I do :) I was busy devoting all the time I put into 3D now into developing my airbrushing skills.  I know I had more money in my pocket for sure, and spent more time trying to find Liquid watercolours for my airbrush (they were hard to get hold of).  The remnents of my airbrushing days litter my house, from the A0 drawing board and plan chest, to the dozens of paintings I never did anyting with :)

John

Life before Poser?

These are strange words you speak.  There was no life before Poser and without Poser there is no life!

Strange Words...

Quote - OT - Do you remember life before Poser?......

Yeah!  It was terrible!
dph

Quote - Life before Poser?

These are strange words you speak.  There was no life before Poser and without Poser there is no life!

Strange Words...

There was a time before Poser, the community thinks of it as  -infinity to 0 BP, then Poser came into existence and it was good and the people embraced it, this was in 1995 or in other words 1 (or 0)AP.

It is now 16(or possibly 15)AP.

John

Quote - > Quote - OT - Do you remember life before Poser?......

Yeah!  It was terrible!
dph

Be strong DP, Poser is here now and you don't have to go back to that time of chaos and uncertainty when Poser was just a thought in Mr Weinbergs brain.

John

PS if anyone is traumatised by thoughts bought up by this thread, help is available on

555-NoPoser-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder

Barely.......I had a wife (or is it a life). I made it out to the mailbox in front of my house more than once a week. I was seen out and about from time to time (terrifying to me now) I had regular visits with my son, ( I wonder where that kid has gone to)

Now I have Poser.

I started with Poser almost 10 years ago - and before ?? I don't remember my live before - LOL

Quote - Barely.......I had a wife (or is it a life). I made it out to the mailbox in front of my house more than once a week. I was seen out and about from time to time (terrifying to me now) I had regular visits with my son, ( I wonder where that kid has gone to)

Now I have Poser.

Don't go out there man, they don't understand, the Poserless heathens :)

Quote - I started with Poser almost 10 years ago - and before ?? I don't remember my live before - LOL

:) pleaase call the therapy line

555-Poser-Isnt-Life-Replacement

;p

I'm old enough to remember those days.
Real Life we called it back then.

It wasn't bad: whoever had put it all together had done a half decent job - the lighting was good, textures were pretty awesome and most things looked pretty realistic, even without being GC'd.
Real Life had its disadvantages, though - it was pretty expensive for what it was and it was often difficult to get the People to adopt any pose you wanted, even if you rigged it carefully beforehand.

I always had that feeling that Real Life had a lot of potential but was just too difficult to use properly, at least for the sort of things I wanted to do with it.

When it was replaced with Poser everything became much easier. I found I could do all the things I wanted to do. Even though it's not as high-tech as Real Life, Poser suits me much better, I think.

I like the fact that Poser can be upgraded fairly easily too - you just need a few dollars. Upgrading Real Life required far more: a career, charisma, a personality, friends, enthusiasm, ambition etc.,. I don't know why it had to be so complicated back then. No wonder it's not so popular anymore.

Ditto Snarlygribbly.  Exactly. 

In all seriousness, the post-1990 updates of RL became harder and harder for
ordinary people to use.  Earlier versions could be used productively by people
without a lot of charisma.  After the main game engine was migrated to the
PRC processor, you had to be either vastly wealthy or tremendously brutal
to get results with RL.  In the Gilded Age 2.0 version, all HD usage was switched
to RAM so you couldn't store up points for future use; you could only steal existing
points from others.

What's a PRC processor?
dph

heh. lad, I remember life before we had computers at home or in School.......

Quote - heh. lad, I remember life before we had computers at home or in School.......

Who you calling lad ;p I remember those times too.  When the heigh of technology was a betamax video player and film monsters were men in rubber suits.

Quote - > Quote - heh. lad, I remember life before we had computers at home or in School.......

Who you calling lad ;p I remember those times too.  When the heigh of technology was a betamax video player and film monsters were men in rubber suits.

I can remember when the height of technology was owning a color TV, instead of the de-rigueur black and white.
dph

Quote - > Quote - > Quote - heh. lad, I remember life before we had computers at home or in School.......

Who you calling lad ;p I remember those times too.  When the heigh of technology was a betamax video player and film monsters were men in rubber suits.

I can remember when the height of technology was owning a color TV, instead of the de-rigueur black and white.
dph

I feel a Monty Python monent coming on ;)

You were lucky when I were a lad we used to get up before we went to bed

There's a life outside of Poser?

Quote - There's a life outside of Poser?

It's a bit like asking what life was like before the Big Bang.  In theory you know there must have been a before stage, but you can't quite put your finger on it.

