Quote - I respectfully disagree PaganArtist. All craftsmen, artists, etc NEED to have the proper tools of their trade. One could not be a very effective animator if one only had, say, Hexagon. Give the best carpenter in the world a rock and ask them to build a house. Would you want to live in that house?
Put a race car driver in the world in a Pinto and some kid who just learned to drive in a Ferrari and have them race, who do you think will win?
Granted, even with the best tools available if one doesn't have the skill to use them properly, they are likely to fail at any endeavor using them. I just don't think you can separate the two: the tools are only as good as the craftsman and the craftsman is only as good as their tools.

Lol.. well, in a 1/4 mile sprint I'll put my 72 Pinto against any Ferrari ever made - but your overall point is well taken.,

Quote - 12427% wow

Expecting King Kong to drop in for a visit were we?

:)

Quote - It's kind of hard to please everybody - I have a very rigid convention of putting anything I do myself under a *Flesh Forge directory.  If a user wants to move it they're welcome to, but something I always hate as a user is inconsistent directory names, and another is having everything off the top level of the directory.  Maybe if you only had 40 or 50 things in your entire runtime then you'd be happy having everything off the top level but damn, that would drive me insane.  At least having stuff grouped by author's name I can make some kind of sense out of what I'm looking for (as long as it's consistent).

I don't mind subdirectories at all, I use them quite extensively in fact, but my pet peeve is the folks that name their cr2 or pp2 directories one thing, usually with the name of the outfit, and their MAT file directory something completely unrelated, making it pretty much impossible to find later on without opening a dozen unrelated directories till you find what your looking for.

As it is the best way I've found to keep my runtimes organized, when I do go to install something, is that I install it into a "dummy" runtime, I just made a directory called "Load" that is empty.  When I do purchase something, I install it into this directory, then take a look at the directory structure the artist used.  I rename them to suit my own conventions, the move the entire thing over to an actual runtime, which empties out the "load" directory and gets it ready for the next install. That way I'm not searching through trying to find where it installed the new stuff, works fairly well.  Also gives me a chance to delete all of those damn readme files that I never read anyway and would otherwise just be occupying valuable hard drive space for no good purpose.

And ya, your right, everybody's organizational structure and thought process is different, I'm not expecting everyone to follow my own preferred naming conventions, that would just be silly.  Nope, all I'm hoping for is a bit of common sense when the artist does get around to chosing their own directory names.  Having a directory in the character portion of the runtime called "Alice Dress" and all of the mat files in the pose section under "Artist Name that doesn't appear in Character directory" with no mention of the fact that these are mat files for the "Alice" dress is really irritating and just downright silly.

My other personal fav is the folks that put things under directories like V4 Clothes or M4 Morphing Clothes.  Umm.. ya.  Like that is the only set of clothes I have for either character.  No mention of what type of clothes they are, etc.. just V4 Clothes.   Personally I've always found that to be a bit arrogant.  It's as if the artist was saying, "My set of clothes was the only one worth buying for V4.  You don't need any others". 

Lol.. so no, all in all I don't expect huge changes there, but when the opportunity presents itself I think one should put a "bug in someone's ear" about stuff like this, hopefully a few artists read through this and thought to themselves, you know what, he's got a point :)

Ok, well if were putting a moritorium on stuff, by all means lets put a moritorium on the following as well.

Vendors putting !, !! or worse yet !!! in front of your directory names for the poser runtime.  If I think your item is so gosh darned impressive that it should appear at the top of my runtime, I'll rename it accordingly.  I spent a lot of time in grade school learning the alphabet, and I'd like to get some actual use out of it - thanks.

Also using vanity naming conventions.  If your outfit is called say "Alice Dress" and the name of the directory in the Character section is "Alice Dress by Whoever" then why in the name of hades would you name the mat directory "Artist Who've I've Never Heard of MAT", or worse yet "My Third Party Texture Set with no mention of the outfit it's actually for MAT".  Ok, if I only have 3 or 4 mat file directories in that runtime, sure I'll track it down pretty easy.  But if your like most and have 30 or 40 mat file directories in that runtime, not having the name of the outfit directory and the name of the mat file directory at least somewhat related is a royal pain in the keester, and it's not like I'm going to remember which artist I bought the "Alice Dress" outfit from 6 months from now.  Same with the texture file directory names.  Finding them in Poser is possible but it's also a pain, so please for goodness sake try to name them something that actually has some relation to the name of your item, burying it under your artist name pretty much gaurantees I'll have to do some serious looking to find a specific texture or mat file I want to edit 3 months down the road when I've long since forgotten who I bought "Alice Dress" or "Mike's Mighty Pants" from.  Your a vendor of 3d artwork who I might have purchased one or two things from all total, your not a rockstar or someone famous who's name and works will be permantly etched into my conciousness.   Please start conducting yourself accordingly.

