Hello all,

While recently backing up some old drives, I came across my backups of Poser 8, 10, PP2012/PP2014, and felt quite nostalgic.  I have been using D|S for the past few years, and am really excited to see the new features and developments in a recent Poser article.  I'd like to try Poser again, but I do have a couple of questions though:

1). Scale - Does Poser 12 still use the PNU measurement system, or is it scaled for inches, mm, cm, etc?  I'm making many things for D|S in Hexagon and Blender, and am curious as to how I need to scale the obj files when making clothes, morphs, props, etc.

2). Utilities - I do have some old utilities from the V4/M4 days for exporting blank cr2 files, rigging, as well as RTE encoder, etc.  Are these still valid, or are there new rigging/setup tools built in to Poser?  I remember something in PP2014, but it was a bit buggy.  I know that Poser 12 now uses Python 3, so most old utilities no longer work, unless refactored.

3). Cloth Room - Coming from the dForce environment, would it be fairly easy to re-fit a dForce clothing item from G3F/G8F to LaFemme or Dawn?  What improvements have been made to the Cloth Room?

Thanks, -David

Hello David,

1 - No change on scale. Poser internally still uses the PNU. 

2 - On new tools there is now the Fitting Room and the Setup Room is improved. It can now also do the grouping. The functions for copying morphs and vertex weights are also available independently. RTEencoder is independent of Poser so it can be used as long as your computer supports it. 

3 - No changes to the cloth room, except that today's computers finally have the muscle to drive it. If you are interested in such a hybrid solution in Poser (pose conforming, dynamic post drape) let me know. I have 'proof of concept'  for Poser 12. There is AFAIK also a tool in the marketplace.  

1) still PNU, though in-program you can choose what measurements it'll show. I've found that, when you export from Blender as Collada, it loads in Poser with correct measurements. Though for clothes you can just import the base figure's obj in Blender and model over that, when exporting the clothing as obj it'll load with the correct size in Poser.

2) Most figures for Poser come with DEV rigging cr2s, but if you load any figure as a bone/rigging donor in the Setup Room, it'll only load the bone and rig information now so you don't really need a blank cr2 anymore for most things. We now also have things like an INJ morph exporter built in, etc. There's a decent array of vendor/creator tools made for P12 in the store by now, too.

3) The cloth room was good to begin with, but sadly, due to copyright stuff with the Cloth Room engine, they aren't allowed to improve it at all. But there are some very good tools nowadays to work with the dynamics in Poser - things like jroulin's script that creates an easy simulation script for your clothing, to be loaded by your buyers directly from their library, or wolfnom's Cloth Presets script that gives you a drop-down list with premade settings for various fabric types. I have successfully converted some dForce clothing from G8f to La Femme (examples: find RPublishing's Genevieve and Fluttershy dresses for La Femme, those were my conversions), and it was pretty easy, I just exported them as obj in DS, loaded them in Blender and reshaped them to fit LF, cleared the DS groupings and created Poser Dynamics groups (Constrained for things that would follow the body without draping, like bodices; Soft Decorated for things like rim turnovers to give illusion of thickness; Hard Decorated for things like buttons), then imported that obj into Poser and set it up in the Cloth Room.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 5:54 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431579

3) The cloth room was good to begin with, but sadly, due to copyright stuff with the Cloth Room engine, they aren't allowed to improve it at all.

Ur.... What? Copyright stuff? I mean: Are you saying that the cloth room will remain as is, it will never be enhanced?

From what I've read around - and don't quote me on this, I don't have inside confirmation or anything -, Poser's dynamics use an engine created by a company that broke and no longer exists, so they can't arrange to get permission to change things in it.

If it were me, I'd replace the engine entirely for something newer and better and arrange a tool to convert older content, but hey, Poserdom userbase is always so scared of change. Though I feel like the people scared to try new features are still the same ones who are afraid to use dynamics at all.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 8:14 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431587

From what I've read around - and don't quote me on this, I don't have inside confirmation or anything -, Poser's dynamics use an engine created by a company that broke and no longer exists, so they can't arrange to get permission to change things in it.

If it were me, I'd replace the engine entirely for something newer and better and arrange a tool to convert older content, but hey, Poserdom userbase is always so scared of change. Though I feel like the people scared to try new features are still the same ones who are afraid to use dynamics at all.

