I use it to model.  Once in a blue moon I do a render.   I'm sticking with version 7 -- DAZ would have to pay ME to "upgrade" now.  All they seem to be able to do is bloat the program and break what works.

It needs to go to another company.  DAZ can't even decide what kind of company they are, much less what they want to do with Carrara, and if I didn't know better I'd think they had only one programmer for the whole company and she's on part-time as well!

In a better world, they'd stage DAZStudio as the posing, animation, and render engine (optimized for pre-made content), Hexagon as the "create from scratch" engine, and Carrara between them as the "does all things and is priced accordingly" ap.  Except that Hex is buggy as hell and has never been supported, D/S has turned into a confusing mish-mash of micro-pricing and add-ons, and Carrara flounders; unable to spend the time the software needs, they try to keep it competitive by leaping blindly in the direction of every cool idea they think they can get a half-assed approximation to work long enough for Marketing to run off a promo image.

The one admission I will give them is that the two major platforms have also stumbled upon sell-the-flash-not-the-function and you can't turn around without running into a completely revamped OS that instantly becomes a must-have (despite breaking half of the functionality and the majority of the software built for the previous version).  So DAZ is forced to try to play catch-up to Apple and Microsoft when they could be working on more important things.

Yes.  I've been using the software since Ray Dream.  I was a regular contributor to three generations of the bug report system, and a regular at the DAZ forums, helping newbies with modeling and texture woes.

So DAZ changes the forum and deletes all my history, changes the bug reporter AGAIN and as far as I can tell deleted all my bugs, and if you say anything other than Mary Sunshine Larks in the Park around the forums, they delete your post.

I'm not waiting on them to straighten up any more.  I'm waiting on them to have a coup.  Maybe a completely new management might be able to start rebuilding trust.

If you are just talking making a render, consider rendering the reflection in a separate pass and comping that with the main render in a paint program.  That gives you flexibility in how much reflection, the color cast, and even allows you blurry reflections without tying up a whole bunch of render time in experiments.

If on the other hand you want to do it all "in camera," a couple things to keep in mind.

First, that bit about the fresnel shader is right on.  Bagginsbill would (and has!) explained in a lot more detail and a lot more accurately but basically most reflective surfaces aren't the same reflection at all angles.  Take a window pane.  Looking at it dead on, you usually can look through it.  Look at a sharp angle, and usually all you see is reflection.

Cheap way to do this is by plugging an Edge Blend node into reflection value.

Next, reflection is, well, light.  If it is reflecting more, then it should diffuse less.  If you leave the diffuse value up and turn up the reflection, you make a surface that is too bright.

Third is blurry reflections.  Most surfaces are not optical-grade mirrors.  The trouble with the Blurry Reflection setting in Poser is it gets really spotty if you don't use a high reflection quality.  Which, incidentally -- a quality of .2 is perfectly acceptable for a non-blurry reflection.  You only need to get up to .6 and above if you are using a lot of blur.  And this slide more than any other single slider impacts your render time!

Okay, fourth is background.  Reflective surfaces reflect what is around them.  If you have a floor and a prop, then most of the look of the floor will be the background color of the scene.  Which can be really boring (and not look realistic).  Often you get a more interesting -- though not always realistic -- result by plugging an image into that background color slot in the reflection node.

That image will be applied to the UV coordinates of the reflective object, however, unless you add one more node.  Plug a "lighting-environment-spherical" into the background slot of the reflection node, and plug your image into that.  That will apply it to an imaginary sphere surrounding the scene.

This may help:

http://brian-the-techie.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-to-rig-poser-prop.html

Or not!

(I'll second the comment about B.L. Render's book.  Best Poser-related purchase I ever made.)

Amazon may have a few copies left as well.  Same deal.

Does run on my pre-retina macbook.  Haven't tried to export yet but so far everything else I've tried has worked.

Thanks!  Seems potentially useful for something, even if I can't think of what right at the moment.

On my own rigging chore, I just decided to hide the dials AND most of the actors, too, and let the power user figure it out.  My guess is anyone who is going to tinker with a multi-actor prop to make the hoses bigger or the levers longer or whatever (I'm building steampunk this time), is the same kind of user who is already comfortable going under the hood anyhow.

(And, yes, now that I have a computer that was made this decade, I will try to get back to Poser Python. )

What I want out of Poser 9 is that it runs on my macBook with (cursed!) Mountain Lion put on it by the idiots at Apple.  My existing copies do not.  I also want to be able to continue building custom figures and exporting them in a form both Poser and DAZStudio can open.

I've been up down and sideways through the Smith Micro site and I still can't tell if it is actually compatible.  Anyone here have Poser 9 running under 10.8?

Also put a control loop around any long thin cylinders.  I call this the "anti-bagpipe" loop; firefly has a tendancy to turn cylinders into balloon animals if you don't.

