Quote - Make GC slider simple, and watch me plunk down my cash!!!!!!!

Are you using Poser Pro (either version)? If so, then I can't see how you could get it simpler than it already is.

GC workflow in PPro can be done in a few clicks:

1. In Render Settings, switch on GC (and change the value to your liking... 2.2 is usually good enough for most scenes so most times it's just a case of one click to activate render GC).
2. If you're using any of BB's shaders that don't have automatic GC detection built-in, find the PM:Gamma node and change it to 1.
3. For each control texture/map (i.e., those that aren't colours that will show up in your render: transparency maps, bump maps, and so on) change their custom gamma value to 1. Or use the script that's included in PP2010 to make this step even easier.
4. Render.

It's only step 3 that might be confusing or difficult at first, but it all comes down to knowing what job each texture map does... if it's colour that shows on your model then leave it alone; if it's used to control displacement, transparency, etc, change its custom gamma to 1. Apart from using the new script to help gather up your textures in one place, there's very little you can do to make it any simpler.
After all, the decision about which maps are textures and which are control data is ultimately a choice only the user can be sure of. An automated routine could only make a good guess, and you'd still have to go through each one and check that it guessed correctly (or read your mind correctly).

Or maybe you mean a one-click or one-slider control that would make your renders look good with GC switched on? In that case... I don't think so. The reason someone's renders look washed out or strangely tinted with unwanted colours when they switch from non-linear to linear workflow is a result of their learning techniques that were made to compensate for lack of linear workflow. So naturally, if you bring these practices that tried to compensate for something that's missing into an environment where the feature is now present... yes, it's going to look horrible, wrong, washed out, whatever. There's no one-click, one-slider solution to making someone change their approach to lighting and shaders.

Hmmm... it seems this thread is demonstrating the Renderosity version of Godwin's Law:
"As a Poser forum discussion grows longer, the probability of it drifting into a discussion about gamma correction approaches 1."

Quote - Too much emphasis on the math side would take away the fun for many of us.

But as you get further and further into CG and Poser picks up these extra features, it starts to become all mathematics.

The artistic concepts relating to composition, etc, apply in Poser 1 just as they do to Poser Pro 2010. As each version in between has been released, the techniques learned in art class have not changed... constructing a good scene, conveying emotion in a face, etc, has followed the same rules throughout. The things that have changed are the technical bits, those based on mathematics (mainly the physics of light).

As a result, the natural progression of all future Posers, as far I can see, will involve more and more mathematics and being aware of what value X does to a render. The baseline of artistic knowledge needed to make a good picture will remain basically unchanged.

You can add the 2008 version of Poser Pro to that liist, too. It's annoying and sometimes, to get around it, I'll do a full render but block off the unwanted parts with a few cube primitives. It's not as quick as a proper area render, since it still has to render the cube surfaces, but at least I know it will work.

A chance for me to put on my Trained-As-A-Linguist Hat...

IsaoShi's right: "slowly walked" is not an infinitive phrase. Any prohbition relating to infinitives would not apply to this phrase since it's a finite phrase in the perfect (simple past) tense.

And DPH is right: the "don't split infinitives" (i.e., don't place anything between a "to" and the bare infinitive form of a verb) is a made-up rule intending to copy Latin and has no place being applied to English.

However, if the text did actually contain a split infinitive, it might be advisable to remove it to help the text to also capture ( <== that's a split infinite right there) the mood of the period being depicted. Read original literature from around about the time of the 18th-century-turning-into-the-19th and you will notice that there are very few (if any) split infinitives. The first time I read Frankenstein, the lack of split infinitives and where it appears Mary Shelley deliberately phrased things to avoid the split infinitives stood out.

Correction: The Translate tool is the third from the left in the row of Editing Tools, not the first as I mention in the post above. Sorry about that, but I can't edit my post now.

One way to move them around by dragging is:

1. Switch to the Top camera and zoom in or out so that your preview window shows the figure or prop you want to move and the place where you want to move it to.