Ok, so that's not to say that you need to forgo using your artist name completely - but a directory called "Alice Dress by Vendor" is a heck of a lot easier to locate than a directory where I have Vendor Name as the main directory, then subdirectories underneath, same with your character/pose file directory names in the poser runtime. 

As to the overabundance of "skank wear" for V4, I guess I can't really blame the vendors for making what seems to sell the most.  I think that as a community the best way to combat this is with the ratings system - if you buy a product that is not skank wear and it's well made and useful, give the artist some really positive feedback.  Tell people why you like the product and that it's a good value for the money.

This gets those products noticed, and they start selling better.   Truth be told I don't think you'll probably see a huge shift in market forces anytime soon, but it's certainly worth the effort I think.  Just my 2 cents worth, as usual I could be wrong :)

BLF,

If you have hair or other items that do not quite fit your current characters might I also suggest that you read a few tutorials on a poser feature called "magnets".  Magnets are a real godsend, once you practice with them for a bit you can easily make adjustments to things like hair or clothes to fix a lot of issues like poke through, sizing, etc.

It's possible to take hair for one character, like V4, and using magnets resize and reshape it enough so that it fits V3 or other characters.   It's also possilbe to use magnets to create your own morphs for hair, clothing, and pretty much any prop or character.

Quote - I am having problems with Poser 7,  after a couple of manipulations it hangs.   I'm not exactly sure when this really started as in changes made to my computer.  When first installed it worked just fine.  Then somewhere along the way it started to hang/crash.  Poser 6 works just fine and I've gone back to it.    But I seem to have invested some money in 7 and would like to see it work.   I've installed the latest patchs but still no go.   I can reinstall but would like to forgo that if possible.   Does anybody have any ideas?   Dell XPS with two gigs of ram onboard, NVIDIA GEFORCE 7800GTX video and Pentiun 3 gighz processor.     Did I miss a change somewhere along the way????

Ok, this is going to sound very, very weird, but believe me odds are good it will fix the problem.  Defrag your harddrive.

Yes, I know, it shouldn't have very little effect on how poser operates, but for whatever reason Poser is very, very sensitive about harddrive (particularly swap file) fragmentation.  Run a defrag on your system with Poser (and all other non-essentials) shut down, and then once the defrag is done try working in poser again. 

If your system is anything like mine the results will be remarkable.  I've started defragging my drives automatically once a week, Poser has remained stable and solid ever since.  Odd, but true.

See, this is why I've all but given up on giving people helpful tips in the message forums.  Somebody adds information to my original post, they get thanked, I don't.. lol..

Oh well, such be life I guess.

Quote - I've found that when my morphs start getting lumpy it's due to me not placing the dots or lines correctly.
If I get tired and my eyes get tired, I make errors.
but when I'm having a good day and get the placements right, I get a really good morph.

This program is like any other, it takes patience, practice and depends on the user.
some are comfortable with it, others aren't.

I so want the latest version but with Christmas close, all my spare cash goes to buying my grand-babies some gifts.
And it will still be a lean Christmas for them...sigh.

I looked at the 3.5 version many moons ago, but decided against purchasing it primarly because a very small change in where those dots are placed results in a very large change in the resultant mesh.  I never could quite get the hang of placing dots so that the mesh would come out looking reasonably human, much less recognizable as a particular individual's face.

Sent an email about this to their "customer support" and never did get any response, apparently since I hadn't yet paid for the program I wasn't worth responding too, nothing I could find in the instructional video seemed to address this problem, and I simply didn't have several months of "play with it" time to work out dot placement on my own. 

So I decided against purchasing it and have generally recommend that others do the same, at least until they either fix the ultra picky dot placement problem or at the very least give you some idea on how to place dots properly.  The videos make it look falling off a log easy - it isn't, not by a long shot.  A minor varation one way or the other and you get a huge variation in the resultant mesh. 

