Speaking of piercings, how the heck do you get a belly ing to stay where it's supposed to? With earrings you just parent to the head, because the ears don't move in relation to the rings. But many poses will shift the navel out from under its ring because the ring can only be parented to the abdomen or hip, and neither works very well. The ring can shift several inches and be buried deep within the stomach or far off to the side, depending on the pose. How do you anchor it to the navel?

The blog says the new content is clothing converted to fit Alyson and Ryan. I assume that if I have no interest in the G2 figures (I don't even have them in my Runtime) that this content is of no use to me?

Likewise, there is no point in downloading the Content Updater if If I do not use the G2 figures and their clothing?

Is there anything in these downloads that is not related to Alyson or Ryan? Sorry, but I got sucked into the world of Victoria and Michael long ago and I just can't go back to CP's figures, at least until they get a lot better. Personally, I think Alyson is a step back from Jessi and Micki, which are a step below V4.

Quote - Whew!  Jerky  could mean anything, if you mean when you flip your dials (take eyes for example) and they flip from side to side or up and down, it could be your dial setting sensitivity control for that dial.  Lowering the setting results in smoother control.  Jan

True, but we are not referring to that. We mean dials that are smooth in a simple scene, but get jerky and wild as the scene grows.

This reminds me of a pet peeve of mine... The default sensitivity of a dial is 1.0. It can be changed to say 0.1 for more precise work, but next time you open that scene it's right back at 1.0. The change is not saved. 

Quote - As of Poser 7, light generated AO has improved dramatically.  There would be no need to include an AO node along with your shaders.

Maybe not, but skin texture authors do anyway. Probably to get the effect on their skin even when AO is not turned on in a lighting set?

My wish list is empty. I've never had anything in my wish list, and if I had, I never would have put 99% of that stuff in it.

I experienced this in P7 as well, and it seemed to get worse as the scene got more complicated. The more figures involved, the more unresponsive and imprecise the dials became and I would end up typing in values out of frustration. Using a standard corded mouse can make it truly excruciating.

I am not a  coder so I don't understand the reason why one figure's dials must be hampered by the presence of another figure in the scene. I hope the engineers use Poser in real-world situations when testing, not only with the least possible demand on resources. Maybe a raw beginner works only with a single naked figure, but he or she quickly grows beyond that.

And while I'm ranting inanely at program designers... Please don't design the interface on your laptop! Most who work in 3D do so on screens of 20 inches or bigger, and what looks right on your laptop shrinks to tiny proportions on large screens with high resolutions. The miniscule text, icons and scrollbars (especially those skinny scrollbars) in P8 look like they were designed for low-res screens, with no way for the user to change it.

BBill's solution is the first and best thing to try in any situation when you think something is transparent but it doesn't quite render that way. And he demonstrates it extremely well.

But even when all 3 transparency parameters are set to zero, some hair props cast ugly dark splotches on skin textures that have an AO node. GND4 is an example of a skin texture with lots of shaders including ambient occlusion. Sometimes this can be addressed by shrinking or expanding the hair so it is closer or farther away from the skin, but this can also result in hair disappearing into the skin or floating above the head like an ill-fitting wig.

Another method in this scenario is to disconnect the AO node in the Face and Head material zones of the skin (or whatever body zone is getting dark splotches from transparencies like lace clothing.) This eliminates the splotches, at the cost of losing the subtle benefits of AO shadowing on those areas. It may well be worth it, if it's not an extreme close-up. You can always re-connect the AO node later, just make a note of what it was connected to before disconnecting.

Of course this requires going into the Advanced tab of the Material Room, which many Poser users are loathe to do. I only understand 1/10th of what goes on in there, but this is one simple thing that pays to learn when you get sick of fixing all those splotches in Photoshop.

I defer to BBill's explanation above, but will add the point that in the new library tree it is very easy to no longer be where you think you are, even though the folders and items in the tree view have not changed. In the old library, you could only see the contents of one folder at a time, so you knew where your save would take place. It couldn't be anywhere else.

It's true that in P8 you can save to a folder other than the one you THINK you're in, but I maintain you can also save to nowhere at all. That is, somehow the folder has become de-selected, yet you can still click on the + button and name the saved item as if it is really being saved. This is true on Mac, anyway. I have saved items and not been able to find them anywhere in my runtime. If I actively re-select the folder and save again, this time it will show up there (sometimes not instantly, but if I go out and back in again to check).

