Excellent!  Thanks Miss Nancy,   I've got it book marked.  I like Quinlor's tut From Wings3d to Poser figure too. 

operaguy,  the jane thread is over in the developers forum

Poser - so simple even a caveman could do it....

Quote - Poser - so simple even a caveman could do it....

OMG too freakin funny.... can't stop laughing giggles

That is such an awesome pic... Mind if I add it to my faves? LOL

...No seriously... You gonna upload that? I so love it :P

I haven't uploaded in a week because I can't sit long at the PC and comment. Had a little horse vs knee accident.

Hilarious, drifterlee.

Here in Los Angeles there is buzz -- i kid you not -- that they are going to make a sitcom from the "caveman" character.

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LOL, Too funny!

I think we can settle this once and for all.

We change the name here to be RENDEROSITY- The Craftspersons Community.
If some ART dribbles out, well that's just dandy.

Of course the few months after the changeover, we might see questions of using Miki2 and interfacing her with the new power saws that come out, but I think we can weather the transition. 
The advert bumps from ACE Hardware and Home Depot (and places like these) will help defray some costs and will provide new inspirations to the noobs as well as the old timers.

"You CAN render it, we can help (when we are not trying to do art that is!)"

Hey, I heard Sears bought Renderosity, and we are going to have Craftsmans tools here for sale as well. My husband will be thrilled, LOL!

Quote - Hey, I heard Sears bought Renderosity, and we are going to have Craftsmans tools here for sale as well. My husband will be thrilled, LOL!

**
dphoadley@drifterlee**
More likely he'll be drilled! ;=D
DPH
PS: Will there be any discounts for purchases in Israeli Shekels?  The US Doller-Shekel exchange rate has been droping lately.

"Dajadues..have you tried Voice-O-Matic?"

Not yet stonemason.
** I haven't invested in Max much since 
I fully switched to Poser this past year for animations & posing.
I'm getting some job offers for animations so will be sticking to Poser for that. :)

**

As I said, I'm not really into making models - it's not fun for me. Shaders are fun and I think its just as cool to focus on this as to focus on modeling.

This "model" is a work in progress. It is just 4 Poser Box primitives. I like to work with boxes and spheres, and don't feel it's plagiaristic to use them just because a BILLION others just like it have been made from scratch.

Yet it has geometry that is more interesting than that. It's done with procedural displacement. And also the wood grain is 100% procedural. Notice that no two places look alike. I can't stand it when people just slap a texture file onto every face of a piece of furniture and you can see all the repetition. That's lame. 

I still have a couple bugs to work out with the shader - I got multiple boards in a direction I did not intend to. But these issues will be worked out shortly, and then I'll post it for you all to download. Then you can do your "Poser" "art" and tell a story about illicit office sex if you like :biggrin:

I am being 3/4 serious.

Craftsman/woman/person works. 
We craft our scenes and render them.
There are different levels to beign a craftsperson.  You have your really experienced craftsfolk and the noobs.

There is the really excellent craftswork. It becomes art when the critical masses proclaim it so.
 
The stuff of the noob, is also art because as some defintions have it, it causes an emotional reaction, at least to the noob craftsperson (and their friends, family, sychophants, thralls, et al)

Hence the galleries. It is all craftswork, but art to some.

You have noobs who can do "Art" because they "get" the tools with which they craft their renders. You have some "experienced" craftsfolk whos craftwork has not risen to the level of "art", despite the amount of time with the tools. They have not advanced their craftmanship. it is still "hobby".

When put in these terms, we can avoid the "ART" arugments. 
With CRAFT(man/woman/person/folk)SHIP the modeller and the Poser user can be put ont he same playing field: How well do you handle your craft?

i yi yi yi BB that is wonderful.

You know, I've been meaning to ask you about something:
In general most 3D props are sharp-edged; naturally, because they are math with precision. Left like that, they have little 'realism.'

When you 'texture" them, they don't always loose their sharp edges. More or less in harmony with the shader you posted for fake AO in corners of rooms.....what is your general shader approach to rounding off the edges, or even introducing noise along the edge, of things such as tables and boxes, etc.

The image above is very pleasing....the edges are pretty sharp, but that sort of cabinet would have sharp edges. Just wonderful work and -- as i pointed out over at 3DBuzz -- a shader engineer is an artist.

::::: Opera :::::

I'd love to have that wood shader when it's done!!