Ok, I give these folks credit where credit is due, they certainly are one of the "better" applications available for doing this sort of thing and that is an accomplishment.  But from my experience their customer service wasn't just below par, it was practically non-existant, so that in and of itself made me decide to what until some other company came out with a similar product.    Still waiting, granted, but I'm not in a hurry to be anywhere. 

If your using Poser 7 / Poser Pro:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/blog/display.php?member=Digger1967

If your using poser 6, you can shutoff the texture filtering as part of the rendering options. 

Hope that helps.

Quote - @ Digger1967**

Step 1: Complete
Step 2: Complete
Step 3: Done. I stripped the unnecessary bones as svdl suggested, but when I try to leave the setup room I get an error message saying that some groups are not assigned to bones.

The fact that your figure does not conform at all makes me think you've matched the exteral names, not the internal ones.

What svdl said here concerns me. How to I get at the internal names of my prop?
**

Actually my guess is there are no groups setup at all then, just open the group editor inside the setup room, select each bone in turn that should have mesh from your clothing figure that moves with it and press "auto group" to create mesh groups for each individual bone, that should do the trick.  The group editor is the icon that looks like a dashed square with a dot in the middle.

The internal names should be auto created when you pull in the bone structure, you probably just need to assign various portions of the mesh to each of those names using the autogroup feature.. my apologies for leaving this out on the original run through, been a while since I converted anything to a conforming figure for Poser :)

Hiya Band,

I must admit when I'm doing conforming clothing I tend to cheat, I don't use the PHI process because it's too easy to miss something and run into problems like the one you describe.  Generally when I'm doing conforming clothing here's how I do it:

Step 1:  Load the default figure the clothing is for in Poser in it's default pose.  It's usually best to use the default model that is "bare", meaning the one that doesn't have any morphs or anything with it.  It's not essential mind you, but it will speed up the process somewhat as it takes longer to load them.  Just be sure not to move or change the position of the default figure the clothing is for in anyway, leave it in exactly the position it was in when it was loaded.  The reason for this, you'll be using this as a reference to line up your clothing, and when you go to add bones to your cloths you'll be doing so by loading this exact same figure in the setup room, which has the effect of pulling in the bones from that figure in the exact same place they are in your current reference model.

Step 2.  Import the prop for the clothing item (in this case your boots) and then position them so they fit properly on the model in it's default Pose.

Step 3:  With the prop for the clothing selected, enter the setup room - then in the figures tab in your library click on the same base model (ie V3, V4, M3, etc) you used to load the default figure the clothing is for, this will recreate the exact bone structure of the default figure inside your current object file.

Step 4: Return to the Pose room, and save a copy of your newly created figure.  You'll probably need to change some names under properties so your figure won't show up as "Figure 1" and should it be necessary you'll might have to redo the auto grouping on the mesh slightly  for more realistic bends, but usually it does a pretty good job of this on it's own overall.

Hope that helps.

Quote - Hi folks,
I posted here before about this before but since then I purchased Poser Pro (havent had much time to use it though) and a couple of other issues did arise. 
OK here is my predicament: I need to get my poser character into MAX 2009 (or earlier) for rendering, -that is a must.  I want to get the hair in to max so that it is strand like and not a poly mesh.  I am downloading the 1.2 upgrade (for max2009 from smithmicro at the mo) and I am hoping that this will import in the charater and hair properly,

I did look at DS as it was a cheaper alternative (but I have no experience of it and some experience of Poser), it appears that DS doesnt integrate with max that well. If I am wrong about this please correct me.

Final thing, can DS models eg v4 Load into Poser, which models are generally considered the best, poser's or DS's?,
thanks
Mike

Hiya Mike, yes it is possible to transfer Poser models to Max, however the "poser fusion" that comes with Poser Pro seems to have a lot of issues in this regard.  As I understand it it actually loads a Poser Object into max by running a copy of Poser to "interpret" the poser content for max, and that the setup for it is anything but straightfoward.  It appears to install quite easily, but it never seems to work after that.  I had a friend tell me that after installing it on his system first it couldn't find 3ds Max, not until he downgraded his 2009 copy to version 9.0, then once he did it seemed to find Max fine but couldn't find Poser until he reloaded version 6, which he thought was rather silly considering it came with Poser Pro and yet couldn't seem to find the software it came with.  From the reading I've done in various forums it's more or less a plug and pray type of thing, plug it in, pray it works, odds are good your prayers will not be answered.

