1. A manual. Note I did not say "a better manual" -- the wad of waste paper that came in the P5 box is NO kind of manual, even incompetent. If I want to play puzzle games I can buy Nintendo. If I buy productivity software, I'm there to, like, produce stuff, not bang my head on opaque or missing instructions on HOW TO USE a button, not just the technobabble you gave about what the button theoretically does. I had to come here with a noob question about how to apply a texture, as opposed to the simple and direct P4 method, which is totally unacceptable. You need to make Dr Geep rich beyond his wildest dreams of avarice, on the way to having him do the manual for you. 2. A competent manual would be a lot easier to do if you focus on usability, not cutesy GUI graphics. Note my repeated use of "straightforward" below. 3. The myriad of add-ons and fixes, as well as the complaints and snide nicknames ("Dork") add up to a big clue that some attention to the basic figure concept would be well-directed. You won't please everyone out of the box, but you could build in the straightforward possibility to modify the default figures to suit the user's needs. For instance, I'd like a straightforward way to make my characters more like the actual people I see at the mall: anatomical proportions, physical condition, and (above all) asymmetry in the details. While we're at it, the skin deformation at knees, elbows, and waists needs to be a lot better managed. Skin deforms differently from quarter inch thick vinyl! 4. Some straightforward way to represent the way a soft object deforms when pressed against a hard object, as when someone sits on a chair. Giving bodies and props a plus/minus magnetic mode that can be toggled on and off would be really useful. Likewise a collision detection that allowed a "drop to surface" button similar to the "drop to floor", for any two named entities.

The issues raised on Sparkchaser, about CL and about Rosity, pretty well nail both, albeit with minor quibbles about details. I still would like to fill out the picture a bit. 1. "It's my business and I'll run it as I see fit." Fair enough, but just remember the old saying, "nobody ever won an argument with a customer." Your way works exactly as long as the customer is willing to pay you for doing it that way, and not one microsecond longer. Read up on how the railroads set themselves up vis a vis the trucking industry, and spend some quality time with the lessons! 2. So far as the Market Place dominates the site, you are pandering to the beancounters at Paypal rather than serving your actual customers. OTOH, it takes money to run a site like this. How to get off that tiger's back, I have no idea. Not my business model, not my problem. 3. The said beancounters, in common with some of the types who post here, do not understand that one of the distinguishing features of being an adult is to be able to distinguish erotic from pornographic. Erotic refers to gender-aligned behavior that constructs and articulates a pair bond based on mutual affection and respect. As such, it is of the essence of human nature, whether or not the Rev Mr Falwell has a problem with it. Pornographic refers to using someone's body as an accessory to masturbation, and is more emetic than erotic. As such, it vitiates human nature, whether or not the ACLU has a problem with your flushing it. Leaning a V3 barbie doll up against a free-stuff prop, inflating its breasts to six times normal, and giving it a suggestive title is pornography, whether or not there is literal contact to the genitals. It is also sheer dreck, devoid of any connection with "Aaahhhrt". The problem here is not only prurience, it is also (and worse) sleaze. That, I suppose, is a 50-50 split in odium between the poster and the mods who allow that crap to proliferate and, incidentally, drive out the people who might have put up some real quality. It gets beyond incompetence into moral cretinism when the mods flush a really high quality, effort intensive, tasteful series of images because they and the beancounters can't fathom the distinction, while leaving the pornographic barbie dolls on the adjacent pages undisturbed. 4. Me, I'd have torn off Rosity long ago except that Dr Geep's tutes are worth wading through the sludge. I don't think I am alone, judging by the comments I keep seeing here and on the competing sites -- some of which come acceptably close to qualifying as adult, both generally and as defined above. Food for thought there, and bon appetit.

Put hair on the tops and call her a Hobbit?

I have the P5 Handbook. It has an aggregate of maybe a page and a half worth of info that is a little more clearly written than what is in the manual that comes in the box, although the CD has some 3rd party content that is usable. It has that distinction only because CL's manual is such crap. You will get a lot more out of Dr Geep's tutes per links here, which by now pretty well cover it. He just posted a link to most of them a few days ago. [hah, cross-posted again!]

Message edited on: 01/04/2005 22:39

PhilC is your man. He has a site with clothing tutes on it, superb stuff. A search here should put you in touch.

F'revvinsake, put this on the Tutes page!!! It's a gem! Multitudinous thanks!

I got that sometimes when I parented a prop to the hand. Parenting to the forearm instead cured it. OTOH, with all the moving parts, chewing gum, and baling wire behind the pretty interface, it could be a jillion other things. Also I haven't ventured into animations. That probably won't be much help directly, but maybe it will serve as a clue? Good luck...

I just set up a single sided square and two of the other kind, one with and one without displacement, to see what happened. Shure enough, single sided and with displacement had no banding, and 'remove backfacing' toggles the bands on and off in the non-single sided square without the displacement. I knew it had to be some kind of forehead-slapper like that. Off to do some band-free renders...

I tried, twice, to change the colors per "My Profile" and still have the blinding glare, unchanged. Whatever little Nintendo Game gotcha I didn't figure out, I really don't give a wet slap about. All I did get was nags to complete the info boxes, which didn't take either the first and second times. Screw the info, I went there to fix the colors. IM me when you fix it. Till then I'm outta here.

