Good on you for still being here. We had a friend who didn't make it last year. Great sadness all around, including hers.

I updated. No issues, not even script buttons, but the presentation is a bit scary, what with ominously asking if it's okay to uninstall the whole f'king world, and, yeah, by the way, would you like us to preserve this bit or that bit? And is it okay to install over old everything? Etc... Scary... But I did it and it's done and yes, of course, there was now an obvious checkbox for turning off the saving of originals.

Ah. That's probably it. Yep. 13.0.399. I shall have to bite the bullet and install the latest update. Anything in particular that I need to protect? Like custom script buttons?

Btw, I like your tagline. I used it the other day going into the doctor's office. When asked by the nurse how I was doing, I replied that I'd set a record today for the number of days I've been alive. She looked at me sort of funny.

Hmm. All I see on that tab is this:

I checked the Misc tab too. Is there something I'm missing?

Most Excellent! Thank you!

It's the hierarchy, right? But does that require bones? I'm reading... Still not getting it...

Thank you for the tip about Cycles and Blender. I know zero about Cycles! Hborre pointed me to the blackbody node. And I'm using it. And I understand the concept of blackbody, but otherwise -- no clue about Cycles. Just copying what I find or someone shows me, which is how I got started with Fortran, ages ago, and assembly language for a 360 slightly later. Sooner or later I manage to figure it out! But a little reading does seem to help from time to time.

Well, damn. Again, after slaving away (and finally getting it to work), I realize that I've done it the hard way. No longer does it seem impressive, although doing it the hard way, by animating dials in the materials room, was instructive. Now I'm just creating props from The Grouping Tool, animating the Visible property, and the rest is probably completely obvious.

Thank you for putting up with my ignorance. I *am* learning.

Thank you. I will do that.

You again??

(Just Kidding)

Actually, I'm trying to set up still images, not animations. I did some animations back 20 years ago but they were pretty crude and it seems to not be my thing. For me, mostly Poser is "just" a digital implementation of a fantastic photo studio. Enormous studio, lots of props, and models who can hold a pose forever.

Right now, for a water surface, I'm using the water that came with The Great Lake prop which came with Poser. I think. It does nice reflections. And I'm trying to make it more realistic. Like adding wavelets or swells. And, especially, ripples around something penetrating or touching the water. For that I've tried using the morph tool but with limited success. So, you got me exploring some of the more exotic (to me, at least) material nodes, and I stumbled across wave3d. Sounds good but a) I haven't figured out how to incorporate it and b) I read recently that it has a major flaw in that its minimum wave frequency grows as the underlying surface grows and makes it useless for larger bodies of water.

But -- thank you for the link! I have saved it for later consumption.

Hey, totally off-topic but while I have your attention, I'm working on a prop made from the standard hires cube. It has "openable" windows on all six surfaces. Like this:

With, ultimately, a parameter group like this:

Only Open Front is working now, although I do have the needed dials from the material room animated, so they're available from Cube_1. I just need to create and setup the connections from them to the dials in the Windows group.

So, my question is really two.

Would anyone else find this useful, you think? 

If so, what's the best way for sharing it?

Hmm. <slaps forehead> Same as what I get with Help>Poser manual, only I for some reason this time, for some reason unremembered, I looked at the index table, not the table of contents, and saw all sorts of things I wouldn't know how to drill down to using the table of contents. Curious. Possibly enlightening. 

Thank you! The online documentation looks incredible. I think I have some reading to do, and certainly I think you have pointed me to *exactly* the sort of technical information I wanted and didn't know existed. 

Things have changed in the 20 years I was gone.

Got it. I had no idea that the connection would be ignored in preview and honored in renders. Very cool thing to know.

Thank you again. I've learned more in the last two days than I've learned in the last two weeks. Or something like that. Maybe three. But what a ride. I shall have to go make images! Annnnnnd -- finish conquering the world in my current game of Civ 6. Priorties.

The big question is how did you learn all this? I've seen nothing this detailed in the Poser Manual, although I admit to not reading it but trying to look things up as needed. Is there somewhere I can read about all this material room stuff and lighting stuff and weird and unusual nodes stuff? Or do I just have to google and dig?

I must ponder your explanation. It sounds like it explains everything about my question, but I must ponder it until grokking occurs. May have to wait until I take a shower, if ya ken.

Meanwhile, being able to get dials from the material room to the poser room parameters/properties panel by turning on animation is Very Incredible and I am majorly jazzed.

*Most* of my background, btw, is not that of retired photographer, although there is that and I was good, but instead primarily that of a retired programmer, going back some 56+ years, and while mostly Python is "Just Another Structured Language", I also only ran into it about a year before I retired and then only briefly, so there are "corners" where my Python Knowledge Map says "Here There Be Dragons", and particularly as regards using it with Poser. And I'm thinking you know a great deal about those corners.

I hate Python's indentation method of doing structure. Bleh! Give me C# any day. Or C++. Or C. Or Delphi. Et al, down to and including Algol W -- and NONE OF THEM DO IT THIS WAY.

Just saw your latest post with the spotlight and prop ball. Nice.

As a photographer, mostly I had no control over lighting temperature, although I had to be aware of it. But strobes and hot lights and natural lights never came with a temperature adjustment. Having control of it is awesome!

Still don't understand how the Preview Lighting Only works. Can you explain how connecting white Color to a black Simple Color works? There's obviously something very basic here that I don't understand.