Cliff,

Considering that a.) your product is being supported by Anton, and b.) that Reba was only politely pointing out that DAZ cannot support every facet that CL chooses to change and has posted that info on their site, not saying -- even in loose paraphrase -- that "one cannot expect any support" if one is a Poser 5 user[!], and c.) that in any case the "incompatibilities" DAZ cannot support would seem to be very few at the present time and not becoming more numerous -- I have to agree with JeffH: this was always just a small customer-service issue on a single product, and this thread's heading and initial message seem way, way out of proportion to me.

[Question mark or not. How much does a question mark soften this: Cliff making a mountain out of a molehill? Not much. I could hardly pretend it was just an idle random question because of the punctuation.]

I don't expect to persuade you on this point. But a referee must call them as he sees them.

Bill

Final Scorecard:

Dave-So gets mucho quatloos for staying on point, with a reasonable point, reasonably and courteously expressed.

That said, Questor gets the most quatloos for making the most valid points. (DAZ obviously can't commit to create the compatibility that CL promised and only CL can deliver.)

Anton gets points for trying to reach and service his customer, despite said customer starting this thread with an outrageously inflammatory heading. Considering that heading, Dan Farr also deserves points for keeping his cool in his own reply. (Perspective: The only P4/P5 issue involved here is perhaps that the rearrangement of the parameter dials made use of the product more confusing; and Cliff couldn't reach Anton to expand on the documentation as quickly as -- in an ideal world -- he might have wanted to. I'm not knocking Cliff, running into a few bad e-mail links on his way to Anton is the sort of thing that frustrates anybody, especially with the arthritis kicking up -- been there, too -- but no matter how you slice it, there's no way this tiny problem comes out DAZ/PLATINUM CLUB BAD FOR P5 USERS.
No . . . way.)

Pokeydots gets the quatloos for keeping perspective, as does SAMS3D for being perhaps the only person to make the point that the Platinum Club name dragged into this means only one thing: unbelievably slashed prices, a very important form of customer support and enhancement of the "Poser experience."

[More perspective: what are the incompatiblities, anyway?

a.) MAT poses. A biggie, to be sure. Of course, CL didn't invent MAT poses or offer them as a feature of P4, so they're not obligated to make them work under P5. However, it would be much easier to make them work again if the problem were tackled from CL's end, and it's really in their customer good-will interest to do so; if we would concentrate our efforts on politely requesting this enhancement, it's probably very doable. But if CL never tackles it, well, hell, MAT poses were a hack in the first place, someone will hack a new MAT pose maker that works in P5, and then no doubt lots of people who offer MAT poses in their products, DAZ and independents, will find it in their interests to offer P5 updates. Somebody'll do it, but you can hit your high chair with a spoon all you like, it won't happen overnight.

b.) The Face Room. Since I'm not out to bash CL, I won't say Big Deal. But notice that Morph Putty does work on Victoria's face morphs; it's the same thing as the Face Shaping Tool, it's just not in the Face Room. It's nothing to write home about, IMHO, but neither is the Face Shaping Tool. Yes, the photo thing doesn't work with Victoria and Mike, and that's because CL didn't feel like spending a hundred grand to accommodate a product they don't make and won't profit from, and DAZ didn't feel like spending a hundred grand to add a new feature to a product that was already worth what they were charging for it. When you consider that most products in the economy have a profit margin of 1-10 per cent -- and usually closer to 1 -- can you blame CL or DAZ for thinking that they probably aren't going to get the millions of bucks in extra orders it would take to justify this expenditure? Or suspecting that the crybabies who flame them would not stand for the price hike necessary to cover it? I don't. And -- calming back down into Perspective mode -- it's not as if the photo thing works all that well even for Don and Judy.

Summary: the only true non-trivial compatibility issue (Face Room is a new feature) is the transparency thing on MAT files. It will probably be addressed very soon by the same CR2-hackers who invented MAT poses in the first place. Is all DAZ stuff -- any DAZ stuff --- useless now and DAZ refusing to do anything about it? NAAAH. Has CL made all pre-5 stuff useless and refused to do anything about it? NAAAAH. That being the case, is there any reason for hysterical ranting against both companies? NAAAAAAAAH.]