What everyone else has said, plus... When I have the figure pretty much there, I turn on the IK all around, then grab the hip and yank it around a bit. A couple of scale inches does it, no need to get extreme. I do that from a couple or three different viewing angles. Playing with the rotate dials in all three planes also helps, again just a bit. The object is to get rid of any zero settings or symmetry that may be left after the main posing work and get some randomness into it. The difference before and after is small but the after is a lot more natural looking. The advice about tweaking face morphs is key. Again, it doesn't have to be a lot, just enough to get rid of the default mannequin zombie look. When turning the head, tilt it a bit as well. Spread the turn and tilt across the head and both neck parts -- that's why the Vickie neck has two parts. If the head turn is more than five or (at most) ten degrees, turn and tilt the chest and shoulders as well. The farther from dead ahead, the farther down the chain of body parts you need to do that. Likewise for most other motions -- the farther a hand reaches out, the more body parts reach along with it. Like, "the knee bone's connected to the..." When reaching, move one or more opposite side limb(s) the other way to balance. The advice about shifting body parts off the vertical center line applies even when the pose is meant to look centered and symmetrical. Half a scale inch here and three degrees there makes a big difference towards realism. For a soldier standing at attention, make that an eighth of an inch here and one degree there, but make it something other than zero. Do the rotate dial in each of the three planes for the part. Pose yourself and notice that the farther you depart from the default Poser pose the more you have to work at staying there. The figure should reflect that. Best of all the advice in this thread: pose yourself first and FEEL the pose, don't just look at it.

Besides the comments already posted about hair and fists, I think I'd try something between an olive drab and a goose-turd green for the dress and a colder, darker red for the background, like iron only just starting to get hot. The bright green is the wrong kind of discord, but you do want the colors to sit uneasily next to each other and look distasteful. Likewise his clothes, maybe slate gray or low-saturation vert de terre? He blends too much; I'd want him dull and in a 'receding' color but still visible enough to throw something at. Folding his arms sort of expresses him being unreceptive, but I'd tilt his head back and a bit to one side and shift his weight onto one foot to make him look more uncomfortable and frustrated. He's too static / passive here to have interested her enough to be that incandescent. I think I'd narrow her eyes a bit and focus them on the horizon instead of the viewer, or through the viewer, to match the rest of her face. On the other hand, along with a couple of the previous posts, what is the target audience and how would this move them to pick up the book? Are we having fun yet?

I've been mulling a theory that CL is actually a subsidiary of Nintendo and is peddling a puzzle game, not a 3D program at all. Getting a simple .jpg onto a simple square primitive, to take a classic example, is way more convoluted in P5 than it has to be (P4, while not exactly intuitive, is at least straightforward once you find the button). I wonder if a lot of the problems people are having stem from the puzzle factor, rather than from actual bugs? Yeah, I'd go for a book that spelled out the how-to as opposed to just expanding on the blurbs on the outside of the box. Whoever set the constraints against your doing that the first time needs to have it explained to them, in Morse code with a 2x4, what a frickin' manual is. Your outline sounds about right, provided you follow the advice about having a LARGE ENOUGH panel of newbies test it for usability. Compared to what I'm seeing on the shelves at Borders and such, $50 for a thousand pages is about standard, or a tad low even, for the usual potboiler crap. I'd pay more for something that actually got me where I want to go with my investment in P5, at whatever page count. If you move this discussion elsewhere, make sure you leave a pointer here so we can find it. The notion of a book being written with the participation of its customer base makes excellent sense and should lead to an example the 'big guys' ought to follow. May your shadows never grow less!

So what I'm hearing is that if I had P4 already sans PP, and got P5 with SR2 thinking it would cover the functionality of PP, it would still be worthwhile to get PP for my P4, if the non-overlap is of sufficiant interest? The two versions are different enough, and have enough complementary strengths and weaknesses, that I have found myself using both, depending on the task at hand. Ridiculous, but not out of place in a world designed by a mind that gets off on frilled lizards and televangelists...

"The only dumb question is the one you didn't ask" Which version of Poser are you fighting with? There is a big difference between 4 and 5. If it is Poser 4, the short and rude answer is "read the manual" although it will still leave you asking questions. If it is Poser 5, the short and rude answer is the manual stinks out loud and your best bet is to come here. There are tutorials on line for P4, reachable via the links on this site, but P5 is new enough that the tutes are still thin on the ground. For either, it is time well spent to go back to the beginning of the forum and scan through it for topics of interest, for two reasons: chances are your question has already been answered, and you will get acquainted with the regulars who are mostly nice people. DAZ is an aftermarket vendor that sells props and upgraded figures. "Victoria" is their female character, which is a substantial improvement over the stock Poser female (depends on what you're doing, of course). The male counterpart is "Mike". Don't worry about that till you get a handle on the program itself. Hang in there and don't beat on yourself. Once past the first part of the learning curve, you'll have a ball. Cheers...

SR2 and the figure updater together make 54 meg. For those of us with dialup, that is NOT "available"!!! I paid for a box that claimed to contain a workable program. If the SR addition will make it that, fine, but why should I have to hassle that much with getting what should have been in the box when I paid for it? If CL wants to make good on the original sale, they can mail me a CD -- on their nickel. Have I a bad attitude? You betcha -- it came in the same box!