While updating the Poser4 figures over the past couple months for P4FemMagic, I've had a lot of questions about what we need/want in Poser 5 figures. Thought I'd first toss out some things we know - and others we can guess - to get a discussion going: We know: 1. Curious Labs/Kupa says P5 will have new hair and cloth technology. 2. P5 will have some kind of built-in figures that are not the DAZ Millennium figures We can guess: 3. The figures may also make more use of technology like geometry swapping and ERC 4. P5 will have a more adaptable library system, hopefully allowing access to files outside the Runtime directory, even on other hard and removable disks. 5. Crosstalk will be solved, even after you reopen a saved scene, so when you set an EyesFore morph, the eyes don't pop out of all the figures. 6. Better morph dial management, maybe with built-in DialMagic-type show/hide capabilities, or some brand-new interface elements.

The business woman is definitely more clunky to pose, especially the chest/shoulder (not that even the best figures so far do well with extreme shoulder or knee poses). She has multiple layers, so the shirt and pants poke through the jacket (you can use the grouping tool to give different material settings to parts underneath and set them invisible). Casual woman doesn't, and works much better. Sometimes you just can't bother with readjusting clothing.

If P5 clothed figures:

• could use the same face and pose files as a nude version (like P4FemMagicTrio),
• could use the same texture maps for face/skin,
• maybe had a couple simple geometry-swapping trans-mapped hair models,
• had morphs to vary the clothing,
  ...would you use them more? Then again, maybe the cloth technology will make separate clothed figures unnecessary.

However, there's a second kind of figure family relationship that we've talked about, but don't have yet. If we have high and low resolution version of the same figure, which have some similar morphs with the same names - then we can use the same face and pose files to create the same character (eyesSlant, noseUp, chinNarrow, earsElf, bodySlim, bigFeet, etc.) for both close-up and full-figure/group scenes. Is this something we want? A lot? Or not so much?

We know what happens when figures have to lug all their multi-megabytes of morphs around - not good for multi-figure scenes, animation or medium-range computers. Geometry swapping and donor-morphs can allow stashing some assets in libraries, easily and quickly available. It does cost something in flexibility and the ability to fine-tune a figure, and it can sure be confusing. All thunk out for now. Whatcha think, folks? Elisa/gryffnn

This might work more for an overall improvment...however since we pay for them...a button to make clothes fit on any character DAZ, Zygote, or any other creator's. Click and FIT. Maybe then we can do more complex poses with clothes that stick. No more "Made for Victoria" Makers can now just make clothes and sell them and we can pay to use them...a lot easier for the user and the superuser. A lot harder for the programmers? So much so they can't do it?

I agree with 420toker big time, click and fit

There is a lot of improvement in Poser5. I strongly recommend one thing: A Wizard creator. Do you want a male or female? Do you want Black, oriental or white? Choose hair from the 40 available: Choose beard (if man) from the 10 available: And so on. Also, a face expression maker will be helpful. Even when it is not asked, a better integration with Max, Cinema, Maya, Lightwave, Vue, Bryce, Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Freehand, World Builder and so on is desired.

Top of my list would be the ability to have figures that did not rupture the mesh so easily attempting poses like putting-hand-to-face.

420Toker - They have already said Poser 5 will have Collision Detection. This means that clothing does not need to be chopped up and turned into a conforming figure anymore. Instead, from what I understand, you create the solid mesh, then load it in, and set the tension of the "fabric", its weight, and other factors. Then, when you put the garment on the figure, the first thing it does is settle, the way real clothes settle on someone. If you made your garment a mite too thick, it will sag and wrinkle. Then when you pose your figure, it calculates if the figure's body parts are clliding with the clothing mesh, and moves the clothing with the body part. This means no elbows poking through the mesh, the clothes can be put on the floor where they'll settle into a pile (like when you toss your shirt on the floor), and so on, and so on.

Perfect Mimic compatibility. Mike and Viky require tweaking, which drives me crazy considering how expensive they are.

