"It would be nice if Poser had area lights"

Funny. I've been playing quite a bit with the Area Light in DS 3, which is applied as a material to any surface, similar to Poser's Gather node. However, DS seems to have improved it, at least in terms of render speed, and it works very well.

But as for Poser, lighting improvements may not be the big thing all users are waiting for. Personally, I'd prefer to see a lot of other things take precedence over lighting. And I'm sure every other user has their own 'To do' list which is different from mine.

mac

"I just want to say, to whom it may concern......Boo Hiss for not having bagginsbill work on Poser materials and rendering!! "

How do you know he's NOT working on Poser materials and rendering?

LOL.

mac

The mention of auto-backup is an example of the problems facing any software dev team.

Someone says 'How about auto-backup?' and out of 10 people, 3 or 4 think it's a great idea and the others all think it's bloat.

So how do the developers choose which functions they'll implement? Because it's 100% guaranteed that no matter what they put in P8, some people will approve of some features and some people will hate those same ones. As in 'You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time'

Well, there is an answer, at least a partial one - options. Every feature (wherever possible) should have the option to turn it on/off, and if possible, be user-definable. As DpHoadley said, 3d max has an auto-backup, but it also has the option to use it or not, and to set the number of minutes between each back-up. That's the only sensible way to do it. If you want it, it's there. If you don't, switch it off.

I've contributed numerous feature requests to Daz Studio's development and I've always urged the dev team to provide user options for everything, (which they usually do). Because no matter how cool or essential I think a feature is, I can be pretty sure that the next person in line won't agree. I remember mentioning to someone in close contact with Poser that one of the worst things about it (for me) was that it can't save or delete multiple props without a lot of faffing about. This person expressed surprise and told me it had never even been considered an issue!

The bottom line is that we all work in different ways with different types of figures and scenes, so there is no one-size-fits-all software that will make us all happy. All the Poser people can do is add what they think is right, based on their own common sense and the various polls they've run.

Although, (IMO) they really need to add a log file and error/crash reporter. LOL.

mac

"This leaves the impression, that users believe, new/better render engine equals better renders..."

I think the increased render speed is the reason for the large number of votes. The move to 3Delight 8.5 has cut average render times by 30-40%. It really is blindingly fast now.

And it may confirm what I said earlier in this thread. If you offer Poser users faster renders, they'd prefer that over advanced features.

The other factor is that Shader Builder & Mixer are still in beta with no documentation which means the users haven't got a grip on how they work yet. Once docs and tutes are available, I'm sure these features will be more widely used.

mac

"You can certainly have both and DS is an example. I don't think they've suddenly seen the light, I think their aim all along was to be more accessible to the casual user - eg. DForms vs Poser Magnets, PowerPose, asset management - while enabling more advanced features for those that want them. The plugin architecture is well suited to that. Can SM do the same with Poser, I don't know but sans a complete rethinking it seems less likely"

It's beginning to look like DAZ deliberately spent the first few years building Daz Studio up into something resembling Poser, with most of it's basic functions, and now they've done that, it's moving up to a whole new level. DS 3 (currently in beta) has some great features. Shader Builder gives you a GUI to make your own RSL shaders and Shader Mixer (node-based procedurals similar to Poser's material room) allows you to combine preset shaders and apply them. These are both immensely powerful functions and they open up a whole new slew of possibilities in DS. Along with Shader Baker, Figure Mixer, Morph Follower and a few other new things, DS 3 is looking very good indeed.

Can SM do the same with Poser? Well, I certainly hope so. They've surprised users in the past (especially with all the things they added to P5), so it may be that P8 will up the ante yet again. I've always felt Poser was being held back by it's outdated code, but maybe the dev team know things I don't and they can add even more without touching a thing under the hood. Time will tell, I suppose.

One thing's for sure. If they aren't up to the challenge, DS definitely is.

Disclaimer - I've no intention of starting a 'My software's bigger than yours' war. But it's becoming harder to talk about the future of Poser nowadays without mentioning DS somewhere along the line. We all use what we're comfortable with and that's just fine by me.

mac

"i think the poser community are doing bad renders because poser is nto able to do better. so now SM is not changing it because they are doing bad renders? "

I doubt it. Poser can already do better renders than 90% of the ones in the galleries. But just because Poser can do better, doesn't mean that people's renders will improve. Improving a render takes some work on the part of the user and a lot of people either don't know how or don't want to learn how to do it. The most common failing of the average render is lighting. Most people just don't understand how to do decent lighting, and nothing Poser adds will change that. (For example IBL hasn't improved the general standard of renders very much, although in theory it should have).

