How about building a separate non-transparent wall behind the 'paper' one, with a door opening in it..... then place the diffuse lights in front of that wall, and place a spotlight behind the door opening in the 'solid' wall.

Wonderful! The 'floaty dress' is especially welcome. I've been trying to equip some 1930's era characters, and have found a severe shortage of sleeves among Poser female clothing. Almost every dress is nearly strapless, and that just doesn't fit in the '30s.

Specifically spline/linear/constant control over animation curves has been added, as has actor key-framing << THANK YOU!!!! It's utterly UNIQUE, and utterly pleasant, to see a software maker responding to customer requests in such a specific way! You've got a customer for life. .....ockham

Thanks for the offer of hosting; no emails yet, so I'll wait and see. I don't want to put it into a form that looks permanent until I smooth out more of the wrinkles. The basic algorithm is good, but it needs to adjust to various circumstances on its own. .....ockham

Oops, the bloody indentations didn't come through properly. I'll have to leave that to the reader.... If you email me, I can send you the script ZIPped up so that its form will be preserved. occam24@gateway.net

wyrwulf, thanks for that link. I'd been wondering if something like that was available; I need an internal close-up of skull parts for my next "interactive textbook". And Daz3D sells a complete skull, which I just bought. ...ockham

Using Poser for commercial work? << I'm making heavy use of Poser in an "interactive textbook" I'm writing. Our old friend Default Casual Female has been deputized as an instructor, adding life to some scientific topics that would otherwise be hopelessly dull. I mainly use a kind of flip-card animation with a sequence of BMPs, because I generally need to control the movements in ways that aren't available with AVIs. The students using the program are strongly encouraged to duplicate the experiments after D.C.F. shows how to do it. ......ockham

You can turn the offset on and off by double-clicking on the current part, then checking "Display Origin" in the dialog box. When this is on, you'll see a green "crosshair" on or near the selected object. The origin is the center of rotation. This adjustment is especially useful for imported .OBJects, which generally have the origin in the middle; by Displaying Origin you can move the object relative to its origin so that it will rotate about the proper axis when attached to something else.

I've been thinking about this, and probably will do it sooner or later. Python by itself couldn't do it, but with the help of an external wave-analysis program, it should be possible. Python could select the point in the .WAV that corresponds to each frame in the animation, and call the external program to analyze 100 msec of the wave starting there. The wave analyzer could (minimally) tell Poser to open the lips more when the fundamental freq (voice itself as opposed to the hissing of sibilants)is stronger; it could also check the spectrum and shape the mouth toward rough correspondence to O or E. Anything beyond that would require manual tweaking, I suspect.

The Python scripting included in the new ProPack does offer a method for collision detection, at least for body parts. There's an EndPoint function, which gives the actual (X,Y,Z) position of the "outer" end of a limb. For instance, calling EndPoint for the left Forearm gives the actual position of the wrist. You could check at every frame to see if (for instance) the Y dimension of the wrist is below the plane of a table. If you want the hand to hit the table, you can stop the action when it hits, or make it bounce back if that's what you're after. If the other object is more complicated than a table, you'd have to check in three dimensions. ..... ockham

Re:....DON'T want to be doing other things..... I don't think this is a universal limitation. I ran your script and crashed quickly. But I've been writing and revising a set of scripts (providing mathematically controlled movements of limbs) and Poser never crashes with these scripts, no matter how many other things are going on. I'd guess, as a starting hypothesis, that the problem has to do with the TKInter stuff; my script doesn't use TKInter. .....ockham

Thanks for answering.... nice to know that I'm not just imagining. So shoes built as figures have the problem, while shoes built as props don't have the problem?

If you convert the AVIs to MPGs first, there's a nice basic splicer called MPGJOIN.EXE available (I think) as freeware. Search under that exact name and you'll find it in several download sites. I've used it and it works fast and clean, no hitches or glitches.

Phil C, thank you! The "point at" feature does exactly what I want, and even more; it solves a separate problem that my "pantograph" wouldn't have helped. And to think, the damn feature has been right there on the menu all along, while I've been busily wishing for it....... Somehow I just didn't connect it with what I was thinking. Thanks for gently "Pointing" my nose "At" it! ..... ockham.