When saving a body pose to the library, you are given the option of including Morph Channels or Body Transformations. The second one will include any movement or rotation of the entire body. Otherwise the figure will be posed in the zero position, facing in whatever direction you have set the hips to face.

The Morph Channels option is for when you want to inject a saved set of morph dial settings (such as Amazon or Tummy Out or Breast Size) into a figure. Normally when saving a pose to position any V4 figure, you wouldn't include these because it will reshape the figure.

Props appeal to my "Keep It Simple, Stupid" mentality. Maybe it's because props don't occupy a multitude of lines that must be constantly collapsed in the hierarchy editor. (When will Poser allow you to collapse figures as a global preference?)

Anyway, I like to work with props whenever possible, even though I realize this imposes some limitations. Other people prefer to work with figures, even when they don't have to. Why does a simple chair with no moving parts, for example, need to be a resource-hogging and hierarchy-cluttering CR2? Because the creator makes CR2's out of habit, I imagine. I generally convert them to PZ2's at the first opportunity and stow them in the props folder. 

It's not an organic figure, it's a prop. Say, a straight pipe I want to bend. I'm modeling the pipe in an external modeling app and saving the OBJ. Then I'm bending it in degrees along the X axis and saving each bend as a separate OBJ, then importing them as morph targets.

The smaller bends, like 15 and  30 degrees, don't distort too badly on the way from zero to 1. But the more severe bends visibly warp, stretch and taper the prop as the dial turns from zero to 1. When it reaches 1, the prop returns to its proper shape (except for the correct bend). 

I can get a smooth morph by making the bend with a magnet within Poser, but then the bend itself stretches the prop in undesirable ways and doesn't look like a realistic bend. I can't figure out how to get the Poser magnet to bend something like a modeling program does, and I've tried every which way.

Anyway, I can create a good bend outside Poser, and I can load it as a target, but I can't get Poser to make a smooth, undistorted morph from unbent to full bend. It's like it only knows the zero and 1 positions, and makes a guess at what the in-between points should look like. I'm willing to provide the in-between bends, but don't know how to get them into one dial.

Did this behavior start happening after a Poser crash? After Poser 8 crashed on me, I started getting the Mac equivalent of your error message (Poser Unexpectedly Quit) upon exiting Poser. The act of quitting normally caused it to "unexpectedly quit," if that makes any sort of sense. This has happened before after a crash, then it would go away after awhile. Somehow the crash caused P8 to do a mini-crash upon quitting (or opening a different scene while already in Poser).

I agree that people just move on. You see that even with some of the older freebies here on Rendo... the image is now replaced by a question mark, and if you try to download, the source no longer exists. No one is obligated to maintain their free items forever. But if I wanted to keep playing with the free and experimental stuff posted by fellow hobbyists, I'm sure the contents of ShareCG and other remaining free sources would outlast my interest in doing so.

I use WIndows at work by necessity and a Mac at home by choice. I've been a Mac user since long before iPod and iPhone etc. brought so many PC users over to the Mac side. There is much less disdain for Macs these days on the part of the Windows crowd, and Apple's mass-market success with the "i" products and their online music and app stores have a lot to do with that.

As far as Poser, I have not experienced the video-related problems reported by PC users, though the general bugs and design flaws are just as frustrating for both sides. For either PC or Mac, you need loads of RAM and the more processors the better.

The biggest drawback for Mac users (and not only for Poser) is so many vendors of software, utilities and scripts make their products for PC only. But this is getting better as more Windows users, including developers, expand their horizons. Netherworks, for example, has started making their python-driven products for both PCs and Macs.

The above solutions are good to prevent something from receiving a shadow. But if a shadow would normally be cast upon your backdrop and suddenly stops at its base, it will be painfully obvious that it IS a backdrop. Better in my opinion to change the light source so the shadow does not fall upon the backdrop.

Many vendors won't accept a credit card without a physical address. Doesn't help if the thief stole other stuff with your address, like your driver's license, but if he stole just your card and doesn't know where you live, it makes it a little harder to order stuff online with it. On the other hand, the "security code" is printed right on the card. Sheesh.

What would blow my mind is a new 3D method of controlling a rope, cable or chain by means that did not involve a figure with 20-30 linked body parts, each controlling the one after it.

