Quote - Okay so after loading up V4 into Blender and manually adding all the nodes needed to get her textures to work in Blender I have to say I am really looking forward to an easier way to load the materials! :)

My question is, will these material importer only for the Blender Internal render engine or the new Cycles material system?  Or is that on the drawing board?

Yeah, that would be cool, but it would probably be best for any BI to Cycles conversion to be done by another developer for Blender, so that all BI texured objects and not just those that come through the Poser - Blender converter can be converted.

That looks pretty neat! I think that you're close. This is just my opinion, so take it for what it's worth and feel perfectly free to discard it.

The three small rings on the end of the nozzle look appropriately steam punk, as do the bulbous sections, and the line is sturdy enough. However, where the line attaches to the nozzle looks fragile, like a blow from the side could cut it. I imagine a heavy nut holding the line down and the line coming in from the side at an angle rather than from the bottom (similar to modern flamethrowers). Also, the wooden back brace looks uncomfortable and the wood at the bottom of the flamethrower nozzle looks like it was attached with Duct Tape.

Have you looked at pictures of flamethrowers? They have two tanks, one for the jellied gasoline and one for the propellent. The tanks were mounted on a metal rack, which the soldier attached to his back with straps. The US, German and British models were rather similar.

If I were doing it, I'd probably follow something close to those designs, but switch a few things around, like making the strapping or webbing and the structure of the rack slightly different. Whatever type of straps that are holding the tanks to the rack should be given some special detail. If they're metal, they might have holes cut in it or something. If they're made from a cloth or leather strap, they should have clasps. I like the brass look, but practically speaking, any army would paint over the brass to keep the gleam down. Of course, the brass would show through in places with scratches and so forth due to rough handling, and that would give a unique look.

The WWII nozzle was fairly similar to what you have, but lighter and thinner towards the rear and overall, somewhat shorter.  The dimensions in the steam punk world are less important than what looks generally realistic, of course. As I said, I like the three rings. An exterior lighter would have been nice, but this is even better, IMO. I can well imagine the rings as an electric igniter, and it certainly gives it the right look. Now, the question that comes to mind is how would one hold and fire such a weapon? 

A flamethrower from this Earth is usually a two-handed weapon with two pistol grips mounted beneath. Generally, there is a switch on the front grip that ignites the mixture (the igniter often being a hot electrical wire), and the one in the rear has a trigger to release the stream.

Naturally, there doesn't have to be two pistol grips, just two triggers and two grips of some sort, or one grip and another place on the front part of the nozzle where one might hold it to keep it steady. Here's a chance to make it look more unique. A grip might look like it was screwed into the side, or the one forward might be mounted on top. Whatever, just so that it looks a tad different, and perhaps crafted in a machine shop.

A pilot light is an excellent idea. I could see one mounted under the front and pointed into the path of the flame, in the shape of the nozzel of an angled propane torch.

I see a couple of issues. First, it's too symmetrical. Steam punk has the look of something home made, or something assembled by craftsmen, not something produced from an assembly line. Steam punk is also heavy duty, unique and somewhat crudely functional. If this flamethrower is designed to be carried, then it should have a separate cannister of fuel, which is logically carried on one's back. There would have to be a hose that connects it to the flamethrower, but not a smooth hose, perhaps one with metal rings, a metallic webbing or something and the connections should be heavy.

If the flamethrower is to be fired from the hip, then the handles have to be well-placed, maybe two of them, one to a side mounted fore and aft, and the detail is everything. There might be a guard -- like a muffler guard on a motorcycle -- around part of the main piece to protect the user from the heat, and the handles should be in parts, likely something bolted or screwed on, and perhaps a flat guard on the handle to keep the user's hand from getting too close to the main body. If it to be fired like a rifle, then it might have a large iron ring sight.

Secondly, texturing is critical. Rivets, worn and heat damaged metal, leather, sculpted wood, etc.

Of course, the highlighted region on the left in the renderlayer tab is just a duplicate of what's highlighted in the 3d view. You sure you have the body in one of the highlighted layers in the 3d view?