I've had really good luck myself transfering poser Models to max by simply exporting my Poser scene to OBJ file and importing into Max from there.  The problem with this method is that Max cannot find the texture files on it's own this way, so you'll either need to point it to each individual texure (which can be a pain) or get a 3rd party program like Right Hemisphere's Deep Explorer, which can easily convert all the information from a collada file into a format that any version of  Max can fully understand with little muss or fuss.

Quote - DAZ recommends that the Mill 3 figures be loaded in the internal runtimes, but that's supposed to be (IIRC) because the morph INJ poses want to look there first, and having them elsewhere slows down their loading. I've never had a problem with that though.

As for V4/M4, you can load them into external runtimes, you just need a Poser.exe file in the folder the runtime is in before the installer will accept it as a valid location. I did that with both, and my M4 installation has nothing in my P7 main runtime and still loads quickly, with morphs loading fine.

Never had a problem with the injectors myself for the other figures being in external runtimes for V3/M3, no appreciable difference in speed from what I can tell.  Never tried that with V4, since it got so grouchy about installing only where it could find poser.exe I thought better safe than sorry.

That's good info though, appreciate you taking the time to share it :)

Quote - Hborre, that's a novel idea that I never thought of....having  runtime just for stuff I might get around to one day. Good grief, I have so much stuff now that I rarely use... I'm like a Poser Pack Rat! 

Just an FYI if you start running low on drivespace  you can also put stuff you use only very rarely in a runtime and burn that runtime to CD or DVD, then put the DVD in the drive and add that runtime to Poser when you need it.  The real trick here is to keep a good record of which DVD that stuff is on, because if you save a scene using something from a "offline" runtime like that you'll need to be able to find the DVD it's stored on to get the scene to come up properly again after that. 

Quote -   how do I get Poser 6, once it's installed, to understand that this content isn't on my C: drive, but that it's on an external drive. But then again, I'm sure that's explained in the tutorial... I just haven't gotten that far yet. This all sounds like a project for tomorrow night. It's just after midnight here and I just got off work. I have be back in at 7:30am! Time for sleep now. But no work tomorrow evening - thank God for that!
Thanks for all the help. If there's anything else you think I need to know, please holler it out -  thanks again!

Easy enough, when you open poser click on "figures"* from the library tab and it should open a list of figures in your internal directory.  At the top of that list will be a file folder with an arrow on it, click on this and it will take you up to the next directory listing, in this case that will be a listing of all your runtimes. 

**(you can actually do this from pretty much any tab, poses, props, etc, I just got into the habit of using the figures tab for this because it's at the top)

You should see one for poser and I think one for downloads in Poser 6.  At the bottom of the library box you'll see a check mark icon and a + sign icon, if you hit the plus sign icon it will ask you to add another runtime, it will pop up a box that will allow you to browse to the directory for your external runtime.

Just repeat the process above to add additional external runtimes, I have a runtime for each figure type I normally use (one for V3,, one for V4, one for M3, etc..) and additional runtimes for things like transportation (cars, bikes, helicopters, planes), interiors (furniture, walls, balconeys), exteriors, animals, etc.

This allows me to very quickly navigate to exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for to complete my scene.  Again, works well for my workflow that way but really you can set it up anyway you like.

Quote - As far as external runtimes, once they've been added to your Runtimes list in Poser, Poser will be able to find the resources in these external runtimes quite easily, without having to factor in drive letters or pathnames or other messy stuff like that.

As far as I know any character other than V4/M4 will work just as well if installed into an external runtime as they would if there installed into the internal runtime.  All of my characters other than V4 are installed in external runtimes, never had any problem.  V4, however, requires itself to be installed in the internal runtime, and from the reading I've done on M4 it appears to have the same restriction.

As for my own runtimes, I have one entirely dedicated to V3, one dedicated to V4, etc.  So if I need a V4 based character I switch to that external runtime and load everything I need from it all at once.  Works fairly well for keeping things organized, keeping individual runtimes fairly small so I can find everything I need fairly quickly, etc.  Even though I have V4 loaded in the internal runtime, I setup a CR2 in the external runtime for V4 as well, by simply loading the figure default and then switching to the external runtime and adding it back to that library.  That way I can load V4 and anything associated with it all from the one external runtime.

But of course everyone has there own system, that's just what works well for me personally.