Is the new hair system geometries based or only rendering based ? I've some problem to deterime that and the P5 book is a bit "closed" for a non-english reader. Thanks for all explanations. Laurent, Paris

both

But you can't export the hair to another program right? Marque

hmmm ... if you cant export the whole figure into another prog that will be not good. I always use another prog to make my renders. I hope you can export the whole figure incl. hair. Chris

It will only render in P5.

that sucks !!!

not good Jeff! But CL is working on some plugins for other 3D apps like Lightwave and Max ... so what is with that?

No it's very smart...out side of poser the mesh would be huge! Most of the information you need has already been mentioned by Curiouslabs right here in the forum. They have said that many of the dynamics features will not be supported in other apps using the plugins. Poser 5 has all new rendering tools, why would you want to render it elsewhere?

because Fire Fly is really slow! Like Bryce and I dont want to render 2 days while other progs need 10 min.

thats a not very good point for P5 but I hope I can export the dynamic clothes.

Where have you seen FireFly before? I don't know much about it. Anything that is a mesh can be exported.

thats good :-) Take a look at Runtime DNA - there are Poser 5 renders made with Fire Fly but I thought everyone knows that!

I thought you had seen something of Firefly outside of Poser 5, you made a comment about it being "slow". They posted render times for each of the images? I hadn't noticed it.

Jeff, I have my sources that says that Fire Fly is slow ... no more comments. I think you'll see until you have your own copy of Poser 5 ... then you will remember me :)

and why should we ONLY use Poser Rendering ? It's a bit reductor !

I agree with you ablc ... its because CL wants to sell their plugins for other 3D apps :) Thats ok for me, I'll pay the price they want :) I hope they are done with it very soon :)

I dunno, why should you render a MAX file in 3DS Max or a Truespace file in Truespace? :-)

Jeff ... because it renders faster! The Max renderer is really fast and it renders much better then Bryce or Poser. ...and if you want to make really good animations or complexe szenes Poser is not the right prog for it. Poser is great for posing figures, applying clothes or props but it is not able to get your szenes done quickly. Thats the reason why lots of people use other progs for their works.

I use Vue to do outside rendering that poser can't do. If you need some special feature like volumetric lights, fogs, shadows and other stuff like that, you should use other software. Just check the vue gallery here. Most of the pics are Poser/Vue and it's a pretty good working team. Laurent :)

here I use tS for effects... check out my Dragonfire Wip... plus Poser ain't a modeler.. if you've ever tried to cross formats in 3D programs you soon realise it's easier to transfer a figure from poser to another system such as tS Max or LW.... Kai

Laurent: your right. there are so much things Poser cant do so why they dont want us to render in another prog?

I dunno. :(

I don't know about FireFly's speed, but CL did say there wouldn't be any network rendering, so that's a problem.

I'ts not that they don't want you to render in other programs its that the format for the hair is different then other programs take just as the node based shaders are but the dynamic clothing should export fine as the dynamics are calculated in poser and all you would be exporting is the final obj file. It is rediculous to think that you are not going to have some incompatabilities in new software technology.

ablc I'm thinking that I read that poser5 will not be usable by Vue, you will have to take it to poser4 to export it for Vue which means the cloth and the hair will not work. Face it, unless Vue and other programs like C4D buy the right to create the plugin you are stuck with poser 5 to do the renders. I'm hoping that I can at least do the animations to pull into Vue, but I will have to wait and see. People complain about Hash, but at least they are honest about not working with other programs. I will use poser 5 for some things and poser 4 with Vue and C4D for other things. Marque

