Quote - ironically, when looking into the "Pro" applications such as Max, Maya, Cinema, Lightwave....

that world is accustomed to and leveraged for much lower poly mesh than Poser and Daz!

Why? Well, they grew up over time when computers were not as powerful, and in a professional production setting laggy viewport and render were intolerable. Hence, low poly.

Also, the destination of much of this is to games, where the characters have to react in real time. You can't have high-poly.

So, for anything seeming to call fo hi-res figures, the policy was to subdivide at the last minute. You deploy the low res version (for example the 4K V4 mentioned above) in the viewport, and then just before render you "subdivide". So, IK vickie becomes 4k Vickie becomes 17K vickie becomes 68K vicky.
 
The poser/daz world has a different focus. HiRes from the start so users don't have to manipulate.

Recently all the pro apps have improved viewport performance and of course computers keep getting more powerful. This consideration is lessening. But not going away!

::::: Opera :::::

One other reason is rigging.  It's much easier and faster to paint weight maps on a figure of say 10k polys than it is one of 80k polys or whatever Poser figures are.  You can set up much more complex animation controllers far easier, and get better bending, etc. if you don't have to deal with tens of thousands of vertices in critical areas (like shoulders and hips).  Realistic details can be added to the subdivided mesh through displacement or normals mapping.  Plus, this allows for much faster communication with whatever renderer you are using, so scenes will arguably render faster too.  Zbrush and Mudbox (combined with high end renderers like MentalRay) have allowed studios to take this to a whole other level now.

Did I upset you?  Maybe I didn't provide you with the typical candy-coated forum responses you were looking for, but my observations and posts were accurate and to the point.

you wrote:
Besides showing off Hisaom's fine kimono, this is also a demonstration of the Poser cloth and hair dynamics and also reflection.

I pointed out the obvious problem with the hair, and I simply asked why you considered raytraced reflections (something that's been around in 3D for more than two decades now) a strength of Poser?

I guess I can understand if you have no real answer for this.  So "have a nice day" as well.

Quote - I did not "forget" collision and yes the hair goes thru the mesh. Does this really upset you?

Nope.  But while you pointed out some other obvious flaws, you failed to mention the hair.  Considering the title of this thread is "in praise of Poser hair..." I felt compelled to ask.

Quote - It's not a rumor, it is correct. I have written about it many times. Poser's collision cannot be accomplished without jitter. I have collision turned off in this animation for two reasons, a) to save time; b) the jitter is distracting.

Yes, I imagine jitter is very distracting, but so is hair passing through one's head.  Seems Poser's dynamic hair does not deserve much praise after all. ;-)

Quote - Also, if you care about this hair jitter problem, instead of a sour attitude, why don't you demonstrate some sort of contribution to a solution or an alternative program, other than Maya or Max.

Why other than Maya or Max?  I don't own C4D or Lightwave, although I can probably find examples of these on youtube.

Quote - **Now, do you have anything positive to say about this beautiful kimono and its artist or any other aspects of the poser's strength in dynamics and relfection?

::::: Opera :::::**

I think the kimono is nice.  Dynamics for that look good.  As for it's "strength" in reflection... I'm not sure what's so great about it.  It's basic raytraced reflections I see there.  Any 3D program with raytracing can produce the same effect, and probably much faster.  Why do you consider that a strength of the application?

What's with the hair passing right through the skull every time she moves her head?  Did you forget collisions, or have them turned off on purpose for some reason?

PS:  I'd like to see this with Poser hair collisions turned on, because I heard a rumor that it's near impossible to keep Poser's dynamic hair from jittering and acting up when collisions are enabled.  For example, with collisions on, have the girl shake her head, then stand still for a few seconds.  Poser's dynamic hair will continue to dance about nervously much longer than it should, and look quite unnatural.  Unlike other hair engines in such apps as Lightwave, Maya, 3dsmax, etc., it's near impossible to calm this effect in Poser.

Or is this rumor incorrect?

Quote -
I've seen a lot of poser enthusiasts complain that high-enders don't take them seriously... Some of them actually think that poser does more then max???   :blink:   I think I need to go pinch myself!

I saw your comment about max and JCM type morphs. I have to preface this with a stement that most of my max experience is architectural and engineering modeling, and I never rigged a character. (I do poser clothing rigging when I have to because I like modeling clothes for Poser content)

Anyway, just conceptually, do max JCM's work similar as Poser? I always thought that the technique would be a lot more advanced then a JCM concept and that transfering a poser JCM which is created to correct poser's wonky rigging would be pretty useless in max, since the rigging would be different.  Am I totally off in thinking this?

Read the documentation on the Skin Morph Modifier in the Max User Guide for full details.  The skin morph modifier lets you use a bone's rotation (either standard bone or parametric biped bone) to drive a particular morph.  So, this lets you handle problem areas in animation like armpits, knees, groin, etc. with simple morphs.  So my point isn't that you can transfer the JCM's in Poser to Max (although you probably could), but simply that you don't need any special rigging magic to reproduce the same kind of bending that V4 has with all her magnets and JCM's.  You can do it yourself right in Max using similar tools.  The paint deformation tool on Editable Poly objects is a quick way to create your own morph fixes, and since there are no body part "groups" in a rigged Max figure, this process is much more streamlined than the clumsy morph brush Poser Pro has.

Quote -
While all of the above is true, before you go on thinking I'm clueles about max, I need to clarify that my question to Operaguy was within the scope of specific items that he was interested in, and not a comparison of Max Vs. Cararra. Operaguy is interested in non-photorealistic animations made with use of poser content, and not full featured use of Max's abilities, AFAIK. So, within scope of his interests, I was curious where Cararra fell short.

