I don't have a basis for comparison with previous versions of Poser to be honest, but it is pretty flexible to use in 9/2012 - thanks! I have only just twigged that I can load the library as an external app component, via preferences... which seems to help everything to run a bit smoother on my sadly underpowered / aged imac.

Bagginsbill, out of interest, what was the rationale for using Flash / AIR to host the GUI for the Library component, if you don't mind me asking? I notice that this is used here...

;-)

Until I do come up with anything else I can contribute, I am going to try actually making some images for my gallery here, featuring V4WM and some converted clothing...

Not promising a timescale here! My personal poserverse is now in a bit of dissarray since sidegrading to Poser Pro 2012. My runtime ran away...

...and besides my actual job, I am terrible at taking on extra curricular stuff... I'm currently supposed to be writing an iphone app for one charity, a database app for another... and my wife needs a new website for her home business... and then I've started modelling this stupidly huge scale spacecraft in Hexagon too.

Another story... but I will endeavour I promise! :-)

Maybe things have gotten a bit frayed towards the end of this thread? ;-)

Moriador, personally I did get your earlier point about V4's elbows.

In my understanding, that's not a V4WM issue though so much as its an inherent limitation of the V4 mesh... and as Phantom3d Mike said, that was simply not something they could make distributable modifications to, as part of the weight-mapping injection package....as obviously V4 and her mesh is Daz's baby...and they needed to work with the existing geometry in that respect.

The unrelated "Perfect" line currently highly visible in the Renderosity marketplace aims to address such issues in the OLD V4, via morphs... but its also implementing all sorts of animated morphs apparently.

There's substantial overlap there, as I now see it, with what weight mapping achieves - and weight mapping resolves the core posing issues much more profoundly than morphs and with less overhead, as I understand it.

The weight mapped solution works better with conforming clothing too I think?

Posing the weight mapped V4 is like working with a whole new, much more fluid character, in my experience.

But, in my very humble opinion, much more subtle, add-on morphs are probably what is needed now, which are specifically designed to enhance the weight-mapped V4 mesh, in the direction of still further cosmetic refinement... a kind of "V4WM Morphkit" add on perhaps?

Mike and the guys who have done the heavy lifting, re-rigging V4... and have done such a great job making the injection scripts work really well, for both V4WM and the Outfitter, don't need to worry about this though... they really shouldn't concern themselves too much with the above...  I don't think.

Michael 4 WM and so much more beyond, is what people would love to see coming from the Poser Place team now I think?

The idea of doing further, morph-based enhancement is "after-market" relative to V4WM in my view and could well be done commercially... perhaps the guys doing the "Perfect" line should move onto this next? Just a thought...

Seeing a V4WM targeted offering from the likes of them would be great for marketplace exposure for V4WM no?

This is my view as a content consumer rather than as a potential content creator.

As also suggested here too, a lot of further subtle enhancements could now be made via a new set of more cutting edge displacement / normal / bump textures too... that could add great value to the Poser Place WM packages and help generate more buy-in?

As lmk suggested to me, over at Poser Place would be the place to contribute on such things... and for anyone to contribute their views on what should and shouldn't fall within the Poser Place team's remit. I've registered there... still catching up on everything under discussion there to see if I might find anything I could contribute to personally and just taking in all the great stuff happening there :-)

Thanks Vilters... yes, you're right... it has now occurred to me that I can use Stuffit to create an archive of my Poser 9 content runtime folder, this archive utility then does a folder merge when it extracts.

Not sure why OS X introduced this particular regression with Lion... there is quite possibly a way round it, that I'm just not aware of.

But still I plan to start reorganising to combine different types of Poser files (e.g. for one character or set) into the same folder as you mentioned... I think that sounds more intuitive.

;-)

Hello :-)

I hope it's okay if I tag onto this thread with a, hopefully, on topic Poser Pro 2012 related question?

I just took advantage of SM's current 50% discount on Poser to side grade up to 2012.

But having installed I find it's created a whole new content folder... fair enough.

