Quote - Anyone know why the String Bikini is not listed on Hivewire3D's site? I noticed people did textures for it but it's not listed in the starter pack or on Hivewire's site.

I just looked at one of the texture packs and the bikini looks like the same one that comes with the free character.  She comes with the bikini.

Quote - As for the issue some have of bringing it into poser? I have had no issue(except for sizing the OBJ down to fit v4 again >.<) In fact the first render I did with my first dress because I couldnt get it to do what I wanted in MD I did it in poser and was plesantly surprised and the drape in poser.

I wrote a tutorial earlier this week (Rendo has to approve it though) detailing how to get an avatar from Poser to MD, how to get your Poser pose into MD, and how to export your draped clothing item from MD and get it into Poser.  No scaling needed.  No idea when they'll or if they'll approve it.

I can do some renders in Poser Pro 2014 using Octane for rendering.  If you want straight up Poser renders I'm probably not a good candidate as it's been a while since I've used Firefly.  If you're not familiar with Octane you can see some renders I did with it in the ol' gallery.

Is there a reason to do the cloth sim in Poser instead of MD3?  Normally I do the sim in MD then export into Poser already fitted to my pose.

Quote - Hmm.  Need a better way to simulate volumetric mass.  Something under the skin. 

Ideally a hard skeleton with softer muscle/fat tissue that the outerskin is being influenced by. Then you could also simulate muscle bending.

I haven't played with the Poser Physics engine much but I think you can set the internal pressure to simulate the skeleton/muscle density.

I live in the United States and outside of California.  No sales tax on my upgrade from 2012 to 2014.

Quote - I am happy with firefly but see that others prefer to use other render engines. Could what those who use reality etc be written into firefly?

I personally use Octane although I also have a Reality 3 license.  Smith Micro would have to purchase the renderer.  Reality uses Lux under the hood which I believe is free/open source and Octane works amongst other tools also like Lux does.  It'd be more limiting for those renderers.

The main benefits to Octane/Reality is that they will use your graphics card to render.  You can render most scenes in under a minute.

Quote - I wonder if they've got enough bugs fixed in Reality 3 for it to work with Pro 2014?

Poser Pro 2014 uses the same version of Python as 2012.  Unless they've made radical changes to the materials room/nodes, it should be fine.  I think the biggest hurdle will likely be compound nodes and converting them for Reality 3, but that shouldn't be too hard since in essence, it's just a folder of normal nodes.

Quote - and it can extract thumbnails from rsr files.

I've been using this to convert rsr to png files.  It works very fast even on large libraries.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=57197

Quote - 2014 material compound nodes will probably need you to update from 2012 to use them.

It seems like compound nodes are just for convenience.  I wonder if they'll update 2012 with a service pack to undo compound nodes.  I'm getting 2014 anyway but it seems like something that could be done.  Somebody could probably write a python script to remove compound nodes during export from 2014 so people could sell the content too for 2012 I guess.

Quote - The e-mail says its "Fitting Room" will handle any character. Is SM finally creating a Poser a room that will work with  the Vickys and Micheals ? I know Poser has never accepted them in the Face Room- I wish that would change.

I don't see why it wouldn't.  If you look at the very bottom of the announcement page there are videos demoing it.  It looks like it'll work with any figured, even a random prim if you really wanted.

http://poser.smithmicro.com/poser10-poserpro2014/

That make sense.  Thanks!

Quote - Do you say, "I am going to make us a meal", and then drive Off to Mc Donalds?

Every day!

I use premade poses as a rough outline.  A quick way to get the parts near where I'd want them.  Then I move them a bit this way and that to get what I actually want.  Poses can be good to start with but unless you're using the default figure you'll likely want to make some adjustments.  Even with the default figure you still might unless you and the original pose maker had the exact same scene in mind.

Makes sense to me.  Goodbye .pz2's.  Thanks.

I randomly stumbled on this thread yesterday and decided to give MD a whirl since hey... free for 30 days!  I've tried previously modelling clothes in Hexagon and Blender to no avail... unless the avatars want to wear a cylinder I suppose.  :)  Anyway while I have no doubt that a real 3d modelling program is likely superior in many aspects, I was very impressed with what I was able to do despite only spending a few hours with the software.  It took me about 1-2 hours (closer to 1 though) to model a basic dress.  Nothing too fancy but still it's something I made.  My first piece of clothing.  I'll certainly play with it more in the coming days and weeks but it might be worth the price due to the money I'll save on clothes.  It's like buying a sewing machine with all the free fabric you can muster!  I need to find some patterns online to emulate or look at seams of clothing online since I don't really understand how clothes are made in the real world.  But emulating them might be a good challenge.

Here's the dress (on a figure) rendered out in Poser Pro 2012.  The texture isn't anything fancy but one thing at a time eh?

http://pandarr.deviantart.com/#/d4zc5ff