I need to request some advice from Poser veterans, here's my situation: I only picked up Poser because I've been wanting to creat a comic series for years, but my drawing skills (alas, none) prevented me from doing it. Now finally I have all the characters, clothes, furtniture, cars, etc. that I could ever want thanks to Poser and its ability to import 3ds and lwo objects.

All's well up to that point... my problem lies in scenery. My story is based on an island, so of course I wanted to create a set where all the events in the plot unfolded, and so i needed some software to generate the island... i tried everything from terragen to mojoworld, but nothing really helped until I found Bryce 5. All the mountains and water were beautifully rendered, BUT, importing the poser obj files was just nonsense.

Victoria here is kind of pondering something, so that would have been one obj file imported in bryce, but then, in the next frame victoria would be talking and that would have been another obj file... imagine how many obj files should be imported to Bryce to make a single page of my comics... it just didn't make sense.

Henceforth, my problem. I decided to create all my mountains in bryce and import them as 3ds files into Poser... but my problem is size... if I import real proportionated mountains into poser (scaled to the victoria, michael, etc), these would be so big, the file would become so heavy it would impossible to work (at least with my 128 RAM)... what you see in the picture is all the mountains downsized to 25%, and victoria and her clothing downsized to 25% as well... problems with this: while the file is light and easy to work with, Victoria casts no shadow and still everything looks so plastic and unrealistic.

what could I do?? sadly Poser doesn't have the haze effect that works so well in bryce, giving that depth effect. No matter how far I take Vicki from the mountain, the mountain still looks like a prop placed right next to her, when in reality this is very far away. In the same line, should I convert all the imported 3ds files in poser props? If so, I'd apreciate some guidance on how to do that, because I have no clue.

thanks for reading.

Max

You could also use your Bryce renders as backgrounds in Poser. The haze would then be in the image. Make your Bryce render the same size as your Poser render for best results. If you want to go further you could plop your Bryce rrenders onto some backdrop pros, like the Daz cyclorama or Nerd's background prop. It gives a more "in the scenery" feeling. I hope/guess you have some sort of paint program as well? Like Paintshop or Photoshop - or Gimp, which is free afaik. If so you could render your Poser people over the default grey background, save as tiff and extract the alpha channel, then composite the poser render with the Bryce render. Lots of possibilities. Good luck :o)

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I think most of your problems would go away if you invested in RDNA's MicroCosm and the MacroCosm expansion. It's a morphing terrain Poser figure and--since it's made for Poser--positioning and scale problems don't exist. Plus you can morph it into just about any shape you want and the texture choices are excellent. And it's cheap.

thanks for your replies... i didn't want to use the "put your characters over rendered backgrounds" approach because you can' cast shadows on backgrounds, unless it's a backdrop... but then that Microcosm thingy looks useful... I'll look more into it, but I think that could solve most of my problems. thnx for your help! Max

You might try Vue d'Esprit instead of Bryce. Vue lets you import Poser scenes. And it's a very easy program to learn. You can get great results quickly, even if you're a complete newbie.

Or you could take your poser figures into Bryce and render them, with all bryce's atmospheric effects. That's the way I do pictures (as opposed to simple poser images)

RDNA has some simple landscaping props for free download, which are very useful, including thier backdrop and skydomes. Also, you might want to consider the DAZ Cyclorama. Most ackdrop props can be retextured easily using your own Bryce renders, and really keep the polygon count (rendering time) down.

If you just want to get shadows on your scaled down models, then the problem may just be with your lighting setup. Scaling the models did not effect your shadows, the missing shadows are, I suspect, a result of the difference in scale between the huge island mesh and the figure's much smaller mesh. During a render, Poser's shadows cast from each light are calculated from the ShadowMap generated from the field of view of the ShadowCam parented to each light. When using Poser's 'Infinite' lights, rather than 'Spotlights', they will adjust their ShadowCams automatically to include everything in your scene that has 'Cast Shadows' turned on. When you have a large model such as your island, this results in a Shadowmap spread over such a large area that subsequently, a single figue is not covered by enough shadowmap pixels to generate a clean shadow. For example, if you are using Shadowmaps 1024x1024 pixels, and your Island is 1000 Poser units long, then each pixel in the shadowmap would cover almost one squared Poser Unit, or 64 square feet in Poser world dimensions. Further, because the edges of the shadowmaps are antialaised when applied to the render, anything covered by less than (guessing) about 10 pixels (/guessing) in the shadowmap will be feathered out and will not cast a visible shadow. That means that for the scales mentioned above, an object at ground level would have to be about 80 feet by 80 feet (10 Poser Units squared) before it would have enough Shadowmap pixels (10 x 10) to cast a visible shadow. Yadda-yadda-yadda, Here's the Fix: Search 'shadowcam' in here for more discussion, but basically, to get enough resolution in the shadowmaps to make visible shadows, switch to spotlights (to avoid the automatic shadowcam readjustment with infinite lights) and zoom-in each spotlight's shadowcam to cover only the areas in each render where cast shadows need to be visible, rather than covering the entire island. This also assumes that, for artistic purposes, simply turning off 'Cast Shadows' for the island prop is not an option. That would keep the lights from automatically including it in their Shadowcam's field of view. (although doing this also brings some other oddities into play -- see past threads by lesBently or one today by maclean.)

wow, that last one was THE explanation, thanks... I apprecite that info on the shadows, but I think that so far I'll give vue d'sprit a try and see how tat goes. thnx to everyone Max