Is this a familiar horror story? You have an outfit in mind. You scour Renderosity, Daz, PPro's, etc. Nada. Then - by chance - someone posts a link here to a site with the perfect item. Wonderful! Your fingers drum on the desk as the download crawls by. But in the readme are the dreaded words, "commercial use requires permission". Okay, you send an e-mail. Which bounces. You check the readme. "(c) MegaArtistMan 2001". You look in Renderosity, and find that MegaArtistMan, from Singapore, hasn't posted for years. His homepage is now disused. Unless you fancy hiring an international private detective, MegaArtistMan has left the planet. But you just know, in those dark late-night moments - and being Poser addicts, we have lots of late-night moments - that when your five-minute animated short is aired on Singapore TV, MegaArtistMan will be watching, sitting on the couch with his best college buddy, MegaHotshotCopyrightLawyerMan. A million to one chance, true. But as Terry Pratchett once remarked, million to one chances happen nine times out of ten. I won't knowingly use a non-commercial piece in any work I think might sell for money. Legally, you are breaking a contract, and it's not worth the risk. All the same, this means that content providers risk having their work passed over and discarded, because of its non-commercial tag. My advice is - make the work free for all uses. If you're not yet making a living off your work, it's more important that it get exposure. The chances that George Lucas will use it to make his next hundred million while you can't afford food for the cat, are pretty damn small.

Just an oddball idea...

Can you find a model of a normal potted plant?

Divide it into two groups - the pot and the plant. Bring it into Poser.

Go into the cloth room, clothify the plant, and run a simulation. Find the frame where it's wilted to your satisfaction, and spawn a morph target.

You may well have to select some constrained/decorated verts, and play with the cloth settings.

Good luck!

Just remember - no matter how kinky you get, you'll never be as kinky as the people listening in through the bedroom wall...

Message edited on: 03/26/2006 15:44

Okay - I tried it again and found that Smoother 3 actually does sparsify a bit - I just wasn't noticing it in the graph. You have to run it a couple of times for the dropped frames to become obvious. So thanks svdl and Helgard, I seem to have got the problems sorted out - just hadn't got used to how the scripts work.

Phil, a couple of years back when I was just getting into Poser, yours was the first freestuff I got, and you were kind enough to e-mail me to help me install it. I still have it on disk somewhere. I'm sorry to hear you had trouble with hackers, and I hope your excellent freestuff will be back online sometime soon. Best wishes for getting the problems sorted out.

It was a false alarm with Walk on Surface. All of a sudden, it loaded with the "last frame" slider set to 1, so it thought the animation was 1 frame. All I had to do was move the slider over. So no worries there - it just hadn't done that before.

As for smoother, it smoothes out the animation fine, but it doesn't seem to delete the unnecessary keyframes.

Thanks for your help!

Okay, I managed to sort out what was wrong with Walk on Surface - and I've got Smoother 3, and it works fine. But it's the Sparsifier that I'd like to get working, as I'm trying to clean up some BVH. I don't think Smoother 3 does any sparsifying, but correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks for the link, anyway!

You could try the freeware program Terranimator, which makes landscapes for rendering in the free Anim8or 3d modeller. It has a facility for rendering a landscape onto a sphere. You can then export that texture and put it on a sphere inside Poser, to act as a skydome. I'm not sure if Terragen can do this, as it's a while since I took a look at it, but it might be worth asking over at the Terragen forum. As for making the background, that's not such a problem. You can even do it in Poser. FOR A CYLINDRICAL BACKDROP (CYCLORAMA) 1) Open the cylinder prop from the "primitives" library. 2a) Use the grouping tool to make the top and bottom of the cylinder a new material. Then go to the material room and make that material 100% transparent, with no reflections, etc. OR 2b) Use the grouping tool to select the sides, make a new prop, and delete the original cylinder. (Dr Geep has posted tutorials here about using the grouping tool) 4) Scale up to suit your scene. If you use a modelling program, you can just bring in a cylinder and delete the top and bottom. FOR A SKYDOME Simply open the sphere prop from the "primitives" library and scale it up till it's big enough to look like the sky. Depending on what kind of texture you use, you may have to import it into UVMapper and apply different kinds of mapping. FADING THE GROUND INTO THE SKY Imagine your skydome is spherically mapped, so that the horizon comes just about halfway up the map. Make a very small black and white texture - 256 x 256 will do - white at the top, black at the bottom, fading into each other halfway up. Apply this to the sky as a transparency map. Make a second texture with a white circle on a black background. Blur the join between black and white. Apply this to the ground as a transparency map. Now, if you line up the fadeout circle on the ground with the fadeout area of the skydome, the two will seem to dissolve into each other. If you make the background colour a pale grey or bluegrey, you'll get the effect of haze at the horizon. You could try to get this effect with the depth-cue function, but it's rather more difficult to control.

If you want to see what can be done with Anim8or as a low-poly modeller, check out some of Geralday's brilliant little creations in the freestuff. How 'bout it, Gerald - tell us some of your secrets in a tutorial, maybe?

Once you've done that, set your preferred render and movie-output options. Then, go to Edit/Preferences and click "Set preferred state". Poser will now open with this set-up whenever you run the program.

Set up your workspace the way you want it. Get the tools and windows set up on your screen to suit your taste, set "full tracking" if your computer can handle it. Then change the lights from the default Poser "Jungle" setting to all grey. Delete the standard figure from the studio so that Poser doesn't have to load it each time you boot up.

1. V3 is an extra figure, available from Daz.com. She - with the male figure Mike - is usually free of charge. However, many of the characters based on V3, which you find here at Renderosity, require the purchase of a morph-target set. These morph-targets allow the body to be sculpted into new shapes.

2. As to why the downloads aren't showing up - if you've downloaded some textures, they won't be in the library at all. You have to go to the Materials Room and open the files from there. If you write back with a clear example of what's going wrong, we can all help you to get things working.

You're not alone, guys, I've also had this "Dr Who Titles" effect occasionally with P6. It never seems to harm the render, though.

Most pro's use Photoshop for texturing, although PaintShopPro can do most of the things Photoshop can, and is generally reckoned better value for money. If you do a search through the Python script collection here, you should find a script that automatically makes MAT files for you.

All together now:

I'm a Vicky-Three and I'm okay
I fight all night and I pose all day
On Wednesdays I go shopping
Down at Renderosity

I leap and slash
I fence and slay
Go dungeon-bashing too
They'll never stop my endless quest
For Multiple-Undo

:)