Quote - > Quote - 'By the agressive tone of your reply seems that I hit a weak spot.'

 
Just in case someone falls for this kind of taunt. This kind of inductive statements is one of the more common logical fallacies. People get aggrivated for a number of reasons, and none of them are very likely the reason that supports the argument the other side is trying to make.

If you want to talk about logic, Conniekat, you maybe want to check your methods of reasoning first.
Should you see all the errors there and be able to fix them, then you may try the explicit analysis of said methods.

Else it's a bit funny to watch because of the adventurous path that lead you to your "logical" conclusions. Even if it's modal logic that you'd apply here.

But it's better than posting cat pics...

While I won't get aggravated by cat pics, the misuse of logic is something you need a sound beating for. :p

This said, do you mind me asking for your number? ^_^
Errr... The bending meshes made me ask, you know... :blushing:

Lol...
If there's an opportunity then my wording is always agressive to some degree. It always helped in the past.
There is no weak spot for I can freely admit that I don't know everything about this topic. I won't even say that I know much.

Yes, you can maybe use ZBrush or Wings, but since I'm not familiar with these I won't state it.
For Maya, Shade, Max or Blender, I can say with certainty that they can import OBJ. Out of these I mentioned Maya as it can not cause any misunderstanding.
Shade and Blender aren't that popular and Max get often overlooked or confused with (max)imum if it's not written 3D Studio Max. That's at least my experience.

But I see now what the words were that you disliked.
Playing around...

Playing around is not to be understood as an depreciation/devaluation.
I don't say that I do more than playing around. It's not mass production or something commercial nor highly artistic. For me it's mostly a way to kill time. 10 minutes here, 5 Minutes there.

Importing to a modeler is not to fix the bends but to create the difference between what was wrong and how it should be. There is no point that I can see in creating such an OBJ file before any pose is applied.
For example all the errors with the thighs/hip with spread legs. There is not much that could be fixed with an OBJ. If there's something at all...

The shoulders can not be fixed with an obj before a pose is applied because it would require to change the area that is affected by involved bones.
But I have to say that I never tried to fix this. If it looked odd it was part of the import/export action.

The errors with morph brush occured for me with A3 and V4.
What DAZ does or says is not really in my field of view. I visit their marketplace sometimes and that's it. The same with most other companies.

Maybe things will be worse with V5. I don't hope so but it's likely.
If there would be a new good figure it's clearly somtething to appreciate.
Single artists however would be easily be overcharged with such a task.
The figure alone can be done in reasonable time but all the add-on content to make users of DAZ figures change and the promotion to get this done fast will be the really hard parts.

There are already some people working on different own models but that leads to several different models and not one new figure and additional content for this new figure.
If it won't get abandoned long before it's done...

AFAIK here are 3 million members. Let's say 2 million... In the field of open source software that would be a good base to start an project. But that apparently don't work here.

Out of 2 million people there are for sure like 100 modelers and painters that can spend some time on some freeware project.
I have no idea why everybody models and paints on his own instead of looking for likeminded.
Yes, ocassionally one is looking for help with something but how often a team is formed?
I only see this with merchants doing productlines together over a longer period of time but not with free stuff.
Lately I've seen dphoadly (not sure about the spelling) with some work he was/is doing on the P4 female. He looked for reactions, ideas, interested people and there was not really much reaction. That is sad.

That attitude makes me more mad than a few peeps (DAZ) taking advantage of people who won't get deep into the matter of 3D.
Well, it is not my problem at all, but coming from open source it is something that I don't get grasp of.
Learning 3D apps was easier for me than learning all the ins and outs of different OS and languages. With other people I think it's similar.

Poser is a little like Visual Basic. Many C/Java/fortran/ASM-coders look down at it but VB is powerful and extremely easy to learn and use.
Of course there are much fewer open source projects for VB than for C++. That's not nice but well, it's a fact.

If there would be projects for Poser content, now that would be wonderful to see.
Damn there are even game modding teams everywhere...

So please work together for a single goal and in one project and than there could be a reasonable chance to produce something that can brought into battle with DAZ figures.
Not because DAZ figures are so awesome advanced, but because they are so popular.
A high quality product itself can unlikely do the job for it is not quality that is sought for in the first.

