When I said 'touch a camera', I meant in an empty scene.

Daz Studio is intelligent about asking you if you want to save or not. For example, if you open a figure, play with it, then delete it from the scene, it won't ask you if you want to save, because there's nothing in the scene to save.

In a blank scene in Poser, move the camera, then hit CTRL+N and you're asked if you want to save. Save a .cr2 to the library and you're still asked if you want to save.

I realise Poser is asking the user about a .pz3 save, not .cr2, but it's still annoying (to me anyway).

mac

Interesting, BB.

Now.... is there any chance that Poser has STOPPED asking you if you want to save the scene.... even when you've done nothing but touch a camera?

That would be one PITA less.

mac

*"*Pretty cool feature - you can drag a material or material collection from the library into the pose window directly onto a prop or figure, without going into the material room"

Interesting. Daz Studio already has this feature (with poses too) and it's something I use a lot. Actually, in DS you can drag any content from a thumbnail into the scene to load it, but materials and poses are probably the most useful for this.

I'm itching to know if you can drag materials onto any figure/prop without already having it selected, but I don't know if you're able to answer that.

Anyway, hurrah for not having to constantly go to the material room! That was an immensely over-rated pastime, IMO.

mac

"hey, Mac, I never said the interface couldn't be improved. I'm just not in favor of trashing it altogether which it seems some folks are"

I'm not really in favor of trashing Poser's UI either. Personally, I don't like it one little bit, but I realise that many people are attached to it and I can sympathise with that.

However, I do feel that the UI is becoming a big stumbling block for Poser. I'm not sure how long they can carry on with the same system and still integrate new technology. I mean, let's face it.... how many other programs do you know of which still load up a bunch of .psd files to build the UI? We're in 2009 and MS provides standardised ways of building the UI, hardly any of which Poser uses. Actually, the menu bar is really the only standard windows unit in Poser that I can think of right now. Opening times for the program are getting longer as more and more .psds have to be loaded, and it's generally beginning to creak at the seams.

But as I said, change the entire UI, and we might see a Poser Users Revolution, because people like it and are used to it. Maybe some sort of dual system might be possible, but frankly, I wouldn't bet on it. Perhaps an alternate system of rooms could be used, where users could add their own UI elements and get used to it slowly, while still having the main UI as an option.

But the really difficult part of all this is that a good percentage of the users DO want to see a major UI change. So how do you keep both camps happy, and still move forward without the whole program falling down your ears?

I don't have any answers. I'm not a programmer, but I'm just pointing out that I can see both sides of it. After using Poser for 12 years, I'm heartily sick of the interface and I'd love to try something new, if they could come up with it. At the same time, it would be a major upheaval and I'd have to get used to a whole new way of doing things.

I'd be more than willing to try, especially if it meant improved functionality and workflow, but I know that not everyone would agree with me.

mac

If (for example), an improved UI allowed things like multiple selection of figures and materials, I'm sure a lot of Poser users would gladly swallow their objections, as long as they were finally able to perform standard operations, like apply materials to more than one surface at a time.

mac

"DAZ also has the advantage because of those fora. Frankly, SM taking them down at CP was a mistake, no matter how underutilized they might have been. DAZ uses those fora to monitor what's going on, and it does so in a very immediate (well, more or less) way. The customer base feels it has virtually full access to the DAZ team because, in a way, it does. Farr drops by and talks to people. Cooper doesnt. And that is a seriously big deal to a lot of people"

I agree with that, but there's another, far more important way that DAZ keeps in contact with it's user base - The Bug Tracker. If I could give only one piece of advice to the Poser team, it would be "Open a public bug tracker!"

Through the DS tracker, I've reported dozens of bugs and seen them fixed. And I've requested dozens of features and seen them implemented. To me, that's what customer contact really means. The software may not be perfect (no program ever is), but at least they're willing to listen to my complaints and fix them.

Poser has always been a closed program in that sense. From time to time there are polls, but we never have a clue if we've been listened to until a new version comes out a few years later. The Poser team may well monitor these forums and wishlist threads, but there's not much evidence of it as far as the users are concerned.

At the DAZ chats on DS 3, Dan Farr came in and talked about the features, along with some of the people who designed them. It makes a big difference when you can ask the guys who wrote the program, "Hey! What does this do?" or '"Will we ever see X feature in DS?"

