Animation

Cloth Room

Hair Room

Bullet Physics

Wind Force

Be very careful with Poser IK; it is onlya partial implementation at best. Something like bellydance hip lifts can be difficult to keyframe, as you have to be aware of exactly what is going on. Most hip action starts at the feet, since that's where the weight is being supported, and involves all the joints up to the end of the lumbar chain.

This is an example of why I say we need a full IK/FK system. Poser only supports IK; with FK you could reassign a target at any joint, so you could designate the top of the belly bending as an anchor to get the basic motion down in hips and legs, then turn it off so the rest of the body is affected by hip action. As it stands now, if you animate with IK in Poser and then turn it off, you can have some serious issues, particuarly if you used quaternions. Although it can be amusing for others to watch your figure turn into a mesh knot monster.

TwoCatsYelling posted at 6:16AM Tue, 10 March 2020 - #4383017

Sorry to piggy-back on your thread/question, EClark. I'm curious if people might share some reasons they prefer one figure over another? Is it related to amount of supporting assets, materials and/or rendering quality, ease/range of posing, etc?

I'm pretty much brand-new to the Poser ecosystem and, similar to when I was first learning about DS, I'm curious when or why certain figures might be preferred over others, etc. In DS, I learned how in some scenarios, the newest options aren't necessarily the best ones.

All the above, naturally. :)

I collect new figures because I consider them resources, actors in whatever I am animating. There are very few people comparatively who can take a figure and morph it enough to where its difficult to tell it was 'Figure X'. Dial spinning doesn't really change that (newest example is LaFemme/LaHomme. Despite the gender change, you can tell it is the same mesh). You have to choose carefully, of course; some 'actors' are only good for face shots, some head and shoulders, etc. due to how the creator worked the topology and rigging. I'm a writer and movie maker, so my needs are quite different from the people who concentrate solely on still images (of course I do that too when creating a character and storyboarding). It was why I paired Vue with Poser; I could animate the figures, then import it into a Vue scene and render there, giving me a non static natural environment, or a more flexible internal render (at least until Cycles was added to Poser). How well the figure bends when a motion file is applied, and how much tweaking is needed are more vital than a lot of things stills need, since you can hide a vast number of sins behind some dynamic clothing

Considering the age of the Firefly engine, they would probably have to rewrite it from the ground up to get more than the OpenGL functions to work. Maybe the code stubs are already there, but if they had been, there would have been little reason to implement Superfly.

Maybe they could look at Filament and its documentation for inspiration: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqXkPVQrfyQ gives a good example and links.

More impressive is the documentation on the engine and the math behind it: google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html

For the simple hinge joints variable resistors would be sufficient. They would be next to useless at complex joints like hips and shoulders due to size constraints. Ribbon sensors could be used in them, but would require you to recreate the articulation of those joints. And there would be joint and linkage maintenance to consider.

I haven't seen those process controllers or dipped into the euro market lately, so I'll have to check them out.

Nice idea on the micro mo-cap armature. The software would be the kicker, though, and it would require enough space to lock the camera locations to prevent vector drift. Even a Barbie sized armature would need around a 15" cubed capture field, and nothing to distract the IR cameras.

And yeah, gimmick is about what it would be. A 3D mouse is a nice added controller, at least as long as the sensitvity is cranked way down.

I had worked on editing a test import with lite for a few days when I had time, so I checked it repeatedly, although not outside Poser. Just as another test I've imported another on on LFP to begin with, and it currently rendering a test for consistency. No changes done yet, as this will be the baseline import to compare future things against. I'll be doing the import export routine, and see if things happen again. I should probably get one of those BVH viewers to double check the conversions.

Google gyroscope sensors and you will get an idea of prices. You have the cheap accelerometers like Adafruit for around $15 a sensor, but the sensitivity probably isn't sufficient. Those cheaper units have peak rates of 200 gravities of acceleration, and are used for rocketry and impact studies. The more flexible gyro's start at around $30 and go up towards $700 or so, depending on the sensitivity. So you would have to prototype just to see how sensitive your sensor has to be to even work. Just moving a leg or arm would involve only fractions of one g acceleration, so the sensor would need to be capable of handling such low force values reliably. Just getting basic body motion would take at least 17 sensors, allowing for ribcage and two points below that for spinal flex. Even using the cheap Adafruit sensor, that's $250 just for sensors. And that is only for 'Woody' style input; no hand motion except wrist bending, and the same with ankles. You would have to design the process controller scheme, as it would take more than one or two of them to handle the sensor input, write the software routines to poll the sensors, and then choose the interface method and program that. Even with a custom wiring harness, the figure armature would probably be at least 18-24" tall just to get everything on the armature. If you wanted it conceald within it, you'd be looking at around 30". There are other sensors, like the single plane flex tape that only measure action along one plane of motion, but then you get into the issues of mixing sensors, which complicates the software by another level. Like I said it can and has been done, but the cost would be significant, as in probably in excess of a grand to prototype.

Hmm. The figure construction could be handled by just about any 3D printer. The issue would the number of sensors you would have to pack onto the thing to get the minimum number of data points. A Raspberry PI could handle the signal translation, but the most you could expect would be basic XYZ trans. Each value would add a sensor to the armature, or require more complex articulation. You could technically do it with digital gyro's like they use in small drones and get triple axis data, but that would still be a gyro for every joint, and the armature scale would increase as more sensors were added. It really isn't a case of can it be done; it already has been. But the woody model was so expensive that it wasn't commercially viable.