For one thing, I can't stand the endless list of links that require scrolling down AND to the right in the Hierarchy Editor to find the last one. And for another thing (and this is the real problem for me) I just can't get the hang of EZ Pose. I would like to be able to get the shape I want in an intuitive way in in one place. not proceed along the links and changing the parameters at different points as I go.

This may be a pipe dream (hey, shaping pipes this way would be great, too), but I can wish.

I would like Poser to be more intelligent about what you're trying to select. Often when you put the cursor over something, it highlights items that are 2-3 layers BEHIND it, and can't seem to see the frontmost object at all... except very briefly as you move the cursor around (but can't seem to stay highlighted). This is not a consistent issue at all, but it is frustrating when it happens. I know you can right-click and select anything that the cursor is touching.. but Poser could be a little more smart about it.

Bring back the thicker scroll bars! These are too damn skinny, even for a precision mouse and nimble fingers. If you have arthritic fingers and/or a balky mouse, those anorexic scroll bars introduced in P8 are a disaster. They are difficult to SEE, much less control.

A longtime wish... The ability to have two scenes open at the same time.

Oh yes, it would be nice for Poser not to crash when you move out of the app for a moment, say to check email or do something on the desktop. P8 is a jealous mistress that way... she wants your undivided attention, and not just when rendering.

This is all great info about gamma correction, though from the title of the thread I was hoping for more practical details from those who have done the upgrade about whether Poser Pro 2010 is worth the $200-$250 over Poser 8.

Re: GC... BB mentioned screwy shaders in commercial skin materials. That may be so, but what can we do about it if we want to use GC with such characters? Have you seen the sheer number of nodes some vendors use to make a skin shader? I am nowhere close to knowledgeable enough to fiddle with all those nodes to remove the over-correction built into them. Better to just delete them altogether? Which ones? 

See the dilemma? I think this is why a lot of people just throw their hands up and turn off GC. They use as their lighting baseline what makes the skin look good, everything else follows that criteria.  Because turning off GC is one controll vs. minutely adjusting 10-15 nodes in the skin shader. 

I'm guessing vendors are making skin look good for the lowest common denominator, which right now would be users of P7 and earlier. So vendors fiddle the skin shader nodes from here to Tuesday to make skin look OK in standard P6-P7 lighting with no IDL or GC. Leaves those who want to use solutions like GC in a bit of a pickle.

It only caused no end of trouble for those whose roots were in the command-line interface and who were accustomed to this_kind_of_naming_convention.  I suppose it's still widely used on the PC side to maintain compatibility with those who use Linux, as somebody said above, or who still have an old 286 PC I suppose. But mostly because it's decades-old habit. I know a lot of people who still put two spaces after every period and 3 spaces at the start of each paragraph, dating back to primitive  typewriters.

As far as I can remember, Macs never had the "no spaces" and "8 characters" limits that the DOS and WIndows programmers originally placed on themselves so long ago. If Poser was an original Mac product, perhaps it only adopted the old-style PC naming structure when it was released for the PC. It takes me back to the 1980s whenever Poser requires adherence to this structure (it drops the 2nd word if you name a material with 2 words in the Group Editor, for example).

Quote - On the shoulder, it appears that there may have been an eight character limit on the body part names – at least for the original Poser figures. 

Wow, that takes us back 2 or 3 decades. Like the way PC people continue to spell_like_this. Microsoft gave PCs the ability to use blank spaces and more than 8 letters a long time ago. (I think back around the time they realized the human race would be around beyond 1999.) But old habits die hard, I guess.

jancory, you were absolutely right. The body parts must have the exact mix of lower and capital letters as the internal names. For some reason they used NO caps in the parts that are not symmetrical pairs, and incorrectly capped the A in ForeArm. And They didn't bother to spell out Shoulder, but chose Shldr instead. Logical and consistent, the people who coded Poser are not. Thank you for solving a frustrating problem.

darkedge, you were right as well. When parented props are saved singly, the parenting is preserved. When saved as a group, Poser changes the parenting of all but one to Universe. It must be changed back in a text editor... with the exact eccentric spellings and capitalizations of the internal names.

So many important things about Poser are undocumented, but must be discovered by trial and error... and word of mouth.

Some body parts have capitals and others don't? I'll have to check that and see if that's the problem. Thanks for the heads-up!