Edited: -- Ack, of course it would be if it shows up in the 3d view. I've had similar things happen in the past but I can't remember everything that would cause this. If you posted the  .blend file it would be a lot easier to track down.

Scratch the last one. The hair would show up. Are you sure the body is on one of those layers you specified in the renderlayer? It should be in one of highlighted layers on the left side as well as the right.

Shot in the dark without looking at the .blend file: Did you make the body the emitter for the hair, then hide the emitter?

Quote - oh, and just to say: sorry, Aardvark_, for basically repeating what you said about importing stuff from .blend files without acknowledging it.  you went over some of the more interesting points of linking and appending really well.

Hey, no apology necessary! We're all here trying to advance the cause and help each other out. 

Quote - is there a trick where i can save the figure in poser as a prop and then load it in blender with this script?

 

because manual laodaing all figure textures is a PAIN hehehe ;)

Heck, as good as the Poser to Blender importer/exporter is, saving Blender objects as Poser prop files (.pp2) just to reuse them again in Blender, is not a good idea. Blender materials aren't done quite the same way in Poser, so there'd be wasted time tweaking the materials to get Poser to accept them fairly well, and then bringing them back, you might have to tweak the material settings again in Blender to get them just the way you want. It's much better to bring in prop files, tweak them to get them the way you want, then save the .blend file with them in it.

You don't need to redo the textures if you save an object in Blender. To bring in a Blender object, complete with textures and all the settings, use the Append option under File. Click Append, browse to the .blend file where the object is, click on the Object directory, then select the object(s) that you want. Copies of those object(s), complete with all their assigned materials, UV maps, etc., will be loaded into your .blend file and your scene. You can also load in materials, lights, armatures, entire scenes, or whatever else you can see is there.

The only drawback to this method is that Blender doesn't allow you to keep thumbnail images of the objects in the Object directory, so you may not know what you're getting unless you open the .blend file itself and have a look -- or keep a seperate file with pictures of what the objects look like.

You can also, by clicking the Link box, link to the data in the .blend file, which means that instead of bringing in a copy of the object, which you are then free to modify any way you like, you have just the link to the data, which can't be changed in your open .blend file. In other words, you could bring in a chair and move it around and resize it, but it wouldn't allow you to change the materials or the mesh. That option is quite useful for large projects.

It's worth reading up on the Append and Link options.

I've been using the importer/exporter, and I love it. The importer has worked beautifully on everything I've tried so far, about twenty or so items in the freebies here at Renderosity. The Exporter is a little more touchy, but also works quite well, at least on my ancient XP 32 bit machine.

A few things I've learned while exporting to Poser:

All objects have to be UV unwrapped even if it doesn't use a UV map. Even a standard cube with a color wouldn't export without a UV map.

I don't know about later versions, but my copy of Poser 7 doesn't handle alpha maps the same way as Blender, so some of it won't translate perfectly. For example, in Blender, it's possible to slap a decal over an object with a .png or .tif with an alpha channel by checking the Use Alpha box in the Image Sampling tab, but in my Poser, I needed to combine a transparency map with the decal image through a blender node, then link it to the Diffuse channel.

All textures assigned to a material must be packed, even the textures that aren't checked, or the export will fail with an error message. "... line 583, in execute image = texture.image"

Materials won't import correctly into Poser, at least in my Poser 7, if they have spaces in their names, like "Wall Material". It has to be something like "Wall_Material".

Some of the values won't be the same in Poser. Diffuse Intensity, for instance, if it's set to .8 in Blender, will be the default of 1.0 in Poser, and it makes a difference.  

Procedural textures won't work. They have to be burned to images and packed.

I've only exported about a half-dozen objects so far, but they've all worked great, bearing in mind the above. I'm extremely pleased with the importer/exporter because it's just doubled the amount of stuff that I can easily bring into blender and because I've been making props for a Poser user, and it's been a pain for both of us working with .obj's.

