Yep, I think I can agree with that, though you missed the slightly lower end Cinema4D that's growing in popularity. But yes, that would have been a perfectly reasonable way to have dealt with it. Similar perhaps to certain other software that works in much the same way. Plugs into major applications yet offers a stand alone front end for seperate work if the user so desires. There's a couple like that and they're fairly successful. I know a lot of people have said they'd rather have poser 5 (with bugs) than no poser 5 at all. I'm not so sure about that. I would rather CL had made the decisions to show off and implement Poser 5 where it belongs - in all levels of market - than to release an application that is lacking somewhat and leave themselves in a situation where even more investment, time and energy will be required writing new parts to integrate the old. If they'd done that then they could spend more time refining what they'd released and working on even more nice new shiny toys to plug into Poser with perhaps a larger market share and more income - perhaps. It is a more modular program now, so that would have been feasible I think. But, having said that. I'm not a businessman, I don't have a company to run and my ideas and thoughts might be just so much bullshit. :) Whatever. It's happened now and hindsight won't fix anything. Here's to the future. :D

Well that would be nice wouldn't it? Instead of mad scientists plugging bloodhounds and beagles with needles and steel skull caps, we could stick the new medecine into someone more deserving and watch to see if they fall over frothing at the mouth. I much prefer that, in fact I can immediately think of a couple people who could do with that. One of them runs my country... It's unfortunate that testing medecine seems to be so lax these days. Stick it into some animal, if the animal doesn't die then it's good. Send out to the public, and when the public start falling over ill then pull it back and complain it was "production process" that altered the medecine to be so unpleasantly effective. Perhaps one day all treatments will be tested thoroughly rather than rushed through for profit, and patients won't have to suffer after effects and allergic reactions to the treatment so they can continue with their lives happily and without trouble. Ah, but such is the wonder of a dream, for it is able to touch on the impossible and the improbable, such as "good" treatment. Meanwhile we still have to be careful of poisoning, death, harmful side effects, allergic reactions and other unpleasantness from the "medecine" that is issued to cure the ills caused by this modern world. Me, I'm glad I'm not a horse, they don't get treated half as nicely as aliens. :)

No medecine is free - least of all medecine that further harms the horse. And I was merely answering your analogy, not debating downloads. :)

and we didn't want to wait for the medicine Or the medecine is too expensive (this is a racehorse right) and too difficult to swallow with no guaranees that the horse will survive or improve anyway.

Why do they have to be fancy? I have no idea. Ask Olga. :)

This is not a comment form. Most comment forms on the web send the details from that web address. This one doesn't. What happens with this page is that you fill in the form, click the button, that sends a "send email" request to your computer, the data is then transferred to your computer and included in the email which is then posted to Olga at EGIsys. It's an odd way to do it, but it does mean that EGI get un-edited data from the users (not of course that CL would selectively edit the data, but EGI obviously want raw responses) It's somewhere between the clicking of the button and sending of the email that the errors are occurring. However, if you use an email program that saves sent items. Check in the history to see if an email has been sent to olga.brueckmann@egisys.de that contains a listed print of your answers on the web page. You don't get a confirmation report that it's been successfully sent from the webpage, and there's a chance that you did send the data. Check in the email program. (Outlook Express is "Sent Items" other programs may differ but most contain a history) If not, then format an email like follows 1 aware of Poser=(answer) 2 Professional/private=(answer) 3 work with poser=(answer) 3 work with poser=(answer) 4 results=(answer) 4 results=(answer) 5 area=(answer) 5 others=(answer) Where the number is the question on the page and multiple choice answers carry the same number as the question. A bit more work, but it's how the data is formatted in the email and send that to olga.brueckmann@egisys.de I should imagine that would be perfectly satisfactory to EGISys as that is how their mail link action formats the email. Hope that helps

For those having problems with the questionaire. Try the web page in a seperate browser window and check your firewall settings http://www.egisys.com/poll/questionnaire.html Submitting the form through a browser will throw up a firewall error as the browser is attempting to remotely send a message via email. It will work, and you can submit through the webpage, but it will fire an alert through the firewall. If you have autoblock on the submit function will fail, might be worth it for those who do not have reporting on in their firewall (message screen warning of access or attempted access) to turn the firewall off prior to submitting the form and then back on once it's been sent. The form works, but security settings may have an effect on it sending. Mainly because it's not submitting a form result to EGI, it's submitting a remote email request. Have fun. :)

Ambient colour white will make the thing glow, I think perhaps you mean Highlight white? For metals I'll usually use a pale grey as the highlight, but never an ambient, that stays black. Excuse me for contradicting you but that sounds very strange. For polished effects you need a reflection map for something like a sword blade, for gun metal check out Maclean's reflection maps in 3DCommune free stuff, there's some very useful reflection maps in his pack. One of which can be changed to a blue wash for gunmetal. Armour is the same, low level reflection settings with highlight to white or pale grey, texture colour to white if using a texture map or pale grey if just using colour and reflection to white. I'd advise you leave the ambient settings alone.