Everyone has their head down, messing around with some gadget
with a tiny screen or sitting at a desk messing around day and night
with a different gadget with a bigger screen, probably with ear buds blaring.
I forgot to mention frying our brains with microwaves from another primitive
small gadget with yet another small screen.
Not being able to see, hear or think too well will make us easy pickings
for the aliens out there... :sneaky:

Yeah, who would want that "other" life where one actually lived a life ? :laugh:

See you around later in the year... While I live that other life...

Living in 2010

**
YOU KNOW YOU ARE LIVING IN 2010 when ...**

1 .. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

1. You haven't played solitaire with real cards in years.

2. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

3. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.

4. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is that they don't have e-mail addresses.

5. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in the groceries.

6. Every commercial on television has a web site at the bottom of the screen.

7. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn't have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

8. You get up in the morning and go on line before getting your coffee.

9. You start tilting your head sideways to smile. :)

10. You're reading this and nodding and laughing.

11. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this message.

12. You are too busy to notice there was no # 9 on this list.

13. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn't a # 9 on this list **

AND NOW YOU ARE LAUGHING** at yourself.

Go on, forward this to your friends. You know you want to.

....and that completes your Eye Test. if you can read the above at a distance of 5ft, you don't need glasses....

I've already reduced the size of the font.
dph

I renember an app called paper and pencil. No propper undo and no 3d . More fexible than an I-Pad and the figures were allways anatomical correct ;) .

Quote - I renember an app called paper and pencil. No propper undo and no 3d . More fexible than an I-Pad and the figures were allways anatomical correct ;) .

Ah good ole p+p I had that for a long time, so versatile, very low power consumption :)

Don't forget the paper based version of poser :)

There was a book called the Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual.
That had photos of people in assorted poses shown at different angles.

I remember life before poser and some of it wasn't pretty. Pencils and sketchbooks were the order of the day.

Life? Don't talk to me about Life! Here I am! Brain the Size of a Planet.......

I do because I usually don't spend much time per week making poser images.  Now looking at rendered females in the gallery is another issue.

Before Poser I had Bryce and Raydream Studio. Once I got Poser there was no looking back.

Yep.  I used to spend a lot more time using Photoshop and brushes and paints.

BTW, I'm now entering life after Poser, mainly working on building stuff to be used in, erm, Poser.  :D 

 First of all... STEVE!!! Where'd YOU GET THAT POSER-Marvin?!  

erhm..

With THAT out of my system (well sorta.. I mean do you guys KNOW who's Voice-acting Marvin?!.. oh.. you do?)

Life before Poser? I vaguely remember it. It was dreary. Dull. One had to resort to playing primitive computer games in order to pass time. Or worse: Had to engage in actual conversation with shudder other PEOPLE.

Then emerged the Age of Aquari..er I mean Poser. And We saw that it was Good. So we remained there.

And totally honest.. It's been 10 years. I can vaguely remember select stuff from a decade ago, but I can honestly not remember what I did before Poser... I have an idea of "reading books" and "playing computer games" but... not in details.

But this just made me realise that I've been playing Worms even longer than I've been using Poser.. O.o And I've never even made me a Posable Worm! 

Before Poser????

I had a life.....

LOL

I remember.  Still in the attic are pads and pads of sketch paper and tracing paper from the art store.  Remember those?  I used to trace things, not to copy them, but to get a feel for the foreshortening and perspective, and it was all moot.  I just do not have a brain that can manipulate a shape in 3D and put it down on paper.  Buildings and landscapes I can do.  Color and composition I can do.  But the human figure eluded me.  I needed some kind of model I could move myself.

So one day I received a software catalog and inside was an ad for Poser.  I immediately wrote a check (there was no PayPal then, or online banking) and headed out the door to mail the order form.  On my way out, I found that day's mail and lo and behold inside was yet another software catalog from the same company, only this issue announced the debut of Poser 2!

Only a few weeks before, I received a gift of Bryce 2 from my brother.  Before Bryce and Poser, my computer was used solely as a glorified word processor which I turned on maybe twice a week.  Now I practically live in front of my computer.

Before Poser, I could do everything I wanted to do with my computer on a celeron 400 with 32mb of ram.

Actually, before windows, I could do everything I wanted to do with my computer on a 386 running DOS. I guess the net wasn't as interesting, though. I mean, ASCII porn?

Unfortunately, he's only a static prop at the moment. I don't remember where I got him but I'm slowly trying to regroup him so I can turn him into a figure. It's slow going. Did a little work on him tonight. I need better tools or less wonky ones. It's hard to select hidden facets with Poser grouping tool!

