challenges of small producers, but it would be nice for consumers if some of these issues were fixed in-house by whoever is building the original items- or folding them into the package they're selling. I can't complain too hard about some of the details here because Bondware upgraded me from Poser 11.1 standard to Poser Pro 11.2 free of charge, but the Poser 11.1 I bought was really a mess and a good example of what I'm complaining about. I appreciate Bondware trying to improve that situation, but I think they have a long way to go.

There's no such thing as a perfect figure. Though they're getting better. You should see all the fixes for Victoria 4 there are. Dawn 2 is going to be released soon, presumably with some built in fixes.

I bought Perfect Pelvis when it was on sale for about half the current price. I've never used it, though. I don't often render images where small glitches in the pelvic area are visible.

There's generally a trade-off. When La Femme came out, someone complained that her naughty bits weren't high-res enough. He needed them for what he was doing. Most people don't. A lot of polys and morphs in an area that won't even show when she's dressed is a waste for many users. Dunno if there's a solution for La Femme yet, but for previous Poser figures, the solution has been a separate add-on.

If Dawn's hips are too flawed for you, and you don't want to buy a fix, why not stick with La Femme? You seem happy enough with the way she bends, so why not just use her?

HKHan99 posted at 1:55PM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363151

I don't know how Hivewire works, is it pretty much a sales platform? In that case, I withdraw my remarks. My impression was that it was more like a business that creates content, from the way it has been presented in discussions here. I understand the challenges of small producers, but it would be nice for consumers if some of these issues were fixed in-house by whoever is building the original items- or folding them into the package they're selling. I can't complain too hard about some of the details here because Bondware upgraded me from Poser 11.1 standard to Poser Pro 11.2 free of charge, but the Poser 11.1 I bought was really a mess and a good example of what I'm complaining about. I appreciate Bondware trying to improve that situation, but I think they have a long way to go.

Okay that's... a lot of mix ups of different things.

-Hivewire 3d IS a content creator group AND a brokering/sales platform. Basically they create the base figures and some other products, and their site sells those and also offers a place for other vendors to sell their products there as well. So HW3d created Dawn, and Ken1171 is another content creator who made that fix.

-There's a problem with fixing things in-house after release - it can break previous content. When a third-party releases a fix, you're accepting that content (mostly in this case: clothing) may not come ready to work with the fix. And this isn't new at all, either - I remember that I had some five different products to fix various problems with V4, and there were dozens more available.

-None of this has much to do with Bondware - Poser has been in the hands of several different companies, and a lot of times each would simply add things to the previous Poser version, leaving everything working on top of an outdated, buggy core. For now, the only thing Bondware had the time to do was a patch to convert the license server to them and address a few bugs/problems they could tackle. We'll have to wait for what it's done for a possible future Poser 12 (not to be confused with Poser Pro 2012), but that's likely to take a couple of years to come around.

As an aside to Ohki's comments above, I would laugh my socks off if Bondware decided to change their name to Fractal Design.

Boni posted at 12:39PM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363060

Most older figures have a "core" rotation with the hip. Antonia overcame this feature by having a secondary hip where you can rotate the hip and the feet stay planted. It is a feature that I really like in her. I'd like to see future figures ONLY rotate on the body and rotate like Antonia's second hip with the primary hip. Don't know why this has been all these years. Actually, because most figures come into the scene with the hip as the first part selected automatically ... for the first several years I didn't even know that I could pick the whole "body" and used the hip to move the figure in the scene and rotate. Caused all sorts of issues.

Karina's S-16 version of V4 solves these issues with the "Movement Control" feature, which (when enabled) limits which trans and rotate dials work on the hip and which on the body, to prevent gimbal lock and various other issues. (The manual that comes with S-16 explains it in depth.)

He also set up some Easy Pose dials so you can rotate the hip by itself (under the Torso section) and do various kinds of bends and twists that weren't easily accomplished in a standard V4. I'm attaching a screenshot of the Easy Pose dials I just made to show someone the options available, but that's just one of the many things I love about using S-16!

