Until recently I'd have said that using a Quadro would be a waste of time and money for Poser.

Well, if you use a GTX series 200 --> GTX 250, GTX 260, GTX 275, 285 and so on, using a Quadro for Poser would be a waste of money since the GTX 200 series performs just as well with OpenGL as a Quadro as far as Poser goes.

However, nVidia recently realized that they made the OpenGL in the GTX 200 series so good that Quadro sales began to suffer as a result of studios equipping their machines with GTX 285's for $400 each instead of Quadros for $4,000.00.

And now, beginning with the Fermi line (GTX 400 and 500 series), they have been intentionally throttling back the OpenGL performance, to the point where a GTX 285 performs significantly faster than a GTX 580 in OpenGL.

So stock up on those GTX 285's while you still can... You don't need DX 11 for OpenGL apps anyway.

I don't know how much of a difference this makes for Poser right now, but it will in the future, assuming SM adopts the newer OpenGL shader models. It seems to make a significant difference with programs such as Maya and Softimage. 3ds max users are safe (for now) since 3ds max uses DX by default.

Never thought you might have to buy a video card that costs 3 times or more the cost of the program you want to use it for, did you? ;-)

Well you wrote "What is the best way to do this without causing conflicts?"

By that,  if you mean simple system conflicts, no, as bagginsbill already pointed out.

However, if you use the same runtime folder(s) with Poser Pro as you do with Poser 7, you could run into conflicts where it comes to saving out new figures and/or shaders/and scenes. In other words, you could accidentally overwrite some of your P7 content, and may not be able to use it in P7 any longer.

Personally, when it come to professional work, I don't take the chances and whenever I update to a new version of almost any program I copy my old content into a new directory and then use that for the new program.

So if you have the disk space, I'd recommend copying your entire P7 project runtime folder to another location and then point Poser pro to use the copy, not the original.

Les, I got your email and thanks again for all you've done!

I have to admit I didn't understand most of what you wrote. ;-)

I haven't had a chance yet to look over the files, but I'll see what I can do. I don't know anything about JCM's really. I know what they are but making them or editing them isn't anything I've ever tried or worried about. In other programs it would be about the same thing as using envelope deformers, or driven key relationships which I know how to do, so maybe I can figure it out in Poser.

If nothing else I can make a good Softimage version of it. ;-)

So I'll see what I can do. I was on vacation but now I'm back to work again tomorrow so I'm not going to have much time. And I still want to finish that shoe I was working on.

Again if anyone else wants it to mess with, let me know. If I can't figure out some way to improve it, I'll just upload the OBJ file along with whatever state it's in at the time and write it off as a perpetual WIP.

Even if I or anyone else can't make it perfect, it can still be made good enough to use if the underlying body parts are hidden.

Anyway as I said thanks a whole lot again and I'll have a look at what you did as soon as I can.

Yeah, that whole poke-through thing. I have no idea what can be done in Poser to eliminate that, with a piece of clothing that by its very nature needs to be very close to the skin.

Of course in 99% of clothed characters, one would only have the visible geometry - A clothed character would only have the clothes plus any visible body parts, but not clothing modeled over the body geometry. Except in certain situations where it would make sense to do otherwise, of course.

But in Poser, short of making entirely new figures for each occasion, I suppose the next best thing is to simply hide unseen body parts and that's what I was assuming people would do. But obviously distortion in the mesh when the body parts are bent is no good.

Well I wasn't sure where exactly to make the part groups, and I figure that's the main problem. I tried to match it up as best as I could with Antonia's parts, but the geometry didn't line up right everywhere, and since (I guess) Antonia has JCM's, that makes it a different story too, since the catsuit can't share those. Again, if only Poser had weight painting, it would be soooooo much easier.

Thanks for your work on it Les! I just sent you an email, and I'll repeat again, if there's anything you need me to do or change, let me know.

Quote - Are they worse than ears?  Ears look rather difficult.

Ears aren't too bad, at least in theory, and if you have a good modeling app that can use curves to extrude polygons and maintain a history so you can adjust the extrusion after-the-fact and easily bridge between the parts.

Larger, more smoothly-contoured objects are more difficult since you have to maintain a smooth curvature over a larger area. At least IMO, that is.

Thanks Cage. I guess it's about time I find some reference pics. ;-)

Here's a picture of the shoe that I'm modeling for Antonia. It's still a WIP and needs some major work. This is turning out to be pretty challenging, really, especially since I don't do much organic modeling, especially trying to model something around something else.