A Wizard character creator sounds like a wonderful idea for those new to Poser-- it would drive me nuts. I'd like much more finetuning on the dials and a clean interface so I can actually Read the dials. Right now I can't fine tune Real Eyes, because the dial parameters don't allow for enough decimal places. Figures that can go to white out automatically-- even better-- a button in Render Materials that cancels all the materials to white. That would cover any Daz or third party figures. I would think this feature is obvious, but I've learned nothing is obvious. Other than that, build in Gryffyn's Dial Magic for everybody at every mesh level and make those dials super fine AND intuitive. Call things by the right NAME. If they don't want to change the tradition of using collar for breasts-- then have a chart that shows what is what and put it on a reinforced card you can keep by the puter. I'm going to keep using Mil figures because they're prettier and I have a fortune invested-- so make the changes usable by them too-- don't have to be all of them-- but the important ones-- Please! I don't do any animation so if the biggest change is to that-- I'm going to thnk long and hard about upgrading at all. Emily

Oh, just thought of something. If the low res figures are kept-- keep them in a separate slot, not in figures, where they take up waaaay too much room. Have figures and lo-res figures as categories, or Default figures for everything that comes with. Sub-folders may take care of this problem, but I thought I'd never fill up a Gig of harddrive too and that was bad prophecy. Any graphics program should assume it's going to be loaded to the gills with anything anyone can find free or not, that way, people buy more stuff, the economy gets better, wars cease and we all go and live by the seashore. Well, maybe not, but it's a good Eastertide thought.:)) Emily

Emily, for finely adjusting eyes, you can double-click the value on a dial, then type in a number to the fourth decimal place, 0.0004 for example. When you press Enter/Return the value will show as 0.000, but the value you typed will still be there and the eye position set accordingly. If you type -0.0004, it will show as -0.000. So you can set positions more precisely, but of course, you can't see on the dial exactly what you set. And when you really want a setting to be exactly 0, it's a good idea to type it in. I definitely would like the remove all textures option, if not a button, at least a menu command - Elisa/gryffnn

Just give me a t-shirt and jeans set that actually FIT the basic characters. Give me a dress shirt that doesn't balloon out over the belt of the pants. And why in hell couldn't they fix such basic things in P4?????

Well this is a little OT, but now that Maya is under 2grand it would be really nice to see a Poser plugin for the Pro Pack considering their character animation tools seem to be better than both Lightwave and Max.

Guys, Please remember that we are dealing with 2 different companies: CuriousLabs and DAZ. They work together rather well, but they are separate entities. I'm not sure that CL actually makes any of the meshes. Hmmmm.... I just dug out my old copy of Poser 2, and the manual says that the models were made by Viewpoint Datalabs (forbear to Zygote and DAZ) especially for Poser. I spent some time with the DAZ folks at GDC, but they didn't even whisper about what they were up to next, besides improving the millennium family. (I put a plug in for better animals.) Anyway, we might want to divide this thread into 2 lines of thought: one directed towards the inventive model-makers and the other directed towards the good folks that allow the models to be posed and animated. Carolly

Hi Carolly, Curious Labs will decide what figures are included with Poser 5, that's what I'm specifically interested in here. There's already lots of discussion about DAZ figures (they've said there will be a Victoria 3), but only Curious knows/will know exactly what features Poser 5 will have that new figures can be built to use. Instead of waiting to complain, why not give them the "benefit" of our opinions now? Not that WE would ever complain...

"Proceedural Textures" An absolute must. ~EA

"a button in Render Materials that cancels all the materials to white" "Procedural Textures. An absolute must." Amen and amen! A more streamlined, easier to use Render Materials window in general. A better rendering engine. (Raytracing capability maybe?) "Export to Bryce" (did someone already mention that?) that pre-sets the transparency settings and so on. Better interpolation in animation. Interpolated textures (the ability to change textures over the course of an animation) Last but not least, and at the top of my list: Collect For Archive A function that automatically takes the selected figure (and asks you about referenced and non-referenced textures, props etc.) and packs it into a "Runtime" folder, ready to zip up and burn to CD (or upload to the marketplace or freestuff).

In the MATERIALS area, a way to kill all textures (after you reset all figs to white :) and a way to zap unused textures (you keep some, zap the others to save space. Not every one PC based has a P4!, But then the processing requirements for P5 may require a CPU upgrade. Sigh!)

I would love to see a "package" command like Hiram mentioned. Something that would export all required files to the same directory (And update all file references inside the files so they pointed to the right place) so you could ZIP and Unzip into a sigle directory instead of having to trust those who download to unzip into 3 (or more) different folders. It would be especially nice if this "Package" command would put up a dialog asking you which files to export and providing checkboxes... thus we could easily tell it not to export copyrighted geometries... but we could let it export our own geometries if we wanted. Or maybe they should build in something that would work to just provide a difference file like ObjMOver? Oversight99