Someone just released a Cinema 4D plugin called "EdgeShade" which procedurally softens the sharp edges associated with 3D geometry.  I like the idea as modeling the softer edges can be a big increaser of size.

** I wonder if something similar could be done with Poser shader nodes... hmmmm **
(do not read that, bagginsbill) ;)

Robert

I've seen people get distracted, and then turn around and run into desks like that -- the kind  with sharp edges.  It's all quite amusing.

It takes a true craftsman to produce the right type of desk/cabinet for such a purpose.

BTW - the woodgrain on real-world modern desks often isn't real.  In order to fit properly into a 3D 'representation of reality' for the average office environment today -- those shaders need to look like plastic-simulated woodgrain.  Or perhaps veneer over presswood.  Real wood is too expensive.  Not to mention heavy and hard to move around.

I have a real wood huge executive desk that is old. I refinished it by hand. It was so heavy and big one leg broke through the floor or our trailer. Luckily, the desk made it home safe and sound.

Oh, I have a very plush office.  My PC sits on top of what I call a "church table" -- the type of 8' long pinch-your-fingers folding thing that one would often see used at church picnics and such.  My PC's at my home office are sitting on top of chuch tables, too.  And I'm surrounded by a cubicle made out of pegboard.  So I need plastic-simulated woodgrain shaders in order to feel like I'm being immersed in the really real reality of the real world.  Or at least my experience of it, anyway.  So what I'm suggesting is a 3D simulation of a plastic simulation.  Kind of like producing fake margarine (I think that there is such a thing).

I worked at a furniture refinishing shop as a teenager, just before I went off to college.  Kutzit -- the varnish/paint remover liquid stuff -- stank.

Most people handle it in the geometry. But I can do it in the shader.

The chamfer is really easy and I won't bother explaining it.

The fillet is harder, but simple in matmatic.

What we want to do is puff out the face so that the edges are round when joined. So each face needs to have a displacement at the edge that precisely implements a 45 degree arc of a circle. Assuming you're dealing with a square and not a rectangle, this is pretty easy. The rectangular case can be handled with just a bit more math, but I won't bother explaining that.

Here's how its done.

Letting x and y be my UV coordinates:

x = U
y = V

The distance (in UV space) to the nearest edge is:

e = Min(Min(x, 1-x), Min(y, 1-y))

Let k represent the desired width of the fillet on one face, expressed in UV space. So for example, if I want a 1% fillet:

k = .01

Now I need to scale e into the coordinate space of a circle with radius sqrt(2). To do this, I scale and flip the edge distance like this:

ex = 1 - Clamp(1 / k * e)

That is essentially my x coordinate for my fillet circle.

Now to compute my corresponding y coordinate:

ey = sqrt(2 - ex * ex) - 1

And now all I have to do is convert that to inches for displacement. A Poser square or box is 10.32 inches on a side. If it is scaled, I need to take that into account. In my demonstration I'm using boxes scaled to 400% so:

scale = 4

Finally the desired displacement is given simply by:

surface.Displacement = scale * 10.32 * k * ey

Done.

I'll post a render showing this next.

Below that, on the left is a panelled box with the hard edges. On the right, the same thing, but I added the calculation I gave above for a 1% fillet. It's clearly better. I've added this to the shader and you can dial in any k you want.

I'll also add chamfer to it - that's trivial.

**XENOPHONZ - "**Real wood is too expensive"

Maybe for you it is :biggrin:

In my home I have cherry cabinets in the kitchen and all the bathrooms with exactly the shape I rendered above, and they are all solid cherry. I didn't yet set up the stain to match, but those shapes and wood grain are exactly what I have in real life.

It's too expensive for the cheap companies that I work for.  My last desk was metal and plastic.  Oh, well.......I guess that they can't afford better furniture because they're giving all of the money to me..........sigh.  We've all got to compromise somewhere.

This shader isn't just for cabinets. It can handle floors too. It will make all the boards for you and stagger them precisely or somewhat randomly, as seen here.

BTW - I believe that you once indicated that you attended MIT -- I worked in a high-rise building about halfway between the MIT and Harvard campuses.  My office building was located right next to the globe in Cambridge.  The building had it's own parking garage on the bottom floor.  Everyone in the building was told not to go out onto the street at night.  I was frequently there until 2:30AM or so.  We were designing a large expansion to a Texaco oil refinery located in Singapore.  My bosses on the project were Brits -- they insisted on spelling 'analyzer' as 'analyser'.