Being single, I don't have any high heel shoes around here to look at for reference, and I'm just kind of winging this one without any reference pictures.

Nothing fancy, just your basic everyday medium high heel, I guess. Actually I think "fancy" would probably be easier. I'm thinking of just scrapping this and starting over since one side got out of control and is not proportional in height with the other side. I dunno, I guess this is one of the reasons I'm not a fashion designer. :D

Opinions? Is this worth continuing work on?

Quote - Every time somebody wants to discuss tactics to decrease fakeness, i.e. realism, a whole lot of "what is art" comes up.

Please go make a separate thread for the 10,347th discussion of "what is art". Note that since nothing in "art" has changed, I don't think such a thread adds anything to the several thousand posts one can find on the subject already.

On the other hand, I think we haven't had a serious discussion of realism tactics in about three years, and since then Poser has changed a lot. There was a "realism" thread that went on a very long time with face_off participating heavily, and I learned a ton from that thread. That is still an important thread, although it doesn't say anything about GC, IDL, modern understanding of SSS, and modern approaches to specularity. I say modern, and by that I mean what I discovered and published since then. Prior to that thread, there was practically nothing about the subject of "less fake". Outside the Poser community, these things were already well known and heavily in use long ago.

If you don't want to talk about how to remove fakeness, then just leave the thread.

I'm not really interested in reading this thread but I got to this post and just had to quote it. After I finished LOL'ing that is. ;-)

I love the directness in the above and I don't think the above sentiments could have possibly been better stated.

Ahh, thanks for the elaboration, I'm definitely going to remember this. It was just killing me before I figured out it was the morphs causing the problem. ;-)

Thanks for that jancory, I'll try that too. :-)

Thanks for the replies everyone.

Morph Manager worked well. I wanted to try the svdl script but every time I tried to download it yesterday the page was timing out. I just tried again and managed to finally get it though and will check that out too. Morph Manager is a slow way to go about it when every body part has dozens of morphs. ;-)

Thanks.

I don't think I want to spend 40 bucks for just one feature though.

Any idea what I would want to look for in the cr2 file if I opened it up with a text editor? So I can just delete all morphs manually that way.

Anything has to be faster than doing it one at a time in Poser and you can't get rid of full body morphs in Poser anyway, as far as I can tell. I want everything gone.

I thought maybe that choosing to save with binary morphs and then deleting the binary file might work, and it does eliminate the morphs, but the names remain. I guess that's halfway though, so maybe that would make it easier to get rid of the rest with a text editor.

Shante,

For one thing, Antonia doesn't have the geometry for creating reasonable looking wrinkles. Not quite, not enough, and her poly flow isn't right for it. I suppose you could add a normal map or a displacement map for such things if you were really intent on it, but that's no good for older versions of Poser and I've never gotten either to work very well in newer versions either.

For another, if you want to have parts that are invisible or see-though, obviously a second mesh is the only way to go about it.

Anyway, I had just asked what people wanted to see made for Antonia. I don't really even use Poser except very rarely, but a catsuit was requested, so a catsuit I have made. ;-)

I have it finished by the way, and halfway rigged up for Antonia and it's workign reasonbaly well. It will probably need to be edited by someone who knows better than I do about Poser conforming stuff though. Les had offered, so if you read this Les, it's ready for you. ;-)

If only Poser had weight map painting....

I'll upload it somewhere within the next few days as time allows me to work on it unless that process gets interrupted by someone else who wants to take it from here.

It's fairly hi-res at 16,500 polys and a reasonable cross between loose-fitting and tight.

I still have to assign part groups to it in order to make it ready for conforming in Poser, and it might be a few days before I can get around to that since I want to move on to something else right now. Plus if you guys would like to see other changes, I'd need to do those first.

I haven't made any wrinkle or smooth morphs for it yet since that would be almost pointless to do before the parts are assigned and it still may be further edited anyway.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants to check out the OBJ file for themselves to see if it's gonna work for Antonia or needs changes, or to get started on grouping it... whatever... let me know and I'll figure out somewhere to upload it to. No point in putting it in the free stuff here yet.

Thanks again Cage. I'm enjoying doing this because I don't get to do too much organic modeling these days, so this is good practice. I am now looking forward to getting it finished though so I can move on to other things. ;-)

As per Gareee's suggestion, I will make the collar higher up the neck, almost all the way to the chin. That's a good idea really, that people can hide it if they want, but one thing that concerns me is if you use a trans map to cut out areas, the area along the cut won't have the polygons that turn inward to give the illusion of depth.