Quote - If you've happened across pornographic images that were obviously creates in Poser, well, have a good look at them. Do you see any evidence of artistic zeal in any of them?

Yes.  Some of them are amazing.

Quote - All those I've happened across (doing a google search with filter turned off) are uniformly crap.

You just don't know where to look.

1. If you're using the photo as a transparency map, remember to copy and paste the image into the second of the three windows in the image editor.  The second window is what makes an image act as a transparency map.

2.  In the material editor, go to the little triangle at the tip and choose Blend Transparency

3.  In the material editor, remember to put a dot in the column that corresponds to the image.   For instance, if you have your photo/transparency map in the second space, put the dot in the second column.

Miss Nancy,

Don't call it Frisco.

Quote - ...I wish her well but unless she plans to run in San Francisco, I dunno. Hopefully the site is profitable enough that someone will buy it and keep it going.

Diane did say that Renderotica was making a profit, and Renderotica's offices are just across the bay from San Francisco.

It was 1995.  I had just received Bryce 2 and Photoshop 3 as presents.  Not too long after, I was browsing the internet, which I'd just accessed that year, and came across Metacreations' web page.  At least I think that's how it happened.  It's been so long.  Anyway, I saw an ad for Poser and knew that I had to have it.  I'd been drawing for years but the human form eluded me.  So I wrote a check, sealed it in an envelope and headed out the door to mail it.  Seems strange now.  Why not use PayPal?  Why not use the online form?  Why not download the demo?

None of those things existed yet.

As I was heading out the door, I saw that the mailman had delivered the mail.  I scooped it up and leafed through it.  There was a software catalog among the bills and letters and inside the catalog was a big ad announcing the debut of Poser 2.  So I went back upstairs to fill out the form from that catalog and put it, and the check, in a new envelope.

Sixteen years ago.  Wow.

A default pose to re-establish the axes?  Well, that will change, not only the axes, but your current pose too.  To correct the axes all you have to do is go into the body parameters and change the x, y, and z rotations to 0.

If you want the figure to move back to the center of the scene, change the x, y, and z trans values to 0.

If you've changed the overall proportions of the figure and want to change them back, change the x, y, and z scales of the body to 100.

The pose that moved the figure out of alignment probably had the body alignment moved and saved with the pose.  After that, the body will stay misaligned until you move it, or until you choose another pose that has the body alignment saved in it.

Remember, when you save your poses, if the body's x, y, or z axes have been moved, they're going to be incorporated into that pose when you save it if you check the body transformatioin option.  So if you want to tilt the figure, move the hip, not the body.  That way the body will always be aligned to "polar north" even if you've tilted the body with the hip.

It depends on how the merchant loaded them.  But you can always save a pose again without saving the morphs and/or the transformation.  When I do that, I give it the same name but add NM to let me know that pose has No Morphs (and no transformations).  For instance "Sitting back NM".

Note:  A good time to save the pose with the body transformations is when you have two figures positioned very precisely with each other.  For instance a man and a woman dancing together.  Or two figures shaking hands.  Or two figures kissing.  If you don't save the transformation with the pose, the figure will assume the pose wherever it happens to be standing, and sometimes trying to move the two figures back in that intricate dance pose or the two hands to grasp each other again is very difficult and frustrating.

But if you save the body transformation with the pose, the figure will assume the pose AND move into position.

When you saved the pose, you probably chose to save the figure's body transformation as part of the pose.  That includes the figure's location.  This option is right after you name the new pose.  Poser asks if you want to save the morphs as well as the pose, and it asks if you want to save the body transformation.

You need to save your poses without checking the body transformation option.  Then the figure will move into its new pose, but will not move its location.

Quote - ...I spent nearly 20 minutes trying to explain to another proofreader that it's not Ice Tea, but rather Iced Tea and that it's Brussels Sprouts and not Brussel...lmao Laurie

Oh thank you so much.  And it's whipped cream not whip cream, barbed wire not barb wire, and mashed potatoes not mash potatoes.

I cringe everytime someone writes that an aritcle of clothing is too lose or they're afraid they're going to loose their cell phone.  I read the thread but forgot.  Did we cover your and you're yet?  Another thing that drives me crazy is the "use" of quotation marks "almost" all the time, seemingly for emphasis.  Other than direct quotations, the use of quotation marks on a regular word often implies that it is not what it states.  I saw a sign in front of the grocery store advertising "fresh" fruit.