So I'm now debating whether to just add the Poser 9 runtime folder to the root folder list, in the library... or whether to meticulously transfer each sub folder / file of my Poser 9 runtime  folder across. For some reason OS X lion doesn't do folder merging, when moving or copying a folder with the same name... it only does a full replace, if you see what I mean.

So the latter might be time consuming! Even with my modest content collection ;-)

I like vilters' point that different files can get grouped in the same folder.

What do other people do around runtime organisation?

Yup - got an A5 Bamboo at present... (in fact I like the A5 size of that personally - which is good cos I couldn't justify spending more on that at the time!) I haven't played with using it much for 3d yet.

Well a bit of playing with it in Sculptris... which is a lot of fun to use I have to say. Although the meshes I've got out of that so far were way too many polygons to use in anything else...

I just got hold of Photoshop CS5 Extended and it seems that this lets you import a mesh and then "sculpt" or "paint" auto-UV-mapped normal or bump textures (?) onto the surface of that mesh... just need to find some more time to explore that really I guess.

I've been getting to grips with what I guess are considered more "traditional" modelling techniques in firstly Shade and then Hexagon, since getting hold of the zero price license for that at the start of the year... started out attempting to learn Blender, but hit a brick wall with that cos I'm not good with keystrokes! Having grasped more of the fundamentals I might try Blender again in due course I guess. Anyway...

...so much great stuff to play with! It's a good time for CG art right now I think :-)

Cool - many thanks!

Invitation accepted... I'd love to contribute... if there's something I'd be useful for!

I'll head over and sign up and take a look around whilst I wait for my shiny new 50% discounted upgrade to Poser Pro 2012 to download ;-)

Attached Link: Smith Micro Poser Deal

http://my.smithmicro.com/marcom/eblasts/poser/20120303/index-web.html

Smith Micro are doing 50% off Poser just now... its a good time to upgrade for anyone wanting to move to V4WM?

;-)

Its great to make all of your aquaintance here :-)

As I said in my earlier post, I'm just a newb here and to Poser... hence I'm coming straight in with Poser 9. So, lucky in that respect I guess!

I have a background, originally, in traditional drawing and painting... pencil, paper, oil paint and canvas... but, have in fact been a programmer for the last decade or so and am just trying to rediscover my creative roots a little. I haven't done anything much creative for most of that time... just getting back on the horse.

I didn't have a big legacy of runtime figures. But I have nevertheless invested in what are otherwise quite old stock figures on the face of it... V4 and now M4... and this was predominanty because I can see there seems to be a future in them, because of the V4WM and ongoing M4WM projects... because of the wealth of marketplace stuff available for them too, of course... but I'd say the weight mapping efforts were more a factor for me.

I don't know what proportion of the overal new user demographic I would represent in taking this view... but its probably not insubstantial? Anyway, just saying...

In any case I see the Poser Place efforts as highly commendable and worthy.

When you're talking about creating new texture maps, to go along with V4WM, adding improved surface detail using bump/displacement and/or normal maps, are you thinking greater surface skin details like, for instance - micro wrinkles and creases round fingers... in the interiors of elbow and knee joints etc, more, finer detailed popped veins, inter-pore skin hatching (which is especially evident on human hands close up)... palm creases... some more micro fine body hair... that sort of stuff?

Small tendons in hands, running off from the knuckles perhaps? Tendons on backs of knees, in feet... could displacement be used to suggest that sort of thing or would it involve a morph?

I'm possibly rambling now... sorry!

Would these types of displacement or bump maps be created by processing photographs or would they normally be "painted" (just referencing photos) in something like ZBrush or Photoshop CS5 Extended?

(trying to stay on the thread here - honestly)

;-)

Absolutely - as hornet3d said.

To clarify, certainly no criticism from me relative to the V4 WM injection product!

Thanks to Mike and all involved for such a stunning effort in achieving it.

It is INCREDIBLY easy to use and, as a product, works PERFECTLY in terms of what it sets out to do and does, in my experience of using it ;-)

As a relative newcomer here, I was more interested in where these "Perfect" morph products sit... given that SURELY in due course, V4WM (and other weight mapped versions of these most widely invested in characters, hopefully) are likely to come to the fore more and more... I would guess that's a question of software take up (as in Poser 9 / 2012 userbase expansion more than anything else).

