I know this thread is a year old but I thought I'd mention that a replacement FBra2.obz file has just been posted on e-frontier's Poser 6 download page.  It only took them 1 day from the time I reported it -- not bad!  Check it out, it's kinda sexy...

Veritas -- The SWELL application crashes on startup on my PC, which is running Win XP SP2. Any advice for getting it to run?

For example...some "high end" features in the latest versions of Poser include dynamic strand-based hair; dynamic cloth simulation with wind forces; a very powerful procedural material editor including true displacement mapping and advanced nodes such as subsurface scattering; magnets for interactive mesh deformation; image-based lighting with ambient occlusion; and all these things can be keyframed and animated. Although it's not intended to be a primary modelling tool you can actually do a fair bit of basic modelling in Poser using the primitive shapes and the mesh grouping tool to make things like buildings and furniture.

Attached Link: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/995/1/305?sbss=305

Attached Link: http://www.contentparadise.com/user/product.php?productid=9751&cat=1325&page=1

Excellent work - thanks for sharing! BTW the skin shader in the Zip file was missing the .MAT file extension when I unzipped it. It could be because on my system, that file extension is already associated with Microsoft Access Table Shortcuts. I added it manually and it worked fine.

Tebop, In the past I have done what you said in your last paragraph. I stuck a microphone out my back door and recorded ambient city noises for as long as I needed for my animation. It took less time in the long run than trying to get clean, realistic sample loops. Another option: rather than repeating one sound clip, obtain several different samples of the same sound and assemble/blend them in random order. It makes the repetitions less obvious.

It's not in the printed manual but is documented in the PDF version found in your Poser 6 folder, on page 38 (page 52 of the PDF). The settings determine how Firefly behaves as available memory gets low -- whether the bucket size should be automatically reduced; the degree to which this occurs; and the minimum free memory required (in megabytes) beyond which the render will terminate itself.

Try updating to the latest ATI driver for your card. I have a Radeon 7500C which is officially not supported for Vue 5 since e-on recommends 9x00 or better. Mine works okay; a bit slow, but never crashes even in hardware OpenGL mode.

This looks like a "feature" of the SolidGrowth generator for this species. To illustrate this, make the leaves 100% transparent so they disappear and load solid colours into the trunk and stem materials. You'll notice the colour of the stems closest to the trunk is desaturated to a greyish tone. It seems the colour of any leaf materials attached to these stems is also automatically desaturated. I agree the desaturation is too strong and brown would be a better colour than grey for dead leaves, but unfortunately I don't think we can change this aspect of this species' SolidGrowth algorithm.

Tropob, When you go to save your animation, click the "Browse" button beside the filename and choose a still image format(e.g. TIF, TGA, GIF, BMP) instead of the default movie format (likely MOV on your Mac; it's AVI on the PC version of Vue). Vue will save the animation as a sequence of images in the chosen format.

Attached Link: http://www.shopsite.com/help/6.1/en-US/sc/pro/cvv2.help.html

It's a security feature since it doesn't get printed on receipts. Therefore the online merchant knows you have the actual card and somebody hasn't just stolen one of your receipts out of the garbage and is using it to make online purchases.

Message edited on: 05/05/2005 23:46

Take heart Tropob, it can be done! I have made animations with fairly modest hardware and software resources. But it generally takes me several months to make a 5- to 10-minute movie (lack of talent is probably a factor in my case, ha-ha!).

Rendering maybe takes only half that time. The rest is spent developing the story (the MOST important thing, in my opinion); building 3D models; posing and keyframing the things that move, lighting the scenes, recording the voices and sound effects; and working through technical problems. A feature-length movie is a very ambitious undertaking, so I suggest starting with something a little shorter if this is a solo project.

To add to the others' responses:

#1 - You really need video editing software to be able to assemble scenes and sync audio and video. It doesn't have to be fancy. Sony Vegas is almost $500, but Apple iMovie will do the trick and it's $79 (if I recall correctly you have a Mac).

#5 - Try experimenting with different anti-aliasing settings, including turning it off, and with the flicker reduction checkbox in Vue's Advanced Animation Options dialog.

#7 - You'll need a separate modelling application if you want to break apart existing models. Effects like smashing a bottle require a modelling program with physics simulation capabilities, unless you have the patience to animate the trajectory of each individual shard of glass. I'm a PC user so I don't know what to recommend for the Mac.

#9 - Full NTSC video resolution is 720x480. On a good TV you will notice some pixelation when doubling the size of a 320x240 image. But if the story is good, nobody will mind. I have seen great stories told with animated 2D sketches. If you want lots of visual effects and full sized renders and you have deep pockets, buy a bunch of Macs and hook up a render farm. Your copy of Vue supports up to 5 rendercows. Then you can give Pixar a run for their money (not.) ;-)

blaineak wrote "I believe the head issue is because you need to create a new character file with the new head."

Your suggestion to add the P4 runtime to P5 is very good and should solve most of tropob's problems, but I don't think it's necessary to save a custom-headed character to the library. When trying to reproduce tropob's problem I was able to import a customized figure from a saved PZ3 scene file without saving it to any runtime library.

tropob, I tried to reproduce your customized face import problem but could not i.e. it worked for me (in Vue 5 Infinite, anyway). Which base P5 character did you use for your customized figure, Don or Judy?