Well, not one I've run into before, but off the top of my head I'd say your best bet would be to go under the Edit menu and select general preferences (I think ctrl K is the hotkey for it).

Under the interface tab, select "launch to factory state", then close Poser and restart it.  If this is some sort of setting in poser causing the problem that should do the trick, and if not at least it will tell you that it's not a Poser setting that was changed that is causing the problem.

Stepdad

Quote - Y'know, I'm a big believer that, if an update doesnt have features I want, I dont bother updating. The CS series from Adobe, for example -- there's nothing there I cant get from my current levels of Photoshop and Illustrator, so I didnt bother with them, and I dont miss them one whit. I'm sure Mac's OSX10.5 will be just chock full of really great stuff, but it's really great stuff that I dont need or want, so I'll probably plod along with 10.4 until I'm forced by my software to upgrade.

But having said that, I cant imagine why anyone would stay with Poser 4. Honest, folks -- and that comes from someone who didnt bother with 5 and gave 6 only a cursory run. But the moment I opened 7, as buggy as it was (and minimally so, I might add, for a first release), I was hooked. I could see a drastic improvement in the renders -- and Firefly, as much as people bitch about it, was a whole new world. And that's not even taking into consideration the Hair, Set Up and Dynamic Cloth rooms, which I've only barely hit after having P7 for months now.

Sorry, but IMHO, as rock solid as P4 was, you're just cutting yourself off at the kneecaps by not going after the upgrade. Yes, the renders done in P4 are still perfectly acceptable, and for most users about the best they want anyway. But --- and again, this is just IMHO -- the folks who steer clear of it and complain loudly that it's "too complicated" or "too weird an interface" havent even looked at it, let alone done anything with it to merit that judgment. The interface is only marginally different from P4 until you wander into the set up rooms noted above. Everything else, folks, is virtually the same, so let's just set the whole interface argument aside, okay?

Is it tougher to learn? Only if you go deeper than the usual "insert from column A here and conform to column B here". Aside from that, things are exactly the same. You still conform clothing to a character. Yes, now they're considered props, but big whoop. It's still the same process. You still change the materials in the materials room with the same process you used in P4 -- I know, because most of the time that's as far as I go with material assignation, although I'm finding some real gems to be unearthed by gingerly stepping into that Advanced tab,

If you want decent quality renders, yep, P4 will do it for you. No argument there. But if you want to push them to the next level.....

Love the advanced tab myself, couldn't live without it at this point.   What used to take me dozens of different texture files to acheive I can generally replace now with a couple of shader nodes and a checkmark here and there.  Some really amazing effects can be generated pretty quick, without the need to open photoshop and edit textures till my fingers bleed :)

As for MikeJ, I'm not certain why someone who so obviously despises Poser would be in a poser forum posting, but if it makes him happy then more power too him.  As my grandfater always use to tell me, the key to having a happy life is simple.  Just remember to never sweat the petty things or pet the sweaty things.  

Grandad was an interesting guy :)

Stepdad

Quote - I'm pretty sure I consider things before I respond - most of the time.
And nor did I say people using anything less than P7 are idiots, though you seem to imply so, through the '69 mustang analogy in your last paragraph.

Just tossing in my two cents, based on about 8 years of Poser usage - just ignore me if you don't like my opinions, but I hardly need to be lectured on what I need to consider before I post.

I meant to imply nothing of the sort, I simply stated and will state again that people use different applications for different reasons.  Poser 4 is a perfectly acceptable choice if it suits someones application.  It just doesn't happen to suit mine.  I can however see how it would a wonderful option to have if, well for example, I happened to own an older laptop without much in the way of system resources and wanted to do some base work while mobile.  Different applications call for different sorts of software packages.

Poser 7 does suit my application, though Cinema 4d would not.  The allegory presented was done so in the hopes that you might consider the fact that various people have a variety of applications and reasons for chosing a particular program.

You used poser for years, and switched as it apparently no longer suited your needs. That is all well and good for you, but it doesn't make poser a bad program, which is not something you implied but rather something you stated in your remarks.  It might be a bad choice for what you use a 3d rendering program for, but it's not a bad program.  That was not an accurate or thoughtful statement to make, which again is all that was "implied" in my analogy.

You may of course consider anything you wish before you respond to anything posted, that is your perogative.  However I would hope that you would be a bit more thoughtful in your replies, if you have used poser for 8 years there is a lot that you probably have to offer in the way of tips and suggestions for improvements.  A thoughtful response of this nature is constructive and conversation worthy.

A simplistic "Poser sucks and everyone who uses it does too" sort of statement like the original post I responded too does nothing and really serves no useful purpose.  If this is how you chose to respond however certainly you have every right too, I was simply hoping that a more civil, adult discussion of such things could take place.

