HakDragon posted at 5:51AM Tue, 15 May 2018 - #4329717

-Timberwolf- posted at 12:29PM Wed, 09 May 2018 - #4329715

HakDragon posted at 8:27PM Wed, 09 May 2018 - #4329714

I still use Victoria 4 because I helped create her. ;)

Can you tell us more about it, please?

No problem, I was the QA Manager for DAZ during the V4.2, A4, M4, and so on all the way through Genesis 1. Our team did all the QA, I worked on software compatibility, and I even worked with Smith Micro during the Freak 4 roll-out to get the Poser scaling issues worked out. All the Gen 4 figures are my team's hard work and some of that same QA team still does a great job there today.

I did not work on original V4 or V4.1, I came on with Aiko 4 and the V4.2 rollout, but I still consider that version (which has stood the test of time) to be an amazing piece of work given what we started with and where this figure will be 10, 20 or even 50 years from now. With all the community fixes and reworks she is still looking and working beautifully for me (especially in Poser).

-Hak aka DAZ_HakDragon

Nice! Thanks to you and the devs/artists, we've had years to make images (aka: "art") using the most successful commercial CGI figure, by far. Ever.

V4 still rocks!

Simplest of setups: Poser Pro 11, a classic v4wm (based on 4.2, of course), curtain backdrop, 3 lights, reality 4. exported to luxrender for about an hour on a c2012 rMBP, all materials exported with no tweaking (except making floor more reflective). About 5 minutes to setup; most of that hunting through the massive library that's accreted over the years. Can't stress enough how easy this workflow is.

Seriously, why would I need to even look at another girl?

shante posted at 1:04PM Thu, 08 June 2017 - #4290715

rokket posted at 2:12PM Wed, 23 November 2016 - #4290097

thoennes posted at 2:51AM Tue, 15 November 2016 - #4288431

Netherworks posted at 8:59AM Tue, 01 November 2016 - #4288414

Is the WM version still available, post RDNA shutting down? If so (and we don't have one yet at Renderosity), I'd like to suggest a sticky with links to essential content, be they offsite or not, in the name of community.

Here? http://www.runtimedna.com/WMV4.html

Just did this with her, after being away from the whole CGI thing for quite a bit (since Poser11 was released). No post work at all. While I can't say that I'm entirely happy with the "state of things" in poser-ville I continue to be super happy with v4wm

The glossiness in her eyes makes it look like she's on the verge of crying. That's a really powerful message considering what this thread is about.

I got the V4WM when it was first released...well.......EVRYWHERE!....and hav not used her ye because i am still not sure if i can include all my custom morphs I use all the time form my plain ole V4/S4/G4/A4 Goulash figures. Love to spin dials and create as many possible figures as I can it seems but not sure i can do that for V4WM. Using her do you use any of the commercially available body adjust/enhance/fix morphs available like Meipei's Perfect series for instance or Posermatic's beautiful breast enhancers and pose morphs or even Erogenesis' LaliBits? If I know those morphs especially as well as all the clothes and shoes and accessories i have invested in for V4 will work for V4WM I will put her in the Runtime quick as a bee! I know too that AerySoul or whatever they called themselves when still at RDNA did a really nice quasi V4WM version for V4 called Alice something and though i have her too I have not used her either......god there must be something wrong with me!

Oh wow, weird. I was searching in Google for something completely other and came across this thread and read along it without realizing that not only had I read it before, but I posted to it :D

I'm sure it's been mentioned, but yes, a lot of the morph packs work. most. I have the perfect morphs and made a V4WM-Perfect figure. However, what a lot of the perfect morphs do is already part of v4WM. Not all of them. But you can get some weird effects when two different things (WMing and Joint fix morphs at the same time) are messing with what they think is base v4 joint.

The character is obviously extensively morphed, mostly using Morphs++. Rendered with Luxrender, courtesy of Reality.

I forgot I even made that render. I really need to review what's I've stashed away in Bitbucket.

Netherworks posted at 8:59AM Tue, 01 November 2016 - #4288414

Is the WM version still available, post RDNA shutting down? If so (and we don't have one yet at Renderosity), I'd like to suggest a sticky with links to essential content, be they offsite or not, in the name of community.

Here? http://www.runtimedna.com/WMV4.html

Just did this with her, after being away from the whole CGI thing for quite a bit (since Poser11 was released). No post work at all. While I can't say that I'm entirely happy with the "state of things" in poser-ville I continue to be super happy with v4wm

The best + best supported figure for Poser. The WM version along with various joint morphs, for when the poses are extreme (aka natural) and the joint is visible (aka: unclothed). Also works well with dynamic clothing, so long as the clothing is a dress or skirt. Combined with the ease of rendering photo-realistic images using Reality+LuxRender and I'm happy with v4.

