Hmmmm. Must be something wrong with my install as that doesn't work. Works in original PoserPro but not in 2010. I'll try to reinstall.

THANKS!

*Hi the Dino animation was a bit "ice skatey"
the female running for her very life in 3 inch pumps was rather cliche'd but her housemaided fetish garb would not be complete
without the matching shoes I suppose.
*too many gratuitous "crotch peeks" that did not ad to the drama
especially at the moment of her fatal impact.
but a decent animation on the leap an rope grab.

Yeah, the sliding dino resulted from parenting the poser scene to a dummy and I didn't take time to match the foot plants properly. I cringed when I saw the render but this was just a quick test. 

The french maid getup was tongue-in-cheek and I suppose I'm guilty of throwing in the up-skirt peeks subliminally. I'd want to re-do the jump to the rope if I did anything more with this and, actually, she's just stunned as I didn't render the final scene where she groggily gets to her feet and a bigger T-rex comes around the corner :)

I really only set this up to test Fusion and I didn't intend to show it to anyone, but figured the results of the lighting and rendering might be of interest to some of the mavens on this forum. I gotta say that I've rethought my view of Poser as a serious tool now that I can get the fast renders and ability to light inside of Max / Maya. Also, I never really was happy with my results for cloth simulation in Poser and I much prefer working in Max. And, finally, I've been messing with HairFarm and it really has blown me away so that my next test is going to be putting some decent dynamic hair on Vicky inside of Max.

Thanks for your comments. Really appreciate you taking the time.

Doc

Quote - Very impressive.  Did you do animation on 3ds max?

Set everything up in PoserPro and rendered in Max. Did the cloth simulation in Max and the camera/lighting, of course. I'm really impressed with how functional Fusion is to render Poser scenes in Max

 Thanks for that info. Just yesterday I experienced the same issue. It appeared to me that the issue involved material IDs that got switched or replaced. I didn't try to troubleshoot it but I recall I did have an UnWrap modifier on a couple of objects in the scene so I'll look there per your findings.

You might want to go to www.turbosquid.com and type in "syringe". Lots of stuff there if you don't want to bother building one yourself and can spare some spendolas. 

 I use the Fusion plug to animate in 3DS Max 2009 (64bit) and I'm very happy with it. I'll be even more happy when PoserPro 2010 comes out with its update for Max 2010. I'm particularly pleased with the ability to use the cloth simulator in Max with Poser models.

 F*ck! I enjoyed that post. ..... you had me going for a moment .... 

Eclipse Studios (www.es3d.com) has some motion sets that include boxing, tackling and a few other 2-character sets that look pretty sweet. If you search you can find some mocap in other formats that also have 2-character sets. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen a set for 3DS Max biped that actually includes a cat fight between two women. It's fairly easy to convert biped animation to Poser if you know someone who uses MotionBuilder and, in fact, there's a tutorial on the Autodesk forum that pretty much describes how to do it.

I find it much easier and efficient to use the FUSION plug in PoserPro to bring the base figure animation into Max, which has a much better implementation of cloth dynamics. Now that they have a 64-bit plug it actually is a reasonable pipeline, in my opinion. Don't know if that's an option for you, but if I was going to do anything serious with cloth dynamics I'd look at the FUSION plug for Max, Maya or C4D.

Quote - Gosh, what a shame to see a beautiful series of films reduced to a cartoon.

And a badly rendered cartoon at that. I was absolutely shocked at how bad this looks to the point that I was suspicious that LucasArts had anything to do with it. Man, this is like an older generation game engine. The eyes in particular look horrible.

I used mocap for some of the running but edited it quite a bit because it didn't match the V3 model very well. THANKS for the nice comments. Max renders area shadows really quickly so the rendering was fast. That's probably the biggest advantage (being able to get quick renders with shadows) of using BodyStudio.

Thanks again for the appreciation. You guys rock.

Alas, I have to report that the video is actually a spoof from a show called Zuiken English that ran on Fuji TV. They called the dancers "Zuiken Girls" and parodied Japanese stereotyped views of America and their own funky English lesson shows. 

I have to give it five stars.

I LOVE OT stuff and especially appreciate you pointing it out in your subject heading for those who get peeved at it.

This was priceless. I'm just stunned and vascillating between WTF? and laughter.