If you instead wish to take offense at what I've posted and attempt to start some sort of argument I'm afraid I'm simply not interested in doing so, I'm far too old to be entertained by something like that and honestly I have far too many other things that I find far more enjoyable to do than to swap insults on a computerized message base.

You are naturally free to take offense at anything I might have said, but no offense was intended.  So if it's a discussion of improvements to Posers UI is of any interest to you I'll be more than happy to discuss it at length.  Anything else I'm afraid you'll have to find another sparing partner for.

cheerio!
Stepdad

Quote - The only software that "sux" more than P7 is...P6, P5, PPP, P4....
Whoever designed that whole node system was on acid, but it's still better than anything P4 had to offer.
As Poser evolves, each version sux a little less than the prior version.
One day, you may become a real program, Posernocchio....

It's all about what works for your application and budget I suppose.  Sure, 3ds max will do things that poser can't even dream of - but then again I can't really afford a copy of 3ds max for home use nor justify the price of it when it comes to what I do with a 3d rendering program in my off hours.

So it's all about bang for your buck - I'm not saying poser is the end all be all of 3d rendering software, but it is moderately priced and for that moderate price you get a decent amount of power and ease of use.

Whatever your prefered software application might be I'm sure it suits your needs and you must like it or you wouldn't still be using it, but just because an application might work great for you doesn't necessarily mean that it works great for everyone else.

Case in point, as a single guy I loved my classic american muscle car, the 69 mustang.  Put a lot of time, energy, effort and money into that car in the years that I owned it.  Worked great for me back then, because it did what I needed it to do and it was fun to drive.

Nowadays I drive a Nissan Pathfinder.  Why?  Because I have a family of 5 and that old muscle car just doesn't fit the bill anymore.  I can pack my entire family into the pathfinder and we can all go to the movies together, instead of taking seperate cars.  I have 4wd so when winter hits I can climb the steep hill on which my house resides with relative ease, rather than parking down at the bottom and walking up.  The Nissan just fits my application better.

But I would never say that anyone driving a 69 mustang or other old muscle car is an idiot for not buying a Nissan Pathfinder instead.  That would be silly.  It's all about what works for their application and personal preference.  Just something you might want to consider in future responses.

Stepdad

Ok, guess I should jump in here myself and add my 2 cents worth as well.  Now, how many people can name a high end 3d rendering, modellling or posing program with an interface that is fully inuitative and falling off a log easy to learn and yet has all of the features you'd expect in a modern 3d rendering program, such as shaders and proper texture mapping.  An app so easy to use that it requires almost no documentation or training whatsoever and even someone who's never worked with a 3d app before can master it on their own in a matter of hours.

Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

Lol.. ok, having written more than my share of UI's in the past I can tell you from experience that it's not as easy as one might think.    The more the program can do, the harder and harder it becomes to make the interface intuitive.  For a program with say 50-60 features and options your hard pressed not to have some feature somewhere that an end user is going to find difficult to find and or use.

Now multiply that by a factor of 5 or 10 and you begin to see the problem.  A modern 3d posing and rendering program is a complex beast with a ton of different options.  If you want users to have that power then it comes at a price - and that is an increasingly less "intuitive" interface with each feature you add.

Sure, P4 has an easier interface - it's "intuitive" because it's what your used to using.  I never used P4 so odds are pretty good I'd be utterly lost in it's interface and find it horrible by comparison to P7, which is a program I'm most familiar with.  It's "intuitive" to me now because it's what I've learned to use.  

Much like Bryce's interface confuses me to no end, but I can fire up 3ds Max and be building models in no time.  Because it's what I'm used too - sit a Bryce master down with a copy of 3ds Max for the first time and watch the look on his face as he tries to work with the UI.  It's most frustrating because he knows what he wants to do and is sure the program must be able to do it, but doesn't have the foggiest notion where to start.  

I guess if P4 works for you then great, use it!  If it suits your needs and your application then I wish you well and hope that you enjoy it for years to come.   But having seen some renders done in P4 I can tell you that it doesn't suit my needs or my application, I need something that has a few more options when it comes to texturing, shading and rendering so I'll stick with what I know for now, and hope that the next revision will have features that I need at a price I'm willing to pay.

Stepdad

Quote - > Quote - > Quote -  

OH I SO AGREE!!!

Big change though and would only work for zip files, not Daz installers (without serious work). I will think about this though. I can't say it will be imminent much as I would like it to be so.

 

Well, if I understood how the program works it essentially "hijacks" the daz install process by feeding it parameters already, so I can't imagine it would be too difficult to just have the program install all the runtime info to a dummy directory and copy it over from there just as if it were a zip.

 

True. Still, the renaming bit would be tricky and it would invalidate the Daz installers uninstall routines.

