Depends what you want to use it for. If for comics and graphic novels, then it would have to be Poser 11. For which you wouldn't necessarily need Pro.

Wonderful, thank you Structure. I did search ShareCG for Python / light but that one wasn't in the search results.

I find there's a partial solution, via the Quick Reference Card PDF, which offers "Hidden Shortcuts":

Lights On/Off - Alt-click Light. One presses 'Alt' on the keyboard while clicking carefully on the light-pin so as not to move it. This at least saves hunting for the Lights parameters tab, though is not a full keyboard shortcut or script.

There's freeware that I use called WinDirStat. It gives you a visual "block chart" of where your largest files are. Point it at the Content folder above your runtime, and let it index it. Then you can see what's hogging big chunks of space, and delete it. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/72/Windirstat.png/1200px-Windirstat.png

Hi again. Here's another tip for getting a clean Toon Lines render, to combine with a Comic Book Preview render in Photoshop (and thus fill in missing gaps in the ink lines). The tip is to remove the Bump Maps from the character, props or entire scene. This is needed when the bump maps show up in an unwanted way on the Firefly render, with Poser trying to render each bump with a toon line and thus creating a mass of speckles when it's only supposed to be rendering toon outlines.

The easiest script I've found for removing all the bump maps automatically is "XS - Shader Manager for Poser" (XS 9) at Renderosity, which works fine in Poser 11. You launch XS9 then select the Character, apply "Toon" and tick "Reset Bump", Apply - and then the bump maps are gone. Also gone are all your diffuse materials, replaced by the XS 'Toon' plain shaders - so it's best to run this last in terms of running through your render outputs. And then don't save the file, after the textures are stripped off. (Note that tickling "Reset Bump" is vital - if you apply Toon in this way _without _ticking "Reset Bump", then the bump maps are retained even though the Diffuse materials have been swopped out for plain Toon shaders).

XS9 is a little expensive, and possibly there are other free 'texture stripping' scripts that will just remove the bump maps en-masse. But I couldn't find them.

I'm pleased to report that the problem seems to have resolved itself after a few weeks, and without any action on my part. I can now access both the Forums and the Marketplace without a VPN.

I just looked at the Rocketship website. Drafter, have you not tried the free trial version? That'll be the easiest and most obvious way to check if PzDB can run on your Windows system. Then, if it does run and you like it, you can get a licence via the Payloadz service, which I've used and is fine and reliable (despite the slightly dodgy-sounding name).

It works fine for Windows 8.1 64-bit. I like it and use it often with Poser, and it saves a ton of time in terms of finding things. But I sometimes wish I had stuck with 1.2 instead of getting the update to 1.3. It's more useful for those with vast amounts of Poser content than a small amount of the latest DAZ file formats, though it will index and thumbnail the latter after a fashion. The problems with the licence server, which happened about three years ago, have long since been cured.

If you have a huge old runtime to index, you need to run RSR Converter on its /content/ folder first, and tick the box to recurse the sub-directories, to ensure you have all the nice thumbnails showing up in PzDB on your older content.

So... make sure you run RSR Converter converter on your content/runtime folder, then try PzDB 1.2 first and if you like that stick with it. For DAZ Studio, my amount of newer types of content is still fairly low, so I find I can manage to find stuff fairly easily with the DAZ Content Library. The freeware Agent Ransack can also be useful in fast searching for keywords on your runtime filenames, though I rarely need to use it instead of PzDB and/or the DAZ Library.

Are the Cornucopia store vendors going to be released from their commitment to E-on's store now, and thus be able to take their content to other stores for sale? Has anyone heard news about that? I presume that Cornucopia was wiped by the hackers and is never coming back. But I had a big wish-list there which I would still like to purchase, and would love to see the Vue content developers start selling again somewhere such as Renderosity.

Works fine in Poser 11, thanks.

Some may still do a Toon Outline render in Firefly, in order to selectively combine it in Photoshop with a Comic Book edges render.

But one of the problems with the Toon Outline is that when the camera gets close to a model, the image "speckles" (has lots of little widely spaced specks across it). I find this can be solved quite easily on a larger 4000px render, by simply applying Photoshop's "Dust and Scratches" removal filter at about a setting of 3, then adjusting brightness and contrast to bring the toon outlines back toward dark again.

Some people's purchased Cornucopia store content will be locked to the old licence. I'm curious if getting a new licence file fixes this problem?

It sounds like Vue hasn't been told the correct path it needs to use, in order to find the Poser runtime and its assets?

Could you use Dimension 3D's free "Pose Chain of Actors" python script, "Mainly useful for long chains like ropes, tentacles, or tails." Or similar. To create a curling wash from the bow?

Poser 11.1 came out just before Christmas, and like most stuff released in those frenetic weeks it was probably easy to overlook.

But 11.1 was animation tweaks and a new v2 Paul/Pauline. So if you never use those, then the 11.1 wasn't very remarkable for you. It wasn't for me. Nice to have it, maybe it makes Poser 11 even more stable. But it's not earth-shaking, like suddenly having multi-pass rendering that works with different render types (Sketch/Preview/Firefly) and which can then be automated and output to a layered .PSD.

Personally, in terms of 'new' characters... if it's not about the old standards of V4/M4 et al, or a few of the fantasy/sci-fi standalones from the likes of Nursoda or Darkseal, then I'm not very interested. I'll take a look at a new character, but I don't want to get sucked into yet another set of expensive dependencies - "must own X and Y in order to use Z". That's not the case with Paul/Pauline, who are of course free. But one generic human looks much the same as any other to me, and I don't see the need to haul out and learn to use Paul/Pauline when I'm much more familiar with V4/M4.

1. If both the textures and materials are being exported, and you see them appearing in your file system, are the materials being placed in their own sub-folder? If so, try copy/pasting them to the same location as the .MTL file and see if that helps.

2. Alternatively, you may have file path problems in the .MTL file. Open it up with Notepad (or better, Notepad++) and show us what it says there.

However, these days I'd suggests that a copy of Vue - with its very tight Poser import and integration, including auto-handling of materials - is the preferable alternative to wrestling with Bryce and .OBJ import.