I just bought the M4 displacement maps myself. Lovely. Totally worth it. I use semidieu's script, which is mentioned in the thread linked to above. However, in Poser 8 I have to make sure that texture filtering is turned off on the displacement images (or M4's mesh pokes through), and rendering with those TIF's is quite a resource hog.

Lux? What's that?

I'm ambivalent about it myself. I can't decide whether it's easier to match a light set to a background that has a very obvious light source and some shadows (from trees, for example) or to a background for which the light source is kind of obscure.

Just as important as matching light and shadows, though, is getting the gamma and resolution equivalent on both the background and render. Not much worse than seeing a high res but washed out render pasted on top of a dark low res background (or vice versa). A shadow mismatch might be apparent after a few moments of contemplation, but a gamma or resolution mismatch jumps right out of the screen at you.

Quote - Are there any other sites like this with lots and lots of clothes etc for Popular characters like v3, v4, m3, m4. etc

Poserworld has a LOAD of stuff for M3 and V3 and A3 and probably more for S3 than anywhere else. I don't see the basis for your complaint.

I was a member there years back, and it took weeks to download everything I wanted.

I agree with the OP. On the other hand, if you're shooting digital and only taking 1 or 2 shots of any given subject, I think you may be wasting opportunities. There's probably a happy medium in there somewhere, but it will vary according to the photographer and subject... That said, I've never taken 1000 shots of any single subject.

I've heard the "You have a nice camera" remark, too. I had to respond truthfully: "Well, actually, these shots were taken with a 4mp point and shoot." Some of my best photos were taken with a Canon Powershot.

I've also seen some remarkable things done with an iPhone. The eye is what really matters. But... a decent camera plus photoshop will certainly help to correct a lot of errors. The thing is, you have to know you made those errors before you can fix them. Most people who take only snapshots just don't see these things.

Thank you very much for the info! I thought I was going to have to wait until I could enroll in school before I'd get a price like that. It worked for me, and I'm downloading right now. :)

Quote - Sometimes - just every now and then, and for no particular reason - I find that PP2010 will choke on a particular scene; it'll crash out doing a render, and trying it through the queue will hang at a particular point, i.e. the same symptoms you seem to be having.

Narrowing down the culprit can be tiresome, but last time I did it I found it was a particular clothing item. When I deleted it and then loaded and conformed exactly the same item with exactly the same textures and shaders, everything went like clockwork.

I can only assume that sometimes errors occur when Poser's reading a geometry file or textures and shaders; try reloading stuff one item at a time and see what happens - if you have the time and the patience.

Yea!

I will have to try this. Periodically I have the same problem. Today, I have tried to render a scene 7 times (gradually reducing the render quality with each attempt), only to have it stop in almost exactly the same spot.

I even tried with a bucket size of 4. It got a little bit further along before crashing. I have a Core i7 860 and 12gb memory. 4 shouldn't be too high.

Thanks for the advice. If it turns out to solve the problem, I will be eternally thankful. 

Quote - > Quote - So many poser artists are using this software to make pornographic scenes.

What is your opinion?

Hm, this site has a at the top, a line that says: "8511 artists currently" online, while this site's adult oriented competitor's line says "currently active users: 209". Not that this is a representative data ascertainment, but i would rather say, "A miniscule insignificant minority of poser artists..." instead of "So many poser artists...", but otherwise your statement is right :-)

Well, I expect that people don't stay logged into adult sites for very long when they are at work, or have children at home. Renderosity isn't perfectly safe for those of a more puritanical mindset, but it does have some safeguards that make it a bit easier to simply stay logged in all the time.

As for the original question, yeah... who cares? Cameras get used for pornography a whole lot more often than Poser does, but we still put them on our iPhones. Pens are still rather common in the world, too. Should we discuss ballpoint erotica? Ahhhm, nevermind.

Exactly, Keith.

I'm going to fiddle with any imposed structure, in order to suit my needs. And I will probably change it over time.

But it would make it so much easier if the structure I started with, directly from the vendors, was consistent.

Heck, it would make a HUGE difference if vendors would just agree to put their morphs in the same morph folder and their readme's in the same place -- with unique file names. If we could get extra userguides, templates, backgrounds, and pz3's in the same places, I'd be ecstatic.

I don't see why these small changes would be so hard. But it's not unlike making public policy. The perfect really does turn out to be the enemy of the good.