Whether you love or hate DAZ, you have to admit to that they at least get right down and talk to the people who buy their stuff. I'd love to see more interaction between Poser and the community, and I'd love to have somewhere to send a bug report, something I'd gladly do in the interests of improving the program for all users.

(Btw, I said all this to the Poser people in an e-mail years ago, so it's nothing they haven't already heard).

mac

Btw, I just found a link to a tutorial which might be helpful. (I haven't actually read it, but someone recommended it).

http://www.sharecg.com/v/29425/pdf/word-doc-tutorial/Reorganizing-Your-Content-in-DAZ-Studio

mac

"View Folders should have been default.  View Categories is very annoying to people with established poser content folder structure"

Never a truer word spoken. I use View Folders As Tree and avoid the whole content Db thing. I find that it's nothing but a pain, although I don't doubt some people like it.

pjz,

I can see you're making a determined attempt to master DS, so if I may, I'd like to offer some advice. As you've already figured out, the Preferences dialog allows you to add Runtimes by content type and the Tree view lets you see them as they are on your HDD. If you're happy with that, I'ld stick with it and forget the content Db altogether. So, on the topic of library structure, here are some of the things you can do in DS which I like.

1. Right-click any folder name> Create new sub-folder / Rename / Delete / Browse to folder location.
2. Right-click any thumbnail to Load / Cut / Copy / Delete / Rename / Browse / Create custom action
3. Left-click to select any thumbnail (CTRL-click to multi-select) and drag to a new folder.
4. Use the 2 top-right arrows in the content pane to go back/forward between the folders you've browsed.

Create Custom Action

This is a great function. Let's say you create a custom action for a figure. A new menu category will appear called 'Scripts' and your custom action will be listed in it. When you click it, that figure will load in DS. You can create a custom action for anything - figures. props, MATs, poses, lights and cameras.

If you want to go even further, open the Customise dialog (Edit> Customise or press F3) and in the left-hand pane, expand the 'Custom' list. You'll see your action there. If you open the Toolbars tab in the right-hand pane, you can drag the custom action to a toolbar. You can also create new toolbars (right-click> Add Toolbar), and switch them off/on.

So for example, you can make your own toolbar (and icons of you want) and add figures or presets to it. Rather than looking through folders for frequently used figures, one click on the toolbar icon will load them.

Another thing you can do in Customise is to expand the lists in the left-hand pane and right-click an item to change the keyboard shortcut. I've assigned my own hotkeys to the entire UI and it's agreat way to speed up your workflow.

You should also take a good look through Preferences (press F2) and change a few things. It's set by default to view small icons, which I find useless, and there are a few other things you might not want, like creating a new camera for every scene.

The last thing you might want to change is the UI itself. There are 2 ways to do this - Styles and Layouts. In the menu View> Interface Style, you can choose a style and in the same menu is an option to customise some of the colors. Interface Layouts gives you a variety of options and you can save any style or layout. It will be added to the list and you can switch between them with one click.

Basically, what I'm saying here is that DS isn't exactly like Poser, but once you start to get the hang of it, you'll find that there are lots of things you can do with the UI and library which can't be done in Poser. One isn't better than the other - they're just different, that's all.

mac

"A lot of people would have been wetting their pants with happiness if shader editing was included in the free version"

True. But if these same people are so desperate to have this function, it'll cost them about $47 right now. If they don't want to pay..... well, it's a bit like saying 'Poser should make the SDK free so we could make lots of plug-ins for it'. It's a nice thought, but I doubt it'll ever happen.

DAZ have made DS 3 as affordable as possible, and considering what's included, (especially for developers) the price is phenomenally cheap. They've also wangled a deal where the Trolltech SDK is now completely free. (It used to cost $995) and anyone who's capable can write and sell plug-ins for DS with no financial outlay. So honestly, I really don't see what more they could do to accomodate people's wallets.

"I don't blame DAZ for not wanting to buy out the third parties that wrote those plugins (fairly sure they are not DAZ in-house people) or wanting to make money off of selling their software, I just think they would make a lot more money in the long run if they had done things a little differently"

Actually, as far as I know, other than dynamic cloth (Optitex), everything else in DS 3 is in-house. Shader Mixer started out in life as a 3rd-party app (Eilir), but chris jones rewrote it completely in consultation with DAZ. I'm not sure if he now works for DAZ, but he certainly works very closely with them.