Oh... Thanks for the info.
Note that it could be the best reason to rebuild from scratch something really useful for, let's say... clothes and hairs? 😁

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 8:14 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431587

If it were me, I'd replace the engine entirely for something newer and better and arrange a tool to convert older content

No need for a converter. Bullet is already implemented in Poser (basically the same Physics-Engine as in Blender). If Bullet would be updated/upgraded and all possibilities integrated into Poser, it could reside side-by-side with the old engine – at least for a while.

Is the bullet engine independent from other companies?

Gosh, I need to get off my butt and learn to use that. I heard the settings for fabric behave differently in that though?

After advice I got from Nerd3D: Bullet as built in in Poser is not suitable for cloth sims on figures. The colision mechanism works only for collision on convex objects. It works fine for draping over a sphere or a cylinder but it does not work say to collide with the belly under the chest/breasts or with the chest under the arms.

I am not sure whether the present version of Bullet is any more advanced in this respect, or whether you would have any chance if you use a 'stick figure' collection of collision objects.

A  solution could be to use VirtualWorldDynamics, Or, if you own one of Marvelous Designer 6 to 9 on windows use the MDBridge for Poser (updates for other figures are available on request. MD10/11 is not supported because  the Python support is not complete)

FVerbaas posted at 10:03 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431598

After advice I got from Nerd3D: Bullet as built in in Poser is not suitable for cloth sims on figures. The colision mechanism works only for collision on convex objects. It works fine for draping over a sphere or a cylinder but it does not work say to collide with the belly under the chest/breasts or with the chest under the arms.

That's why I said: "upgraded/updated" :)

Look what Blender did with Bullet. It is all Open Source.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 9:50 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431597

Is the bullet engine independent from other companies?

Bullet is Open Source from the beginning. It is used in many important – and even commercial – applications.

Part of the Documentation says: "All source code files are licensed under the permissive zlib license (http://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib) unless marked differently in a particular folder/file."

Autodesk started with Bullet for Maya 2019:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2019/ENU/Maya-SimulationEffects/files/GUID-CC0BDE04-468D-4383-9553-14157E23D171-htm.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_%28software%29

adp001 posted at 10:36 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431602

Look what Blender did with Bullet. It is all Open Source.

https://renderguide.com/blender-cloth-simulation-tutorial/ .looks promising indeed.

Regarding Poser's Cloth Engine: It's certainly not bad.  The only problem is that it is bothered with geometries that are not made for its use. If you build meshes "by the book", you get very, very good results in no time.I've proven that many times (and have been preaching it ever since the Clothroom came out). With a cloth engine, "a lot helps a lot" is the wrong way. So no high-resolution meshes with countless polygons (this applies to all physics engines, by the way; other apps use low-res proxies for high-resolution meshes). Rather, you should build meshes whose edges follow the flow of the material. Add sensible settings for different parts of a garment (e.g. friction is important, stretchiness can help, etc.). This way I get 4-8 seconds computing time per frame for tops. And, no: one setting for all doesn't really work.

Fact is, without some knowledge and understanding of the matter you won't get far in the Clothroom. At best, you get random results that can hardly be reproduced. But that is not different with DAZ - because "they also only boil with water", as they say here.

I'm using Blender to create my clothing - no MD, just Blender with a couple of paid, but pretty cheap, addons specializing in clothing creation using the sewing methods.

Gosh, wouldn't be great if Poser brought in more things from Blender after we've had success with Superfly? :)

FVerbaas posted at 11:00 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431607

adp001 posted at 10:36 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431602

Look what Blender did with Bullet. It is all Open Source.

https://renderguide.com/blender-cloth-simulation-tutorial/ .looks promising indeed.

Yeah! But it's not Bullet alone. Blender has some very capable people working on it that make all the other physics engines look pretty ordinary.

Here is a video how to make cloth with Blender - even easy for starters and usable in Poser (if the right model is imported into Blender) ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h89tkUJLuM

Wow!

Thanks all for the replies!  I'm happy to see the updates to Poser, and your feedback is great.  I look forward to tinkering in Poser again.  Going through my archives, it's amazing to see how much I've invested over the years, and how I'm not using it anymore.  As much as I'd like to splurge on the latest system with RTX3090's and such for D|S, I have to be realistic and continue to use my existing rig with a 1070 8GB card.  Which is another question - how does Poser use CPU/GPU versus D|S?  Which is more important with Poser- CPU and RAM or GPU?