Before Poser, I would use overhead transparency sheets and a felt tip pen to trace pictures from educational magazines like Playboy, Gent and Dude. I taped them to my TV screen and then trace the outlines with my mouse on an Atari ST (512 KB RAM) using the paint program Neochrome. Then I'd paint and fill in the outlines in 16 colors (out of a palette of 512) in all their 320x200 glory. Later I got a primitive - in todays terms - and expensive ($75.00) 3D program called Aegis Animator. Poser is, I suppose, the culmination of those two experiences.

Now, I can no longer spend Saturday afternoons chatting with the nice folks at the long defunct newsstand wile perusing source material. Instead, I spend time looking for the perfect HDRI map. Instead of working on some Frankenstein mouse/pantograph gadget, or hanging out at the tobacco shop (that oddly, was the only place in town selling ST software!), I'm wondering if this hair is sufficiently different from all the other hair I have to justify getting it. Progress is nice, but I'm not sure that the 'good' old days weren't actually better.

I am a latecomer to Poser. Before Poser I played The Sims (hangs head in shame).

Quote - I am a latecomer to Poser. Before Poser I played The Sims (hangs head in shame).

Bless you :) I played Sims for a while, until I realised I was worse at virtual life than i was at real life :)

On Poser 6 or 7 the Banshee ship was a homage from on an old atari image as well!

That was hand drawn, but I recall hand scanner (B/W?) and  a scanning system that used a fibreoptic cable attached to a the head of a dot matrix printer!

*Still in the attic are pads and pads of sketch paper and tracing paper

• Mine are in the front room.*

Nearly all of my 3d models start off with a pen or pencil sketches. 
Scans , digimemo or the trusty  wacom. 

Quote - lmckenzie - remember degas elite ? This image was made with that.

On Poser 6 or 7 the Banshee ship was a homage from on an old atari image as well!

That was hand drawn, but I recall hand scanner (B/W?) and  a scanning system that used a fibreoptic cable attached to a the head of a dot matrix printer!

*Still in the attic are pads and pads of sketch paper and tracing paper

• Mine are in the front room.*

Nearly all of my 3d models start off with a pen or pencil sketches. 
Scans , digimemo or the trusty  wacom. 

I was in the Amiga Camp myself, the copy of Deluxe Paint IV was awesome, though I didn't really get the hand of it myself.  Love that old school stuff :)

John

Absolutely, as a matter of fact just loaded it up for my ST emulator (Steem). I have no idea how to get the drawing surface to show. That's a great image - light years ahead of what I could do then or now. You probably remember the Neochrome animated waterfall and maybe the ST version of the Amiga bouncing ball demo. I always wanted to get whatever program it was that let you use all 512 colors at once - Spectrum 512 I think.   I may have some images on diskette in the back of a closet. I may see if they're still readable some day. The image viewer I use, XnView will display  both Degas and Neochrome images.

I do recall the printhead scanner. I just tossed my ST recently. It was one of the lemons that always had bombing problems but I spent countless hours with Neochrome, programming and playing Sundog and Mudpies. I even ran dBase III+ using a PC emulator. 

It was a great machine but Atari never marketed it enough - at least in the US. I believe that a few  musicians are still using them because the MIDI software was so good.

"I was in the Amiga Camp myself"

 Home of the original Video Toaster editing app. I just Googled that and found out something I didn't know:

"One feature of the Video Toaster was the inclusion of LightWave 3D, a 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program. This program became so popular and useful in its own right that in 1994 it was made available as standalone product separate from the Toaster systems."

Also one of the original designers was comedian Dana Carvey's brother !

Quote - "remember degas elite?" 

Absolutely, as a matter of fact just loaded it up for my ST emulator (Steem). I have no idea how to get the drawing surface to show. That's a great image - light years ahead of what I could do then or now. You probably remember the Neochrome animated waterfall and maybe the ST version of the Amiga bouncing ball demo. I always wanted to get whatever program it was that let you use all 512 colors at once - Spectrum 512 I think.   I may have some images on diskette in the back of a closet. I may see if they're still readable some day. The image viewer I use, XnView will display  both Degas and Neochrome images.

I do recall the printhead scanner. I just tossed my ST recently. It was one of the lemons that always had bombing problems but I spent countless hours with Neochrome, programming and playing Sundog and Mudpies. I even ran dBase III+ using a PC emulator. 

It was a great machine but Atari never marketed it enough - at least in the US. I believe that a few  musicians are still using them because the MIDI software was so good.

"I was in the Amiga Camp myself"

 Home of the original Video Toaster editing app. I just Googled that and found out something I didn't know:

"One feature of the Video Toaster was the inclusion of LightWave 3D, a 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program. This program became so popular and useful in its own right that in 1994 it was made available as standalone product separate from the Toaster systems."