It won't be a surprise if some Poser related people of e-frontier are willed to support this if there's just a good amount of work done. From what I uderstood they also prefer quality.

Now I won't interfere any longer in your relationship with bended meshes... g

Quote - You obviously don't really know what you're talking about:
MorphBrush morphs load BEFORE the joint parameters so that they make the mesh directly manipulable.
This makes them completely unique compared to any other rigging method.
There is no need to export, and so far I neither used more than a few minutes to make them.
(A lot faster than having to do postwork)

Besides, noone says that you have to do morphbrush correction morphs over and over again.
Like V3's JCM morphs or V2's correction morphs they can be used over and over again over a whole range of poses.

Oh well... It would have been better to use the biggest font size for the word excessively and put its definition right after it. Excessively means what it means and nothing else.
Further I can not see the need to point out the obvious. Maybe I start with the fact that the computer must be turned on before the OS can load and after this is done I can start Poser at some point. But this is obvious...
Just as it obvious that joint params can not be loaded before the morph brush data to get this result.
I really have not the slightest idea what I'm talking about and thus I was stating clearly that modifications via morph brush are the same as other morphs. And as a logical conclusion of lacking knowledge and my aversion of morph brush I was saying that it's totally crap and that it should be fixed/patched out of the software.
Oh wait... Actually I wrote:

Quote - A character with more bones sounds great.
It would help a lot in fixing the weird look that figures often get after doing rather normal posing with them.
Right now the only things that help after adjusting of the bones (and related settings) is to take the figure to a modeling app or to play around with this morph brush of Poser 7. The morph brush is great but it screws up the mesh somehow if used excessively.

Let me explain this part for you:
"...modeling app or to play around with this morph brush of Poser 7. The morph brush is great but it screws up the mesh somehow if used excessively..."

I have loaded a figure and applied some pose to it.
The mesh bends and the result looks odd or unrealistic or even ugly.
Now I can export the odd looking parts and fix them in Shade or Maya and reimport them as morph target to Poser.
OR
I can use the morph brush of Poser 7 and fix these parts with it.
Then I don't have to do any export-import action, but often I keep a copy of the modifications in case I need something similar again. But that again is obvious.
...
Are you still with me? Shouldn't be to hard to grasp til yet, right?

Ok, now the screwed mesh part.
While I know that the morph tool does not replace a true modeling app nor does it have much in common with said apps, except that one can move single vertices, I like it a lot.Because I like it a lot I wrote that the morph brush is great.
No, I don't look down at Poser or the morph brush just because I have all the other oh so great and professional apps installed. - In case that was what you read out of that line.

All that stands there is that the morph brush tends to fuck up the mesh if used excessively.
There is absolutely nothing that one can get wrong.
It's the same as saying that Windows 2003 DCS R2 tends to crash if one starts many apps which require much resources and if this is done over a couple of days.
This says only that said Windows doesn't like it if you start said apps very often and this over some days. It does not say that this Windows is crap and it does not say that it is the right way to use this Windows.
Actually I like said Windows version (for SMP, RAM support and virtualization) and I can live with the fact that I have to restart the computers once a week or at least all 2 weeks.
The same way I like the morph brush and while knowing how to use it I have to look what are its limits before using it in the way it is thought to be used. Easy, heh?

My wording may be different as for me there's no emotional link to any of the named Software, but we basically say the same.

Quote - More time I don't have....but money I do have . Silly changes don't just drive off people who take advantage of a free place to post pics but also those of us who help the site make money.

My loss to a point but it will be R'osities loss ultimately when it becomes just too irritating a place to spend money in.

True. I don't wanna know how much money I've spent already at the marketplace...

Actually I prefer buying here over buying at DAZ for the way things are set up here.
But with some more of these invaluable "improvements" to our best, the few reasons to spend money here will be gone.

Quote - It is rather aggravating to try and get one meshes vertices 1 mm from another meshes vertices especially doing 1 Vertices at a time.

:lol: That one was good...

You can do it 2 ways: Like tekmonk said with an shrink-wrap tool or by copying and moving.
I don't know C4D... shrink-wrap can be called differently. It is a tool to make one plane or mesh fit to the shape of another mesh. Similar to the way dynamic clothes fiting to the bodyshape in Poser or Maya.

