Nice render Ronstuff. What light set did you use?

While we're busy banning images that turn people on, let's ban photos of men with large wallets. After all, that's what gets most women excited.

For animations bound for DVD, I create the animation uncompressed, then use TMPGEnc-Plus to convert the AVI file to MPEG-2. It's also important to use a DVD authoring program which skips using its own MPEG conversion routine if the clip is already DVD-compliant (i.e., if you've already converted it to MPEG-2 using TMPGEnc). The free version of TMPGEnc will let you encode to MPEG-2 for something like 11 days before it expires. I bought the TMPGEnc-Plus upgrade for $45 or so download purchase and it works very well.

Thanks again to everyone who put so much thought and creativity into solving this problem of using PZ2s for "pointing at" things.

I tried Migal's PZ2 for pointing the eyes at the aux camera, and it worked great! I then made another for pointing at the main camera. When I tried to change the file to point at a prop, though, it didn't work... but I'm sure only because I didn't change the right things in the PZ2 file. But I'll keep trying.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Wow. I'm amazed at the extent and sophistication of peoples' response to this query. (Thank you!)

Taking a cue from Miga and lesbentley's conversation on this topic over in the technical forum, I did a little experimenting and found that the "Point At" conditions are indeed saved with the character in a CR2 file ... IF the prop being pointed at is somehow in a parenting chain with the figure whose element is being pointed. That is, the Focus Ball prop I use is parented to my main camera as a default. If I parent the main camera to my figure's Body, then save the character, when the character is reloaded the eyes are still pointing at the Focus Ball.

So I guess if I don't want to have to "re-point" the eyes as the target prop every time I load the character from the pallette, I can just save the character with the main cam parented to it (along with the focus ball), and eliminate the need for a pose file method for re-establishing the "point at" conditions.

The cost, of course, is that I can't move the figure's BODY without affecting the main camera, but I tend to move the figure's location and pose with Hip anyway. But if any of our several resident geniuses come up with a better solution, I'd love to hear it! Thanks again...

Maybe this should be titled "The Wench and the Wrench" ?? (They're both nice BTW.)

In my experience, one of the most important factors in determining rendering times is the light set you use. If you use one of those global illumination light sets with 30 or so lights, and many of them are set to cast shadows, the shadow mapping time can be very, very long. In addition, I've found that my risk of crashing while rendering an AVI goes up considerably with more complex light sets (even on my Dell M-50 precision workstation with 2.2-GHz, 1MB RAM, large swap file, etc). So I've spent a fair amount of time mixing and matching different light sets to try to get a reasonably realistic global illumination look without using too many total lights or too many large and complex shadow maps. Anyway, you might try different light sets on a single frame render to see how you want to trade off speed versus lighting quality. Good luck...

Looks like I'll have to try DivX again, at least for encoding AVIs for playback on the computer. When I tried it a couple months ago (v 5.0.2 I think) I didn't really like the image quality. I thought it wasn't as good as using Quicktime Pro 6 to play back an imported AVI or image sequence from Poser. Also, the DivX player included in the bundle kept crashing at the end of every clip. But I should try it again now that v5.0.4 is out (thanks for the tip Little Dragon).

Thanks to BYS for the insights on what actually constitutes a DVD-compliant stream. I had just been going by the Ulead or DVD Complete setup screens reporting whether the imported clip was being interpreted by the program as DVD-compliant or not. But maybe Ulead just interprets a 720x480 Quicktime MOV file as an MPEG.

I just finished running some tests comparing a few different DVD editing and authoring programs (and their embedded MPEG encoders) using Poser AVIs and image sequences as inputs. My aim was to find the best quality display of Poser 4 animations on my HDTV digital television after burning the animations into DVD.

Bottom line was I was very disappointed at the quality of the MPEG encoders used by Ulead Movie Factory 2 and Dazzle Complete DVD. I also tried the MPEG output file mode for Pinnacle Studio 7 (to burn directly to DVD you need to upgrade to Studio 8, but I read about major problems with crashing during burning... and I had already bought ENOUGH authoring programs trying to find the right one). But Pinnacle MPEGs were even worse.

As a matter of fact, I was also very disappointed in the quality of the MPEG encoding by these programs of regular digital camcorder footage when burning to DVD. I saw lots of distracting jaggies, especially in outdoor high-contrast action shots. And doing something like a slow pan across a grassy area made the grass look all jaggy and pixelated. Very disappointing since I had just assumed DVD authoring programs would make perfect replicas of my digital camcorder tapes.

Then I found some advice on the DVDplusRW.org forums that suggested using TMPGEnc to encode the MPEG files. In fact, I found four different message threads which suggested TMPGEnc as the best encoder. I tried their trial version last weekend and it works better than anything else I've tried on regular camcorder footage (but still not as perfect as the original tape plays on my HDTV).

TMPGEnc also did a very good job with Poser 4 avi files, though I haven't really tried this out extensively with lots of different tweaking sets yet. And I'm not sure the TMPGEnc results on DVD will be better than some earlier tests burning Poser AVIs to DVD I did using Quicktime to convert the 640-x480 AVI output from Poser to a DVD-compliant 720x480 stream (Ulead, but not Dazzle, can import Quicktime MOV files and you can tell Ulead Movie Factory 2 not to re-encode DVD compliant streams, so you avoid their MPEG encoder that way... though I think Dazzle will also skip it's own encoding if the input is DVD-compliant). I remember from my testing that this gave good results, but I need to look back over those tests to be sure (I'm not very rigorously organized when I do these tests... not a scientist type... and I forget stuff too quickly these days)

So my advice would be to try the free version of TMPGEnc at TMPGEnc.net. This trial version lets you encode MPEG-2 files for 11 days or so before requiring an upgrade to TMPGEnc-Plus. I've been convinced enough of the quality improvement using TMPGEnc for my digital camcorder DVD authoring that I plan to get the upgrade, which I think is about $45 for a download version.

Let us know what you think, and if you find any other good programs or strategies.

Good luck...

I also changed the displayed leg-bend pose from 0 deg hip & -65 deg thigh to -30 deg hip (the supposed limit) & -35 deg thigh. There's still an inappropriate flat patch near the hip joint on the thigh, but it's not as bad. And the weird bulge on top of the thigh is significantly lessened.

I may try Jim Burton's Glamorous Vicky, but I've already built and applied a number of my own magnets, and I'm not sure how well those would transfer to GV. I'd like to keep using my own magnets because they deform the V3 clothes as well as V3 to maintain the fit.

But maybe I won't scrap V3 just yet.

Again, thanks to everyone...

The material? It's ... well... I think it's mithril. You know, from Lord of the Rings: "light as a feather... but hard as dragon scales". I think VV2003 found it while poking around some temple somewhere during her neverending quest in search of conforming clothing.

If you're concerned about DAZ and others using a ! prefix to elevate folders, all you have to do to re-elevate your favorites is add a space after the ! to those you want to reign supreme (e.g., "! Favorites"). For those you want at the very top, add 2 spaces.

Oops... credit for the suggestion conveyed in this thread to slightly scale up clothing goes to milamber42 rather than Jim Burton, though I owe Jim B many thanks for lots of other great ideas and products (can't wait to use the refit file I just downloaded to fit his Las Vegas hair to my V3)!