Hmm.... but that would be simple enough to work around I would think, install everything without the "uninstall" feature from daz, and just incorporate an uninstall feature in your own program instead.  Since the idea is they'll be using your program have it keep a log file of what it installed and where and give it the ability to uninstall them instead, bypass the daz installer almost entirely.

Truth be told what little I have from Daz I never use there uninstaller routines anyway, more of a pain that what their worth.  I don't want 20 or 30 extra entries in my add and remove programs menu, enough crap in there already :)

Stepdad

Quote - "can't you just make the shin invisible ?"

I'd normally do this, too, but it's a stocking, and you kinda need to see the skin underneath for it to look right. Good thing I decided to brave the magnets, again, because I was able to fix that pokethrough in the left shin! Yay! (The rough render shows the stocking fitting normally on Aiko when Aiko has the StretchLegs setting at 1.0, and has a pose applied to her; as can be seen, everything works just fine, though I think I have to make her feet invisible; good thing she comes with boots, too!)

I'm going to see about making these stockings fit the thigh and shins when set at 120% and 130% yscale (roughly 2.0 and 3.0 on the StretchLegs morph; yes, I actually sat down and figured this stuff out; that's what obssessed people do). After I've made sure this method is solid, I'm also going to see if I can't package up the magnet and the bone structures for download, with a nice, neat tutorial attached to it. Why make people completely recreate this method if they don't have to?

...
...
...

I cann't believe it! I actually found something that works! (Hopefully!)

TheKeeper

Keep working with those magnets.. the more practice you get with them the easier they are to use.  They scared the snot out of me when I first started using poser and I rarely if ever used them, now I use them all the time.  They are an incredibly powerful tool and once you get some practice with them you can very quickly and easily produce a wide variety of effects which are very easy to turn into morph targets.

Stepdad

Ok.. a couple of basics on skirts for poser characters.  When you "conform" an item of clothing to the character it matches the bone structure inside the clothing figure to the bone structure inside the character you conform it too.  

Now, when the bones are bent those mesh areas of the clothing that are designated as part of that bone group will bend with the figure.  This works great for pants, shorts, and most shirts.  Not so with skirts.

When the figure moves forward or backwards eventually the edge of the skirt makes contact with the legs and causes "poke through".  There are a couple of ways of fixing this though, not to worry.

Most quality products put out by vendors use one of two methods, in fact some use both, to address this problem.  They will either add extra bones to the skirt allowing you to bend certain sections of it to allow it to conform to your pose, or they will add morphs that will allow you to make portions of the skirt come out, up, or move side to side.  Many use both to allow the user maximum control.

However if your working with the poser default characters odds are good your also working with very basic clothing that has no such capabilities built in.  That's ok, you still have a couple of options.

First, magnets. The allow you to deform part of the clothing to suit your needs.  There are a lot of really good tutorials on magnets out there, so I won't go into great detail on this unless a followup is needed.

Second, you can do what the vendors themselves do and add additional bones to the skirt in the setup room.  This is a bit more complicated of course and has a few more steps involved, but it gives your clothing the maximum adjustability with the greatest of ease.

Setup room tutorials are also available in abundance, I'm sure you can find one if this notion suits your fancy.

Hope that helps,
Stepdad

Quote - hey all - I recently happened across MarkVolk's stunning image 'Gravity' and was quite stunned by the beauty and originality of his heroine! Anyway, I've been trying to incorporate aspects of her shape (mainly breasts and hip/thigh areas) into a super-heroine character of my own. In spite of some very helpful information and advice from the artist, I just can't seem to get these areas to look right at all. Sooooo, and this is a bit of a bizarre question, I was wondering if any of you V3 morph experts might be able to take a guess at the morphs/settings that might create a similar shape?

Any thoughts would be really appreciated! Many thanks in advance :)

Magnets... they are your friend.. your best friend really in poser.  Most morph settings aren't really designed for such extremes and you'll probably run into difficulties if you try to go too far off a fairly default pose, but if it were me I'd probably give magnets a shot.

Just my 2 cents worth :)

Stepdad

Quote -  

OH I SO AGREE!!!

Big change though and would only work for zip files, not Daz installers (without serious work). I will think about this though. I can't say it will be imminent much as I would like it to be so.

Well, if I understood how the program works it essentially "hijacks" the daz install process by feeding it parameters already, so I can't imagine it would be too difficult to just have the program install all the runtime info to a dummy directory and copy it over from there just as if it were a zip.

That's a real toughy actually - water is a funny beast.  It has a fairly unique property known as "surface tension" that causes it to react in strange and wonderous ways.

Ever wonder why people jumping off a high bridge die when they land even though they are hitting water?  Surface tension - hitting water at those speeds is like hitting concrete.  Same reason a modern aircraft carrier can stay afloat even though they weigh more than 35,000 tons (or roughly 7 million pounds).