Take a mesh that you wish to render as smooth. Do a least squares fit calculation using all of the points. I think I remember that this is done using three points in sequence - but however many - it defines the equation for a curve. All of the pixels on the surface of the mesh are then adjusted to match the average of all of the converging curves. You can be rendering a cross section of one facet and it will be curved, not faceted. This may or may not be exactly what FireFly is doing, but it is probably something close. You cannot export this, it is the renderer doing it. It also means that adding a lot of extra points just to make a mesh smooth, does not make it smoother, it makes for more calculations and a slower render time though. The speed of FireFly will depend on how dense the mesh is. Poorly coverted NURBS clothing and high poly figures, might take a while. We pick up Raytracing and a renderer that does near infinite smoothing. Not too shabby. Poser 5 hair. Building from an existing prop, a hair style can be made and saved to the library. The part that defines the actual Poser 5 hair appears to be based on calculations - not created mesh, so it looks to be internal to Poser 5 and not something you can export. If you are exporting from Poser to another program for rendering, it looks like you will have to use mesh based hair. Yep, I took a Vic scalp, grew some hair, saved it. It reopens in Poser 5 with the grown hair. Open the prop in MFM, and it is just the scalp - no hair verts. The hair is code in the library file. Shame on CL for offering something specific to Poser 5 that makes it special.

so the low rez Vicky should be practicly indisinguishable from Hi rez with a much shorter rendertime?

Well they did say it would only render in poser 5. Marque

If you're worried about the hair not rendering in other apps try this:

Open Poser 4 Pro Pack, load the ball prop into the scene, select it and type "hair" into the keyboard.

Create a hair growth on the ball and save it as a pz3.

Open that using the Lightwave or Max plugin and see if it renders.

The treemaker hair has the same construction as the P5 hair, only P5 adds parameters so it will render.

-Jeff

well if you can't do that kind of magic with meshes no one can blame CL for not providing and export system as the other programs would have to use the same system to render it. blame them for not keeping up with Poser if you have to blame someone. ;P

Low vs standard - needs testing, but if faceting is a problem with low, that should no longer be the case. The problem with morphing low density mesh is that the location of inflection points has to be rather precise. On the figure that I am working with now, there are places where I would prefer another row of verts. If you have the morphs you want, then yes, I suspect that low res Vic will do you some good.

Attached Link: animated hair test

*"They have said that many of the dynamics features will not be supported in other apps using the plugins. Poser 5 has all new rendering tools, why would you want to render it elsewhere?"* Render elsewhere?? ?Hmm lets see.. how about volumetric lighting particle systems ,infinite terrains, Radiosity ,liquid/smoke simulation explosion effects, multipass rendering for seemless compositing in after effects or combustion and a REAL 3D camera system OPEN GL .hardware acceleration , batch rendering , custom scripting abilities not to mention world class modeling tools to name a few reasons Go back and look at the "ruby tuesday thread where you see a Naked poser female standing in front of a reflective plane with a nice shiny reflective sphere sitting on a table NO offense but the "firefly "render engine Looks about as good as Bryce3D was 6 YEARS AGO!!! Have you gotten some official word from CL about the hosting plugins for poser5?? the current poser propack4 plugin for cinema dose not actaully "IMPORT" the poser files but simply references the Data into cinema for rendering in Cinema's SUPERIOR rendering environment. if what you say is true then poser5 will be useless to me as i am an animator who dont do many NAKED chicks named "Ruby" standing in front of mirrors. Oh well( Sigh!!) it looks like I will be continuing to use Cinema4DXl's strand base animated hair ( Link) system and Cloth dynamics. and poserpro4. :-/

Yes Cimema 4DXL is very impressive and so is it's price! $1695

Yes and alot of Die hard cinema owners I know with$$$ cash$$ to spend were considering buying poser5 as a character animation add-on if they could host the character animations with the cloth dynamics and hair But if CL Turns ther back on this $$Lucrative$$ high end market its their Loss.

So it seems I have purchased Poser 5 for almost a complete loss. Since hair and dynamically conforming clothing cannot be exported to another application, the only advantage P5 has for me over P4 is the greater control over the facial morphs. For over $200, just having improved facial control is pathetic. I really am not looking forward to the continued drudgery of hand-painting in hair and clothing!