Randym77- I was never planning on not using La Femme, but I see that all the base figures have very different morph capabilities and it's nice to have some variety. Dawn seems to have some nice characteristics that La Femme doesn't come with, but lacks others. Giving either (or Pauline, etc) characteristics that others have that they don't is technically doable, but would require a lot of work in Blender, so it would be nice to see easier solutions. Otherwise I have to pick a figure for a task based on what it does or doesn't do- which for a comic-book kind of project is limiting, because you never know what you're going to want a character to do. It's not a huge deal because I've come to the conclusion that for what I want to do, I need to keep the role of the renders to an absolute minimum and hand draw as much as possible. I've pretty much abandoned the idea of using the renders directly in my finished product. Now I'm trying to figure out the point at which the amount of work in Poser or some similar program actually makes my life easier on the finish level, or just adds to the workload.

Ohki- I get what you're saying about the problems with fixing things. I think, though, that it's an unfortunate part of digital business culture that we think it's normal to use that as a reason not to fix things. If fixing something means that a lot of 3rd party materials designed to go with your original products don't work right any more, that's definitely a problem for consumers. To me, though, it's the kind of problem that suggests that the item wasn't ready to be sold. I don't have a solution, and nobody's perfect, etc etc. It's a sign of old age, I guess, that I have such high expectations.

Perpetualrevision- while that looks pretty cool, it's another throw-money-at-it solution (I guess the S-16 contribution is free, but I don't have V4). As I said up above, my focus at the moment is going to have to be to minimize my dependency on accuracy from the models. Sucks but there it is. Down the road I may focus on 3D asset creation for my own use.

It's possible to get much better bending from Dawn than you have shown above. It takes patience and experimentation but it can be done. Bending legs and various bits of hip, pelvis and abdomen will get you a very good result.

Can't show you right now but I'll post something tomorrow if I have time.

The thing is - there's no NEED for a fix in Dawn. The fix just exists (I think?) to change her posing to the same style of some other figures. Her posing/body parts are a feature, not a bug or a problem.

Dawn is rigged in a way to make sitting easier. Her "center" is the hip - but she also has a Pelvis body part, below the hip.

The problem you're seeing is probably because you just bent her hip with Inverse Kinematics on her feet, and that effectively bends her pelvis instead of her legs to keep her feet in place.

You can either 1. turn off IK, bend her hip, then bend each leg forward, or 2. leave IK on, bend her hip, then bend her Pelvis back to 0, and this is what happens (what you had / what it can be with my suggestion, with no extra fixes, out of the box as she loads from the content that comes with Poser 11.2):

And I just noticed this - above, the ugly one, I bent the abdomen 1 by mistake and not the hip. When I bend the hip with IK on, she correctly bends at the legs and not the Pelvis so it just looks like my nice version above too.

Basically, you just need to know where to bend. Dawn has much more body parts along the spine than LF does. That is better for some things and worse for some others, but basically they're just two different figures and it's just a matter of knowing how to work with them.

Ohki- as I mentioned, I did get a better result with a different approach- still had some odd stuff in the gluteal area but not as bad. I'll have to check out that extra parts business you mention, that may be the, uh, missing piece...

Since we're talking about Dawn, I'm a bit confused by the library structure for her. Am I missing something, or is she not as morphable as LF? Especially the face- there are some character morphs you can blend, but I'm not seeing tools for shaping individual parts of the face. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

HKHan99 posted at 9:57PM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363232

Perpetualrevision- while that looks pretty cool, it's another throw-money-at-it solution (I guess the S-16 contribution is free, but I don't have V4). As I said up above, my focus at the moment is going to have to be to minimize my dependency on accuracy from the models. Sucks but there it is. Down the road I may focus on 3D asset creation for my own use.

Geez, I've been doing this a long time. V4 was free. They got you by selling morphs a little bit at a time. (Like they are doing now with V8)

HKHan99 posted at 7:55AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363243

Since we're talking about Dawn, I'm a bit confused by the library structure for her. Am I missing something, or is she not as morphable as LF? Especially the face- there are some character morphs you can blend, but I'm not seeing tools for shaping individual parts of the face. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

Dawn was created before La Femme, and made to work in both Poser and Daz Studio. La Femme was created specially for Poser 11, and makes use of some exclusive technology - including posing chips in the face. Dawn doesn't have them, nor does any other Poser figure that I've seen (I've noticed that Project Evolution does wonderful face expressions but alas - I don't have PE, so I don't know how those expressions work)

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 10:57AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363280

HKHan99 posted at 7:55AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363243

Since we're talking about Dawn, I'm a bit confused by the library structure for her. Am I missing something, or is she not as morphable as LF? Especially the face- there are some character morphs you can blend, but I'm not seeing tools for shaping individual parts of the face. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place.