Final score, then:

Questor -- Most Quatloos (winner)
Dave-So -- Mucho Quatloos (loyal opposition)
Anton, Dan Farr, pokeydots, SAMS3D -- (honorable mentions)

Submitted for your approval by the referee,
Bill

And nothing sets the period like some price lists pinned to the wall. Low prices.

Deuce,

Although all the advice you've been given here about cheap modeling programs is good, I vote with Ockham that you put together your first few props in Poser itself from primitives. You learn so much that way -- about grouping, parenting, hierarchy editor, changing the rotational center, exporting to .obj, etc. -- and it's the best way to learn, with each new topic being of practical use as you pick it up. Also, you'll need to understand all these things anyway to make the best of props you create later on with a modeller.

In answer to your last question, once your prop is complete, you export it as a Wavefront object and in that form you can run it through UVmapper (a freeware utility) to create a "UV map" and save the map to the object. This "UV" map is the same thing as the "texture template" that comes with a store-bought prop, a 2-D map of the object's surface. You apply the texture by painting the map in a 2-D program like Photoshop. (And realistic textures -- bump maps and transparency maps are just other kinds of textures -- can make very simple primitive-derived props look much more detailed and realistic than their underlying shape.)

I was where you were just a few months ago; I picked this stuff up the way Ockham suggests and I encourage you to do the same. It doesn't take that long. Oh, and once you've assembled a few props from primitives, and have to get past the limitations of that process, you'll be much more highly motivated to take on a modeller -- which will help, because there's usually quite a learning curve there.

Bill

We've seen one or two really good-looking examples posted here, but a lot of people still share my opinion that the photo-mapping doesn't work very well yet. Depends on the face you're doing, I suppose: some faces fall within Don or Judy's morph range, some don't. Then there's this whole other issue about why the resulting heads are so often shrunken. (But you can scale them back up.)

It does seem to be working better since the patch, which makes its control mechanism more visible. Also, I started getting much better results after applying a suggestion I saw somewhere here in the forum (which I should have thanked and credited at the time, when I still remembered who posted it):
For the full-face shot, don't use the picture you snapped, but instead go into your graphics program and create an absolutely symmetrical picture by flipping half of your face over the other. You'll have to experiment with both sides and exact placement before you get something that still looks like you (an absolutely neutral expression is vital), but this kind of bi-lateral symmetry is what the Face Room wants to see; the control points are much more likely to fall into place and give you a likeness-shape from such a starting point.

I repeat, though, I'm counting on CL to keep improving this feature: it's a great start, but it's not nearly there yet.

The Xenofex filters (a good buy for lots of reasons) include a Baked Earth which has a Cracked Paint setting, and a Crumpled. Baked Earth is good for a network of cracks, but all flakes remain flat with no color variation. Crumpled looks less flakey but more 3-D, with color variation from flake to flake. Both settings have options to tweak, lots of possibilities.

Bill

In my experience, for what it's worth, the DAZ store is creaky but honest, and their customer service has always resolved all problems in a more than satisfactory manner in the end. This said, once you get your product BACK IT UP. My product history page with them got completely hashed this summer, many entries missing and those remaining a mess of duplicates of each other. Back up the zip files of everything, label them clearly, and put them on a shelf.

I should add that, theoretically, you can force the veins to stick out for sure in Poser 5, using displacement maps instead of bump maps. This actually pushes the geometry out, instead of relying on optical illusion. Can't say I've tried a displacement map yet, and from what I've seen in this forum it may not be all that easy or straightforward to do -- but if you have 5, you should definitely look into it.

Another thing that can affect the way your brain interprets the bump map is the underlying texture colors. The problem with veins is that they're usually darker than the surrounding skin and that tends to encourage the brain to see them as depressions (though not always). Could you give us some screen shots of the successful and unsuccessful veins? Might give us some ideas on how to change the visual context. My first guess is to make sure there's a gradient across the width of the vein, so that the center is noticeably lighter than both edges -- that might provide a good depth cue. But what you're noticing, as heyas says, is standard bump map behavior -- to your brain it sometimes looks protruding, sometimes indenting, in itself; all you can do to get the illusion working in the right direction is fiddle with the context, light and color.