D. Sort of a mixture. While I have one main 60 gig runtime, I use P Booost, so I have many custom folders created over the years to help separate things into more manageable sizes. Also in the process of creating specific separate runtimes, so there will be ways to access content if the main system ceases to function. It would be lovely to go to the multiple runtime scheme, but that would entail unsnarling the main runtime to save the content no longer available.

estherau posted at 11:11AM Sat, 15 February 2020 - #4380491

What does no compositing mean? Does that mean you can't take a render from vue and superimpose a poser person in photoshop? Love esther

The compositing function in Vue lets you render in layers that can be saved separately. So with no composting you can't create separate alpha masks, illumination and/or shadow channels, R-B-G as separate images to be used in a NLE like Photoshop or GIMP. You could probably create the Vue image, make the Poser image the alpha, and superimpose it over the Vue image, but nothing more complex than that.

Age of content also plays a huge role in this. Older stuff were bound by the 8-3 rule from DOS, which is what led to the explosions of !!!!, to force a list to the top. UNless they completely rewrote the entire library system, then it is also still limited to 255 entries in any one category. After that, things just don't show. I've been using P-Booost myself for so many years that I haven't kept up overmuch on what's been fixed there (reinstalling a 60 gig runtime is not a trivial task, particularly since RDNA and several other vendors are gone, and a lot of that content simply isn't available anymore). If you have Win 10 in the mix you have to be extra careful, as it will redesignate the texture (ie: image) files as hidden and or OS specific, and if the OS goes boom, so may those files, depending on your setup. Multiple back ups are your friend.

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 4:43AM Tue, 21 January 2020 - #4377263

Dale B posted at 4:40PM Mon, 20 January 2020 - #4377262

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 2:19PM Mon, 20 January 2020 - #4377247

Yeah, on it already - that friend is helping me try to pick one among the ones available. Also checking if I'd better take an older mobo to keep my DDR3 memory chips or if I should invest in taking a while longer to go for DDR4 chips instead. And other technicalities like that :)

Heh. You should get seachnasaigh to show you pictures of his **whole **lash up. Galadriel is just one box of many if I remember correctly. Gave StallionTek a bit of business. Had all those conversations from the Vue board marked, until the links went sour with an update.

Well dang - that picture with all the processors lined up already got me baffled. I think if I see the entire set I might need to clean up a puddle of drool here.

At least one puddle. His rig was intended for Vue rendering, which can make the harshest Superfly rendering seem....tame. With a rendergarden you can distribute the buckets across the network, and crank the settings up to insane levels. I suspect there was some of the Potato Chip Effect at work as well. No one can eat just one, after all....

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 2:19PM Mon, 20 January 2020 - #4377247

Yeah, on it already - that friend is helping me try to pick one among the ones available. Also checking if I'd better take an older mobo to keep my DDR3 memory chips or if I should invest in taking a while longer to go for DDR4 chips instead. And other technicalities like that :)

Heh. You should get seachnasaigh to show you pictures of his **whole **lash up. Galadriel is just one box of many if I remember correctly. Gave StallionTek a bit of business. Had all those conversations from the Vue board marked, until the links went sour with an update.

One thing on the workstation. Do you need a server OS to take full advantage of the ECC ram? I know at one time you did, but that was before they transitioned to the NT kernel.

Once I get my bloody runtime reassembled (I salvaged most of it, but bloody Win 10 reassigned the texture files into win images and basically destroyed them in the borked update, so 30+ gigs to install and unzip once again) I'll get to play around with the changes they've already made and see how they work and how many issues they might correct.

eep - dude, that's why I keep whole backups on both removable and network disks (well, that and I have multiple 'runtimes', both Poser and DS-oriented.)

I apparently have lucked out. On one of the drives I found multiple backups of old hard drives, and in one of them I found the 58.1 gig runtime backup. This was of course discovered after I have redownloaded the DAZ, Rosity and Rotica zips that remained. Which of course meant incomplete RDNA, PoserPros, Poser Style and numerous other defunct sites content. I am so glad that Hogwarden's P Booost still works on Win7.....

So if things are intact, I get to haul out the scene files I have and rerun some animaton tests with P 11.2 and see what there is to see.

Retrowave posted at 2:27PM Sun, 05 January 2020 - #4375564

It was less time than I thought, I'm either back already or I forgot to slip back into obscurity. Anyway, gotta go now, stuff to do and hardware to sort out and I really don't want distracting with forums. I was determined to start work on an album in 2020 once I have my computer sorted. I decided to return that laptop and build a new desktop PC instead, so once I have that built, I'm jumping back into synths until I have my album done.

Might even release some stock tracks for animators and filmmakers to licence, though to be honest I think I'd be wasting my time, the market is saturated.

It depends on what kind of tracks you lay out as to whether that market is saturated or not. And Reaper does look interesting. Just finished building an Ubuntu 18.04.3 USB drive, so I'll play around with it and see how it does on a separate system. If Poser fields a native Linux version, and the Vue rendercows likewise go Linux at a reasonable price point, I'll be more than happy to dual boot the main box and run the rendergarden on Linux. I really don't want to have to pony up for 7 OS installs