Good info there, Replicand. I divide my time between L.A. and San Jose but confess that I enjoy the film projects I work on more than the forensic stuff. But, hey, you gotta pay the bills.

I completely agree with you about rolling your own character meshes. I've been using Modo lately for modeling and took Steven Stahlberg's "modeling cybergirls" course last year, which helped my technique a whole bunch. More recently I picked up the "Essence: The Face" book, which was very enlightening on several counts. I particularly appreciated its suggested workflow using FaceGen as a starting point for building human heads. Since you're a Maya guy you won't get any use from the cool Max plug-in for skin shading that's included but I highly recommend it to Max users.

In all honesty, I also have to say that you'll be a better animator and have better results if you follow your approach and I much prefer building and rigging my own characters when time and budgets permit. However, I often get clients with just a few thousand bucks who need a settlement or mediation presentation with some character motion on an insanely short deadline. They almost always have a photos available (often pretty brutal crime or accident scene pix or even morg photos) and in forensic presentations anything you can do that comes closer to matching the person depicted is a plus. Usually the character motion is not complex so, for us, using Poser for the setup makes a lot of sense. BodyStudio lets us render the result pretty painlessly within the crime or accident scene we built in Max. 

Since we rarely deal with facial expressions or speech, we've started creating 3D head models with FaceGen when we are given decent photos of the person's face. Thus, we can create a really nice textured likeness that we export as an OBJ file and then substitute it for the Poser character's head. We're not going for film quality, so using conforming clothes works just fine and we have a presentable customized character without having to do any rigging.

Having said all of that, I'll acknowledge that the high density of the Mil3 characters is a bitch as is the texture load. That's why I'm really hoping ReissStudio releases a 64-bit version soon. 

In the end, I guess the peculiarities of forensic animation make this a particularly apt solution since production values are not required to be as high as commercial or film work and the emphasis is on speed and shortcuts to get customized stuff done on time.

Like everybody else out here, I'm an aspiring film guy too, by the way. Figuring out how to do decent effects on a shoestring is one of my favorite pasttimes. You might enjoy seeing some of the stuff I did on a short here: www.lodohappyhour.com Click the VFX notebook to see a breakdown of the FX I did. We used FrameForge3D and Poser for a bunch of Previz, by the way.

Take care and maybe someday we'll cross paths.

Mark Johnson
www.forensicarts.com

Quote - Post 1 looks pretty good, though not like a photograph because the tables and floor's reflections are too strong and the scene is spotless (no dirt). This is obviously a universe where entropy doesn't exist. 

I'm not familiar with Vray but know mental ray very well. Posts 3 & 5 don't look much better than Firefly IMHO. Tried Body Studio but stopped using it because it seems like a waste to not take advantage of the tools inside of "more powerful" systems.

Thanks for the comment. None of the images posted here were intended as showpieces and were merely tests to confirm a variety of Poser models/animtions would render properly in Max. 

Regarding your final comment, I think a couple observations are worth making:

1)  Everybody will agree that Max, Maya, Messiah and other tools offer much more sophisticated character rigging solutions than Poser. However, if you are simply looking for the option of using clothed characters with a huge range of clothing/prop options pre-rigged and ready to animate, you cannot touch the advantage of having access to the Poser world. My business is forensic animation and if a client needs to have a pedestrian in a scene dressed a particular way or, say, a policeman -- well, Poser permits us to generate a reasonable character in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise simply because of the vast (and inexepensive) content available 'off the shelf' here and on other sites.

1. Being able to use the Max render environment is a huge advantage, in my opinion, because it is SO much easier to light and work with cameras than within Poser. Granted, you can do almost anything inside Poser if you are willing to take the time. But those of us used to being able to grab and move spotlights and their targets within the workspace pull our hair out using the Poser paradigm.

2. There really is no good "fast" render option with Poser unless you accept the preview mode as good enough. In my opinion, just being able to QUICKLY render fully textured Poser animations from easily controlled cameras makes Bodystudio worth the price of admission. 

So, I guess my question to you, given that you gave up on BodyStudio, would be what your alternative is? Did you give up on Poser animation completely and animate all your characters elsewhere? If so, don't you miss the huge ready-made content available in Poser? If not, don't you miss the rendering/lighting/camera advantages of Max/Maya? I'm just curious as to what part of the equation I'm missing since you didn't find BodyStudio to be useful.

Thanks!