Looks nice - I think I downloaded your dress btw., like your work However I assume this is not the original P11 material of the hair but the later updated one or your own?

Cause when I got P11 the hair for Pauline had a rather dull and lo-res texture if I remember correctly. Also - this hair is static. You can adjust an animate the long part on the shoulder an a few things but its not up-to-date dynamic hair... and I just got P11 Pro and the updated hair a few weeks ago.

The new textures are indeed quite ok.

Also, about knowing your tools - you are right, but what I do know is that this tool does indeed have a lot of bugs... The last update alone listed a lot of them that were fixed, but there are still a few.

I just toy around with the toon shader for instance - you can connect and combine it to many things, it seems, so you think it might be a way to create great interesting non-photo styles/looks.

And when you do that, it seems to work and looks pretty much like expected in the preview. Just in rendering, it has totally irregular behaviour and looks totally different-

For instance when you switch the outline mode to "improved" the objectmay turn black with dots, and such things. The "improved" mode isnt usable. But you need to make a lot of tests to figure that out for sure. Change render settings to see if its an issue with that, and so on.

So this is another thing where you seem to be 85% there quickly, but then you hit a wall. And five hours later you are still only 85% there and wasted a lot of time with bug.

Thanks both of you.

What I do not get and makes me wonder is the following:

_“Legitimate Uses” means .... (d) creating original Content for sale, distribution, public display, or public performance; ... (f) creating characters or props based on Restricted Content in Proprietary File Formats, where the original (or modified) geometry, texture, or other Restricted Content files are not distributed with such characters or props;

(g) creating characters or props based on Restricted Content in Program Export File Formats for inclusion in game engines and in compliance with the Program Content License below, where the original (or modified) geometry, texture, or other Restricted Content files are distributed with such characters or props; ..."_

What does it mean? It sounds to me like that you actually can develop new figures from base figures and distribute them, provided the original content can't be extracted? Or not? Why not?

Yes you are right, sorry about that, however last time I mailed support (Smithmicro) I didnt get any specific help (The 11.1 update never installed and worked for me properly despite uninstalling the older version) nor information whether these were known issues.

About the issue with the Internal Pressure resetting, I could narrow this down to either a problem with several objects I made (like, possibly, unconnected vertices or similar. IDK) OR a problem with one of the several file cross-references Poser makes and keeps. Unfortunately I can't narrow it down further.

I looked into DAZ last night, it made quite some progress since last time I checked (several years ago) and some things are actually better and more modern than Poser, however I find it slightly confusing and it seems less focused on content creation.

The renderer is quite fast but I didnt find my quick test results too stunning, and despite I tried relaxed parameters it seems to put an even higher load on CPU and GPU Also it crashed several times with a very basic scene without much content.

I am pretty frustrated cause I just spent more than one super labour intense month learning this software and reactiviating an old Cinema 4D license I own but never really used, and learn that too (its pretty quick to learn btw), just to hit a wall.

And this happend each time I tried Poser: its wasted time.

And had high flung plans, for two projects, had to scale them down the more problems I encountered. I was 95% there 3 weeks ago and quite euphoric. Now, I am 95.3% there. Cause the limits I hit are 75% not my own limits but bugs I cant change, no matter how much work I put into that.

Now it was the material room that started to freak and become unuseable, and then it was the Bullet Physics where one parameter (Internal Pressure) starts to rest itself to zero since today.

I just spend about 3-5 hours to understand whats happing. Used different scenes, different objects. No change. It stopped working. It just resets, at random frames. Quite possible that its due to a problem in the object I made, but no matter what I tried it its the same, so how can I know? There is no report in the log file, at least none I can relate to. And it was s the n-th time I remade this object (the crappy hair from above)

So all these weeks were all wasted, the projects all nonsense. Plans are obsolete. Money I had spent for content is also wasted, basically.

I just wonder what I can do to save a little of this wasted time.

I wonder if it makes sense to switch to DAZ, and port the project if possible, but it doesnt have the physics it seems, and I dont want to waste even more time.

There is a positive thing, but it's kind of ironic cause I don't know it this is by another mistake: I bought Poser 11 standard version some years ago and now I have Pro after an update. Not sure if there is only Pro now, or why.

I didn't pay too much for the software and thats ok, but I paid quite some money for content on shopping sprees, so in the end this compensates for that.-- But whats more important is the time invested and abandoned projects.

And I dont get the neglect, like why some figures are so badly supported, Or why brand new "Paulines" where introduced just to be replaced by the "La Femme" concept a few weeks later. Or why Roxie has such technical issues, like unsuable eye shaders that are obviously wrong when you load the figure into the init scene. Or why there were so bad hair materials, and now the "Pauline" hairs have new, nice materials but you only discover that by chance. And when you install that content it gets installed into the user folder, not the factory folder. And like everything, it doesnt use any recognizable name scheme or folder structure. Each artist and each vendor has its own naming and folder scheme. Not even consistent with one artist. And there is hair in figures, hair, and props branches.