Scott. If you are using UVMapper, and have saved an object file without normals. Then, on importing that into poser noticed that the "normals are reversed" you can import that object back into uvmapper, select the reversed areas and flip the vertices. Then save the object as usual, with export normals unchecked and it will recreate the object with the relevant parts showing correctly. Removing the normals from an object does not preclude you being able to edit the object again to reverse parts that are showing as "hollow".

It's easier to use something like UVMapper to remove the normals anyway shrug. Yes it is, much easier, much cleaner. As for render times. I would claim that I have noticed a differnce in speed. That is most likely not a result of the object being cleaner but rather a lessened memory usage as a result of having a smaller object loaded. Rendering is cpu and ram intensive so more ram means logically, more speed. On complex scenes with volumetrics, radiosity, reflections, transparencies etc or any combination of those, the difference in render time is negligible if there is any at all. Spanki, I'm not arguing your point that hand editing vn out of an object file creates a corrupted file, just that software today appears to be much more forgiving than it used to be. There was a time when normals were essential in order to load an object into a render application IIRC but that day has passed. Software houses are more familiar with the fact that users will do some pretty weird things and have, in my opinion, made the software more robust as a result. Anyway, I don't disagree with you, and using UVMapper or similar application to remove normals is the better way because it takes the related info out as well. But it's not, how can I put it without you screaming at your monitor? LOL It's not absolutely essential anymore. It's just better practice and cleaner, resulting in more logical object files. :)

it's a good bet that a majority of the rest of 3D software in the world will barf trying to read these illeagally formatted files. Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of judging "the rest of the 3d world." I can only look at the software I've tried out using my files to play with the tools in that software. Normally I don't hand edit vn lines out of a file though I have done, uvmapper does that perfectly well. But, with Softimage, Cinema4D, Bryce 4 and 5, Poser 3 and 4, Messiah, Maya, and a couple others I can't recall off-hand they did not barf at all. Loaded the object file and it looked just like it did in any other app that I tried. Whether there are apps that hate missing normals exists, I haven't found it yet. No doubt there's at least one, maybe more out there somewhere. shrug

They are aware of it, otherwise the filters would not have been introduced with Pro Pack for P4, they did announce I think that they were working on this for a future release, a Poser 5 Pro Pack I suppose. It's unfortunate that if they're as desperate as intimated that they didn't consider this as a greater source of revenue and aim at pro-level as well rather than leave it to a "later date" when they might not even be around. Indication from Cooper's own comment is that they needed the money from this release to survive, that survival may have been greatly influenced by the current situation and the lack of hi-end support. Time will tell of course, but I personally think it was a serious error.

It's not that a program has to be hard to use to be professional, but the depth of the tools make it hard to use. For instance, a software package I've been playing with recently. Messiah. The materials lab in that has basic colour usage at the surface level with multiple options for specularity, glow, diffusion, transparency etc etc etc. The next material level below that allows the application of textures as well as the top level colour controls. The textures can be multilayered and alpha channeled. There's another layer of controls beneath that. When you add in the multi level options of the lighting system, it creates even more possibilities, effects and results. It's not something that a new user could just open and "click and create" like they can with Poser. The definition of pro app is not in it's difficulty of use, but in the depth and power of it's controls. Messiah, Lightwave, Max, Maya and others have that level and depth of power to their control functions. Poser does not. Poser DOES allow a complete newbie to click and create without ever worrying about deeper level control functions for the creation of an image/animation. More powerful applications expect you to work at it, but as a result produce far more impressive end results. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with battling an application but rather with the power and versatility that application offers to create the vision inside your head.

Perhaps. I'm sure one of the submission criteria at Daz is for "no normals" in the file. Maybe I read that wrong or somewhere else though. I am surprised to see they leave them in. Even without UVmapper or Cr2Edit the normals can be removed in a text editor by deleting everything beginning vn (vertice normal) and resaving the file. It is a valid point though that many people might not even be aware that they can remove the normals without it seriously affecting integration with other applications.