If you like to work with Milena (who is great-looking, like everything I've ever gotten from Maira), look for clothing that boasts of having the V2 morphs -- fortunately, more and more people are including them. As for adapting regular Vicki-wear, like the cocktail dresses, you can see if the individual part morphs will help you; I don't know what they have. If they don't have V2-like morphs, though, your best bet is probably The Tailor. I have always heard great things about The Tailor, and if it works as promised it's obviously worth the price. In fact, I've even bought it and just haven't used it yet -- but because I haven't, I'm loath to say it will definitely work and that you must have it.

Maybe I'll check it out for you, not on the Cocktail dresses, which I don't own, but some other Vicki-1 specific dress.

Meanwhile, don't despair that you have no clothes for Milena. If you have the Morphing Vicki Clothes, you have a lot more than perhaps you realize. The dress (and several of the other articles) has a number of different material zones which can be turned transparent or visible in the Render Materials window; this fact, combined with the Length morphs on the Hip and Thigh and sections, makes it possible to create a whole heap of different dresses in a few seconds apiece, of which I will picture just three:

(There's a snappy club/cocktail dress for you on the left.) I used V2 instead of Milena to save time on conforming, but I'm sure all these conform. The longer skirt lengths will only take certain poses, but that's true of a lot of long-dress meshes that you haven't already paid for. Make all the material groups of the dress opaque and your model is covered from chin to wrist and as far down as you morph the length: it follows that with your own custom-made transparency map, you can scoop down the front, lower the backline, add a slit to the skirt, etc. Bump maps can put pleats in the skirt. None of this, fortunately, requires any real talent -- I say this from personal knowledge. So you can actually make quite a wardrobe for Milena from what you've already got. (And if you make something really nice, and charge low enough, you can sell it on Renderosity!)

Bill

This is the fit I get with the procedure outlined above. (Bikini top at 60-odd% transparency).

Bill

Sorry, Nebula, I'm just very tired:

Everything I said in the preceding message is right except I left out two of the Body morphs, Superheroine and BreastSize1 (and I miscounted the ones I did list.)

It should be eleven morphs: Superheroine, Breastsizes 1,4,5,6,7,8, BreastGone, BreastMale, BreastNatural, and TopSlope. Those and only those -- then adjust Nipple Out on both Left and Right Collars of the Bikini Top. Watch your pluses and minuses. That really should do it.

Bill

Nebula,
I'm not sure what's going wrong for you. I'm pretty sure Milena has no custom morphs, and only uses the regular V2 morphs, so if you do have the V2 Morphing Clothes as it sounds like you do -- you shouldn't be having this problem.

I just loaded up Milena, left her in default position, selected Body, and noted on a piece of paper the values of the eight non-zero morphs that affect the breasts:
Breast Sizes 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, BreastGone, BreastMale, BreastNatural, and TopSlope. I loaded the Bikini Top (which appears to be what you're calling the Bra) from the Morphing Vicki Clothing folder, conformed it, and got your Figure 1. I selected Figure 2 (the Bikini), Body, and applied all the same body morphs to the eight dials listed above.

And at that point, I have to say, I've got a great fit, much better than your Figures 2 or 3, except that the nipple is sticking out. Going in to the Left and Right Collars of the bikini and dialing a Nipple Out of .5 fixes that and it looks great. (I have to go to sleep now, but I'll post a picture some time this weekend if this becomes necessary to make you believe me.)

The only thing I can think of that you may be doing wrong from your description is you may be trying to match up too many morphs. For instance, Milena has some Left Collar morphs which, if applied to the Bikini's Left Collar, for some reason screw up its lines a bit.

But just do the ones I describe above, and you should be in good shape.

Bill

Ahh yes, our ancient enemy . . . the protection scheme . . .

SR1a (complete) would not install on my (Win98) system, but SR1b (complete) did, and program seems completely normal when it comes up, none of the interface prob's reported by others.