Its also a positive thing that obviously a lot of thinking went into keeping everything legacy compatible in the past. But its 2020, and sometimes you have to make a cut, and rethink that kind of concept. Do we need compatibility with every 1990ies software content? Or do we rather need a working software, and usable content? I dont know, I assume there actually are people who use this software professionally, but where are they and what do they say?

Sorry for my rant, had been super frustrated yesterday.

I am using the latest 11.3. ... , not sure about the last numbers, 181 I think.

I use HDRIs, the IBL can load them too but I am pretty sure it does not use the full bit depth, it seems to have less dynamic, when you use te IBL so you need to resort to different methods for HDRIs.

Sometimes Poser starts with different, obviously older UI grafics... seems to happen randomly and this indicates that something is really messed up with the program. Whats annyoing me the most however is that in the matrial room the modules jump around at random locations far away and you have to scroll endlessly to find them and put them back in place and then they jump again. This happens for instance when you forget to de-select them before you close the window. The input module always jumps a few 1000 pxiels when you touch one of the inputs. This and that I dont find a way to use hair thats moving naturally but doesnt poke through the face at the same time.

You can have good looking hair with Bullet Physics and it calculates quite fast, when it doesnt have too many polygons but either it pokes through or it gets a diamond shape from collision detection (and still pokes into the head regardless) And you need a haircut thats suitable for this, cause you need to set the weights, so with most hair styles you cant do it cause you need to set the roots rigid but the rest softer. In other words it could work when you invest a lot of time, develop your own hair etc but in practice it doesnt and you only find out after you invested a lot of time.

ok, found it, "NoiseTexture" node

however I ran into a problem with this: when I use it on transparency with a high resolution of the noise on the Poser Surface root node, the object appears 100% transparent in the preview - that is the texture is not evaluated correctly in the preview when it has a high resolution - what can I do about that?

I renders fine and as expected

Thans for all the answers. The easiest way for me thats also in line with my thinking is to use two hemispheres, but I just still have to figure out how to map the image on the ground so it matches at the seams.

The hdri didnt show on the background object when I use the Environmental Map node - it shows with the normal image node but thenit isnt scaled around the whole scene.

@EldritchCellar I just had to realize that having different colors/values for diffusion and specular doesnt work in superfly, only firefly

thats a pity cause I think that using an additional diffuse light with image based lighting looks bad in most cases. but having no gloss at all also looks strange in some cases...

so what I have now is a single IBL light for arranging the scene, gving me a very coarse preview of the lighting and kind of light everywhere, and two hemispheres, and than I can switch the IBL off quickly for rendering.

its also a pity that HDRI bit depths are not supported in the IBL it seems, cause it seems to render faster and would be quite convenient to use.

I experiment with making an image based shader for the IBL that creates more dynamic but the result while being useful is not as good as using the lighting from the dome

Thanks much for the link unfortunately this doesnt work for me in 11.3 It doesnt install in the path thats recommended (in a dircetory that doesnt exists) I assume the way the python scripts are handled has chnged since this was released.

Also, while this looks like a very useful tool, I am still interested in the answers to my questions As I said I searched and didnt find the answers.

Thanks.

Thanks, this is good to know and the hair I made is pretty bad in this regards, but works never the less.

The problem I experience also occurs with the simple ball and hires cloth disk form the "primitves" folder in the props in the Poser factory runtime.

The cloth wraps around the ball in a low-res diamond shape, not in a ball shape, even if "use animated mesh" ist selected. I expeted that it would use the vertoces aor polygons for collision, not the low-res convex hull shape.

The hair I made doesnt work with the cloth simulation because of the way I made it, the polygons are not connected

I would like to animate it with Bullet Physics becuse it behaves and looks very nice there, just the collision doesnt work right...

Thanks. Fantastic - my workaround was to bake the animation and export as as obj and reimport as morph target...

I solved it, ran into some problems with normal maps but got help on the SmithMicro forum Now I am interested in these watercolor shaders. Its not strictly black and white since it has to render in Superfly, but its close to the look I was after

The cycles shader toon seems to do exactly what I want, it's different from the other toon shader. (but youd still need a B&W color map for the face,) Also the ccyles shaders seem to only work in the Superfly renderer which seems to have global illumination going on so you need a scene thats black for black shadows?

Unfortunately the cycles shaders are porrly documented.

I am still surprised there is no input to this thread, there must be s.o who understands the shaders.

Cause now I am interested in how people do these watercolor shaders, and I have no clue and no material example. Does anybody have an example? Does that inly work in the pro version?

Unfortunately the camera isn't locked that way. Even tried locking and unlocking again. It's not that important cause I decided to redo the animation and work on shaders/materials first. I also was dissatisfied with the dynamic hair Thanks for your help.