At any rate, because water has this cohesive effect, it tends to react very differently to different types of surfaces.  Water on a horizontal surface will tend to bead and pool, but when presented with a vertical surface it will tend to stream or drip.

I would imagine a mathematical model of this would be highly complicated - certainly far above my meager math skills.  I imagine some incredibly brilliant individual with 6 or 7 advanced degrees in math and an intimate knowledge of the python programming language might be able to come up with a python program to do an accurate simulation based on the type of surface and amount of water.  I have enough problems balancing my checkbook and the closest I ever got to python was the local zoo.

Me personally I went the lazy guy road and just made a set of various brushes for photoshop and put it all in post production based on what I think looks good.  Not scientific and certainly not accurate but most people probably wouldn't notice the difference.

As far as the part where water would be dripping from a vertical surface (lets say from the fingers or the chin for example) my guess would be you'd probably need additional geometery of some sort to accurately simulate this in program like poser, a prop file of some sort would probably work, but again nothing I can think of to automate the process of adding them without some really high end math or script.

If you do come up with a solution I'd love to hear it, it's one of the tougher questions to crack to be certain.

Most useful feature I could think of off the top of my head would be a filter for the directory names that come in many prepackaged runtimes.

For example, the directory name in the character folder might be Micheal's Suit - but the guy who made the runtime for whatever reason decided to put "Mat Suit" for a directory name for the mat files, and used "artist name here" as the directory name in the geometry and texture file location.

This can become quite maddening after a while, you get 10 or 20 directories like this and trying to track everything down becomes a royal pain in the keester, especially those damn material files.  How can anyone possibly remember the name of the original vendor 6 months or a year later so they can track down the geometry or worse yet the original texture file?

If your program could allow you to substitute a single name for all of these different directory names that would be a real godsend.  It would be nice it it would check to see no duplicate names of that same directory already existed, but just the ability to get rid of that stupid "MAT" designation or those godawful "!" signs in front of the directory name would be fantastic.

Nothing worse than trying to find something when it's out of alphabetical order.  Really wish more people would keep that in mind when there packaging this stuff in the first place.

Lol.. ok, rant over... 

Stepdad

Lol.. nice of them to offer it for free, but considering my limited Japanese skills (just enough to get my face slapped), I think it would be faster to model one myself... lol

Stepdad

Quote - Well, the tutorial didn't look all that bad, for the most part. The steps seemed very easy to follow. I'll definitely consider MorphMaster as another option! Thank you!

TheKeeper

Well, not too certain about wardrobe wizard, as I understand it it's primarly geared towards converting clothing from one figure type to another rather than morph transforms, but I could be wrong as it's not a program that I've used personally.

I've heard good things about the Tailor from a friend who owns a copy, again not a program I use personally but he swears by it.  He says for figures other than V4 it's about as easy as it gets, you load the CR2 file for the figure (Like Aiko or V3), then load the CR2 file for the clothing, pick the morphs from a list of full body morphs and then click on the transfer button and save the final result.  Pretty much a 1, 2 3 sort of process from the way he explained it.

From what I understand he was having some difficulty getting the program to work with V4 - apparently from what he was saying some of the FBM's in V4 are a bit different, so he finally had to create FBM's for the V4 character himself by applying the morph, creating a full body morph in poser, then saving a special version of the V4 cr2 he called V4 Tailor.  

Then the tailor could find the FBM's fine and it seems to work great even with the standard V4 character, he only uses the "Tailor" cr2 to load into the tailor as a reference file.

Me personally I probably use a much less popular method, when I need a morph I export the clothing in question to an obj file, edit it in a modelling application and then reimport it as a morph target.  Works for me, but some people prefer the click and it's done approach.

Nothing wrong with that mind you, but my workflow and application is probably a lot different than most so I've kinda developed my own way of doing things. 

Just my 2 cents worth
Stepdad

Quote - I've spent a few days searching, contacted people with no reply, and finaly decided to just ask here.  I'm wondering how to do some major morphing work with my figures.  One example would be like DAZ's alien head morphs, how exactly do they get the head to morph like that?  Is it a set of maticulous placed magnets or something else?  Or is this something that I would have to export my figure to another program and work on?

Well, you can do a surprising amount with magnets and the morph tool from within poser, but for truly "advanced" morphs I've found the easiest and simplest solution is to export the geometry as an obj file, import it into a 3d modelling program, make the changes I want and then load the same geometry back into poser as a morph target.

The big thing to remember is not to add or delete any vertices or change the scale while your in your 3d modelling program, as long as you don't it should load right back into poser as a morph target with no problems whatsoever.

Hope that helps!
Stepdad