I don't think that any of the DS 3 features will leave Poser lying in the dust. Not because they're not great features, but because the choice is still pretty much what it's always been. People either love/hate the DS/Poser interfaces. That's the one reason I don't see a mass exodus towards DS. It'll be taken more seriously as a competitor to Poser, that's for sure, and I bet a lot of people will try it out, and even make it a part of their toolset. But in the end, users will still have their own preference, and if Poser 8 ups the bar even higher, all the better.

mac

"it's possible that there's no shadow options with the new daz area lights, either"

There are shadows for area lights in DS. All you do is add a Shadow brick (aka node in Poser) and connect it to the area light brick.

It'll add considerably to the render time, of course.

mac

"The fact that something as necessary and simple as tiling still has not been made a standard surface feature leads me to believe they still see little value in increasing the ability for content creators to have better cross compatability with Poser (as an example) . Unless I am wrong and they do suddenly unveil easier to use advanced surfaces that include many of the more simple to use surface settings that are standard in Poser there will be no more interest by content creators to include settings for studio or create content especially for Studio"

Khory,

I hope you noticed that tiling is now a standard surface feature in DS 3? And it's fully implemented in the viewport, which is quite cool.

I'd say that anyone who doesn't want to pay for DS is still getting a good deal with the free version. A lot of new things have been implemented, including a 64-bit version, and the difference in render speed alone is pretty spectacular. I'm getting render times which are 30-50% faster.

mac

I think one reason some Poser users find the DS interface off-putting is maybe because they approach it as another version of Poser. I've used Poser for 12 years and DS for 4 (? - since the 1st alpha) and I slowly became familiar with it along the way.  But now I'm so used to all it's conveniences, that I find Poser very limited (in terms of it's UI, I mean).

In DS, I can build my own toolbars, add my own icons, assign shortcuts to almost any command or UI element, add folders as shortcuts to a menu (Poseworks free Favorites script), create my own 'rooms' and populate them with the tabs I want, and a bunch of other things.

What I'm saying is, DS isn't Poser, and if you expect to find a lighting trackball, you'll be sorely disappointed. But it has many compensations, and my workflow is way faster in DS.

And btw, you don't need to buy DS Advanced. There's a free version too. It doesn't have a lot of the advanced capaibilites, but it can use them. For example, Shader Mixer presets work fine in the free version.

Another thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is DS 64-bit, which (so I'm told) is a 'true' 64-bit app. I'm still on 32-bit so I don't know the ins and outs of this, but I believe Poser doesn't utilise the full 64-bit capability? If I'm wrong on that, I'm willing to be corrected. I'm only going by what I've heard.

One thing's sure. If Poser gets sold off to yet another owner, (and believe me, I hope that won't happen!), I take comfort in the fact that I already have a good alternative.

mac

"hey Bagginsbill..have you looked at D|S3 recently?..I'd love to see what you could do in shader builder & shader mixer which seems to offer many things Poser does and some...the only thing D|S users are lacking now is a 'D|S Bagginsbill'"

I second that.

Actually, BB, I think you'd be impressed by  DS 3. Not just by Shader Builder/Mixer, but by the way DAZ have opened up the whole of DS to 3rd-party coders. In fact, the full DS SDK is now completely free, (it used to cost $1000), and allows anyone to delve deep into DS and come up with all sorts of cool plug-ins and scripts. The documentation is also pretty thorough so it's not difficult to get started.

Like Stonemason, I stick with the current (non-beta) public version. DAZ have now settled on a fairly simple system where they post a stable version on Download.com and have a 'beta' (but usually pretty stable) version available at DAZ. Plus at the moment, they have DS 3 which is in beta, but has some remarkable improvements and new features.

mac

"I have been interested in d/s but find the content installation and lighting controls confusing"

I have a tutorial which might help with lighting (and cameras).

http://digilander.libero.it/maclean/DStutorial.htm

mac

Yes, Daz Studio has smoothing. It smoothes by material, which gives more control than by object or body part.

mac