Dawn was created before La Femme, and made to work in both Poser and Daz Studio. La Femme was created specially for Poser 11, and makes use of some exclusive technology - including posing chips in the face. Dawn doesn't have them, nor does any other Poser figure that I've seen (I've noticed that Project Evolution does wonderful face expressions but alas - I don't have PE, so I don't know how those expressions work)

So basically Dawn is always going to look like Dawn unless you take her into something like Blender to mess with her? She's not Face Room compatible. I see that there are some controls with the Special Edition Character version, but they don't do very much and quite a few have no dial at all, they are just a place holder. That's unfortunate and limiting.

quietrob posted at 11:05AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363255

HKHan99 posted at 9:57PM Sat, 21 September 2019 - #4363232

Perpetualrevision- while that looks pretty cool, it's another throw-money-at-it solution (I guess the S-16 contribution is free, but I don't have V4). As I said up above, my focus at the moment is going to have to be to minimize my dependency on accuracy from the models. Sucks but there it is. Down the road I may focus on 3D asset creation for my own use.

Geez, I've been doing this a long time. V4 was free. They got you by selling morphs a little bit at a time. (Like they are doing now with V8)

Yeah, it's that "they got you by" approach that bothers me about this whole business. It seems directed more toward extracting money than getting a functional product out to people. I bought Poser because I thought there was less of that than with Daz- and there is- but not as much less I was hoping for. I don't know how things are in the 3DMax, Maya, etc kind of professional world because I can't afford to play in that league- they get you pretty good right up front, but I presume that for real pros that's justified by the functionality you're getting (although it would not shock me to be wrong about that- I have had some mighty expensive software in the past that was only marginally better than some really cheap stuff- and now it seems the free, open source stuff is closing the gap with the high end pro stuff in many areas). Anyway, I'm gradually figuring out what, at this time, is practical to do in relationship to the kinds of projects I'm focused on. It's not as much as I had hoped for a variety of reasons, but I think I'm homing in on how to use the tools I can afford to access in a productive way. I'm a little frustrated because there's a lack of clarity up front about the limitations of a lot of this stuff and you have to mess with it a lot to figure out what they are, but I suppose being transparent about that would be bad marketing. I have a feeling that the 'market' is on its way to splitting between the high end pro stuff and the free open source stuff and that both Poser and Daz are going to lose their market share in the process. Still a few years away, but when I see how rapidly Blender is developing, it seems inevitable.

If you ever do use Blender to make your own figures, you'll understand that it's not the "they got you approach" that is causing your frustration.

It's that this is really complicated, and there are technical limitations. Different designers have different solutions to these technical limitations, and there's no real consensus on which is best. (The arguments about JCMs, etc., can go on forever.) If you're used to the way one figure works, there will be a learning curve when using another one.

Dawn does come with some morphs built in. And some you have to inject. There also additional morph packs sold separately. That is normal. La Femme probably has more morphs included than most, but she was also released with a separate morph pack that cost money. Third party vendors often make even more morph packs available.

It makes sense to sell them separately, IMO. Not everyone wants all the morphs, and if they're built in it makes the figure very resource-heavy. (That's why they're often injected, rather than included in the figure when loaded.)

SamTherapy posted at 10:35AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363165

As an aside to Ohki's comments above, I would laugh my socks off if Bondware decided to change their name to Fractal Design.

This... this seriously needs to happen.

HKHan99 posted at 1:47PM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363328

So basically Dawn is always going to look like Dawn unless you take her into something like Blender to mess with her? She's not Face Room compatible. I see that there are some controls with the Special Edition Character version, but they don't do very much and quite a few have no dial at all, they are just a place holder. That's unfortunate and limiting.

If I remember correctly, there are morph packs for Dawn. The expression control chips are a new thing, but morphs have been used since forever.

