On installing DAZ content:

You just run the .exe file, and the program, if it's never been run on the machine, asks you where to put the content. It may also ask you which version of Poser you have: there are signficant differences between Poser 4, Poser Pro Pack , and Poser 5 or later.

DAZ, while they don't want people to do repeated downloading, don't seem to have any limits on requesting resets. Better to keep well-organised back-ups, but they run a decent operation. They're not immune from doing dumb things, but who is?

Even slow broadband is hugely better than a dial-up modem. You can still make ordinary calls, and that big file will come chugging down the line. It beats an overnight phone-call for a download.

Quote - LMK, you may have ran into the MS Update issue.. Lately, MS Updates have been rolling back Drivers, so after updating the OS, you often need to reinstall the latest Driver.

I've had this happen a few times myself.

Microsoft don't seem to be very friendly to OpenGL. You pretty well have to go the graphics card/chipset manufacturer to get a reliable driver.

Way back in the Seventies, the character sheets in RPGs, and other record sheets for other sorts of games, were printed with a permission to copy for personal use.

In recent years Print-on-Demand services have reached the point of competing with conventional printing on price. The places which do this are rather keen on being sure they don't fall foul of copyright, just as photocopy shops did in the Seventies.

If I want to have a .pdf manual printed and bound, in there an explicit grant of permission I can point to?

(Not that I want to, unless the content has improved a lot.)

Quote - Very cool, Phil... Is this one based on that play "Death of a Salesman" or on the Twilight Zone episode where a fast talker outwit Death by giving him the biggest pitch in the history of creation?

It might be a bit too mid-Atlantic in style, but "spiv" is definitely British English. Private Walker, Flash Harry, that sort of guy. But Phil might have had "Guys and Dolls" in mind too.

Quote - I've now finally (after numerous e-mails) received a breakdown of the charges from UPS
Note that UK customs add on an arbitary £6.35 VAT value adjustment where the shipping rate is not stated on the package, so we are paying VAT not only on the shipping charge but also on an additional £6.35 applied by UK customs.

I remember my experience of this sort of thing, many years ago. It is really important to correctly describe the goods. And "correct" in terms of UK taxes is not always obvious. For VAT, books are zero rated. A role-playing game could be classed as a book, if it wasn't in a box with a set of dice, and a special deck of cards. I had a consignment of games delivered, of which about half could have been classed as books. It was a clearance sale by the US publisher, I still got a good deal, but ouch!

It's also interesting, looking at my records, that DAZ 3D always includes a "Shipping" line in their email, while it doesn't look as though Content Paradise ever has.

The point is, it's simpler to have the line in the records for every transaction, with a zero value for a download. That's the sort of explicit nothingness that some thirty years of dealing with government forms has taught me to do. Hiding the details as a single "total value" is pretty stupid. Even if it doesn't turn out to lumber the customer with a bigger bill.

 Obsigh.

Nice render.

But I get tired of see the prominent flotation aids.

I can see why a normal map uses the Gradient Bump input—if I read the manual right it's only used by the P4 render engine for .bum bumpmaps—but there's always been stuff out there which misuses it. I would have been tempted to change the label.

But I've never been that clear on bumpmaps. How can that single value, of the greyscale at a point in UV space, define a change in the apparent angle of a surface?

Let me know if the Poser manual ever gets past being an aide memoire for highly-trained CGI professionals.

I've come across several problems over reflections being handled differently in Poser and in Studio. The basic Poser model is derived from the Phong shader system, Diffuse, Ambient, and Specular colours/textures, and Specular Highlight size. I'm guessing some, but what you describe could be a Specular Highlight problem.

This Phong model is a simplification of reality. A glossy material has small Specular Highlights. I've seen signs that suggest Poser and Studio store that information in very different ways, which get mistranslated.

Think about how the lighting works. Basic infinite lights aren't really right for an interior, even on this scale.

Seen 2001--the landing sequence at Clavius with the ferry-ship descending into the base, on the landing pad. There are quite a few observation galleries, with people visible.

You maybe don't need a 3D figure in the Airboss Station, but a simple transmapped rectangle, silhouette or picture, would help set the scale. And enough light to see it.

More control/observation/refuge points along the wall bases and maybe some places on the deck. Where's the emergency gear if there's an accident? Some of this stuff could be separate props, maybe even one or two items as promotional freebies.

Any clutter needs to be controlled, but this place looks almost unused.

Possibly the easiest is the job I did a few months ago with the Melody figure from RDNA. That has an animal head on an A3 body, with modified hip geometry for a tail. Which makes some Aiko add-on morphs awkward because of the changed hip.

Little_Dragon provides a very good add-on tail as a freebie, so I decided to combine the standard A3 body with the Melody head and neck.

No need to make bridging geometry, just combining the bits from the two figures. There are some complications with different names for the morph channels used in INJ poses. Frankly, a huge amount of .cr2 hacking.

Note that the full version of A3 is currently available for free from DAZ, as part of a bundle. I think one bundle has just the LE version, and another has the full version.

Another example of a head-transplant is Little_Dragon's Millenium Catwoman, which puts the Millenium Cat head onto the V2 body (you need to have both the original figures to unlock the encrypted model data on that, and I think DAZ have a lot of old stuff on sale).

Finally, one quick and dirty trick:

Pose the donor head/neck with the morphs and eye positions you want.

Export just the head, neck, and eyes as a .obj file.

New file with the figure you want to attach the head to. Import that .obj and it's now a prop. Position relative to the new body, and save as a smartprop, parented to the target model.

Slightly blurred memory suggests that some versions of Poser have features which automate some of this prop-as-bodypart stuff.

I don't think P6 was that big a jump on P5. Wasn't there something about a change of ownership in there? I'm pretty sure that I bought P5 in late '03  and the readme is dated August '02. P6 was March '05. So P7 came out fairly quickly, under two years.

Since P8 includes Wardrobe Wizard, and if you don't have a copy the normal price is half that of a P7 upgrade, it's not so expensive. But I want a better idea of how it'll run on this old machine. If it needs multi-core processors and metric s--tloads of RAM, my answer is NO!

I doubt the UI is any better in terms of colours and contrast, from what I've seen, but I've replaced my monitor recently, and that's helping a lot. Though a bit more control on font sizes would be a help too. Do P7 and P8 still used fonts defined by pixel maps?

And is there any truth in the rumour of a "Make Porn" button?
 

I've still no idea why the problem started happening, but the "loss of focus" workround does work.

 That one's actually buried in the release notes for one of the P6 upgrades.

This may be the point at which I end up trying Linux and WINE, rather than trying to figure which security patch on Windows might be responsible.

 I only have experience of Poser manuals from P5 onwards, but they're pretty useless. Go read the descriptions of some of the Material nodes.

For instance:

FRACTAL SUM
The Fractal Sum node is a fractal function that returns values between –1 and 1. It has the
following attributes:

Which is a list of the inputs to the node, and nothing at all about just what sort of fractal math is going on.

And a diff file for P5 and P6 could be pretty short.

 I must admit that a requirement such as that makes me wonder just what is going on?

I haven't noticed anything about Windows 7 either. I'm not sure my current machine has the oomph to handle Poser 8, and if I go to 64-bit with excessive amounts of RAM, it looks as though it will be a choice between Windows  7 and Linux/WINE.

And the file sizes for downloads are worryingly large. Why couldn't they have split up the 1,5 gigs of content?

I'm not going to hurry.