Now, if you offer people fasterrenders in Poser, they'll jump on it like a shot. Because that's what a lot of people want - to do the same thing in less time. Whether it's better or not, is beside the point.

I may sound cynical, but in 12 years of using Poser and Daz Studio, the main improvements I see in the actual output have come from improved figures and textures, not from amazing new technologies in the programs. Of course, I'm talking very generally here. There are some people who push the limits of software to great lengths, but for every one of them, there are 10 other people who do fairly average renders which could be improved by knowing more about lighting or the software they're using.

mac

I use real-world scaling in all my products. I mean.... why would you not do it? It's as easy to make things the correct size as it is to take a wild guess. Every modelling app has some sort of scale and it's not rocket-science to export things at Poser scale. Mind you, judging by the amount of people who don't do it properly, there must be some weird satisfaction in doing it the wrong way.

However, Pose changing scale with P6 didn't exactly help matters. It's only 107.5% difference, but it does show. Why they did that, I'll never know.

Anyway, all my products - Room Creator, Home One, Bar Italia, etc - all use real-world scale. I can guarantee that.

mac

I'd be happy if Poser 8 came with some basic improvements - and I mean BASIC.

The ability to frame any selected body part
Cameras that aren't locked on the center of the universe (ie. the dolly camera, but an entire range of them).
The ability to add a new camera at will.
The ability to save a scene to the library with lights and cameras (without being forced to parent figures together or saving UI info ala .pz3)
The ability to save multiple parented props together without faffing around with Subset - and the ability to delete them all at once.
A customisable UI - at least for keyboard shortcuts and maybe toolbars. (I doubt any UI which relies on .psd files will ever be properly customisable).

I already have all these things in Daz Studio, so it's not like I'm forced to do without. But if Poser is ever going to woo new users, they need to make it more modern, windows-compatible and user-friendly. The days of users learning bizarre new interfaces went out in the 90s. Most people want to deal with standardised UIs in all apps nowadays. When I was first confronted with Poser (12 years ago), it was a challenge to learn. If I came across it today, I probably wouldn't even bother trying.

mac

Thanks a lot, guys. I'll check out these links and try it out.

cheers

mac

I think I found it.

image=

Although I'm not sure what the path would be. Somewhere in the python library? And are .pngs ok as images?

Sorry. I'm fumbling about in the dark with this stuff. LOL.

mac

Hi adp,

I have a question. I was looking through the docs you linked to, and on this page

http://effbot.org/tkinterbook/tkinter-standard-dialogs.htm

it mentions an 'icon (constant)' option.

Does this mean icons can be used on a dialog button in place of text? I couldn't find any more information on this in the docs.

mac

Wow! That was fast!

Thanks very much. And thanks for the link. I've been on google for ages hunting down python pages.

cheers

mac

"Oh yea, and some way to Stop Poser adding the "GoalCenterOfMass" and "CenterOfMass" to every figure"

Oh, god! Yes!

That's the worst rubbish ever added to Poser.

mac

Thanks ockham,

I downloaded LoaderLocate and I'll have a look at it.

I had a feeling I'd end up with python for this. My only hesitation is the things I keep hearing about some scripts not working from version to version.

mac

Thanks, bob. Now that I think about it, python is probably the way to go. I'll check out those scripts you mentioned.

It would probably help if I explained what I'm trying to do. I'm building a pack which has a system of modular drainpipes, pipes and cables (on the exterior of a house). Each set has a number of basic components and the user fits them together to match the structure of their house (Room Creator, which is also modular).

My idea was to include a bunch of pre-prepared files, but rather than save entire collections of props, I thought of using Readscript to build the sets. Now that I have the daz studio script, a simple pose file which can load any number of figures or props, and pose them, I'm hoping to find a Poser equivalent. If there's no way to do it, I can always save prop sets in the poser version, but I always prefer to make both versions of a product as similar as possible. Not only that, since I mainly deal in complex scenes, a workable system like this would be useful to me for all sorts of other things.

Oh, and thanks for news on Les. I haven't spoken to him for a long time, but before I asked in here, I searched this forum for both the subject and his name. I'd forgotten just how many weird and wonderful things he's come up with - lol.

cheers

mac

PS If you use daz studio and want to try that script, it's here. There's a downloadable file with samples, ready to go.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=1428914