HKHan99 posted at 10:36AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363334

Yeah, it's that "they got you by" approach that bothers me about this whole business. It seems directed more toward extracting money than getting a functional product out to people. I bought Poser because I thought there was less of that than with Daz- and there is- but not as much less I was hoping for.

Fun bit - with few exceptions, there really isn't nearly as much of that lock-in as there used to be. I can use (with very, very few exceptions) Poser content in DAZ Studio. Folks can (with sufficient effort) use exported DS content in Poser (though this will become increasingly hard to do as the two applications diverge).

BUT... both applications can still import and export 3d assets in basic formats (Wavefront .obj, .fbx, etc). Both have plugins (and other apps have plugins for it) that allow export to a wide variety of render engines, modeling suites, compositing apps, you-name-it. Taken together, this means with a sufficient level of effort, neither application really locks you in.

I guess what I'm saying is, the whole lock-in with Poser or DAZ Studio is, well, way overblown. I say this because neither are big-enough players to demand much of anything, let alone dictate terms. I am more than willing to wager that both companies bust their cojones to interoperate with a whole plethora of other applications, to accommodate a wide variety of workflows (I got to see some of that up-close and personal back in the day.)

If you want serious lock-in though, look no further than converting the .max file format to anything else w/o using a paid-for copy of 3DS Max (as an infamous example - there are worse - way worse). Yes, DS has binary file formats, but DS costs $0.00. Poser (I think still) uses easily-opened files that can be read by pretty much anything (even a text editor), and converted with little effort (...or use the free DS app to open it, then save as .fbx).

Long story short, Poser and DS really don't lock-in much of anything, compared to the CG world at large...

HKHan99

Have you injected the base and starter morphs? These give a range of head and face part morphs.

Nails60 posted at 2:38PM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363392

HKHan99

Have you injected the base and starter morphs? These give a range of head and face part morphs.

Yes. As I said, some of them are empty placeholders and others have pretty weak effects (except the Hag!). A lot are about expressions, even when they are under the Morph category. While some variation in Dawn is possible, its within a range that makes her pretty distinctive, I think. I think Hivewire may feel the same way since I see that they offer a facial morph pack separately. I get that no figure is going to do everything, I was just hoping for a bit more because of all the excitement about her.

Penguinisto posted at 2:44PM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363370

HKHan99 posted at 10:36AM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363334

Yeah, it's that "they got you by" approach that bothers me about this whole business. It seems directed more toward extracting money than getting a functional product out to people. I bought Poser because I thought there was less of that than with Daz- and there is- but not as much less I was hoping for.

Fun bit - with few exceptions, there really isn't nearly as much of that lock-in as there used to be. I can use (with very, very few exceptions) Poser content in DAZ Studio. Folks can (with sufficient effort) use exported DS content in Poser (though this will become increasingly hard to do as the two applications diverge).

BUT... both applications can still import and export 3d assets in basic formats (Wavefront .obj, .fbx, etc). Both have plugins (and other apps have plugins for it) that allow export to a wide variety of render engines, modeling suites, compositing apps, you-name-it. Taken together, this means with a sufficient level of effort, neither application really locks you in.

I guess what I'm saying is, the whole lock-in with Poser or DAZ Studio is, well, way overblown. I say this because neither are big-enough players to demand much of anything, let alone dictate terms. I am more than willing to wager that both companies bust their cojones to interoperate with a whole plethora of other applications, to accommodate a wide variety of workflows (I got to see some of that up-close and personal back in the day.)

If you want serious lock-in though, look no further than converting the .max file format to anything else w/o using a paid-for copy of 3DS Max (as an infamous example - there are worse - way worse). Yes, DS has binary file formats, but DS costs $0.00. Poser (I think still) uses easily-opened files that can be read by pretty much anything (even a text editor), and converted with little effort (...or use the free DS app to open it, then save as .fbx).

Long story short, Poser and DS really don't lock-in much of anything, compared to the CG world at large...