Quote - At the time I suggested this, someone pointed out that they'd hate the structure the way I did it, and that's fair enough because that sort of thing was personal preference. What I was getting at, though, is that it isn't trying to create a folder structure that would make everyone happy, which is an impossibility, but one that's consistent, so that if and when I want to reorganize things to suit my preferences, I know where they can be found as a default in a newly unzipped/installed file. The single biggest pain in the ass with the wildly individual structures in product distribution is the textures folder.

Amen!

I totally agree. I would not really like that particular structure. But as you say, it's not the specifics of any given structure that are important. No way will anyone come up with something that would satisfy everyone. All that matters is that the structure is logical and consistent.

With your suggestion, I'd probably rename or move an average of two folders for every product. At the moment, I'm renaming most of them. But I don't even bother with textures because I'd like to have time to render something occasionally. As a result, the mere thought of actually moving products from one runtime to another makes me want to cry.

Geep, you're a hero. Thank you!

I have amassed a large collection of freebies over the years, and I do use them quite often. But I haven't posted a render in years.

I have all the same memory issues as everyone else, and I admit to skewing the download stats because I've had to redownload something just because I couldn't remember what the zip was called and can't find it on my harddrive.

Licenses and readme's are crucial to giving credit, but when they're all named generically, license.txt or readme.txt and they're in generic folders they will get overwritten. I see no reason why creators don't give useful and specific names to their files. But ashtray.pp2 with a readme called readme.txt that came in a zip called ce34.zip is asking to be forgotten.

I don't want to sound ungrateful, but there are things even freebie creators could do to make it more likely they'd get credit, if getting credit is important or even just nice to see.

The thumbnail in the zip is a very good idea.

Of course, we see VSS in the poser forums so much that I don't think I'd ever forget what those zips are. I do use it, but it's not a sure bet. About half the time, the shaders look absolutely fantastic on the texture I'm using, and the other half, they are a disaster. With the disasters, I've tried tweaking the shaders, but I have to admit I lack skill in this area. The discussions in these forums have persuaded me quite thoroughly that the complexity is simply way beyond me.

That being said, the 50% of the time it works for me, it really works. And the light meter is a revelation in itself. Brilliant indeed.

The creators in this thread have made some exceptional things. I'm almost inspired to render something and actually post in the gallery here just because of this thread. Though, like others, I kinda worry that my render would suck... and well... in the end that wouldn't be very flattering to the freebie makers. So I'll just say thanks to everyone because the freebies really are what make rendering with poser as a hobby fun. :)

Speaking as a buyer -- and I haven't purchased that much from Rendo, I hate to confess -- there really seems to be a very strong bias towards popular merchants, and the competition among the less popular looks to be wickedly fierce.

This site does little to help the new vendor. The interface is geared towards finding top merchants. Every time I want to search for an item using the middle drop down box, with all the merchants listed, I sigh in frustration because the cursor is likely to lose grip while I'm scrolling through a list that is way way way too long for a drop down. The top sellers list is much more reasonable and actually usable.

The search function basically does not work. Even if you know the name of an item and the merchant who produced it, you're likely not to see that item show up in your search. It's bizarre. Forget searching by category. There's too much stuff, and it's too disorganized.

Texture makers are not helped by this because, at least as far as I can see, there's no way to link to the figures that they've textured. So you see a texture you like and then spend 20 minutes trying to find the figure (you'd buy both if you could!) but even with the name of the item and the merchant, you can't freakin' find it.

I don't know how anyone actually finds things to buy here. So I wonder how big a role the galleries play. A very popular artistic render with mp links might well stimulate a buying spree. And surely some of it is the luck of the email campaign. I get an RDNA or DAZ newsletter with a full screen ad on it, and I know I'm going to see that product all over galleries at all the major marketplaces. If you're competing with that product and didn't get such a spread, well, good luck, I guess.

I expect the most successful vendors aren't just good at creating content, but at selling it as well. But some of it is probably dumb luck. The stuff I've bought, I stumbled on purely by accident.

This tutorial is totally awesome!

I started reading it because it looked entertaining, which is a truly remarkable accomplishment, really. But now I find that I'm actually learning things as well. Thank you.

The art that inspires us from Royo and Vallejo to comic books and pinups isn't exactly filled with heavily clothed females.

Besides, you'll see skimpy clothes on poser girls, even if they're kicking someone's rear because it's a well known fact that fantasy females cannot fight with any spirit or skill unless their navels are exposed. And apparently, they fight with even more gusto when the cleavage,  the bottom of the breasts, and the sides of the hip are visible. Full plate is a death sentence for a girl.