"Today's e-mail from Poserworld said they were starting a new business (making custom 3D models), because they believe the Poser and DS user base is shrinking.

Is that true?  Why would the user base be shrinking?  Is everyone moving on to Lightwave or other high end software?"

Think you have to be very careful when comparing different tools and then conclude that poser is shrinking based on that. 

In my opinion you cant really do that, as these programs are completely different. Blender, 3ds max, maya etc are complete 3ds applications which allow the use to build everything up from ground, where poser is a tool that makes use of these things and is not meant to be a complete 3d package.

Switching from poser to one of these application is like going from word to a programming language. Where the learning curve is extremely high and with no experience in making 3d even making the most basic things are really difficult.

To put it into perspective it is probably equally difficult to modelled good looking characters as it is to make good rigs, texture them and animate them, so its a lot of work to make something in one of these applications to even reach something near what you get in poser. So looking at nice looking images made by very good artist requires a lot of experience, and my guess is that they use several different tools to reach the final result, from a 3D application to photoshop, maybe some after effect etc.

And none of these programs will give you anything that looks good with just a few clicks on some buttons. 

So my guess is that poser user base is fairly steady, might even increase slightly, but that more people might start to integrate more tools into there workflow, which is very common for anyone that does 3D i think. 

Personally i might use posers cloth room for cloth simulations and then import the result into my 3d app and finish up whatever is needed there, because its actually really good and easy to use.

But regarding the OP post, even if they are switching to custom models not really sure what it means, But I would assume that, what they might try to do, is just to reach a larger audience, since poser as well as unity3d, the different 3D apps etc. can all work with these "custom" objects anyway. So doesnt really have to aim it towards a certain application. But as i said not really sure what they mean with custom objects, they might mean something else.

What i might think could work quite well, is if you take the UV map of the character and make it white and then draw the outline and some of the details into it. So the texture would actually look like a drawing. And then you make another texture map where you add the comic type shading to like 3-5 gradient levels and then in poser you can blend the maps together, or just make it as a single map if you dont need to be able to control the outline seperately. Could be fun to try to see if that would actually give good results :D 

Here is an example however there are some heavy use of photoshop :D And its actually really hard, and doesnt look exactly as i wanted.

But anyway i think you would really have to think outside the box with special textures for the characters and objects you use, so you could get as close to a final product in poser as possible before taking it into photoshop or gimp for finishing up. Also set up special lights for poser which would give these comic style shadows, which you have done quite nicely in the last render i think.

Kinda screwed up some images and cant fix them, the cover of the comic book is wrong in the last book this is the correct one :D

"thanks again for the pics!"

Your welcome, also not sure how i could forget but if you need inspiration for storytelling and how to build up pages, like layout etc. I would suggest that you get this comic book, which is the best comic book i have ever read. 

If you dont already know it, this is the cover of the combined 3 part series. Unfortunately i werent able to find the english name for it. 

But it was written by Bruno Chevalier and illustrated by Thierry Ségur.

But besides being a good story, it uses a lot of very sweet layout techniques.

Like this example, where these small beetles kinda of live there own life, while not being important for the story it self. 

Same with the top left corner, its a bit hard to see here, but its another example of all these small side story going on in the book, in this case a battle between these two types of critters, that again doesnt play any important part of the story, but is just something that goes on in the background while the main story is told, but it helps to make it very entertaining, because there are so many details added to it that you keep discovering new things while reading it. 

But anyway in my opinion this comic book is a masterpiece, which i think you can get a lot of good ideas from, even if you should not be into the fantasy stuff. 

I think it could be really nice if you could apply some kind of comic book filter to it, maybe do some photoshop thingy, and/or render a thin pencil stroke outlines of the characters as well to give them that comic book look. 

Here are some examples for some inspiration.

Here i think the shading are really nice, especially the background which gives a very nice comic style look.

Also have a really nice comic look to it, and the texture are very smooth with some rough shadows.

Again the shading looks really nice with few gradient levels that give the comic look and again the blurred background is really nice.

Here i think the contrast really looks nice and again the very blurry, handpaint looking background give it a good comic look.

And if you are looking for something that is not 100% realistic but with a lot more details. And in general a quite dirty image, which give a really cool comic effect i think.

If you want to save some time with textures, colors etc and just work with grayscale it can be really cool as well i think.

But think there are a lot of good inspiration in these images, that can be used to make some really nice comic book styles, and think at least some of the styles could be copied using poser and photoshop or Gimp etc. 

"completely off-topic but still with public interest: how do you manage to get multiple images in one post, and how do you get them exactly between the paragraphs where you want them?"

--

"If you're a dummy poster, then so am I. I'd like to know how he did that as well."

Im a noob poster as well, so havent really thought about it, and dont know how to explain it, but ill try to show it. :D

Then ill add another image the same way

And that basically just it :D

After you post if the text is next to the image just edit the post and press enter at the start of the text that are on the side of the image and then it should pop underneath the image and look correct.

Thats not bad, I try the hair room once in a while, but always give up, i really dont get the controls and my hair always looks bad, so i give up quite fast. :D

Really hope they make some serious improvements to that room. Maybe so you could create single lines that you can use to control hair within a set range so it was possible to get the hair to flow like you wanted a bit more easy. 

Sorry i misread now that i saw Reds answer, i think he is right. So just ignore my first post :D

Just export it as obj while standing in the frame you want, or you can choose it when it ask if you want a single or range of frames. Just find it easier to just be in the correct frame. After you have exported it you just import it again. 

