I must admit to being a bit mystified that the Global ordering system won't let you order in US dollars, only Euro & GBP. Being in Australia, there's a much better exchange rate directly from AUD to USD. I cannot see any advantage to CL in forcing people to pay a currency exchange fee to someone else.

Actually, the latest SR for Poser 5 MacOS X is 5.0.4.335. I had to complain to CL to get this version as they apparently don't have direct control over the new web store site (administered by another company altogether) and have difficulty reconciling the availability of updated versions for online purchasers (I ordered P5 when they were still using their old web store).

Stewer, thanks for assuming a comma in the appropriate place in my statement to render it correct :-). I was actually referring to references I had seen implying that quaternions calculated for a specific frame of reference cannot be meaningfully applied to another, unrelated FoR without receiving invalid results. On the human joint issue, I'd bet that quaternions are what CL uses for Inverse Kinematic calculations, hence the sometimes unnatural and unpredictable joint strangeness seen when pushing IK to its limits. (Well I know MY knees don't bend that way...) Pity IK uses seems to ignore joint rotation limits when engaged.

Thanks ockham, that's a great start! I've posted a modified version in your latest Jiggles thread with multi-frame influence of the six most appropriate, gravity influenced, breast morphs controlled by the chest morph values, but analysing the collar morphs for their effect. Pity the analysis takes so long per frame. As you're saving analyses to files, maybe the analysis of the average influence vector for each morph, body part combo could be converted back to the body part's local space and saved to a file. The appropriate morph vector files could be read and converted to worldspace for each frame's morph setting, speeding up the whole process.

Here's a modified version of ockham's morph analysis script posted in another thread which analyses all frames up to the currently selected one (should work on both Mac and PC P5 as no Tkinter use) for instantaneous gravity effects on selected collar morph targets controlled by the chest. This has no motion acceleration analysis other than gravity, so is useful for a series of non-animated still frames/poses in a scene. Care was taken to avoid the use of morphs which operate in opposite directions for the left and right collars, such as BrstLieDown or BrstCleavage, as gravity requires them to operate in the same direction regardless of the body's attitude (imagine lying on the side...) Script includes some tests to determine current morph dial values (rather than FBM or JCM influenced values returned by Parameter.Value() ) . File is FindAvDirs2.py

Tguyus, I looked at ockham's jiggles script (though I can't run it being on a Mac, dagnabbit). What I'm looking for here is an instantaneous gravity vector angular measurement relative to the default orientation of the body part or prop. That doesn't require calculations of first or second order derivatives for velocity and acceleration or twang/damped oscillations. Specifically, I need to determine by observation, which axis of rotation of an actor relative to world coordinates should influence a specific morph target. Imagine a static hair prop with morphs for side-side and front-back swing/sway. The front-back swing needs to be controlled by the head bend (x-rotation) if rest of the figure is in its default orientation. If you turn the figure 90 degrees left or right, which rotation axis components do you use to determine the head's attitude relative to the default position? If you then lie the figure on its side (still facing left or right), The head's axis (origin to endpoint vector) may lie in the global YZ plane with a global X rotation of +/- 90 degrees (approx) but no front-back swing of the hair would be expected, side-side would be involved instead.

Thanks nruddock, that's a different link to a document I was referring to. I've just seen a code fragment from ockham which implies that the matrix ordering used by Poser is the OpenGL style which is transposed from that document and was an outstanding point of confusion till now.

underdog, my feeling is that the quaternion, which expresses a (fourth) rotation about an axis is exactly what you would want to manipulate to counteract the "rolling" effect, provided the quaternion axis is coincident with the object origin to camera (or point-at target) vector. You might have to experiment and/or do lots of research to understand the relationship between the quaternion rotation angle theta and the world orientation of the camera. I'm entirely unconvinced it could be as easy as resetting theta to zero without touching the axis (in this specific case) but that shouldn't be too hard to test.

I still see value in renders that are larger that the visible screen area as there is then detail available to be zoomed in on (to the point where pixellation becomes evident), though DPI settings are still irrelevant here. Another catch with print media DPI is whether or not the printer driver or printer is halftoning or dithering an image to achieve the available colour gamut. In this case, the image pixel DPI may be significantly less than the DPI the printer actually renders onto the page to give the optical illusion of the required pixel colour/shade.

An added complication (as if learning quaternion maths from scratch wasn't enough) is that I'm using scaled scenes, which instantly de-normalise (i.e. make non-unitary) the transformation matrices and quaternions, which have to be normalised (essentially divided by their magnitude) before the incorporated angles can be extracted. The best reference I've found so far (from a google "quaternion" search) is: http://skal.planet-d.net/demo/matrixfaq.htm Has anyone played with this stuff to the point they can usefully share their knowledge?

Has anyone attempted to make use of (let alone understand) the actor local and world quaternions exposed in the Python interface? As explanation, I'm investigating ways to identify the angular change in attitude of body parts and props with respect to the poser coordinate system in order to automatically control morph targets to simulate gravity effects. I'm being stymied so far by lack of A) Poser relevant documentation (i.e. how the actor.WorldMatrix() tuple is ordered, B) synaptic disaffection due to a severe throat infection, and C) suspicion that there is no Python interface to the actor rotation ordering (XYZ or YZX, etc.) necessary to correctly interpret quaternion coordinate systems. As far as my recent research into 3DCG applications for quaternions goes, it seems that quaternion interpolation would most likely eliminate animation discontinuities inherent in using the Euler (global X,Y,Z) rotation angles when in gimbal lock situations (i.e. one axis is rotated to coincide with another thereby losing a degree of freedom).

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You're welcom rjbourc. I'm about to head off on vacation for 2 weeks and won't be online at all, so I'm happy you're not left hanging :-)

Ah hah! I think I've found what I was looking for... http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1474180 Describes how to create a morph carrier CR2 file which readScripts in the original character CR2. Unfortunately I'm off on vacation for the next 2 weeks, so I won't have time to play or respond before I come back, boo hoo ;-( Sorry this was a bit OT for Python, but if anyone knew, I thought it would be here I got a response.

Ah hah! I think I've found what I was looking for... http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1474180 Describes how to create a morph carrier CR2 file which readScripts in the original character CR2. Unfortunately I'm off on vacation for the next 2 weeks, so I won't have time to play or respond before I come back, boo hoo ;-(