Yes, I get that the big pro programs try to keep everything proprietary if they can- another reason I don't use them, on top of the front-end expense. I don't feel locked in to Poser, if anything, I feel like there's not enough internal consistency or depth. Mostly I wanted something that would spare me learning Blender, but I find I need to learn Blender to use Poser for what I want. Poser isn't useless, and it does have some nice content, but it isn't designed for asset creation, and there isn't enough of what I need around on my budget to let me do what I had hoped to do. So, I need to use Blender at the asset creation level, and from what I can tell, I need to use Blender at the rendering end, too, for the kinds of projects I'm doing. I say 'from what I can tell' because I just haven't found much about NPR rendering in firefly, so maybe I can do what I need to there, but I haven't figured out how. Preview simply has too many conflicts with things like strand hair to be much use, and the NPR rendering settings are too limited. Overall, I feel like Poser has some really good features, but often they don't work well with each other. "With enough effort' is not very heartening.

randym77 posted at 2:55PM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363339

If you ever do use Blender to make your own figures, you'll understand that it's not the "they got you approach" that is causing your frustration.

It's that this is really complicated, and there are technical limitations. Different designers have different solutions to these technical limitations, and there's no real consensus on which is best. (The arguments about JCMs, etc., can go on forever.) If you're used to the way one figure works, there will be a learning curve when using another one.

Dawn does come with some morphs built in. And some you have to inject. There also additional morph packs sold separately. That is normal. La Femme probably has more morphs included than most, but she was also released with a separate morph pack that cost money. Third party vendors often make even more morph packs available.

It makes sense to sell them separately, IMO. Not everyone wants all the morphs, and if they're built in it makes the figure very resource-heavy. (That's why they're often injected, rather than included in the figure when loaded.)

I do understand that it's complicated, which is why I didn't want to design all my own stuff in Blender. I also understand your point about different design strategies. I think, however, that when creating a commercial package it would be useful to adopt an overall design strategy so that its various parts functioned consistently. Yes, technology advances and somebody comes up with a better idea, etc, etc, but a user-friendly approach would try to avoid having so many different approaches in the same package. For those of you who have dealt with Poser for many years, this may not seem like an issue- you learn each new thing as it arrives, but for a noob it is really annoying and time consuming to dig through. One thing that I like about Blender, as complicated as it is, is that in 2.8 they've done a pretty good job of integrating all the stuff they've developed over many years and made the parts present in a pretty consistent way. It makes it a lot easier to learn. I know that if the Bondware team cleans Poser up, there will be screaming from old hands. Some things will go away, lose functionality, etc. I get that, and even I was nonplussed that Wardrobe Wizard went away just when I was figuring out how to use it. But a consistent approach would really improve the package overall, I believe. It would also be a lot of work to achieve, so I'm not expecting miracles, just saying.

This is how I'd do it:

Thighs bend -50, Pelvis -19, Hip Bend 69.

HKHan99 posted at 6:27PM Sun, 22 September 2019 - #4363396

I do understand that it's complicated, which is why I didn't want to design all my own stuff in Blender. I also understand your point about different design strategies. I think, however, that when creating a commercial package it would be useful to adopt an overall design strategy so that its various parts functioned consistently. Yes, technology advances and somebody comes up with a better idea, etc, etc, but a user-friendly approach would try to avoid having so many different approaches in the same package. For those of you who have dealt with Poser for many years, this may not seem like an issue- you learn each new thing as it arrives, but for a noob it is really annoying and time consuming to dig through.

Hah. If anything, it was WORSE back in the old days. A lot of the "standard" things about Poser now were not standard back then. I remember being utterly baffled that Michael 1 did not look the way he looked in promo renders.

Because he had no textures. I didn't realize you had to apply the textures. Now, most figures come in textured. They might be ugly textures (V4, I'm lookin' at you), but there are textures. The figures don't come in looking like shiny plastic dolls.

A lot of the "standard" things about Poser now started out as hacks. I think they've done a pretty good job of standardizing, actually, considering that.

I don't think it would be a good thing to try and force things like rigging to be standardized (other than having to work in Poser, of course). It would stifle innovation. (This is an issue comes up a lot with respect to Poser and DAZ Studio. They started out being able to use the same figures, but no longer can. Some users want them to go back to using the same content, but I think that would weaken both applications.)

There's a learning curve. This has been an issue since the beginning. It looks so easy, but it's really not. There's still no "make art" button.

There was a Make Art button in WW.