If you copy the needed parts of the mesh without changing their location and move them away you get a similar result. That might work nice for a shirt but can be much work for gloves for example.
You should have an option to move an object by entering numbers for its new location otherwise it'll be hard to get exactly 1mm.

Yeah it is to some extent...

If you extract the file you bought, you will find the listed files in the directories they are supossed to be in.
Like "V4Lashes1.jpg" or "V4Teeth.jpg" have to be located in "RuntimeTextures..." because if you load some mat pose it is the Texture folder where Poser will look for the needed textures.
Same with " Body-1 INJ.png" and "Body-1 INJ.pz2" where the .png is the thumbnail for the .pz2 file. To see and use them, you have to put them in your LibrariesPose folder within your Runtime folder.

The PSD files are useful if you have an application that can read PSD files. Like Softimage XSI or Adobe Photoshop.

You can open them and use them to create your own textures or modify existing ones.
For example you can use "lips2.psd" to replace lips coming with some texture that you got already.

But if you don't want to use XSI or PS or similar apps and if you don't want to make your own skins and the like, you may ask the merchant to exchange that product with something else in his store or make use of the refund option.
In one of the manuals that come with Poser you will find a description of filetypes and where they have to be. It's not very complicated after some time.And of all similar applications Poser is by far the easiest to use.
You should also have a look at your installation and what filetypes you find in which folder.
This will give you some idea of where to copy any future content. If you got many products you maybe want to sort them in a different way than what they r sorted after installation.

Quote - Quote- A tensor is of course much more than this, but not for Poser*. -End quote.*  Could you elaborate?  Thank you for the links

Sure... I forgot the derivative nodes in Poser (dU, dV, dPdU, dNdU, ...) anyways.
Tensors appear in so many fields from norm mathematics to continuum mechanics that it would be a book if I write about every use for them.
And with my english it won't be fun to read, besides that I won't ever write a book about anything.
Not even for an fellow soldier. :p

If you specify a little what you want to know I'll send you an IM.

A character with more bones sounds great.
It would help a lot in fixing the weird look that figures often get after doing rather normal posing with them.
Right now the only things that help after adjusting of the bones (and related settings) is to take the figure to a modeling app or to play around with this morph brush of Poser 7. The morph brush is great but it screws up the mesh somehow if used excessively.

For those who want a quick result (i.e. not days of importing and exporting and modeling) it's obviously not a very appealing procedure.

I think the popularity of certain figures comes from 1) how they look in renders 2) what add on items are available 3) the marketing.
The behaviour on posing is something that most probably don't care much about. Especially if they are not proficient in 3D and/or art. Direct competion to DAZ figures is difficult.
If there are many customization options it would help. Many clothes and character morphs for a new figures will help also. However, without really intensive and good marketing it won't make many users and merchants switch to this new figure.

Assuming that there would be a similar amount of pictures showing Apollo as there are pictures showing A3, and assuming further that Apollo would be a female figure, then probably more people would start to use this figure and even any new figure that the creator of Apollo, Anton, would create, will have a bigger user base.

At the time V2 became popular there was not really much to choose. Most merchants came
after that one figure. The P4/P5 standard figures are not crap. I remember that I liked the P4 figures better for their flexibility but used V2/M2 and later V3/M3 because there was just more add on stuff available.

I like it if I can load a figure, some environment and clothing, adjust a few things like pose and textures and then do a first render. The polycount is not important for me as long as I don't do "real time" animated stuff for PC.

Quote - I'm so releaved to have come into CG at an age when you don't need any math knowledge or degrees in geekology to get anything done,tools these days are focused around the artist who creates with them & fortunately we dont need to know the technical in's & out's of vector math to know what we're doing.

spoken as a highschool dropout who's worst subject was math :-)
Cheers
Stefan

I loved math for quite some years while a child, then later I almost hated it for the longwinded formulas needed to describe simple things like weather and after that I loved it again. A good relationship so to say...
It's not that I say everybody has to study mathematics by all means. But I admit that I'm a little biased if it comes to this topic. And I will defend my lovely little vectors with my life. :glare:

Poser offers a nice playground with the material room and most Poser artists don't use it at all, despite the fact that it is not as hard to use as the figure setup room.
There is no relation to high-poly figures or modeling nor will the small field of vector math enable one to describe the whole range of shapes in nature. The whole post was about what  vectors are. With keeping in mind that this a CG forum...