If you have "special" (Meaning more than just diffuse) material on the hair its a good idea to just save it to the library as it will most likely not be correct after you import it. So its just so its easier :)

"On a seperate note this is part of the reason merchants as a whole don;t do more dynamic clothing. It's a steep learning curve even for veteran users and the merchant gets too bogged down with helping people that buy their clothing make it work correctly, or worse yet getting complaints that the clothing doesn't work as advertised."

*Think you have a point in that, even though im personally a bit suprised that dynamic cloth doesnt seem to be used more than i get the impression that it is when reading the different posts on the forum. I would imagine that the marketplace was filled with high quality dynamic cloth. And thats where i think you have a point, there is quite a long way from just a piece of dynamic cloth to some of high quality with a good balance between details in the cloth and at the same time having an acceptable simulation time.

Which also requires that the vendor making the cloth can make it so that the cloth room gets enough details from the cloth to simulate it with good results. So the vendor needs to know how and where to add extra details to places where bending occurs and fewer where there wont be as many.

Like in the dress i used in the example above, if it was original suppose to have a belt with it, adding more details around the belt would have been a good idea.

If you look at the image below, which i actually think might be the same dress that i used in the example above, but that i have optimized. The amount of details you get with folding of the cloth is pretty nice, even though i might not have used correct settings, it would be near impossible to do with conforming cloth. If you think that none of folds are in the dress from the beginning. 

But guess its a matter of taste, i really enjoy using the cloth room and being able to pretty much take any piece of clothing and use for what ever character i like, by just morphing it to make it fit them and then some simple export/import. 

"A method of embedding ALL of the settings/information withing the individual dymnamic cloth pieces could help this but the last time I checked this wasn;t possible. If it has changed I would go back to working with dynamic of hybrid clothing."

*Not sure i understood you correct, but if you save the dress after you have added all contrains and cloth settings etc. They are saved with it, and you can add it like any other piece of cloth. But where you with conforming cloth would choose "Conform to.." you just make the dynamic dress child of the character you want it to be used with, and then you just make a cloth simulation and setup collisions. All the constrains and cloth settings, cloth groups etc are already there. But not sure that is what you meant?

"The belt is just an object around the waist. Ideally, the belt should do what belts do and restrain the dress. But not in this case. The dress sim will immediately envelope the belt like it's not even there. 3D Mobster has the same idea I did, which was to restrain the dress around the waist, but I really want to know why the dress isn't restrained by the belt even though it's set to collide."

Here is an example of how you can do it. I created a belt and an old dress i had, so nothing fancy, but it will suit the purpose well. They are two seperate objects, which the colors show.  

So have imported both objects. And i have scaled the belt so its around the dress and victoria as well.

So in frame 1 i have scaled the dress to 119% and in frame 10 i tighten it down to 104%. The belt is really tight at 100% and will match victoria, so i leave it at 104% so there are some room for the dress, you can ofc experience with it, and also this is done really fast, so to avoid to many problems ill leave it like that.

In the cloth room i have these settings for the dress colliding. The belt is not part of the simulation yet, except as a object for the dress to collide against.

As the simulation is calculating, the belt is tighting around the dress. Since frame 14 is working fine, ill export the dress (Only the dress) in frame 14, and delete it from the scene, then import it again, so it now looks like frame 14 in frame 1. Then ill move the keyframe of the belt scale to frame 1 as well. 

Now the dress and belt looks like it did in frame 14. Next ill export the dress and the belt together. Using the above settings. Delete the old ones from the scene, and import the new combined dress. 

In the cloth room i setup contrains the belt and then i have selected the parts of the dress under the belt and just around it. So there wont be any poke throughs. You should probably spend a bit of time doing this correctly as i just rough it pretty fast. so there will most likely be poke through with certain poses. 

When that is done, you can calculate the dress as a single object like a normal dynamic object. 

You can add a contrain on the dress around where the belt is which will make the cloth behave as if there was a belt holding it tight to the body at that area. And also contrain the belt if you havent already-

My guess is that would give you the best result. 

Otherwise you could try to soft rigid the belt, which will make it follow the dress, but think that might end in unwanted result as the belt would appear to be very loose and unnatural. :)

If the constrain doesnt work try to post an image of the belt as well. Maybe before you have simulated the cloth.

"Thank You! All of the human motions are motion-captured. Unfortunately I am the one who did the mocap and all of the walking looks pretty much the same - which is another reason it may look slightly off. That and I only had an 8'x8' capture space so the walking was done on a treadmill.

Hopefully if we get enough favorable ratings at ScreenHits we'll be able to conitnue making episodes and if so, the quality will be MUCH better since we would have a dedicated team. Trying to make enough money to survive AND do this is not easy.  :)"

Human motion is always difficult to do i think, as we are really good at spotting when something is off even if its just by a little. But i was just thinking that you might be able to speed up the walk animation, not make a new mocap. But anyway know its a lot of work, but just my thoughts. :D

Not sure if you know this site as it seems like you do a lot of animations, it might be a nice help. It have a lot of good animation references videos with frame counter in them so its fairly easy to compare speed of an action, also have for a lot of different animals.

Referencereference free database for animations

http://www.referencereference.com

"We know that it’s VERY rough animation-wise - but as essentially the work of one person, it’s not too bad.    We’re VERY aware of the shortcomings of this pilot - rough animation and story pacing - but it was pretty much a test project to evaluate a pipeline."

Really well made i think, getting a story in there voices and so on. Quite impressive.

Just a small thing. and as you have already said its a pilot episode so things are a bit rough. But something that i noticed quite fast is that the walk animations are a bit slow, so kind of give the impression that they walk in slow motion, increasing those i think would really have a great impact overall on the pilot and the pacing of the story.

But that said, it must have taken a very long time to make, so i hope everything turns out well for you, and very fun to see a project like this.

Best of luck with it, and again very impressive work :D