Fair enough regarding your carrara comparison.  I didn't necessarily think you were clueless about max, but I've learned that when dealing with Poser enthusiasts, you do come to find  a lot of dissemination of  misinformation regarding higher-end applications.  Many Poser users seem to assume that only Poser can do certain things, or do certain things more efficiently than higher-end applications, which is usually untrue when you get down to it.  Conforming clothing is one example that I see mentioned a lot.  People tend to think that only poser has this kind of thing, and all clothing in high end apps is dynamic.  Strange.

Quote -
max doesn't work with bodyparts like poser, so for any little morph you have to have the entire mesh loaded. Putting all of those morphs into Max at once is a pretty good way to choke it up, so you'll have to be judicious about what you put in. But, you can still have a 'fully loaded' startup master saved.

There's workarounds to this.  Such as putting all your necessary morphs into a "dummy" .max file, and merging the ones you need into the actual scene (morpher modifier) as needed.  Kinda like using Injection Deltas in Poser.

Quote - If your biped is expertly rigged, with good joint parameters and falloff zones, you may not need poser's JCM's or figure out how to mimic magnets. I'm not even sure if Max supports the concept of JCM's. I don't have any rigging advice, since I never seriosly ventured in that direction with max.

JCM's are basically the same thing as "Skin Morph" modifier in Max, so yes, Max supports that concept.  You can research Skin Morph in the Max manual if you want further info regarding it's functionality.  In fact, you can take that concept a few steps further using the Reaction Manager in 3dsmax, and have morphs control other actions in the scene, or each other.

Quote - I'm very curious though, what it is that Max will offer that Cararra won't, for what you're needing, is it the cloth sims?

For character animation, there's a lot that Max can do that Carrara won't.  Aside from pure rendering optimizations (which one may or may not utilize), there's things like morph-driven textures (allowing you to do such things as change to a custom bump map automatically when certain morphs are dialed in), adding to the realism of expressions, etc.  I could go on if you like.

I think I see the problem.  Look at the order number on that project in the queue.  It's set to render as the second process for some reason (I'm assuming you may have canceled the first process), and it's waiting for the first one to finish.  However, since there is no previous order number in the queue, it's just gonna sit there and wait forever.

I must assume you already tried rebooting your machine to reset the queue, and starting over again.  I had the queue working, and it works pretty good.  What I did was open a PZ3, send it to the queue, then after it's in there, go and open another, do the same, etc. The first one you sent to queue should be order number 1 of course, and once you have a bunch in there, you can change the order numbers around for all the other processes, but never change the first one from being first, or it might screw everything up.

Quote - You forgot Vue..... ;) And when you get down to it, nothing else has the features -in package- that Poser does. Do any of the Big Boys (tm) have dynamic cloth or strand based hair out of the box? Not unless you forked over more $$$ for the plugins

Not true in all cases.  3dsmax has both dynamic cloth, and strand-based dynamic hair systems included "out of the box" so to speak.  It also has a world-class production render engine (Mental Ray), a highly complex node-based particle system (Particle Flow), and two different rigging types for character animation (Biped and Bones).

Quote - Drifter, the Gecko in the commercials was created and animated using proprietary software at Rythm and Hues studios. I believe R & H Studios makes use of Maya in their pipeline also, so it's likely that's where the character was originally modeled.   This guy was lead animator for the commercials from 2001 to 2004.

Heh.  I don't think Angie would be all too happy if she knew you just called her a "guy".

:rolleyes:

Just download the video for Polyboost 3.  The selection capability of that plugin can not be done in Max by itself, without some help.  A lot of the stuff there can't be done in many of the other highend apps I've worked with either, so that's not a putdown of Max.  I have never worked with Hexagon, and really do not ever intend to, so I won't attempt to comment on if it can do these things or not.

The polydraw feature is really something Max should have integrated.  It's that good.

Quote - By categorizing morphs as vertex maps? Not terribly complicated in my book.

Not complicated, just unorthodox in my book.

Leave it to Lightwave to overcomplicate a workflow.

Maybe Modo refers to Point Cache (vertex cache) as vertex mapping?  What I mean is (and I've never laid eyes on Modo yet so I don't know for sure) baking vertex motion to a mesh can be considered animation morphing.  I've never really heard it referred to that way, but if that's what they mean, then I understand it.  That's quite different than weight mapping vertices on a rig though.

I'm sometimes amazed by the plethora of misinformation circulating around here regarding highend software, especially coming from some ill-informed Poser users who clearly have, at the very least, only a foggy understanding of what they're talking about.

Quote: "Morphing to make ya mesh look like another girl is a Poser thing."

Whatever.  Morphing in highend apps is extremely common. You move verts around to create a morph target, which is then activated for things like facial expression and articulation in animation.  In 3dsmax we have a Morpher modifier, which allows you to load dozens of morph targets to a base figure.  All the highend apps I know of have something similar.  Just ask the folks over at Weta Digital about the 800+ facial expression morphs created for the Gollum character in LOTR.

Quote: "Ask Artist that has made charter meshes and can show you there meshes how long to make a 3D Mesh girl."*

I can probably model the subD form of a girl in less than an afternoon.  However, that's not including texture mapping and rigging, and it's not including a lot of detail work.  Unwrapping the UVs, and painting detailed texture maps for diffuse, specular, bump, epidermal, subdermal, and reflection can take a couple days.  If I'm using photo textures, then not quite as long, but still not in 8 hours.

Quote: "If thay can not show you a character mesh they made then there not qualified."

Just take a look at my gallery.  Everything except the girl in my Avatar was modelled, rigged, textured, and rendered by me.  The girl I only did the rigging, texturing, and render.