That's what I mean when I say P8 forgets where you are in the library even if you have done nothing to change location. It needs the folder to be selected again. This is not consistent behavior in my case.

I think there may be a memory leak, because sometimes most or all of the menu items will be grayed out and the shortcuts stop working until a relaunch of P8. I don't know if this could affect library behavior.

The P8 library is quite quirky, dare I say buggy, under Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6, even after SR1. The library function buttons on the bottom can vanish at seemingly random intervals, though they can usually be reacquired by going into another category and back again. For me, rendering doesn't seem to have anything to do with it.

Adding an item to the library won't show up there until you go out and into that category again. Sometimes you have to select the category again to make sure you are still there (the library forgets where you are and may not save the item even though it goes through the steps without complaint). This is heartbreaker if you close P8 without saving, thinking you have put your in the library but actually haven't. 

I don't know how much of this is due to the fact that the library is now Flash-driven and no longer constantly polls the drive (which I suppose is the reason for the refresh buttons). BBill could answer this more intelligently.

Looks like a nice piece of freeware for Windows only. I would willingly pay for a Mac version.

Quote - Now would it be possible
to save my new parented hierarchy to my prop
folder WITHOUT having to manually put an X next to each child as a subset of the parent before saving?

To auto-select every child of a parent, option-click the box next to the parent. Everything that's a child will be selected, too. Likewise you can deselect all the children that way.

If you want to mark or unmark the entire scene at once, do this with Universe.

This works both in the Hierarchy window and in the Select Subset window. It also works for making a bunch of things visible or invisible at once. Option is the key (that's for Mac, not sure if PC uses a different modifier key)

I too have shed many figures and props over the years, mostly free stuff that seemed so cool at the time (being free) but now seem primitive or amateurish and not very useful. Yet their geometries and textures remain.

It's a daunting task to tackle many hundreds of OBJ and textures and try to figure out if they're still attached to anything. Especially since an author might unhelpfully name it az-rxm-23.obj and egocentrically put it in a folder called Ralphie3D. Not very easy to identify what the heck it is. (Poser can't find obj files if you rename their folders, so you can't attack this by organizing proactively, like you can with textures). 

A utility to identify and delete orphaned object and texture files would be very useful. And for god's sake don't just do a Windows version! Macs are more popular in the 3D and creative arenas than they are in business offices, and should be part of the equation.

On the topic of shortcuts in general, some of the most commonly used commands don't have a shortcut. One must go to the menu to Duplicate or Conform To, for example, and the Back and Bottom camera views are inexplicably missing shortcuts. This wouldn't be so bad if there was a way to add your own shortcuts. I hoped this would be fixed in P8, but alas.

Ah, sweet relief. The library now sees the full contents of folders (it didn't before under Mac OS 10.6) and the icons for library contents can be enlarged. (The new library options are sorta hard to find, they're under a bar at the bottom of the library)

These were the biggest impediments to me using P8. Thank you! Now to see how well the other bugs were fixed.

I am using Poser 8 and Poser 7 on a Mac Pro 8 core with OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. Here is what I know, or think I know:

• Poser 7 often crashes during render under Snow Leopard.

• Poser 8 doesn't crash during render, in fact renders much faster than P7.

• Poser 8 has some problems finding library content under Snow Leopard, and will sometimes crash when you refresh the library or category. Smith Micro knows about this.

• Since P7 works well as far as the library is concerned (and lacks the tiny-icon problem that P8 has) but crashes during render, I currently use P7 to set up sceness and use the library, then shift to P8 for final tweaking and rendering. This is not optimal, but works for me until they issue the first service release.

• In P8, the renders are SUPPOSED to use most or all of your Mac's processing power. That's why P8 renders so much faster. P7 didn't use all of a computer's processing power to best advantage. In P7, when one core finished its work, it took a break instead of helping the other cores. P8 keeps all the cores busy at nearly full capacity until the render is finished. This is a good thing.

• Moving out of Poser and doing other computer work while a render is in process is asking for trouble. I've got 8 cores churning away when I render, all near 100%, and I don't dare do more than glance at my e-mail while that's going on. I suppose I could tell Poser to use fewer threads to render, but then I get slow renders again. I'm in the habit of doing something else (off the computer) during a long render.