Attached Link: http://www.castledevgroup.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index

So why do you want gray people?

When you make couples poses, you generally have two codinated poses, one for person A and one person B. When you make the pair of thumbnails, you have a few choices:

• Put both people in each thumbnail. In this case, it is difficult to tell which pose is for which person, without putting additional text on the thumbnail.
• Put one person in each thumbnail. In this case, it can be difficult to tell what they are supposed to be doing.
• Put both people in each thumbnail, but make the person that they pose does not apply to gray, kind of like a phantom person.

I use the third approach. The only problem with it is that it is a pain to go through Michael or Vicky and turn all the materials to gray.

Over on the Castle Dev site, we just published a free command-line utility for changing colors in PP2, PZ3, or CR2 files. It was designed to let Vue d'Esprit users change the highlight colors when importing Poser PZ3 files into Vue. We found that an additional use for it is in making gray people.

All you have to do is change all the diffuse colors to "0.7 0.7 0.7" (a light gray), and the specular and ambient colors to "0 0 0" (black). You still have to turn off all the textures, but checking the "texture change applies to all materials" box and changing one of them to "None" in Poser will do the job.

Instructions for changing highlights for Vue d'Esprit and for making gray objects are included in the ReadMe file.

To get the program, go to the attached link, and select "Vue D'Esprit". Then select the "Poser PZ3 Color Changing Utility."

Enjoy...

Lynn Grant
Castle Development Group

Sounds cool. Will this work with any cr2? I'll d/l it and try. I usually end up setting transparency to 50% on the unaffected body/part, but it's a pain. Thanks for making this available. mac

Well, yes and no. It works on the Poser 4 part on any CR2. It does not alter the Poser 5 material specifications. (Since it was originally designed for Vue users, and Vue doesn't import Poser 5 yet, we didn't put support in for changing the Poser 5 materials yet.) Also, it does not change the transparency, at this time. (It wouldn't be hard to add that support, though.) lynn

Out of curiosity wouldn't it be simpler to set figure style of unused person to cartoon, smoothed or something other than texture shaded?

Well, maybe I'm missing something, but in Poser Pro Pack if I set document, figure, or element style to cartoon or whatever, it seems to have no effect on the render--just on the pre-rendered display.

I meant for making thumbnails actually...for "poses" I myself tend to just let poser save the thumbs...only when transparencies are involved do I bother with rendering thumbs...and I dont own pro-pack :(...Sometimes for detail shots I'll render for thumbs, but for something thats tiny enough for two figures posed together it just doesnt seem worth the time to render it...Here is a sample I did just to see...granted you can tell a difference if you look very close, but not a large enough difference to warrent the added time and effort imho...

Yes, that way should work fine, if it fits into your workflow. We render all our thumbnails...it makes the process of creating both RSR and PNG thumbnails a bit easier for us...so letting Poser generate them doesn't work for us, but your method would be very handy if you can use it. Like you said, the quality difference in the thumbnail is very small. Since I'm rendering the thumbnails anyway, what I do is rather than making the characters gray in the render, I pre-make a gray Vicky and a gray Michael and store them in the characters library. (That's where the utility is handy.) Then I just bring one gray and one non-gray character into the scene, and put the poses on them. So, depending on how you make your thumbnails, this utility could be handy, or it could be useless. The important thing, though, is making one of the characters in your thumbnail gray (or semi-transparent, like maclean does), however you do it. Pose thumbnails that just show what one character is doing are very confusing sometimes.