Hey thanks for all the very good information!

Estherau, I didn't realize that you could simply share runtimes on a cross-platform network. That's an amazingly awesome bit of info I was completely unaware of.

Ghonma, I have a couple of powerful renderers and use both Max and Maya in my work. However, I've often used Poser to quickly set up character animation. I understand you can use a plug such as GestureMax to move Poser assets into Max but it is my understanding there's no good way to move a Poser scene with animation to another renderer. Am I wrong about this? Jeez, I hope so because the Firefly renderer is a DOG. Please enlighten me peeple!

Since I have licensed copies of Poser 6 and 7, I assume I can run both concurrently and not trigger the AFAIK check?

I'm a big fan of FaceGen myself. When I saw this post and spotted the nice straight-on photo I looked on Google Images and found a profile. With those two images you can generate a really decent 3D head in a couple of minutes complete with texture maps and even morphs (although the morphs are pretty goofy if you are facile with a decent modeler like Modo you can pretty easily tweak them and get good blendshapes).

I timed myself and came up with this (admittedly rough) quick Bjork model in less than 20 minutes. I imported the head into Poser 7 as an OBJ prop and parented it to a Vicky neck and then made the Vicky head/eyes/tongue invisible. This allows you to pose your model as the Bjork head moves appropriately with the neck. If I want a different expression its easiest to trade out one of the morphed targets created in FaceGen.

I included the wire preview so you can see that FaceGen does a nice mesh in quads. Voila.

Obviously, with a little bit of time and effort you could do much much better but I find the hardest part is always getting a decent head mesh with textures and FaceGen is pretty much the bomb in that regard. By tweaking the nose and eyes you could have a fairly convincing model I believe.

Mark

*From Miss Nancy: canoma was mostly for doing interiors (rooms with rectangular walls) that had
rectangular items in them. trying to do a model from photos is probably too difficult to
describe correctly, but one will just end up with a dull, flat-looking canoma-type model.
*Actually, Canoma was mostly intended for modeling exteriors and especially for angular structures and buildings. It relies on perspective-based photogrammetry so that doing interiors can be problematical due to an inability to get enough perspective changes on walls.  I met one of the developers a couple years back in Palo Alto and he told me how Adobe bought the program and deliberately deep-sixed it because they were fooling with a web-based 3D program that never was completed. He gave me a copy and I actually still use it regularly and have seen it show up cheap on ebay every few months.

My profession is 3D forensic modeling and animation so that I have to often build stuff from scratch to use in legal animations.

The two most commonly used image-based modelers still commercially available are Image Modeler by RealViz and PhotoModeler by Eos Systems. I have also used both of those programs with good success although I actually prefer using Canoma because it is so easy to use. I use it to generate rough 3D shapes that are in proportion and I then import the shapes into a more capable modeler such as Modo or FormZ where I use the Canoma templates as a rough base to work from. I've built everything including vehicles, bridges and buildings using this workflow. Unless you have blueprints or good measurements it can really be a time-saver to help you build a 3D model in good proportion.

Oh, and one other thing that Canoma and these other image modelers does well is to create textures for your 3D surfaces. Let's say you have a couple photos of a billboard. Canoma will do a pretty nice job of correcting the billboard image that you can then edit in photoshop.

Arcady & Fugazi, thanks so very much for the help. Your taking the time to respond is much appreciated. This is such a great community. May everybody have a happy Christmas! Mark

I'm an idiot! THANKS!!!!

You can find a number of MoCap files at www.turbosquid.com. I noted there are several freebie files that are in fbx format that you'll need to convert. Of course, they also have a lot of mocap for purchase. The quality and cost of the files varies widely, though.

You can find pre-made motion files from a number of sources such as www.daz3d.com. However, you might benefit from working through the nice walk designer tutorial here: http://www.daz3d.com/support/tutorial/tutorial.php?id=922

TheDoctor

Don't know if you need it bad enough to spend $29, but TurboSquid has a 3D tennis court with net that comes in OBJ format which will import into Poser:

http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/242084

If you want to keep the price to free you can e-mail me and I have a court without a net I whipped up. You could make a net easily by using the plane primitive in poser and simply map a net with a transparency map onto it. You can get good tennis net textures by searching for "tennis net" using either Google or Yahoo image search.

If you want it write me at vislaw@yahoo.com.

Thanks. You know, that probably does exactly what I need. I put together a rather intricate animation of a character in Poser and I simply need to place that character in a Max scene. Perfect! Thanks for the suggestion as I'll check it out immediately.

Mark

I did briefly look at the Digimation page for Gesture Max. As best I could tell, though, it appears that it moves the whole model into Max without saying anything about motion files. Do you know if it transfers your key frames? If not, will a gesture-max transferred model accept a Poser BVH motion file?

Thanks for your help. I really hope you (or someone else) can give me a followup on this.

Mark

HA! I am a dolt. The DALEKS made me do it.

I don't even know what the Sonic Screwdriver is. Please enlighten me!

Ok, my problem is fixed. Unfortunately, I'm not completely sure what the problem was. First, it wasn't the firewall as the problem persisted with and without it on. Then I freed up a lot of space because things were getting tight on the primary drive. Then I found a bunch of viruses after running AdAware and Spybot. Finally, there was a process using a bunch of CPU time called IMJPMIG.EXE. I lookedly it up and it apparently involves the East Asian languate functionality on Windows. I don't need that so I disabled it. Anyway, it was chewing up almost all the processor cycles so it may have been the culprit. I'm told that some viruses write to that file and it very well may have been infected. Anyway, things work now. THANKS for the help. Mark

Will look at both suggestions. Cannot tell you enough how much I appreciate being able to turn to this community for help. I'll post the results of my troubleshooting shortly. Mark

Congrats to everybody on Beta and at CL for getting it right this time! I'm retiring P5 and will deal with my own rat's nest of runtime now. Thanks. This was a very helpful thread.

Yes. I tried a variation of that with a nest of scaling problems resulting. Your initial suggestion seems to be the most elegant given the limitations of Poser.