Thanks again!

Quote - Thanks benney got it. I'm now wondering why, having deleted half the cube, there is a stray vert in the centre of the cube?

It may not be a vertex. It may be the origin for the object. If one deletes all the vertices on an object, the origin will still remain. It's orange, and so can look like a vertex. A cube's origin, unless the cube's vertices are moved in edit mode, is in the center of the cube.

@3dwizzard:

Background: It's possible to put a movie in the background -- just tried it to make sure --and there's a sequence option, too. The Origin button in the tools window is visible by default, at least in my version, a recent 32 Win download from graphicall.org.

You're right about the "Add Tools" option missing. I thought that was a useful feature and don't think they should have gotten rid of it. Still, hit the spacebar and a tool search box comes up. Start typing the name of the tool you want, and it shows up there.

There are a few decent tutorials on this, but I can't find any using Blender 2.5. Still, the principles haven't really changed from 2.4x. Making a realistic water animation is usually done by animating normal, color, and/or displacement maps across a plane. In 2.5, this is done by creating empties and assigning the textures to "object" instead of "generated," choosing empties as the objects, and then animating the empties over the plane. 

This ocean tutorial on this page is rather old, but if you're familiar with the older interface, then you probably won't have much trouble recreating it in 2.5.

http://www.cogfilms.com/tutorials.html

@tlc:

"The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6" has about 25 pages on it. The book does a reasonable job of covering compositing using blur, alpha over, lighting effects, and vector blur among others, in other words, that ones that will be used 90% of the time, and it shows how to split them into rendering layers and recombine them. Not bad. It doesn't get into the lessor used nodes, though.

The master book for compositing is "Blender Compositing," which I also have. It's for 2.49, but doesn't really matter since the nodes in the Node Editor have changed very little. That book isn't just for the Node Editor, by the way. The author, Roger Wickes, takes a broad interpretation of the word compositing, or combining, so theres a great deal about perspective, and masking techniques. It's rather heavy duty, but so is the subject, and he uses several projects to demonstrate.

Retopology: I didn't see anything in the index in "The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6" on retopo, but that's more of a tool than a subject, IMO. Blendercookie has a decent retopology tutorial here:

http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/08/30/retopology-and-normal/

"A few years ago I tried Blender and hated it and went with Hexagon. Three weeks ago I thought I'd give 2.54 a try.... and I totally love it. 2.54 and now 2.55 are a lot easier to learn. Why learn an "old" version and then relearn the new version? I can heartily recomend  both the  free and paid for courses at blendercookie, they were enough to get me going and there are quite a few tutorials out there already for 2.5x."

Almost the same here. I like Hexagon a lot -- it's a modeler than makes good sense and is the easiest modeler to learn I've ever used, but there's so much more to Blender: its UV unwrap tools are far superior, as are its painting, texturing, and sculpting capabilities. I believe that starting to model is difficult on any modeler, but after the basic concepts are learned, switching modelers is not so hard.

I used 2.49 for quite a while after 2.5 came out because 2.5 lacked certain tools and it seemed to be changing constantly, but 2.54 and 2.55 are pretty stable and complete with some nice advances. Plus, the interface is more consistent, and just -- slicker, more professional.

I haven't bought Blendercookie's Blender course tutorials, but if they're like the free tutorials they offer, they are likely a worthwhile investment. I have Blender Foundation's "The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6," and that's a very good place to start, too.

This is paraphrased from The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6."

On the Output Panel, ignore AVI jpeg and AVI Raw. Choose FFMpeg, which is really a workhorse that covers most of the options you'll need, then open the Encoding Panel directly beneath it. If you want AVI, then choose AVI. If you choose AVI or Quicktime, then you'll have to choose a codec from the control to its right. The author recommends H.264 or MPEG2, although he prefers H.264 because it's more modern and compressed. For the bitrate, the standard setting of 6000 is perfectly adequate for most things, but if the size of the file is too large, then reduce the bitrate. If there are artifacts, increase the bitrate.