It was always fun to gaze out of my 10th floor window down at the little groups of tech school students walking past below.

Quote - Don't worry - matmatic can make fake wood too

This shader isn't just for cabinets. It can handle floors too. It will make all the boards for you and stagger them precisely or somewhat randomly, as seen here.

Now that's what I'm talkin' about.............:biggrin: !

Thanks, bagginsbill.  I am properly impressed.

Quote - Here's a little sewing box.

 
Exquisite little box and a shader.
Nowm for the step up in reality it needs a tad of noise in direction of the woodgrain, since lacquered wood is never that smooth (unless covered by a thick layer of resin) :))

Ad for a desk, mine is a laaaarge flat (no raised paneling) solid core, primed, doorpanel with Ikea legs screwed to it.  Cheap, under 50 bucks, and it makes a perfect desk.

I think that my "church tables" were something like $39.95 apiece at Sam's Club.  Lotsa surface room, though.  And strong -- which I need for all of my equipment.

bagginsbill, you mean 90 degree arc of a circle for the fillet I hope... ;)

Very cool!

But limited in to what it can be applied by the sounds of it.  Would be more generalized if one could set a minimum angle between polygons (like Phong uses) that determines where the filleting should occur.  The problem here might be one of associating UV with polygons.

Quote - Don't worry - matmatic can make fake wood too

This shader isn't just for cabinets. It can handle floors too. It will make all the boards for you and stagger them precisely or somewhat randomly, as seen here.

Yes, but can it handle cellos? (I gave up on a WIP which was a memorial tribute to Rostropovich because I couldn't get the texture I was using to look at all good in a render.)

Nope, I mean 45. See where two faces meet, they each contribute half of the 90 degree fillet. They touch exactly at the mid point of the fillet.

The reason is this. What do you do where three faces meet? Think about it. If the top face did all 90 degrees of the top fillet, and the front did all 90 degrees of the fillet with the left face, then you could not make the top fillet agree with the side fillet. And you'd have to program the front face to not make the fillet with the top face.

My way, you make the fillet on all four edges, but it's only half a fillet. The adjacent square on each edge makes the other half.

I agree it is limited and you'd have to do different math for edges that were not at 90 degrees. Still, given that I can make nice fillets for boxes, this saves a lot of time. No modelling.

Yes I can handle cellos. Give me one and I'll put a shader it.

Quote - My way, you make the fillet on all four edges, but it's only half a fillet. The adjacent square on each edge makes the other half.

I agree it is limited and you'd have to do different math for edges that were not at 90 degrees. Still, given that I can make nice fillets for boxes, this saves a lot of time. No modelling.

Is the angle of normals of the faces information that can be extracted? Or a perpendicular to the specific edge.
If any of those can be read, then you wouldn't have to be limited to 90 only, but the the bisected angle between normals (or it's complement) - depending on which way the normal vectors are pointing, could be the angle used for half fillet?

bagginsbill: Ah, I see.  So you consider the 'fillet per face'.  I stand corrected. :)

Holy cow. That's all I have to say. This is like sitting at the foot of Aristotle! I have to report the following emotion: bagginsbill is issuing so much great stuff, so fast and of such quality, that I am afraid if I (personally, the ego of og) do not soak it up and do something with it right away that he will stop!

Mr. BB that is just humor, but with a tinge of truth. Very grateful and eventually all will be put to use. Wow.

::::: Opera :::::

This issue is pertinent to my case over at 3DBuzz, by the way. Do they have such node warriors? Do they even have nodes? I swear the material room and the brains (others like Olivier as well as BB) that are showing us the power are putting Poser in high company.

By the way, I just responded in that forum!
http://3dbuzz.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=150857&page=5

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I didn't read the entire thread, but are they actually against topless female images? meaning they only like to see buff male hunks? o.k., I can live with that. but women are prettier IMVHO :lol: well, excepting jude, hugh, brad and johnny, of course :lol:

Miss Nancy, I think I would have been better off to have left V4 nude and not warned about nudity, as we do here. Then it might have been taken as a "nude artistic study."

Instead, a few of them think i am being.....and I ask for your forgiveness ahead of time....titilating!

It is really just one or two people who are attempting to make me the bad guy.

::::: Opera :::::

I think it's just "tit for tat".

Heh. Lots good info in that on pipeline pieces.... Now if P8 or and SR of P7 would do fbx.....

hey dale...as well as FBX, what if P8 added a new render engine option: VRay?

