Hi, Can anyone point me in the direction of some documentation on how to get started with creating props / scenes for use in Poser 4 / Pro Pack / 5? At the moment I've created an OBJ file of a room, which looks ok after splitting the verticies, but I would like to go further and make it possible to hide different parts of the file - for example walls or windows. It would also be nice to make the doors, windows posable. I guess to do this I need to create something more complex than a simple .OBJ file, but what ? Also does anyone know if Poser 5 renders OBJ files any better than Poser 4. The need to split verticies to make the room look normal is really annyoing! Regards, Max

They render the same, you either have to split the verticies or bevel the edges. Sharen

To make bits of your room invisible - assign different materials to them (in UVmapper for instance) - then you can set them 100% transparent when not required. For things like doors and windows, a quick cheat is to make the door or whatever be a separate prop parented to the room. Then you can just use rotate or translate to open and shut it. Clunky, but it works. If you want to go the whole hog, you'll need to get into hierarchy files and joint parameters... shivers ...but something like this would be an easy way to get started.

Thanks for the pointers so far ! I have a few more questions / comments which I hope people can help with ...

The obj file of the room is actually created by a program I have written. In theory I should be able to come up with something more appropriate for use in Poser. However, I am not sure what file format would be best to use. Certainly the obj file format has too many limitations. It also sounds like props might not give me enough control either ...

Given the above, what would people suggest as an approch ? What would be the best type of Poser object to create, a prop or something more complex (are they termed figures). I am certainly prepared to contemplate producing a hierachy file - can anyone point me to some documentation regarding their syntax / structure ? Does curious labs produce any documents for developers ?

BTW I have attached an image of a room that I have textured and rendered in Cinema 4D. If only it looked like that in Poser ... oh well.

You'll need to use the OBJ format at the point where you Poser-ise your model, because of the need to have the named groups for your "body parts". How you get to that point is up to you, of course. If you have a look in the Poser manual starting about page 304, that should get you started on hierarchies. However there is a misprint in the manual which stumped me for ages. The first line of your hierarchy file should be of this format: objFile :Runtime:Geometries:folder:filename.obj The manual gets the position of the space wrong in two different ways. :-( It MUST be objFile, space, colon, path string... and the capitalization of "objFile" and the path definition is critical as well.

The difference between a prop and a figure is that with a figure some parts of it can be moved relative to other parts. If the room that you show were a prop then it would be entirely fixed, but if it were a figure then you might be able (for instance) to make the door or windows open. By the way, your room looks pretty good, except that (in the UK) the door should be 6 ft 6 ins tall by 2 ft 6 ins wide (usually) and there should be some door handles and winmdow handles. Also, for the UK at least, most external walls are either 9 inches wide if solid, or 11 inches wide if cavity walls. Yours look to be about 4 inches wide which is very unlikely for a habitable room in the western world. Back to your original question. A major problem with Poser when rendering solid objects is that its rendering engine rounds off corners which share vertices with more than one face. This is independent of the file format used. When rendering human bodies it's a feature. When rendering things with sharp corners it's a bug. Maz

Thanks for the information on this. Looks like creating the room as a figure will give me most control - I'll have a look in the manual. Thanks also for the comments regarding the room. I agree that the door dimensions and the wall thickness are wrong. Fortunately, it's easy to change them. I also plan to add support for things like door handles at some point in the future (also need to rewrite the utility at some point as well.) Criticism and information are always useful. What other kind of things would be good to support (curtain rails, etc ?) Finally, I agree that the way Poser handles this kind of geometry is a nightmare. Splitting verticies helps, but still sacrifices rendering quality. I only have Poser 4, is the Pro Pack or Poser 5 any better on this front ? Max

Oh - just read the comments regarding the Poser 5 rendering engine being the same as the Poser 4 engine so disregard that question ! Max

Well, having spent the last 6 months building a room, I can tell you what I did. My room (ie. the structure) is a multi-part figure with 40 walls (4 walls x 10 variations), all interchangable. The reason for this is to allow the user to choose the wall he wants with the appropriate spaces for windows/doors in different combinations and positions. In addition, I have 10 different doors/windows, all figures, with an average of 20- 30 body parts, allowing full posability, switching between styles, switching on/off roller blinds, venetian blinds, etc. There are also another 30-odd add-on props which can be used to change the shape of the room, plus various floors, and so on. That stuff comprises the basic pack (it will be for sale at DAZ). On top of that, I'm building several expansion packs, (because I designed the basic structure so that it can be easily expanded); sunken floor, extensions, mezzanine, attic, yadda yadda. Right, Now that I've bored you with all that, LOL, my advice would be to go for multiple figures. One for the room, and one for each door or window, This will give you a lot more flexibility. If you look at your room, each window has between 2 and 5 'windows', plus an outer frame. Then there's a door and frame, 4 walls a roof and a floor. If you put that lot in one single figure, you'll end up with too many body parts. No one likes to scroll through a list of 50 parts looking for the one they need. Much better to split them up. Also, if you find a way to add multiple spaces in the walls for doors and windows, the user can move single figures around. If the room's all one figure, you're a bit limited. Plus, with separate figures, you can do things like, make the window crossbars separate body parts which can be switched on and off. Having said all that, if you don't know about creating cr2 figures, you'll have to learn a lot from scratch, but it's not impossible.... just long and tedious. 6 months may seem a ridiculously long time to spend on a room, but I've had to redesign it several times over because I keep finding great new tricks to improve it. mac

Re size, this is posette in front of a door, window and patio doors. As far as I'm concerned a window is the size it is. It can be any size at all. A door? Well, I think my door is a bit wide. Certainly wider than maz says. But 6' 6" by 2' 6" sounds very narrow to me. That's a ratio of 1:2.6. Mine is 120 by 65, or 1:1.85, and it looks to be 6' 6" high, but wider. Is that a big deal? I don't think so myself. Mind you, I left the UK 20 years ago and live in italy. On top of that, I now live in a chalet in the mountains where the rooms are tiny with low ceilings. For the walls, I left extra height, figuring that it's easier to lower the ceiling than Yscale the wall and distort the texture. I'm interested to hear comments on scale in this pic. mac