For artists it is not vital to know what app do to let some model or render appear on screen.
While I used/use Maya, Max, XSI myself I was never very happy about the fact that I have to read manuals to create an model that is more than a few cubes or spheres.
Poser was a great invention to ease the creation of CG art while avoiding the the need to model all needed stuff by oneself.

Manuals teaching the usage of some application are different from learning what different canvas types are good for or what kind of paint can be used for what look. The latter is less annoying for some reason while the manuals are more like geology and chemistry for an stonemason. g
The artistic stonemasons usually dont care much about how old the stone is that they work on or where that stone was plenty million years ago or what happened that there is a "stone" in the end.

As a sidenote: I'm not an artist anyways. For me it's nice to see good artwork, can spend many hours with this, but I rather see relations, numbers, physics and later the picture itself. Sometimes I don't even reach that point of seeing the picture and fail to get it's emotional meaning.Remembers me of the days I had to do handicraft work and pictures in school. OMG...

Quote - I will say that I can't see posting the freebie links in the other forums now that we have a freestuff forum. My push will be to allow any linking to freestuff items in the Renderosity Freestuff forum. Just as the Product showcase is for all commercial posts, I see the Freestuff forum being for all freestuff links.

Quote - As I stated originally, there was some miscommunication and we (admin) haven't made a final ruling on freestuff links posted that are not in our Freestuff area so please hold tight and don't get too worked up yet, lol:)

I have to say that what you, StaceyG, have written so far, sounds pretty acceptable. The wording is good too.

Yours quest for new rules is remarkable, no doubts about that.

To avoid misunderstanding it might be helpful to say clearly what is OK.

What is written leads me to the conclusion that someone has to post said links first in "freestuff forum" and than link to them from whatever else post here.

For example if someone is asking for a certain free battleship-model and someone else knows about such a model, then this someone has 1) to post the link to to the model in "freestuff forum" and after this 2) post the link to the "freestuff forum" - where the link to the external site with the said model can be found - in the post of the person asking for a free battleship model.

Umm yeah...
I can see that it helps to concentrate all freebies.
I can also see that this appears a bit clumsy if I stumble across such an request, know an external source and want to share the information about this source.

That's better than to disallow but it lacks some aesthetics.

Forgot a link from another post:
www.generative-modeling.org/

And found someone writing about NURBS:
www.generative-modeling.org/research/projects/NURBSUBS

And all other stuff:
www.generative-modeling.org/CGV/DigitalLibrary/publications/Papers

:blink: Kawecki knows about the dark age of CG and all it's horrors!
Yeah I had totally forgotten about these old green or amber colored "graphic" displays. On the other hand I would say the start of vector graphics in relation with computers was with the eraly VG programs and later the Corel stuff that made them somewhat popular.

The holy vector that is used by electronic and CG apps comes from math. A vector is always a vector here, no matter which application or circuit element. There are also vectors in biology but that's a different topic.
The vector itself is nothing more than the expression of how informations are associated.
For example if you move your hand from left to right with 1 m/s, that's an vector applied to your hand. Basically traditional painters were the first who made vector graphics.

As described by the surface integral of vector fields it is possible to express a spheroid the surface is parametrized using a system of curvilinear coordinates.
**For Poser there are only 3 vectors ready for plug&play use. P-Node, N-Node and displacement.
I know, it's horrible boring for like 99.99% to read, but these P and N nodes get used much to seldom.

Description:
A P-vector is a tensor that get it's properties from the linear combinations of the exterior product of tangent vectors of P.**
Would be a lot easier if I could write formulas here or do some sketch, but this crappy editor won't let me be creative.
A tensor is an array that expresses an geometrical entity relative to an set of vectors. Like (1,5,4).
A tensor is of course much more than this, but not for Poser.
Linear combination is just a fancy word...
Let's assume you have scalars (a) and vectors (v). The linear combination would then be:
a1v1+a2v2+...a[n]v[n]. Nothing difficult. a1v1 means a1 MUL v1.

