Quote - hate to but in, but I am a poser 7 user. what is the big + if thinking of upgrading to poser pro? I am just a casual user creating characters then using C4D for placement in scenes...ie, interposer.  It's all working now so not sure if I want to mess things up...thx for the advice!!!
coocoo

If I had it to do over again, I probably wouldn't have bought it . . . it has a few advantages. The Lightwave plugin just came out, and I like rendering in LW.

There's also some improvement in how it handles multiple runtimes-- seems a little more responsive in handling big libraries.

As others have said, its barely a "Poser 7.5" -- not a "Pro" version. Smith doesn't seem to know there audience. . . why would I do distributed rendering in a clunky render engine? If i were doing that sort of thing, I'd get it into Lightwave or 3DS, and use the very superior render engines there.

aaargh! don't render these things as AVI's!

Never ever, not even with zero compression.

Compression makes compositing a bear, because you'll never get a clean edge or alpha, and recompressing the composite will produce lots of artifacts.

When rendering Poser animations, save as numbered TIFs . . . Poser will save out a perfect alpha with each one.

Will make your life way easier.

On the PC, I use Discreet Combustion (an old version, which works just fine). Jahshaka seems very similar.

(BTW: love your "Corman's Comeback" image)

Quote - I just found a way to do it.......... 1    I opened another (cuirass) tunic
                                                       2    hid the parts I didn't want.
                                                       3    reversed the normals
                                                       4    conformed it

                                                              walla

billythekid

This is a very useful trick. Poser's Preview Renderer is now very good, IMO, it often gives me what I need. Just remember that you can texture the reversed surface differently-- this will give you a cloak interior which is different than the cloak exterior; in the case of the Roman tunic, it looks like you're getting interior textures correctly from the UV mapping, but this won't always be the case

Quote -
I noticed that if figures are conformed to one another or parented to one another, it asks me whether I want to save just that figure, or the whole assembly (or collection) or whatever poser calls it (I forgot the dialog box name for IT)

I haven't had this happen -- but I haven't conformed them-- I parented. I'll poke around and see if I can get that to work as you describe-- it makes sense, because it does happen that way with clothes, I think.

Thanks-- helpful idea!

 Hi there-- yes, I know that thread . . . was my OP!

This question is related but  different. in the other thread, I was trying to rig two figures together-- but they remain as separate figures. Now what I'm trying to do is to save as one figure

Quote - How about a two click solution? :biggrin:

Create a droplet to reduce opacity and save to a new filename.

Then read the new files into layers. (I think thats already a function in CS2)

Hmmm. Gonna try this. Reading files into layers works . . . its adjusting the opacity of all the layers that's the pain. But you're suggesting creating files which have lower opacity, and reading them in. . .might just be the ticket: thanks for the thoughtful suggestion.

Quote - Do a search for Grim at DAZ.

that's exactly right ! thank you!

Quote - Ah!  What if you use the hierarchy editor.  Rename her hip to pelvis and parent it to one of the dino's spines?

This seems like a good idea, but in fumbling around, I discovered something that works. . . one can select a figure, and choose "Set Figure Parent" -- I'd never found my way to this bit of menu before. Poser is oddly "modal" with respect to geometries. Some geometries are "figures" some are "props" and so on. In the case of figures, you have to pick the figure, be sure "Body" is the part selected, and then "Set Figure Parent" -- which I do to the Tawhak hip.

This seems to work OK, so far . . .

Quote - What if you combine the two models before importing into Poser?

They are native Poser models (Tawhak is from Daz, and the blue girl is from ExpressionImage here on Rosity.)

Quote - What about the dino's hips as the root bone and the female branches off the dino's spine?

This sounds like a plan-- but when I go into Setup, I just see the Blue girl. . .I guess what I should be asking is how do I bring two separate characters into Setup together so that they can be rigged together?

I have recently switched to the ATI FireGL 7600 and added memory. I found that the memory add did more for overall responsiveness than changing the graphics card, and cost much less!

The better video card does buy you more responsiveness . . . one thing to remember is that texture memory, even on expensive cards, is limited. This is where those Poser imported models cost you-- the geometry does just fine, but the 8 zillion byte texture maps choke the card.

So the other performance tip I'd give is to downsize texture maps and/or replace them with procedurals. .  . this dramatically improves scene performance.

The idea here is that you're using a picture of the background to light the scene-- not individual lights. That's part of the HDR technology idea, its called "image based illumination" (or "IBL" for short).  If you think about a person walking outside on a sunny day, he's being lit by "everything".  HDR lighting is a special kind of picture that works very well for lighting scenes.. What I was saying is that Poser had one of these pictures of a beach scene, as I recall.

For starters, you need to get your scene set up for this in Vue so: import your Poser scene into Vue, and set it up with the "stock" Vue HDR illumination.

You can do this from the "Atmosphere" top menu-- its under Effects:Others. Do a render with the default Vue settings . . . once you've got that working, you can move on to swapping in other lighting environments

Don't be surprised if your first render comes out with the characters looking a little dark-- that's what photos of a real person ourdoors on a sunny day look like -- using this technique, you usually need to add a little "fill"light, just like you would in a real photograph

Quote - Thank you so much. It is actually an outdoors scene, a beach, a sunset and Poser characters.

That's an ideal scenario for HDR lighting.

Actually, if you have Poser, you probably already have a very good lightprobe to use-- look in the Poser HDR VFX  or Image based lighting Lights folder . . . there is a "lagoon" lighting rig, I think . . . the image that's being used there is a beach scene, and you can load it into the environment map in Vue

Attached Link: http://www.debevec.org/Research/IBL/

One question to ask is: "What kind of photograph?"

There's a tendency to think of "real" world lighting as being "all the same -- its just real". But the hard shadows of a sunny day in Arizona are very different from the very soft interior light of an overcast day in Seattle

In general, the difference between CG lighting and real world lighting has been the low dynamic range of the CG environment (meaning the distance from the brightest brights to the darkest darks in a scene).

The guy who did something about this was a graphics researcher named Paul Debevec-- he pioneered a lot of High Dynamic range technology. The fastest, easiest way to make your Vue scene look real is to use the HDR atmosphere-- its not perfect, but you'll get "very good" very easily. I've attached a link to some of his early work which describes pretty much the problem that you've got "how do I make a rendered image match a photograph". Vue has an excellent and simple HDR lighting mode (just load the HDR atmosphere to get started).

Attached Link: Good YouTube Quartz Composer tutorial

"Quartz Composer" doesn't look anything like Particle Illusion -- but the underlying technology can produce similar results. Quartz is Apple's API for accessing OpenGL hardware for sprite graphics. QC is a node based application, similar to Shake, Combustion or the Vue Advanced Function editor. . . that's a very different paradigm from Particle Illusion, but the underlying idea is the same-- push bitmaps to the graphics card, and use OpenGL compositing modes to produce images.

For examples in use see: Quartz Candy,   Quartz Compositions, and Apple's Quartz Composer Developer page