2. Make sure you're using the Translate editing tool (the first on the left of the row of tools).

3. Select the figure (or prop) you want to move, and if it's a figure make sure this selection is the Body part and not anyhitng like "Hip", "Abdomen", "Right Hand", etc.

4. Hold down the shift key. As long as you hold the shift key down, your current selection will always stay selected.

5. What this means is that you're now free to move the mouse anywhere around your preview viewport and your character/prop will move in the X and Z planes (it won't lift off or sink into the ground).

6. When your figure/prop is where you want it, you can release the shift key, release the mouse button, and you can now pick another character to move or do whatever else is needed.

It's not as quick as being able to select something and then click elsewhere to instantly transport the object to that position, but it's as near as I've found given Poser's interface.

Great realistic movement! It doesn't have that 'slowly wading through water' feel that a lot of beginners' animations have. You should definitely do more.

My response to such a person would be "Yes, you're right."  That should end the pointless-argument-to-be there and... so what if one person thinks you're not creating art? It's just one person. It's not you.

Quote - Poser Pro with its in-built gamma-correction exposed this fact... people of course thought that something was wrong with gamma-correction and turned it off, but it was the lights or the rubbish shaders.

Or, in some cases, they followed the instructions found in the product's READMEs.

Here's a direct copy&paste from the RDNA Terradome instructions:

"Make sure not to use 'Gamma Correction' in 'Poser Pro' as this will do odd things with the shader system."

The product itself is great and I keep on finding new ways to use what's contained in it (and I would recommend its purchase to anyone who asks) but when you find something like that lurking in the instructions that come with it, it does produce a sinking feeling.

You could try this:

1. Select the body part you want the morphs from. (E.,g., "Head" or "Body" or wherever.)

2. Copy this to the clipboard ("Copy" from the "Edit" menu, or in Windows press Ctrl+C).

1. Open MS Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

2. Paste the contents of the clipboard into a blank spreadsheet ("Paste" from "Edit" menu, or in Windows press Ctrl+V).

You should now have a list of all the morphs, and a load of other info (e.g., the value of the morphs, what type they are, and so on).

The third column usually contains the name of the morph, and the fifth column contains the current value (which is useful, since you can sort the spreadsheet on column 5, and you'll have all your minus morph values grouped together at one end of the sheet and all your positive morph values at the other).
You'll also have Scale, Translation, etc, values, but you can easily delete these since there aren't too many of them.

If you want just a list of the names of the morphs, highlight all of column 3, copy that to the clipboard, paste it wherever you want.

Quote - The big lesson here is to examine all third party vendor shaders for inconsistencies and errors.

Definitely.

There isn't a vendor that I trust completely enough that I can load in one of their products and press "Render" and know precisely what I'll be getting as output.

Glad you sorted it out, Benboom. Just make sure you check every texture you get. You'd be surprised just how many do the Translucency/Ambient thing. (And a whole load of other errors that I could mention.)

It might be that his skin material has either Ambient or Translucency set to something other than 0. These will give the impression of self-lit objects, and while it works okay in sunlight to give a more glowing appearance to skin, it really doesn't work at all in dimly lit scenes.

Dosch Design has a Prius in their 2007 cars collection. (Not sure about later years since I haven't got them.)

http://www.doschdesign.com/products/3d/Cars_2007.html

Admittedly, slightly expensive if you're just after one car, though.

This, I'm sure everyone will agree, easily justifies the push for more realism.

If you have Poser 5 or less... yes, do the cheat with the sunlight shadow thing. It's probably the only way (apart from adding a hundred or so low-intensity lights pointing into the scene from every angle) to do sunlight in those programs.  It's not how light really works, though, since 8.8% of light will not pass through something that's 100% opaque.

But from P6 onward, I would always recommend that lights be kept to shadow intensity 1.0 wherever possible and some kind of global illumination (IBL or IDL, or both if you have them) to recreate the way that ambient/indirect light will naturally reduce the intensity of the shadows, just as it does in the real world.

As I said, both get the same result. But one way is mimicking reality and the other is just making stuff up as long as the final result looks okay.  I prefer the former.