I have way too much V4 stuff and it's way too expensive to replace it all. This is not my only hobby :)

RedPhantom posted at 1:51AM Sun, 09 October 2016 - #4244665

I don't know what problems you're having are but at least since the sr1 I found, if my library loads blank, there's a little refresh button in the lower right corner and I can hit that and it loads. I don't know if it worked before the sr1, never tried it.

This worked for me. I had the same problem just now, after installing the latest update (SR3?). Clicked the little button and for a second nothing followed by a few blinks then the library was back. Incidentally, restarting Poser before I tried this did not make the library come back. A quick Google brought me here and now it's working, thanks :)

System: Mac; Mid 2012 MPBr, 2.6GHz i7, 16GB, GeForce GT 650M, OS 10.11.6 (latest El Capitan), Poser 11 SR3 (of course).

cool :)

i think i am able to commit the time.  there are occasions during the year when i'm on holiday for 1-4 weeks when i would not necessarily have internet access (international travel).

i would not want to use my main user account for this, though. but rather an alias, so as to not invite confusion between me the user, and me the moderator.  plus, that way i could argue with myself and it wouldn't look too weird :D

i am in sydney, australia (for the most part) and typically online in the late morning (sydney time).  on weekends, i would typically be on in the early morning (~7ish) 

cheers

Quote - thoennes, I call this my second home lol I'm also a moderator that makes a difference. I do more than the gallery/forum and also I look over more then one day in Poser and another gallery.

Its up to the coordinators to how much time they want to spend on the site (not personal time) besides what is required. Which I stated above. I'll try to break the hours down but its just a guess.

Gallery: 1 hour
Gallery Fixing: 30 mins - Hour (depends on how many issues)
Forum: (2 days a week) - Depends on how many you post to and depending on the situation. Hour a day.
Member questions - Depends

Hope this helps :)

It does.  So about an hour a day, about 4 days per week.

I actually have gobs of time (relatively speaking) most days.  It might be something I could do.

Questions: how many hours a day would you say you personally spend on this and how do those hours tend to distribute over the days of the week.  For instance, do you spend time as such:

Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa

1   2   2    3   4   5   3 (hours per day)

Note: I'm on UTC+10 (uhm... +11 since we're on DST now in Sydney :)

Quote - Something I've realised just lately is that sims tend to run much more quickly under certain circumstances, one being in a fresh load of Poser.

Also the dynamics are far smoother and quicker if the hair strands (certainly within groups) are not tangled or touching each other at the start of a sim. This is easier said than done if you've styled the hair extensively to start with.

With long hair I've been using fewer verts per hair (20 or 30) for the sim, baking them with Cages script and then increasing the verts. This probably isn't of use to animators unless it can be automated to bake each frame (not even sure if that's possible).

That makes a lot of sense, but it's really hard to achieve using the limited styling controls.  In fact, it makes perfect sense.  I've noticed I can lock poser up easily by simply running a hair simulation with collissions and have the hair start inside the body.  Locks up, every time (on OSX - says app not responding - maybe it's just super slow?)

If worst comes to worst, couldn't you brute force the baking on a frame by frame?  I mean, run the simulation in draft mode, use a script to export each frame of hair as it's own prop running it through cage's script.  Then, when it comes time to final render, you run another script that advances the frames, loads the frame hair prop, change the verts, render, rinse repeat :)

The second script loads each frame to render, it loads the correct frame hair prop, makes the vert change, renders, then goes to next frame?  It could dump those frames to the queue manager which would still kick them out to different network render nodes a'la a normal animation.

Wait, can we even access the queue manager via python?  I though we couldn't, in PP2010.  I suppose it's possible to figure out the inputs to the queue manager and call it as an external command.

Or, can you export the hair simulation frame geometry in such a way that you can load that information back into the prop at the correct frame?  I haven't looked into what a hair simulation looks like at a file level.

So i tried playing around with the dynamic hair styling tools.  It was one of those things i keep track of with each version, hoping (like with dynamic clothing) that they've improved it.

Mostly i care about dynamic since i enjoy animation.  For obvious reasons, dynamic cloth and hair makes this easier :)

The latest poser pro does a great job of improving rendering times.  However, the dynamics engine is brutally slow.  once i have a long hair style, one that drapes down the back and shoulders, it takes an hour (dual core Mac Book Pro with 6GB RAM) to drape the hair.  And the drape effect is a mess.  The hair becomes spastic when it hits the shoulders.  And I styled the hair so it should drape nicely over the body.  What gives?

