Hi,

It appears that Content Paradise has dropped the Talk Designer Expansion product from its catalog, as the above link now defaults to their home page, and a search of the site comes up empty. My Google search of the Web also came up empty. Does anyone know if the product is still available, or if not, why it was discontinued?

I see that bluegene has kindly offered a solution for V4 here in FreeStuff, but no such luck for poor V3. I may have to create my own. If I do and can get it working, I'll share it here too.

Thanks,
Ricky

I hadn't thought of creating a new one. I don't have room on my secondary hard drive for a copy of my one external runtime, but I do have about 8 GB available for a smaller directory structure for testing purposes. I'll give that a try.

Thanks,
RJ

dburdick, that is undoubtedly the best wet skin I've seen! It's amazing because it includes realistic specularity, a variety of water droplet sizes, and realistic rivulets. Very nicely done.

Can you please tell us more about how you achieved this? In particular, I don't know what you mean by a "wet specular map".

RJ

Thank you, bagginsbill. You've made me use parts of my brain that haven't been exercised since my calculus classes! Still, your explanations are so clear and thorough that I was able to follow your lines of thought, and now I have a better understanding of how the Material Room works.

I wondered about the purpose of the two-color Specular Blender on the Diffuse node. Now that it simulates subsurface scattering, I will have to give it a try.

Also, I was just thinking about doing an ocean scene, so I found your discussion about World space coordinates for water textures particularly interesting.

Finally, what is your Matmatic program, and where can I find it? It sounds most interesting.

RJ

Thanks bagginsbill. The Turbulence node works well as an easily adjustable Bump, and gives the Glossy specular reflection the ragged edges I was looking for. I really appreciate your help.

Also, thanks pjz99. I changed my Units to Inches and entered the values bagginsbill showed, and then watched as I changed Units back and forth among Feet, Centimeters, etc. Funny, the Bump Value changed accordingly, but the values in the Glossy and Turbulence nodes were unaffected by changing Units. So you're right, we have to be careful when we're sharing Material Room settings, since Units affects some values there.

Rick

nruddock, 

Thanks for the quick and helpful reply.

V3 is visible now, by only checking "Include existing groups in polygon groups" on Export. Thank you.
 
However, I'm still doing something wrong, because the Imported-Modified-Exported object's changes don't appear in V3. It looks as if the geometry modifications I've made are simply ignored by Poser. I've re-tried it a few times, exaggerating the Morph Brush tool modifications each time, but still with no effect.

Also, thanks for the caution - I backed up my original blMilWom_v3.obj before I started.

moogal, good point about the universality of this approach, but I want this geometry mod to affect all of my V3 characters, as it is a subtle "correction" for all.

Thanks,
Rick

nruddock, 

I've used your great suggestion to Import V3's OBJ file for use with the Morph Brush tool. After backing-up the original, I made a small change with the tool that goes across body parts, and then used Export to overwrite blMilWom_v3.obj with the modified OBJ. 

However, when I open a previously-saved V3 character, she is invisible. On the other hand, she is visible and looks fine if I re-Import blMilWom_v3.obj. The modification still looks good too.

I left all of the Import and Export Options checkboxes and values at their defaults. For example, "Weld body part seams" and "Include body part names in polygon groups" are the only ones checked in the Export Options. Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Rick

I read that the e frontier developers admit that the Poser Morph tool won't work across body part boundaries. I haven't tried the Mirror option myself, so I'm curious to hear other's experiences with it.

I see e frontier has a new Morph Brush video tutorial on their Website, but I couldn't download the large movie file, so I don't know if it would answer any of your questions, JQP.

nruddock, I'm very intrigued by your comments, but I don't understand what you mean by "load the OBJ". For example, how would I open V3's object, blMilWom_v3.obj, in Poser for editing? Or would I open it in an object editor, such as Hexagon, Milkshape, Carrara, etc.? Also, can you give us the name and/or location of one of the available scripts you mentioned?

Thanks,
Rick

Hi,

Yes, I've been running Poser 7 in Windows XP x64 for a few months now on a home-built AMD 64-bit dual-core processor with 2 GB of RAM. Poser 7 SR2 is fast and stable on this setup for me.

Rick

Hi,

I received an email reply from e frontier concerning my bug report of the missing parameter value in the graph window:

"First off please let me apologize for the delay in getting back to you; we're
trying to get caught up with our backlog.

Thanks for letting us know about this! It should be fixed in our SR2 updater,
which is due out soon. For the moment as you've noticed it's easy enough to
select the parameter you'd like to edit, which will cause its name to draw in
the menu."
So, I'm glad I reported the bug at http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/18?sbss=435 and hopeful that this problem will be fixed in SR2.

Rick

I just finished using the new Jiggles script to add a bit of Jell-O effects to V3 in a Poser 7 animation. It worked like a million bucks.

I ended up setting the Min Limit and Max Limit on the Parameters to -1 and 1 respectively, since otherwise Jiggles creates excursions beyond these reasonable limits during her most extreme movements. I saw the same excursions with the Kozaburo Short Bob hair that I jigglized last week, and fixed them by hand.

Also, using Jiggles with a figure's Body is not supported, but that's understandable due to the issues with Full Body Morphs.

So the net net is that Jiggles is now P7-compatible. Thank you very, very much, Ockham.

Rick

Thanks for the link, msg24_7: I've saved it as a favorite. It's a simple Web form, and I described the textbox issue for them.

You're right, stewer. However, my search of the e frontier Website has not found a way to report this kind of information. For example, I don't see it on their "Contact Us" page:
http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/20/1/289?sbss=289.

Do you know how we should submit bug reports to e frontier?

I haven't seen the particular problem you describe, though your "Before" screen-capture illustrates an issue that I have noticed in P7 SR1.1.

Notice that the text box in the upper right corner of the Graph window is empty, whereas it should list the currently-selected Parameter, as it did in previous versions of Poser. I can populate the textbox from the drop-down list, but it no longer auto-populates from selections made in the Parameter window. I have to click the right-arrow and select Graph...

I have rendered many Poser animations directly to AVI with the DivX codec, but it's no fun to wake up the next morning to find the process failed overnight. So, per the good advice offered here by kuroyume0161 and others, I'm now rendering animations as collections of still images in PNG format, and then assembling them into video clips with Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0.

Premiere Elements is pretty good, though I've read that Version 3 is buggy, so I'm on the lookout for other editors, and other output formats besides DivX. That's why I'm intrigued by the generally positive remarks above about WMV quality, and Ockham's comment in particular that "WMV is easy to assemble from images by using the MovieMaker application that comes with Windows."

I looked around in MovieMaker and its Help file, but came up empty-handed. Can anyone describe how to import a set of sequentially-numbered images into MovieMaker?

Thanks,
Rick