***If you're worried about the hair not rendering in other apps try this: Open Poser 4 Pro Pack, load the ball prop into the scene, select it and type "hair" into the keyboard. Create a hair growth on the ball and save it as a pz3. Open that using the Lightwave or Max plugin and see if it renders. The treemaker hair has the same construction as the P5 hair, only P5 adds parameters so it will render. -Jeff*** Sadly you are right Jeff :-( I grew some hair on the Ball prop and opened the file in Cinema4DXl via the plugin and No "hair" Came in with the Ball.

Alduin, if it makes you feel any better, I suspect a lot of people will end up being disappointed in Poser 5 when it doesn't do what they expected it to.

dynamic clothing will export Alduin. it is just a deformation of a mesh. and yes many of the new features were designed for use within P5 and as has been said by Kupa himself there are many situations where you will want to use P4 solutions modeled transmapped hair conforming clothing. you people act as if becouse certain features don't export well to other programs It's CLs fault, were dealing with sophisticated programs here. getting them all to work togeather properly has never been easy. and it's been only a few years since the only way you were going to get real cg animation was a $30.000 SGI machine and programs which cost about as much. here you have a $350 program that can do lots more then those programs, on a PC! and has many of the features you can only get as plug ins in some of the "high end programs" yes some people will be dissapointed, but I didn't expect P5 to be the savior of the world just a great upgrade to a very good and unique program. Sorry, rant off :)

Since poser figures are only a part of my scenes, and I build all my scenes in Bryce, I don't expect I'll EVER render a scene in Poser, no matter what the version. I can understand those who only do nude vickies with some simple background are content to render in poser, but not people who do immensly complex scenes like I do - it just WON'T work. If hair and clothing effects can't be exported then they are utterly useless to the many folks like me. It's also very apparent that those who can't currently afford to upgrade or continue to use Poser 4 for whatever reason are to be distinctly 'second class citizens' around here from now on.

Allen9 wrote "It's also very apparent that those who can't currently afford to upgrade or continue to use Poser 4 for whatever reason are to be distinctly 'second class citizens' around here from now on." I'm not sure why you think that. sure the P5 frenzy is in full swing but when all that dies down people will realize that though there are many new features this is still P4 with bells and whistles after all everything for P4 will be useful in p5 sure there will be some P5 items that will not translate to P4 and lots of technical questions to solve but there sure are a lot of us that do use bryce and even though I have ordered the upgrade there are many scenes that I will still go the predomanantly P4 rout to haave figures that transfer properly to bryce and view. to me it it's like the OSX mac thing, there was a frenzy of I got mine stuff going on in Mac forums but when many people realized they'd still have to run many programs In os9 that eleteism soon dissapeared.

People have said clothing will export, others say maybe. What I meant by exporting dynamic clothing was exporting the draped cloth result, not the ability to continue to futz with the cloth in another program. So if I put a shirt on the Poser 5 male and make it "cloth" and then export the full figure, will the shirt export as a static mesh with him as it looks in Poser 5 with all the wrinkles and folds? I would think so since it is a mesh deform. This would cut my worktime by months. Hair: same deal. I get the hair looking right, maybe do an animation to get the hair to blow across the face and stop the animation at a choice frame. I then export the full figure. Would the hair export as a static mesh with the figure? I would hope so since the hair is supposed to be "strand-based". This would also cut months off my work schedule. I am not very concerned about polygon count. If the hair doesn't appear in my renderer of choice (Carrara Studio 2), it does have its own hair-growth function through a 3rd party plugin. However, it is geared toward fur and human hair looks more like a chia pet. :( I am not interested in making animations, but realistic still images of people in motion (or standing still if the job demands it). I've heard the Poser 5 renderer is spiffy, and I've seen some images done with it. It does look nice, but making a cityscape and parkland of a square kilometer in Poser 5 (with quite a few hundred imported objects) would likely be unfeasible. Alduin