I'm really hoping that dynamic cloth and hair are high up on the dev team's list (thickness and elasticity, please).

Sigh....  Still using ploy hair (i read that U3 uses dynamic poly hair a'la "cloth hair" which i tried and cannot get results that are even remotely realistic looking)

Quote - LOL, I could go with the old trope, 'they all look alike to me,' but obviously there are regional or 'sub-ethnic' variations that might or might not be especially discernible to the untrained Western eye. Whether that's any different from the challenge of making a single mesh be every person, I don't know. I simply wondered if a dedicated 'Asian' mesh would simplify the task of making a reasonably credible range of Asian ethnic types. If we are indeed stuck with needing a specific mesh for each ethnicity and sub-ethnicity, it seems like only one step from needing a custom mesh for each individual - though I'm sure that would make DAZ happy :-)

It would be nice if we could easily switch heads on a figure in poser.  Typically, the head does not interfere with the clothing, so the rigging and WM of the body would still work with the existing clothing.  But you could switch heads that are built for highly accurate ethnicities.

I think the variance in body types can reasonably be handled with rigging and morphs on a smaller set of meshes.  The face, though, is where much of the character lives.

This seems to be easily possible with the technology we already have.  Consider, it's the conforming clothing where most people have the massive investment in a figure.  But it's the face where the most variation in characters is.

Just thinking outloud...

Quote - I have lion but haven't installed it yet, because I have a lot of old content that might have daz installers that I haven't installed yet.

Love esther

Hi Esther,

One thing I do to future proof against the (horrible) DAZ installers is to make runtime zips out of them.

To do this, I run the installer, targeting a newly created desktop folder named the same as the package.  This creates the normal runtime hierarchy in that folder.  That's pretty much all the installer does for our purposes.  Then I install that runtime using RSRConv (like all other content). Then I zip those and store them.

For old content, I actually use the windows installers, doing the same thing in a VMWare windows session.

A major advantage of runtime zips, of course, is being able to reinstall everything very easily with a single simple shell script. Another is portability and backwards compatibility. A separate installer is a "silly thing". A smarter method would be to include the package installer in DS and Poser.

Hmmmm. I sense a script in my future. :D

cheers ^^

OSX is a unix derivative, underneath, and as such treats everything like files.  This makes a lot of things easy.  Merging directories is not one of those things :D

I really really wish they'd change the way the GUI deals with this (offering at least the option of a merge).  But Steve is not a guy to 1) admit he might be wrong and 2) change his mind.

The windows way (on this) is a lot less dangerous and typically more what people want.

I periodically sync my content directory between my desktop and laptop.  Took me about an hour to copy the 35GB back from my desktop.  So I survived.

I wish the installer logging was more detailed and the logging facility could keep up, so I had a definitive answer to what happened, though.

Now I'll just use both runtimes (separately), which is what I wanted in the first place. :)

I just unzipped the install.log

postinstall goes through my entire content directory, file by file.

Sep 23 07:41:46 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: /Users/Shared/Poser Content/Downloads/Runtime/Textures/vyktohria/DynamicTee

Sep 23 07:41:46 Oz installd[39969]: *** process 39969 exceeded 500 log message per second limit - remaining messages this second discarded ***

Finally gets to:

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: PackageKit: Executing script "./postinstall" in /private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.RIcQpP/Scripts/com.SmithMicro.PoserContent.ProContent.pkg.QubRKf

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: /Applications/Poser Pro 2012/Runtime/prefs/Default Poser Prefs

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: reading content root path

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: CONTENT_ROOT_PATH is: /Users/Shared/Poser Pro 2012 Content

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: /Users/Shared

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: /Users/Shared/Poser Pro 2012 Content

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: >>> Copying /Users/Shared/Poser Content

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: ditto: can't get real path for source

Sep 23 07:41:59 Oz installd[39969]: ./postinstall: rm: /Users/Shared/Poser Content: No such file or directory

tell me this is not an error with postinstall calling the RM command on my content directory????  

My fear is that they copied everything from /Poser Content to /Poser Pro 2012 Content, RM'd that directory, and THEN copied the new files from temp directory into the same directory structure, including the directorties.  Unix doesn't merge directories, it replaces them.  That's why you can't drop content that's just a "runtime" dir structure onto the existing runtime on MAC.  You have to use something like RSRConv that merges the files into existing directory.

Hard to tell, I don't have the listing for the postinstall script.  If I had it, I could see what it's doing in short order.