All this happens in an vector space V over the field K - to list the common used letters as we need them now for the exterior product... :lol:

Dunno where to start.
Let's say that the exterior algebra is a case of unital associative algebra - in case one wants to go deeper into this topic that is a point to start.
Unital (for engineers and some CS folks it's sometimes "unitary") means that the algebra must contain an multiplicative unit. This is also called "identity element" and has the property 1=1x=x1=x for all x of the algebra.
The exterior product is the multiplication of the exterior algebra and thus it is alternating on  vector space V and further a bilinear operator.

The P-vector is a concept where "P" comes from p-form. It is related to dual space vectors.

The N-vector... Is easier.
N is a (surface) normal. A surface normal is a 3-dimensional vector (x,y,z) that is perpendicular to an surface and based on it or on the tangent plane to an point p if the surface is not flat.
Dunno about the spelling of perpendicular... I mean 90° to the tangen plane or the surface.
The normals have no specified direction by default.  It can be 90°  to both sides or inward and outward.

Displacement needs not much explanation I think.
It's again a vector and the distance is not specified.
Displacement is if you move from A to B in n seconds. You can go whatever way you want as long as you are at B after n seconds. There is no information about the path in this vector.

There could be different descriptions about these topics of vector math. I have only written them down as I remember them from everyday use. No guarantee for nothing...

But after all it's like Casette said. Having fun with the figure is important. Not as important as learning math but it comes second to it and before anything else.

And I have not even written a word about NURBS yet...

Disabling external binary morph targets and compression helps to solve this problem of corrupted files with windows. Since it's Poser and not the OS that fucks the files up, it might help for Mac too.
I noticed that this occurs more often if running many apps that need much memory and cpu power and switch between them while Poser is doing something.

I remember to have it seen the first time while programming GPU's.
GPU's are good for vector math and they are cheaper than true vector processors.
Back in about 1999 or so that was. lolz...
Later, about 2001, it was nothing fancy anymore to do complex scientific sims or graphics on the gpu. AFAIK There was never a software for homecomputers because they got only 1 or today 2 graphicsystems and the 32bit aren't a big help here as well.
The problem would have been to get the data fast enough to the graphic subsystem.
The next problem would have been the memory limit of 2GB or 4GB.Somewhat later there were renderfarms to solve the memory and number of gpu limit.
For rendering some fancy picture a single gpu and a normal pc are enough. Same as with 2D vector graphics.
The math makes it a bit more difficult to change shapes but there are scriptlanguages and there are even new ones in developement currently. Just nor for mass market as usual...

It's also a question of marketing. Right now it's just many whitepapers, formulas and few nice pictures. That won't sell...

There's a project somewhere with a little (technical only) description for some approach to use math based graphics for fast depiction. Have to look for the link later...

Quote - Hay has anyone ever heard of Vector Polys?  I hav'nt, but I know this is the mathmatical savior to always being conserned about what your 2D Resolution is.  As when you create a Vector based 2D image, it never has a Resolution.  Vector based images look the same small as they do posted on the side of a building, because the relationship between each pixel is a mathematical equation.  I bet Polys could do this also?

Something like this. But this method is in use for quite some years already.
Not exactly the same tho as vectors have to many limits that won't matter much for 2D, but for 3D.

For some reason (-lazyness-) there are just to many sticking to highpoly tell hell freezes over.

Quote - Well, I'll come to Daz and get your freebies :)

What gets me is that Renderosity doesn't even host the file or the thumbnails for the free stuff.  What's stopping someone from editing the file after the fact and reuploading it under the same file name on their web site?

You're right. I think this is just a ruse to squash the free stuff provider because they aren't generating any revenue for company.  However, they fail to see that the reason many are members here is because of the kind generous community that exists here.  That is slowly being eroded. Always one less reason to come here...soon there won't be any reason for some people :(

Someone should start to make a list with all the issues that make users want to leave.
Hey in another 5 years you can tell people that once upon a time there was a website...
Glad to see no cat pic here. :p

Oh yeah, that sounds like the first tutorial I gonna read!