Well it looks like that is what I have to do. You have a good point about it being a good idea anyway, but it still kind of sinks that Poser does such a poor job with this.

Thanks for your reply!  This is what I'm going to do.

Thanks so much for your responses!

Hmmm.  I have never noticed this before, but I guess I usually have something else in the background or am rendering animation.  I think the problem with rendering to JPEG is that you loose some detail in the compression.  PNG is a lossless compression, so I prefer to use it.  I wish I could just check a box somewhere in Poser that says "don't make the background transparent."

Sorry guys!  Nevermind this post.  I see now that the items whose material I cared about were not actually part of these figures.  I know what is going on.

Is there a way to delete this post?

So yarp, your experience with a key system has been good?  Which one do you use?

Hey PhilC,

What kind of sales verification do you look for?  That sounds like a good idea, but I don't know what I would ask for.

Also, does anyone have suggestions for how to price your plugin?  I don't want to go too high and loose sales, but I can't go too low either, because I need to make a certain amount to compensate the time I spent working on it.

Wow, that is really discouraging.  Are there really so few people honest enough to pay for a plugin that its not even worth selling one?

It kind of makes me want to try to make it as hard as possible.

Does anyone have an opinion on activation keys?  That seems to be the most common approach in regular software.

What about the script validating itself against a web service everytime it runs?

For that matter, what about just implementing the code as a web service that requires the activation key  to access?

Thank you all so much for your responses!

Pret-a-3D, what kind of deterrent do you use for Reality?

PhilC, I know that in reality this is the only choice, but does this mean that I should not even put in the effort to have an activiation code or something?

Quote - Ok, I did the test and it failed. Keyframes were inserted on every actor. That's for sure a surprise since I only posed the right arm. In the partial Pose there were only that arm actors but keyframes have been inserted on all actors.

Yep, I was unpleasantly surprised too.  That was a frustrating day.  I'm also surprised that so many more experienced people than myself did not seem to know that this is how it worked.  I don't think what I'm trying to do is so strange. :-P

Quote - It is simple: I fooled Poser by loading the Pose with the Hand pose function and it worked (thanks EB for the tip). I only have keyframes on the selected actors, now.

Wow, as EnglishBob said, that was very clever!  It also shows your level of Poser expertise that you even thought to try that. :-)  Great job, and thanks so much for figuring that out!  I do wish Poser would officially support this rather than us having to do a workaround, but this gets me working.  I have not tested it on my system yet, but I trust you.

Also, kudos on incorporating that option into P3DO!  It sounds like you have a great product there.

Wow, EnglishBob!  That was a fantastic explanation of my problem.

Thanks so much, yarp!  I am sure that P3DO is a great tool, but does it still create those extraneous keyframes as EnglishBob was describing?

I suppose I should file a bug report with SM.  I currently have a more important bug report out for an even more obscure firefly rendering problem, so I'm inclined to wait until they respond to that before filing another.  Maybe that's silly.

Hey ockham,

Thanks for the response!

Yes, I am sure that SetX, etc. are indeed moving the world vertices to new positions.  It is worth noting that I am doing this from within the world space callback, so that might make a difference as far as how you can manipulate world vertices.

You are right that Lady Danbo's neck looks like it is in the same plane as her head, but in my example in the first post, that triangle is the only visible object in the scene.  The only other objects are the ground and an invisible pyramid.  I tried moving the triangle away from the ground and the invisible pyramid to be sure that they were not somehow overlapping with the triangle and causing an artifact, and it seems like they are not.  Regardless, they are not visible in the render.

PS.  Its a coincidence that my example bears a striking resemblence to the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. :-)

Thanks so much, EnglishBob!

That's not the answer I was hoping for, but its starting to look that way.  If anyone with a newer version can confirm it is still like that, I would be interested in knowing.  That might be worth an upgrade.

I did notice that P3DO Explorer Pro includes a feature that lets you open only part of a pose, but they did not specify whether it avoids creating all of these extra keyframes.  That product is $25, so I might shell out for that if it would solve the problem in an efficient way.

As far as the keyframes on the lights, I just installed a service pack on PoserPro 2010, and I belive the readme says that it fixes the light keyframe bug.  I tested, and indeed I don't get keyframes on my lights.

If you have not already patched Poser 7 with SR3, you should look into that.

-digitani

I opened up my pz2 file to see its content, and it does only contain the one body part I posed.  It must be that Poser creates all of those other keyframes when it applies the pose.

Is there any way to stop it from doing that?

Hey guys,

I'm sorry that I asked the question and then disappeared.

Thank you for all of your answers!  I do appreciate it.  Obviously, there is a lot of stuff I don't understand here.

geep, that is a great tutorial, but I'm not sure my answer is in there.

In my figure, the geometry is at the body level, and there is no "Display Origin" box to check.  Maybe I should be looking at the center of mass instead, but neither one seemed to change its position on load relative to the floor.

I did go into the setup room  and find where I could adjust the origin, but again, it made no difference to where it was positioned on load.

Maybe the origin is not the solution to my problem.  From reading, it sounds like the origin is mostly about being the origin of rotation for the actor rather than a translation origin.  I'm pretty confused now.

If you look at a figure like Aiko, it loads with the feet on the floor, rather than the center of the body on the floor, and I can't figure out why.  Aiko's center joint origin is not on the floor, so that's not it.

I'm starting to think that maybe I can solve my real problem another way, so maybe its not so important for me to know the answer to this now, but I'm still curious about this.  I suspect that not understanding this is going to come back and bite me eventually.

Thanks again for all the help, guys.

-digitani

Hey, DarkEdge, thanks for your response!

Its true that in my example, I could have used a hand pose, but I'm not just concerned about that example.  I want to be able to load a partial pose in general without creating key frames for all of the actors/parameters that were not posed.  If you can't do this, then it seems like poses are useless when you are doing animation.  You are forced to do everything by hand.  This would be very disappointing to me, because the thing that I love about Poser is how modular it is.  Being able to save a pose for use later is so great and would be very helpful in animation, but not so much if loading that pose puts keyframes in for every body part and parameter every time.  When keyframing my animation, I want to be able to load a preset arm or leg position and only create keyframes for those parameters that changed with the pose.

I did some more thorough testing, and did verify that loading a partial pose does not override the current value of a parameter that is not included in the pose.  It just creates a keyframe with the current value.

Can anyone tell me if this is just how Poser works, or am I doing something wrong?

At the risk of sounding whiny, I just can't imaging a circumstance under which this would be desired behavior.

Thanks again,

-digitani

Hey, estherau, thanks so much for your input, but Bagginsbill was right.  I'm developing a tool that I want to distribute, and I want it to be as easy to use as possible, so I don't want to tell the users that they have to make the prop-based controls invisible manually before rendering.  I still appreciate your help, though. :-)

EnglishBob, I am a pythonhead, so thanks for that little tidbit as well.

-digitani