Finally, everyone knows that the correct pronounciation of wash is warsh...not worsh.  Sheesh.  ;-)

You can but you're going to have to fix any major light or dark areas and even out the skin areas with an image editor like Photoshop or GIMP.  For instance, I made a bump map out of a head texture but first I had to fix the eyebrows.  Since they were dark on the texture they were dark on the bump map and created deep grooves above the figure's eyes.  The texture was that of a man who had a fair amount of five o'clock shadow.  Each whisker made a tiny pit because it was dark.  In photoshop I changed the dark eyebrows to white and I isolated the beard area and inverted it so that the stubble was white dots instead of dark dots.  Oh!  The texture is the one you see in my avatar.

Now the eyebrows show as raised above the surface of the skin and the stubble doesn't look just painted on.  You can almost feel it in your imagination when you look at it.

I hate when vendors make a texture and state "Includes bump map!" and you look and see that it's just a greyscale picture of the texture.  It's a lot of work to make a real greyscale bump map because you have to analyze the texture and figure out what's raised and what's lowered and then alter the greyscale image accordingly.  But when it's done right, it looks great.

You can also change your foreground color to something brighter.  The default color is usually  black or grey, but if you change it to pink or lime green then you'll be able to see your lights and magnets and fans much easier.

The problem with basing bump maps off a desaturated texture (you might want to change the mode from RGB to Greyscale to make the file size smaller by the way) is that the dark and light parts of the texture usually do not correlate to the high and low features of the skin.

For instance, say the texture map shows a mole or beauty mark on the figure's face.  If you take that into Photoshop and desaturate it you'll discover the problem when you use it as a bump map.  In bump maps, white is high and black is low, right?  That dark mole or beauty mark is going to create a pit on the figure's face.  If there are veins visible on the texture, they are going to create shallow grooves on the figure.  Wrinkles are going to become cracks and fissures.  Shadows that are part of the texture are going to create depressions.  And if there are any highlights that are part of the texture they are going to cause bumps on the figure because they are white.

It's ok to use a texture as a bump map if you need to give an object like wood or stone a little bit of texture provided that texture is relatively even.  But even then you might have problems.  If you took a brick wall and made a bump map out of the texture, the mortar between the bricks would stick out because the mortar in the bump map is white.

Try closing all your folders before you shut down.  I read somewhere that Poser scans all top level folders and all the ones that are open one level down.  So if you have all your folders open in a file system like  this:

Poser 8

     Figures

          DAZ People, Freak, Freak 4, Victoria 3, Victoria 4, Michael 4, Matt, Maddie...

it has to read the Poser 8 directory and all the figures before it opens.  If you close all your folders so that all that shows is

Poser 8

under each category (figures, poses, hair, hands, etc.) when you shut down, then all it has to read is Poser 8.  There's nothing open below that level.  Sometimes it's slower than other times, but when I do this, on a slow open, my 45 gig runtime opens in about 10 seconds.  When it's fast, it opens in about 3 seconds.

I render in Bryce nearly all the time.  As far as re-applying the materials goes, I do it once and then save the texture (including specularity, bump, transparency, etc.) as a material in my Bryce material library.  Then next time I import a figure and I want to use that texture all I have to do is select the body or body parts and apply the saved texture with one click.  I have libraries for body textures, head textures, eyes, hair, and various other materials I made.

If you're comfortable with using a kind of abstract interface then you'll enjoy Bryce. I've tried Vue several times and ran screaming from it every time.  All those tiny little icons...if I wanted an interface full of little Mayan glyphs I would have asked for one.  Bryce's interface is elegant and simple IF that's how you're wired.  Don't look for a control that says "Translate Y+".  Look for an arrow pointing up.  I can definitely see how some people would feel more comfortable with Vue's presentation of data and controls.  Like many things (PC vs. Mac, chocolate vs. vanilla, dogs vs. cats) one is not better than the other, just more appropriate for particular users.  It's no wonder Bryce is appropriate for me.  In my place of work, for security purposes, all our controls are symbolic or geometric.  There's not a word or a number anywhere.

I like Bryce's lighting and material editor much more than Poser's.  You know how many people say Poser art looks awful?  That's because so many Poser users don't bother to learn the details and just render and present staring mannequins with shiny skin to the world, and that's what the world thinks Poser does.  It's somewhat the same way for Bryce.  I hear people say all the time that "Bryce won't do this," or "Bryce can't do that" and I laugh because I do those things all the time.  You can do almost anything with an imported Poser figure except for a few things, among them: subsurface scattering and dynamic hair.  Perfect your pose before you export it though.  Otherwise you'll have to re-pose in Poser, re-export, and import again, which isn't that big a deal in my opinion, especially when you have all the textures saved in your Bryce libraries.