A more complex (but flexible) option;

Take that cloth plane, scale it appropriately to make one "segment" of a longer tape.  Then use PhilC's "All Tied Up" to make an easy-pose ribbon of appropriate length.  Make sure to use a tiling texture, as the texture will repeat each "original piece of cloth" down the length.

My memory is a lot of people were using a library for some GUI functions that didn't get ported to Mac.  Many of the tools I'd tried (not yours, of course!) were not compatible. A problem I've been having a lot with Java, too -- had to upgrade to Mountain Lion before I could use MIDI libraries properly! 

I've had your book bookmarked for ages, but neither the time nor the money to pursue it.  Of course, now that I have an upgraded computer to play with, I don't have ANY version of Poser that will work on it.  Working back in P6 on a PPC for the nonce.  Thinking P9 for the new machine because it seems as if exporting DAZ-compatible rigs might be easier there than in Pro 2012.

Anyhoo.  How this came up is I was dial cleaning on a steampunk prop.  I'm always debating whether to hide all the dials I don't want the user to be playing with in normal use, or leave them open for posing possibilities I hadn't thought of when I built the thing.  Being able to provide a one-click pose that unhid the "now fully editable!" dials would be fun.  Of course, my guess is one person in thirty would even figure out what that pose was for.  But that's still four times the number that would run a script to do it... (if you were up to running scripts, then just run PocketKnife, eh?)

Another option to keep in mind:

You can make a conformer with extra body parts.  Those parts can either be non-bending or have broken affectors (remove those lines from the cr2).  What this means, is, the underlying body part (say, the belt) poses and bends, but the weights on the belt just follow the belt and don't bend.

Since you can construct all kinds of heirarchies, can have, say, a tank that is either parented to a conforming harness, or to a phantom body part (create a body part called "chest" but don't give it any geometry), and it has as children a tail of poseable hose parts.  There's even a way to conform to two different body parts (so the tank follows the back but the mask follows the head), but I'm a little rusty at the moment and forgotten how it works.

On other hand, no harm in keeping it simple.  I'm rigging a gadget with a rotating part with a wire lead on it, and it looks just fine to have a morph that bends the wire to follow the rotating part (slaved to it with ERC).

On the knots... Look for how wood is sawn.  A knot is the base of a limb (or the dormant bud of one), with a conical cross-section, therefore they have a specific relationship to the grain pattern.  Which means they will show differently in wood that is flat sawn versus quarter-sawn.  But as a quick-and-dirty, a wider spacing between the grains means that part of the board is closer to flat to the normal of the tree, thus knots will be circular; a tighter spacing means you are moving towards perpendicular, and encountering the knots longitudinally instead of in smallest cross-section.

Anyhow...starting point for research there....

Just as an overview, I think realistic looks have "noise," and "dirt."  There is a fair amount of overlap, but think of the former as being overall iregularity, and the latter as being specific spots.  Or the former as being amenable to procedural methods, the latter as being better-suited to texture maps.

Take a windshield.  All of it will get scratched, dusty, and water-spotted (more-or-less).  Grime will collect in the corners -- which can possibly be done with advanced procedurals.  But the streak and scratch patterns of the wipers are specific to where those wipers hit, and are best handled in paint.

For a nicely-used Army jeep, I'd try using a procedure to bleach the paint on the upper-facing surfaces and generically add dust on the lower parts.  And add a general procedural for the small-scale irregularities of the paint/surface.  But combine these with a rust-and-grime map that paints in where mud splashes from the tires, where oil drips, where boots scuff getting in and out, and more wear/scratches/bleaching on the higher traffic areas.

Or just one big hand-painted map, plus an additional noise procedure to add a little fine-scale noise.

Read up in any plastic model magazine/forum, Fine Scale Modelers et al, or the equivalent in the Model Railroad community, for how they approach what they call "Weathering."  Physical props people -- my favorite blog right now is Volpin Props -- also go into the techniques of weathering. 

Which us theater people used to call "distressing."  Still call it that.  I'm rambling.  Starting up on texturing some steampunk stuff right now and that's a whole load of grime and patina and so on.

I've thought about a more generic magic items collection.  My memory from my old D & D days was most characters ended up with a bunch of little magic items about them; ring of levitation, several one-shot scrolls of fireball, gauntlets of +3 versus annoying-people-who-say-"ni!"-in-the-middle-of-a-gaming-session, etc.

Wow.  These are lovely.

I would TOTALLY pay for a bunch of your tutes in pdf format.  You thought about offering that?

Nice.  I'm definitely going to use those blur settings of yours to get a nice "softer" metal like brass.

Oddly enough, just built a physical prop out of brass, steel, and stainless steel.

What would you do about a brushed surface?