Echoing Gary here - coming back to Poser, but for a specific reason. As I do, I've run down the AI rabbithole with some keenness and alacrity, upgraded my GPU to an 8gig card (3070) which now I find a bit underpowered to run Stable Diffusion - at least, the version I want to run, which is 1.5 - and creating persistent characters for this little novella I'm writing. The only thing is, whilst I'm able to get my characters to *generally* obey my prompts:

facing camera, full body shot:1.125, elegant beautiful 30 year old woman, dark (short) bobbed hair, wearing (ivory blouse), wearing dark skirt, (open mouth),  (glaring) at the camera, sitting in (outdoor cafe), outdoor cafe, coffee cup,

which gives me this:

...getting the pose right is a bit hit and miss. And this is where Poser comes in. Yes, there is this site which does a great job with poses, but you're stuck with what they have, which may or may not be suitable. So, I'm having a go creating my own poses for my little scenes so my characters are doing precisely what the scene calls for. Tools: Stable Diffusion 2.1 and ControlNet.

Not to necro an old thread, but I do wish Blender's posing tools for figures was a bit more seamless, less work... more like Poser's. I'd be using Blender at the moment instead of Poser 12, which I just invested in. Stupidly, I thought at first, but my whole wander down the AI rabbit-hole has taken me to Stable Diffusion, which enables renders not far from Midjourney's. My biggest issue had been getting the figures to obey the prompts, but here is where Poser is (and Blender so SHOULD) kick in: with the ControlNet add-on to Automatic1111, you CAN make the figure pose the way you want them to. This is so a gamechanger, Lobo.

This is a great time to enjoy technology! I created this office:

just by entering this prompt into Stable Diffusion: elegant reception of an office, tasteful furnishings, well-lit, flowers, plants, couch, reception desk, 

AI did the rest. Colour me addicted.

Anyway, hope new figure-posing tools for Blender (not Rigify) become available that will give Poser a run for the money.

Thank you, Lobo... that transparency conundrum has always been s ource of irritation for me, particularly as the approach is just a wee bit different for Poseer than it is for Blender. Good resource, that one! 

Thanks for replying, Lobo. Blender is such a massive piece of software with its fingers in so many pies (sorry for the sticky metaphor) that it is virtually impossible for anyone to have even a passing knowledge or even exposure to all aspects of the software. I've gotten into AI character development using Discord/Midjourney and what can be done with just typing in text into a prompt is positively mindboggling - this text: 

Charlotte Veil, beautiful woman, braided bun hair, black hair, white peasant dress, light makeup, 4K --ar 16:9 --q 2

produces this image:

All I wanted to do was create textures for my figure, and this was the rabbithole I ended up going down. BTW: this is NOT an actual person... this is an AI-generated figure. Sort-of does my head in... as you look at the gallery of both Midjourney and Leonardo.ai, it sort of leaves you breathless.

Sorry, didn't mean to throw more confusion into the topic: delaunay is an odd-enough beast to wrestle with, all on its own.

Thanks, Lobo. I actually have Cloth Weaver. It's very actively supported and updated.

I guess what I was looking at was the finished cloth and how it deformed. With Cloth Weaver you also end up with quad-based mesh, not tris. Almost all - if not all - of Poser's dynamic cloth is quad-based. I'm just wondering if

1) delaunay is all it's cracked up to be,

2) you need a special sim engine to deform it correctly and

3) there's a way to optimise quad-based cloth.

I tried the Tesselate Tool in Blender - think that's the one - some time ago and the results were not stellar: the cloth took longer to deform and looked pretty ordinary when it was done. Probably something I stuffed up.

That's very nice of you, Lobo.  🙂  Thank you!

As I'm now retired and on a fixed income, upgrading to the latest versions of paid-for software is no longer an option, whether for videography, image creation or composition. It's a matter of "use what you have" and I've yet learned even a fraction of what I want to about Blender (and composition). Because of the fixed-income thing, I won't be upgrading Poser. Blender, on the other hand, will allow scripting shaders, and it's likely where I'd be doing all rendering anyway, so no reason to stay on an older version. 

This Blender forum always has useful posts offering sound suggestions. Added benefit: the tone is always respectful here.

Just reading this thread and felt to cold shower of being left way behind. In the past, I would simply script shaders in Python. Worked for Poser AND Blender. Still have Poser 11 and was thinking of scripting a quick-n-dirty skin shader and - horror of horrors - come to realise that Superfly and Firefly are two different critters. And whilst Blender has 80 Cycles nodes, Poser only has some 60-odd of them. 

Otherwise I'd give you a quick solution you could run in Python, Red. Unfortunately, in my absence, they've moved the cheese. 🤨

Not sure if this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXpbK2T1HJA

addresses your question, but if it does, he explains it better than I could.

If I understand correctly, Blender isn't even letting you work on the UV map of the horse at all. You might try a stand-alone UV-map program or, just an idea: you might try exporting the horse figure as OBJ, just for the UV map.

More than one way to skin a cat.

The word "Encyclopeadia" is apt: this looks very comprehensive! Thanks for the heads-up, Lobo. :)

May your New Year be peaceul and happy, Lobo.

Sometimes, you'll get the Error opening file for writing messages if your user account lacks certain privileges. The simplest solution for this problem is to install the problematic application as an administrator.

See: https://windowsreport.com/error-opening-file-for-writing/#:~:text=Sometimes%2C%20you'll%20get%20the,problematic%20application%20as%20an%20administrator.

Not much to add to RedPhantom's and Lobo's sage suggestions. When you create your figures, stay with quads and tris - ngons (faces with more than 4 sides) tend to not translate well into Poser. Also, pay attention to normals, that they're facing the intended way... been caught out by that one a few times. Materials can be assigned in Blender: to do all the Poser file location stuff, I used to use Poser File Editor by Dimension3D. Don't see it in the marketplace anymore, sadly.

Not sure if anyone's particularly interested in this, but I've put together ... well, it's a bit strong to call it a "Rigging In Blender Tutorial", but anyway, generally speaking, it seems to work pretty consistently for me. Please let me know what you think:

Rigging Figures in Blender

Thank you, Lobo.

A bit of background: in terms of which computer I do most stuff on, it's my old (2012) Macbook Pro, where I do mostly writing musical sketches and pretty much everything except Blender. I have Poser and Blender loaded on the thing, but it's abyssmally slow and laggy. For Poser I've got an older desktop with Windows 10: that's all I run on Win10. For Blender, I prefer Linux Mint (dual-boot with Win 10). About the only reason I've kept Poser is: posing figures... it does it so well.

I've struggled to rig figures in Blender. Even with Rigify, the steps were just complex enough to where the rig never 'took'. Watching a video today by Pixxo3D on YouTube changed all that: I've actually managed to rig a Poser figure (using Basic Human Metarig) - after around a dozen or so tries - and discovered some interesting things about rigging and parenting Poser figures in Blender.

* 'Doubles' - that is, vertices that occupy the same space as other vertices - will prevent your rig from 'taking' to the figure

* Hair needs to be parented to a bone - not impossible, but that took several tries as well

Quick-n-dirty render:

Posing - such as it is, all done in Blender. I'll have to have a go with the full Rigify rig next so I can pose hands, eyes and expressions.