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Poser can export as RIB, which means you can use any Renderman compliant standalone renderer.
But I agree that a plugin architecture for render engines would be much more professional. Poser 7 already can render in a separate process, so it shouldn't be too difficult for eF to add other render engines.

Quote - Do they have such node warriors? Do they even have nodes?

Who? The 3D buzz or the higher end programs?

Quote - hey dale...as well as FBX, what if P8 added a new render engine option: VRay?

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Well..... Since I just finished downloading my Truespace 7.5 and Vray 1.5, I'd say hell yes! Being able to add engine options would definitely be not only a useful, but more professional appearing move. Actually, wasn't fbx one of the possible options listed in the questionaire a few months ago?

Quote - Poser can export as RIB, which means you can use any Renderman compliant standalone renderer.
But I agree that a plugin architecture for render engines would be much more professional. Poser 7 already can render in a separate process, so it shouldn't be too difficult for eF to add other render engines.

Hmm... I keep forgetting about the RIB output. And I wonder if they are doing the architecture changes needed to shift to a plugin structure of some sort. The python scripting crowd is making some nice little enhancers....and an actual plugin architecture would really open up the growth potential.

the reason i cite VRay is becuase they of course are in competition with Mental Ray and other variants and looking for an angle, and they have now gotten in line with trueSpace. 

I have trueSpace 5.0 and the offer to me is full upgrade to trueSpace 7.5 with VRay for $595 (was $495 until offer expired the other day) and the new user price is $895.

I have to imagine that there have a  least been conversations between EF and VRay. I have no evidence, however.

Hey dale, you got the deal! The only reason I hesitated was......no cloth sim and new hair sim in TS. Let me ask you this one question....

Can you move a fully realized Poser ANIMATION, with dynamic hair and cloth, into trueSpace and then render with VRay?

::::: Opera:::::

By the way, I left a message with the trueSpace marketing team when I was trying to decide to upgrade, and they called me back. We had a really productive discussion in which I brought up the value to them of a better Poser --> TS flow, especially for dynamic hair and cloth render. They told me "we already have plans for a better integration with Poser and have begun to realize the large numbers of users."

I see other evidence. As witnessed on the home page of Rendo, TS is hosting a catwalk show of Aery Soul's models presented in a TS 'common area' which includes chat and VOIP. It's next Tuesday. Great way to introduce Poser people to the TS interface!

http://renderosity.com/news.php?viewStory=13601

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Quote - Hey dale, you got the deal! The only reason I hesitated was......no cloth sim and new hair sim in TS. Let me ask you this one question....

Can you move a fully realized Poser ANIMATION, with dynamic hair and cloth, into trueSpace and then render with VRay?

::::: Opera:::::

At the moment I can't answer that one. I am still in the very early stages of learning the Truespace interface and its updates; they have been upgrading the application faster than my free time for learning is available. What I have at the moment is the download; the hard copy and manual are still a few days away from release (I do like Caligari's habit of making a download of the final available so you can get started right away). However, I'll see about loading one of my dynamic test animations and see how it imports and renders. I do like hearing that they are looking at better Poser integration. Now if they can work out an X-stream scheme with Vue Infinite....that would be some serious mojo to have.

Hello everyone! 

I followed the "Poser VS max/maya" thread from 3D buzz to here and am very glad I did! I think the art you do is beautiful! I hope that this aforementioned "thread" will not carry any ill will to 3D buzz or it's members. I am not a spokesperson for 3D buzz or any member there but myself. But, I will say one thing. Buzz (Jason) is one of the most caring people in the art and CG community and spends countless hours (along with his crew as well) helping ALL people from that same community.
I hope that I can still come here and look at all the works you people create as I find them inspiring. I have made 2 post in the thread created by Opera and I stand by what I have said. A tool is just that, it is what is in a persons heart and imagination that brings an art piece to life. A pencil is a tool that any person can pick up and use, it is an artist that can use it to create a masterpiece! 
I look foward to seeing more of this site and hope you all will come over and visit us as well!

DJ, i never intended to make a stink over there, although I did intend to get people to stop making "Poser jokes" from ignorance. It turned a little antagonistic. However, most of the people who posted were NOT rude or huffy, only a few.

I hope that this aforementioned "thread" will not carry any ill will to 3D buzz or it's members<<
I have a lot of respect for Buzz; speaking only for myself, if/when I go to Max I will be over there as a contributor.

::::: Opera :::::