Also one of the original designers was comedian Dana Carvey's brother !

Good ole Lightwave :) I remember it being on the Amiga, but only because I wanted it more than chocolate cake at the time.

I'm not sure what software they used, but the majority, if not all of Babylon 5's cgi was done on the higher spec Amigas, the 3000 was it?

John

More asncient trivia:

"Lightwave was the progeny of two former Amiga programs, Videoscape 3D and Modeler 3D, both from a company called Aegis"

Which sounds like it may well have been the same folks who created the Aegis Animator I had and that was also available on the Amiga.

and:

[Videoscape file format] "It is now used by Blender for importing/exporting meshes in text format."

So these old machines, especially the Amiga, were an important part of the history of modern 3D.
 

Quote - More asncient trivia:

"Lightwave was the progeny of two former Amiga programs, Videoscape 3D and Modeler 3D, both from a company called Aegis"

Which sounds like it may well have been the same folks who created the Aegis Animator I had and that was also available on the Amiga.

and:

[Videoscape file format] "It is now used by Blender for importing/exporting meshes in text format."

So these old machines, especially the Amiga, were an important part of the history of modern 3D.
 

It was a marvelous machine, the Amiga.  Mine was shoehorned into a PC case with a 68030 accelerator (processor not graphics) a massive 60mb hard drive and a whole 512kb of ram.

Don't get me started on how briliant the OS was :) sighs gold old Workbench.

John

I did the CBM - VIC20 - C64 route but couldn't afford an Amiga. Expensive in those days. $300 for the box alone but I learned all about ASCII graphics and MIDI with those machines. The VIC was great because if you thought about it you had a built in analog to digital conversion unit. It was called a game paddle My first portable computer was a 17 lb dual 360k floppy, no HD; monochrome, Osborne.
pdg

Quote - That was hand drawn, but I recall hand scanner (B/W?) and  a scanning system that used a fibreoptic cable attached to a the head of a dot matrix printer!

*Still in the attic are pads and pads of sketch paper and tracing paper

• Mine are in the front room.*

I had one of those wonky hand scanners!! They were crap! But I made do. LOL!
My sketch pads are burried in moving boxes somewhere.

Quote - I did the CBM - VIC20 - C64 route but couldn't afford an Amiga. Expensive in those days. $300 for the box alone but I learned all about ASCII graphics and MIDI with those machines. The VIC was great because if you thought about it you had a built in analog to digital conversion unit. It was called a game paddle My first portable computer was a 17 lb dual 360k floppy, no HD; monochrome, Osborne.
pdg

I had a ZX81, Commodore +4, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 then with great regret a PC :)

I still have 2 Amigas kicking around the place.  500 plus and 1200 HD.

Don't really use 'em but it seems a shame to throw 'em out.

I used to use Deluxe Paint back in the day. 

 I started with Bryce 2 and Ray Dream Designer. I was playing a hot new Mac game called Marathon-by an obscure company called "Bungie." They had an early online presence. Someone created some new female characters for Marathon using this cool App called Poser2.

   I still have the box somewhere (I think), Poser3 came along and I found a forum called PFO run by a lady named Willow and fellow called Grey. There were various battles revolving around copywrite issues-if I remember correctly.

  There were also squabbles over whether or not anyone could post their NPIAT renders-(Nekkid Posette in a Temple). Yes-there was a life before NVIAT renders came on the scene! Eventually Renderosity was born- and a companion site for NPIAT renders
 
  What ever happened to Willow and Grey?

All of those companies (Commodore, Atari, TI, RadioShack) may have made some questionable decisions but in the end, consolidation was bound to happen. Incompatible software and even disk formats fractured the market too much. It was fun at the time though :-)

Willow still has some textures for sale at Daz3D. The product page only says Willow but Google says Willow DaNaan, so I assume it's her.

I still have Poser 2. The figures were disappointing though, of course they were still meant mainly as models for those who could actually draw.  Missed 3, got 4 and somehow found PFO. Don't remember too much about the clashes. I remember Thralldom,  Lannie's, Greylight,  Ghastley, HappyWorldLand... Mostly gone though Greylight  and Ghastley still live on.

Quote - heh. lad, I remember life before we had computers at home or in School.......

when you learned your multiplication tables and did most of your sums in your head ...
Yes, I quite enjoyed those days; but now I'm retired I enjoy all these clever modern electronic gizmos and what they can help me achieve ...

But I still miss real money.

(Footnote for non-Brits: real money is what we used before they dumped this decimalised stuff on us)