oooh, color, err rather render me intrigued!

Quote - > Quote - I am saddened to hear that the hair has not been fixed, I would think they'd spend some time on that.  

There are other options for animated hair in 2014 Pro. You can now use conforming hair and setup physics on it. It is worlds faster than dynamic, and gives far more predictable results.

Thank you all for your replies.

I do have much better hardware now, and even tried installing poser 7 on it, but the fact that it was single core meant that it still ran very slow.

I am saddened to hear that the hair has not been fixed, I would think they'd spend some time on that.  You don't know how many times I left a 200 frame animation running hair and cloth updates all night , and then two days for a high quality render just to find that the arms and boobs popped right through the cloth and the hair "scrunched" at around frame 30.

It's quite frustrating when you have 4 days setting up and 3 days rendering and your animation is crap when you're done.

For me this is a hobby, I am not making money at it.

I think based on what I have seen here I will not upgrade and give it another try, as some of the fundamental things I want to do seem to still be - if not unworkable - at least problematic.

Maybe after I retire and have nothing but time on my hands.

haha - there ya go pjz99 and Tiari!  Now I feel protected from false advertizing liability.

And don't think of this thread as complaining. What I'm trying to do is inspire LOL

Merry Christmas!

I must admit that this is a far better response than I had hoped for... I posted my comments for 2 reasons. First as a discussion starter, and second in the hopes that a little more artistic value might come to pass.

In regards to composition, I have heard it said that Ansel Adams would find a good landscape shot and wait all day hanging in a tree for the light to be 'just so'.  In virtual art, we can move the Sun with a click of the mouse...

If you don't know who Ansel Adams was, close that mega-breasted pinup render and google for his art.  You won't be sorry.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled boobies.

Most good art and most good speech is offensive in nature.  You can't please everyone, and the whole notion that you can do anything at all without offending anyone in the whole world is a pipe-dream. 

On my daily drive to work, the overtly sexual ad billboards are highly offensive, I hate the rewriting of Christmas carols and "Twas the Night Before Christmas" for radio commercials...

Twas the night before Christmas and we all need a car...

• you get the point.  It all offends somebody.  But life is not about not offending anyone, living is a series of things, some we enjoy and others we detest.  There is only one way to cleanse offense from the planet - and that's to get rid of the humans!

Merry Christmas (haha)...

you can create a cloth sim with no constrained groups, I did bed blankets that way

Could it be that this is a problem relating to my new computer being a Pentuim Duo?  I have heard of wierd problems before with software that goofs up in dual core systems.

And where would the current patches to P5 be found?

Well, if I can't get the cloth room to complete it's calculations, then it's a moot point anyhow. 

Is it possible that I missed a patch or something?  I'm suprised with these horrible bugs that everyone didn't ask for their money back.

Thanks for the detailed advice, I cant wait to try it.  Man, I tried to do a simple hula dance, and the entire figure looked like she was in a blender!  I take it all this is covered in the manual under IK chanis or something?  Is there a good tutorial here in renderosity about this?

As for the firefly animation thing, I had been doing what you said... It's the strangest thing.  I can render a single frame from any frame in the scene, but when outputting an animation as an AVI, It's all that poser brown-gray. 

Strangely, if I tell Poser to output it all as BMP's, all is well.  Also, If I use the Poser 4 renderer all is well.

On the cloth thing... Here's what I'm doing.

1. I created a Judy figure, and made a 400+ frame walk path.  the walk worked perfectly.
2. I added a dress, and went through the process to create a cloth sim, as I have many times before. 
3. I made sure to match the sim's framecount to the walk's.  I think it was 475 frames.
4. I gave it a drape of 20 frames
5. I hit "calculate simulation".

The calculator seemed to drape for about 5 frames, and even though it counted out the rest of the drape, nothing changed in the last 15 frames.

Then it started into calculating the animation.  It calcualted 3 frames and quit, like it was done.  I tried 20 or so times to get it to finish.

Hours later, I trashed the whole scene and started over.  This time, the drape happened just as before, and then the calculator just sat there for 30 minutes without ever reporting a single frame was finished.

Most software would actually report if it had encountered and error.   Most software would understand that 1, 2, 3 does not complete a loop of 475.  

So I guess if I ever want to do a short movie, I need to pick another program.  I guess Poser is only good for posing stills to export to a better renderer.  It's sad, really.

As you can probably tell from my comments, I am an infrequent Poser user.  I'm not trying to make a career out oif it, I'm just trying to have some fun.

ok, I figured it out...

First, the way Truespace clipped the neck hole out of the cloth left long triangles from the hole to the corners.these acted like stiff poles when the drape was happening.  I wrote a Delphi program (because I can't clip a mesh in truespace for some reason) that created the mesh I wanted and it all worked fine.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Attached Link: nerd 3d article on cloth draping

look at the above link...

Maybe I'll just wait for Poser 7.  I can't beleive they released a buggy cloth room and didn't fix it in a patch.  I hate this trend in software companies.  Anything to keep you shelling out $500 every 2-3 years.

any ideas which settings I should start with?

Awesome! That luuv plugin has saved my life. I went from almost giving up to actually productive. I had a lamp created in about 15 minutes. (5 of that was figuring out WHAT the heck I was supposed to "ALT-Click" on (It's the plugin's icon, not the object to export).

Thanks for all these replies.

What export options do I use to export from TS? Using obj files, I always get just one object, no sub-groups and no textures.

Message edited on: 05/20/2005 16:14