Thanks, -David

Starkdog posted at 12:30 PM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431613

Which is more important with Poser- CPU and RAM or GPU?

Poser12 uses - like its predecessor - Cycles as a render engine. And P12 renders significantly faster than P11 (CPU and GPU). In addition, according to the rumor mill and an official article from Bondware, the programmer who originally implemented Cycles in Poser and is very familiar with Cycles has been tasked with reworking Poser's Cycles implementation and incorporating new features (which also benefits speed). How far this has progressed or how far this will go remains to be seen. The original (Cycles in Blender) is fast even with "only" CPU - if the hardware allows it (means fast CPU, but above all fast memory, e.g. RAM). Nevertheless, there is still a speed advantage for GPU if a graphics card from the last generation (upper end of the price scale) is used. Otherwise, a modern CPU with access to very fast memory could already be faster – or at least fast enough :)

As for the amount of RAM in general: it is an important factor in any 3D application. The larger, more elaborate and higher resolution the models, the more of them in a scene, the more memory is needed. For the final render itself, it's probably not so dramatic: 16 Gig is sufficient in the vast majority of cases for CPU rendering, without the computer having to continuously swap data out and read it back in. But in many cases 8 Gig will do as well.

Poser Superfly (renderer) can use GPU for rendering, which is much faster, but it can also render via CPU. Firefly, the older renderer, renders via CPU only. Other than that, CPU and ram will help you load and deal with more stuff on your scene.

Edit: wow, seems like I'm crossposting a lot today lmao

Starkdog posted at 12:30 PM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431613

David, here is a test I did this year: how many Vic4 could Poser 12 handle.
May system is based on an old i7 8700 with 32Gb of RAM, the main partition is stored on an SSD. My card is an RTX2080Ti.
With this system, I had to stop at 13. I kept an eye on the RAM used on the graphic card: between 3.7 and 4.2Gb were used. And Poser used up to 18Gb of RAM besides this.

IN RTX mode, I don't remember but it lasted less then 15 minutes.

For most aspects of poser, I think having a good CPU helps. I've got a meh one and it's not bad. I think it only relies on the GPU for Superfly renders, if you use that option, and possibly the preview display. My video card is old and can't do any of that cool stuff, but I manage with the CPU.

This is probably my most populated scene that I rendered with all the figures in rather than rendering groups and stitching it together. of the 21 figures, I believe 19 are M4. The 3 in the foreground in all brown, the tops all were draped in the clothroom. It took a long time to render. I don't remember how long, but it was overnight, possibly longer.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 11:17 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431609

I'm using Blender to create my clothing - no MD, just Blender with a couple of paid, but pretty cheap, addons specializing in clothing creation using the sewing methods.

OK, well now that you've got my attention, which addons specializing in clothing are you using?  Clothing is one of the things I've never been good at with Blender.

Miss B posted at 5:17 PM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431634

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 11:17 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431609

I'm using Blender to create my clothing - no MD, just Blender with a couple of paid, but pretty cheap, addons specializing in clothing creation using the sewing methods.

OK, well now that you've got my attention, which addons specializing in clothing are you using?  Clothing is one of the things I've never been good at with Blender.

Garment Tool, available at Gumroad, and Simply Cloth Pro, available at Blender Market. I just checked now, they're pricier than when I got them, but only by a little - still quite affordable!

I render using Superfly and use the presets in the render settings to pick a preset that gives me a render speed / quality balance that I am happy with.  In some cases I accept the loss of quality for more speed if I think I can denoise the final render to an acceptable level.  There are presets for both CPU and GPU at different quality levels, of course all the presets can be tweaked but they are a good default to work from if you are new to Poser 12 and Superfly.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 5:56 AM Sun, 12 December 2021 - #4431679

Miss B posted at 5:17 PM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431634

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 11:17 AM Sat, 11 December 2021 - #4431609

I'm using Blender to create my clothing - no MD, just Blender with a couple of paid, but pretty cheap, addons specializing in clothing creation using the sewing methods.

OK, well now that you've got my attention, which addons specializing in clothing are you using?  Clothing is one of the things I've never been good at with Blender.

Garment Tool, available at Gumroad, and Simply Cloth Pro, available at Blender Market. I just checked now, they're pricier than when I got them, but only by a little - still quite affordable!

Thank you ma'am, I'm going to check those out.