The high ratings that the "Perfect" products apparently have in the Renderosity store,  would seem to indicate the status quo with the market... right now?

In that sense, V4WM must still be a little, if not a lot, ahead of where a good number of Poser users are at perhaps?

But in itself, V4WM should be seen as a big incentive for Poser users to upgrade to Poser 9 / 2012, I reckon.

I am certainly looking forward to the "more coming" on the weight mapped front, from Poser Place, to be sure... just got M4 complete from Daz as it was, probably still is, on sale there at the minute...

...and thinking I should probably really have forked out for Poser 2012 instead of just Poser 9, on this front... ah well, I guess SM will let me sidegrade in due course, when I eventually have time to play around with some WM painting myself ;-)

Thanks :-)

Is the point of most of these morph-based (?) bodyshape fixes more to address joint bending issues and distortions than anything else?

On that basis then sure, I can understand that the re-rigging, as an integral part of the weight mapping, should presumably sort all this sort of stuff out on its own... and then I shouldn't need them, if I'm adopting V4WM... which I am.

As I understand it, the V4WM injection corrects and improves the way that the existing bodyshape mesh behaves when it bends and flexes?

Does it actually somehow reshape and refine the base (static) bodyshape mesh a little too?

I guess the latter is more about how anatomically "realistic" (or whatever) a shape  the original figure's base mesh itself is... and that's something else altogether isn't it? As in aesthetics rather than functionality perhaps... these crossover I guess though.

Further to that last paragraph in my previous post... I should clarify that I don't know whether the available bodyshape fixes work or not with V4WM.

Has anyone tried applying any of these available fixes to V4WM?

That would be interesting to know...

It seems to me that these fixes and V4WM could perhaps compliment each other, in due course... rather than necessarily being alternate routes to take?

I am fairly ignorant regarding the technicalities of this at present, but I have been wondering how the "Perfect" series morph fixes would work WITH V4WM?

I don't know exactly how these available bodyshape fixes currently work - are they injecting morphs into the V4 mesh?

I have started playing around converting some characters I've created in my runtime to V4WM and converting clothing figures with the Poser Place clothing converter is also straight forward and seems to work well. I've had mixed results with the limited selection of hair figures I currently have.

Posing a weight mapped character certainly seems way more intuitive...

But I'd certainly be keen to implement fixes for things like the elbow bones (I mean the appearance of there being bones there rather than functional rigging bones) etc. too.

Would it perhaps make sense for the creators of the "Perfect" product line and other vendors creating such body shape fixes, to look at versions of their products, in due course, that work on V4WM?

I don't currently have any of the "Perfect" fixes and probably wouldn't go down that route due to their not (as far as I'm aware) working with weight mapping... and, as a Poser 9 user, I would see this as the way forward for anything I was going to add to my runtime.

Thanks :-)

Got a lot more shaping / modelling to do... now that I have a solution (or two) of sorts to the scale issue and rendering the whole model in Poser, I'm going to crack on modelling some interior elements and, in fact, a fair bit more refining of the exterior design.

But then it's onto UV mapping and materials for it - including probably some displacement stuff I think. I'm using this as a vehicle (literally) for me to work out and learn as much as I can about modelling something for use in Poser. Whilst maybe trying something that also pushes some boundaries too.

So there's certainly a heck of a lot for me to learn from this!

I'm definitely aiming for something, in this project, that can be self-contained within Poser, for all scene compositioning and rendering purposes... and something that can work as a setting for human characters... as that is so central to what Poser is for and about of course.

Another useful tip - thanks

Relative to this apparent rendering limit, I wonder whether and how this might be reflected if using an external render engine... for instance LuxRender, via this Pose2Lux script?

I have created enough for myself to do already for now... but I was planning to have a look at trying some Lux rendering in due course perhaps. I was thinking I would maybe wait to see what happens with the proposed new Poser 9/2012 optimised version of the LuxRender exporter perhaps before I start to look into that.

I am just running Poser 9 (on Mac). Perhaps this Firefly render depth limit varies for the 64 bit Poser 2012?