Anyone tried Kenyan chocolate? (Cadbury's have a factory in Nairobi, I think).

The ambient temperature there is pretty close to the melting point of the European stuff so they have to use something with a higher melting point than cocoa butter. Concrete maybe. Whatever it is, it's absolutely horribe.

I've been trying to get settings that minimise the moire pattern, with limited success so far. Not at my main PC at the moment but I'll post when I get a bit further along.

I discovered recently that if you have Dimension3D's 'XO' (eXtended Object Manager) script - available in the marketplace - it will parent infinite lights without any messing about.

To parent an infinite light:

1. change it to a Spot

2. parent it to whatever

3. change it back to infinite

Like this?

Quote - "I'm getting 'way too many complaints in my mailbox about this to let it go on much longer."

Very well. Let the Daz bashing continue then. I will not interfere.

Daz-bashing is not the same thing as questioning the wisdom of some of their recent decisions. The point is that a lot of their customers feel, rightly or wrongly, that they can't do business with them any more, or at least not as much as they used to.

Even if all the criticisms levelled at DAZ here and earlier threads were without foundation, the fact that the perception exists at all means that something's gone wrong.

It's normal for a company that's very good and successful at one thing to attempt to be successful at others in order to grow its business. This involves taking risks, and the risk-assessment process needs the company to be brutally honest about its own strengths and weaknesses.

DAZ aren't the first company to allow over-confidence (some would say arrogance) into that process and come face-to-face with commercial reality a short time later.

Genesis is a brilliant piece of work. The trouble is that a big chunk of the potential customer base can't spend money on it because they use Poser, and - for whatever reason - will not switch to Daz Studio. Even if it's free. And the workarounds to get Genesis into Poser are simply not worth the effort.

This must be hurting DAZ, but it's probably not killing them.

In the next few days we should see SR3 for the latest version of Poser which is rumoured to support single-axis scaling. Perhaps, a little further off, there will be support for some version of Catmull-Clarke subdivision, but this will be on Smith Micro's terms, as it should be.

If / when that happens, we might see a Poser-optimised Genesis. I hope DAZ can hang on long enough to make it happen.

I haven't connected everything up here, but you could use it to drive bump, displacement and / or specular (through a blinn node for something like satin).

Use the Math Functions / Multiply to change the scale of the weave (higher value = finer weave).

You can also use it with a color ramp, or with one of the 3D texture nodes.

It's surprisingly versatile.

Dimension3D has a collection of procedural shaders ($15 in the marketplace). They're for Poser 5 and up, so some of them are quite dated, but the procedural wood shaders are very good. The metals, glasses and water are not that great in later versions of Poser, but there's interesting stuff in there, including some very useful props.

Point and spot lights you should be able to parent without problem. For infinite lights, change them to spots, parent to the camera, then change back to infinite.

The camera's lens is set at 50mm. The only parameters I changed in this test were the Focus Distance and Aperture - the values are shown, you'll need to look at the bigger image for it to be useful.

The conclusion is that Poser does the depth of field thing accurately, at least for a 50mm lens. The top 3 images are to test the advice I gave above; let me briefly explain the last two.

On number 4 I set focus distance to 1000M (because there's no 'infinity' settingin Poser), and I'd expect a real-world 50mm lens focused on infinity and set to its narrowest aperture (f64 is a bit extreme) to have everything in apparent sharp focus (unless it was a few centimetres from the lens).

For number 5 I've focused just in front (15cm = 6 inches) of the closest Andy and kept the same narrow aperture, and as I'd predict from a real lens, closest Andy is just coming into sharp focus while those at 6M and 10M are soft.

So there you are. The key to creating depth-of-field effects is in knowing where to set focus and which aperture to use; and if you have photographic experience you can use that in Poser quite predictably.

A lens can only focus at one distance. In front of and behind this distance the subject is out of focus.

BUT - depending on the aperture of the lens - the degree to which things are out of focus varies. There is a distance range - dependent upon and controlled by the aperture - that appears to be in sharp focus. This is what gets referred to as 'Depth of Field'.

The smaller the aperture (i.e. the larger the f number) the wider this area of apparent sharp focus is.

Poser tries to replicate this physical phenomenon, using a 35mm camera as a basis.

You can read up on all the physics and maths and come up with a formula to achieve what you want, or you can use this 'cheat':

Determine the distances from the camera of both A and B. Set the focus distance about one third of the way between A and B. (so if camera to A = 1 metre and camera to B = 1.3M, set focus distance to 1.1M).

Set the aperture to around f11 or f16.

This is based on real-world experience. If it doesn't quite work first time in Poser-land, increase the f-number rather than change focus. And note that if you set the f-number high enough, C will start to come into focus too.

Dragging and dropping .obj files into PoserPro 2012 does not work.

I use the free one from Dimension3D all the time.