Hey all - thanks for the well wishes. The speculation? I could do without that, but it is what it is.

Here's the skinny. I needed a new challenge. Loving Poser has kept me engaged on and off for 20 years. But there are a few other things I love. Photography. VR. Hardware, gear and gadgets. I joined Lytro as their Director of Product Marketing, my first day is February 9th. Lytro is working on some very innovative technology that's in its infancy. Plenoptics. Light field photography. They're a great, well funded company in start-up mode. They need someone with my skills. It's a lovely new challenge that I'm stoked to be able to dive into. My head and heart both need that.

Here's where I'll be moving: https://www.lytro.com/

Parting is bittersweet. There's a family of folks who I've worked with for two decades, grown up, survived alongside. And then there's this crazy Poser product family, the pinnacle of personification.

I let the team know months ago that I was planning a change so they could prepare. They have been. The change will be good.

Have a little faith, please?

Cheers,

Steve Cooper

Quote - Thank you. One further clarification, if it's not too much trouble: one of the features that's piqued my interest is the figure combiner because, as several people have noted, being able to create low-rez figures for populating scenes with the huge library of assets I already have would be excellent. Is the combined figure with the single texture map something which can be used within the program itself, without additional work in the setup room or whatever, ie, the tool creates a new CR2 right out of the box so once you run it there's a low-rez figure ready to use in Poser?

Yes- both the newly combined figure, poly removal and poly reduction for figures and props will work inside Poser, and they will really help with large scenes with lots of background figures. There might be some tweaking needed in the Joint Editor, but the design on these features is to utilize the weight maps from outermost figure when combining. Once combined, the new figure should be able to be saved into the library.

Quote - So, to be clear, will PPGD be, essentially, PoserPro 2014 with those features on top so someone using PP2014 would be able to do everything they do now with PPGD, or will PPGD be limited (not counting the new features) compared to PP2014?

Keith, it's the former - Poser Pro Game Dev will essentially be Poser Pro 2014 with the new Game Dev version features added to it. All current Poser Pro 2014 features and functionality will be included in the Poser Pro Game Dev version

Thanks for asking for clarification.

Update: Second Life relies on COLLADA, so with Poser Pro Game Dev's planned poly reduction and figure combining features, and using the COLLADA exporter, getting clothed figure content into Second Life will be possible.

Quote - Will this means FBX will be available in next SR(fingers crossed)? Thanks,Jura

Jura - FBX, the poly reduction and figure combining, and KINECT support will be exclusive to Poser Pro Game Dev, but there will be affordable upgrade paths.

RE: Second Life - I'm not sure if they use either FBX or COLLADA as a piepline. If they do, then theoretically the Game Dev product could be used as a content creation resource. We haven't been looking at this direction though, our primary focus for the Game Dev version has been to play nicely with Unity and their 750,000 large developer base just in their Asset Store alone.

I don't want to come off as ignoring other feature requests in this thread - apologies in advance if it appears that I am. They've been logged and noted. I don't know the status of those - we're pretty buried trying to close out Game Dev for an August delivery, but there will be continued SRs down the road. Thanks for the contribution.

Quote - those game things sound pretty good.  you guys can use P2/P3 figs for starters.  maybe snazz 'em up with sci-fi/anime/fantasy stuff.  or even use those old robots (BrainStem.cr2, Hard.cr2, Helix.cr2) as bases.

p.s. by extrapolating from previous poser releases, estimate PP2016 appears by Xmas 2015 (~Dec. 21).  in case anyone asks.

Extrapolate? Math is hard. :-)

We created a sample Unity game with Helix and Brain Stem, a two person laser shooter. We'll be freely distributing the Poser files, FBX assets and the game files, along with a tutorial video on how it was created. It's really cool to see these awesome, yet dusty Poser figures have a little life breathed back into them.

Quote - > Quote - Why combine the material?

I'm not developing games.  sigh.  pp12 forever.

 

There's way more you can do with a game engine than just making games. True fusion between Poser and Unity could be a great thing for Poser users, and for content vendors.

 

 

~Shane

That's the key Shane. The Poser eco-system has created far more assets that would be perfect for game deployment than any other system to date, Turbosquid included. All that's needed are some tweaks to those items inside a tool like Poser, so they comply with best practices for poly-counts, textures, animation data, morph targets and rigging.

We hope to open up a huge new space for content developers, without having to recreate anything they've previously built. We've been working closely with Unity and Mixamo to create those tools. Behind the scenes, all involved are pretty jazzed about what is in the works.

edit: A good friend locally developes touch screen interactive 3D content for the Monterey Bay Aquarium; the exhibits he's building are very much like the screens in Minority Report. He uses Unity for his work. And he's a huge Poser fan, and is working with us in the beta as well.

Quote - Why combine the material?

I'm not developing games.  sigh.  pp12 forever.

Content deployed via game engines like Unity works better if a single texture atlas is used for the various material areas.

BTW, the polygon reduction was developed in house and is pretty dramatic; it still supports morphs, preserves material groups, the existing shape, and can reduce polygons based on density of the starting geometry.

Even for traditional Poser users, polygon reduction and conformed figure combining would allow background figures at much lower poly counts to reduce the memory footprint of complicated scenes.

Thanks for posting that snippet above. We want to keep improving the current versions. There are plans for a game/interactive development version in August, with polygon reduction, combining multiple figures into a single figure with a single combined material, discarding hidden polygons during the combine process, Kinect support for capturing animation, and robust FBX support. A by product of this development cycle will be continued support and ongoing Service Releases for P10 and PP2014.

RE: heads up -

The DLM will indeed let you pick where you want the installers to be stored. I run an SSD too, and don't store them on my main C drive.

Once you've downloaded the installers, you can move them onto any other machine or let the DLM run the installation for you. If you want to manually run the Poser installer, just simply be sure all the installers are in the same folder, then run the application installer.

The SRs are as equally tested as the main app, and we actually have more leeway with timelines for the SRs than we do with a new full version. That said, features do sometimes get broken when fixing something else, and that can get missed by the internal QA team and external beta. But it gets addressed in the next SR, and if it's impactful to lots of people, we'll do a .1 version of the SR. Each subsequent Service Release gets better, adds stability, fixes issues, and sometimes roll out new features.

For reference we are working on an SR4 now. Poser 10 and Pro 2014 will be with us for a while, so we're keeping the SRs moving forward.

Attached is a screen cap of the updated version of the Download Manager soon to be released. There's a new tab in the DLM that will show just the Updates. Whatever serial number you enter will show updates for that version. I'm running a beta serial, so I get the full beta installers. Enter a german serial, and you'll get just German, Poser 10 serials reveal Poser 10 installers...

Here's the version that Isikol created using a Genesis character

Here's the original reference photo Isikol used

Have you guys tried using the face sculpting morphs in the Face Room with Roxie? Open uup the hundreds of shaping morphs - go subtle and create new character morphs.

The photomatching isn't as relaible as the sculpting morphs are. But those sculpting morphs are super detailed.

Earl - you're getting some really good feedback here. Glad to see that.

I did a posing webinar a while back that's gotten some good exposure. I recreated an aggressive dance pose from a photo using Anastasia at the time, and IMHO Roxie bends better than her. Maybe not perfect, but better.

Here's a link to that webinar if you want to check it out:

http://my.smithmicro.com/webinars/poser/posing-techniques-3d-human-figure/

Coop

The roxie interview made me teh laff. :-)