Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Poser 5 - New things and fixing old things

Phantast opened this issue on Apr 26, 2001 ยท 45 posts


Phantast posted Thu, 26 April 2001 at 5:29 PM

Since there's some discussion of Poser 5 at the moment, I'd like to contribute a few thoughts. (Which may be too late, or repeat what others have said, I can't say; anyway, here goes). I see wish list items as falling into two categories: things that really constitute advancements for Poser 5, and things that ought to have been fixed in Poser 4. List 1 is the relatively hard stuff. In some ways List 2 is more interesting, as it shows failure of the design process rather than a question of not meeting technical challenges. Items in no particular order. List 1 A) Models that don't crack up in relatively simple poses. Posette can't drink a glass of water without severe injury to her elbow. B) Clothes that conform without ripping to shreds in anything other than quite basic poses. C) Clothes that automatically conform to the morphed form of the underlying figure. D) A more flexible camera, positioning and lighting system like the one in Bryce. E) A better render engine. That should be enough to be going on with. List 2 F) A more sensible system for selecting body parts than the silly little drop-down menu which disappears off screen because it is bulked out with every single finger joint. Relegating finger joints to a separate sub-menu would, you might have thought, been an obvious design decision. G) Better dialogue boxes. The existing ones are not only ugly, they lack the expected ability to tab from one control to the next. H) Better indication of what element is selected. For instance: you adjust a light with the light control, and then try to do something with the figure, and it doesn't work. Why not? Because you have Light 1 selected, which is shown to the bottom right of the window, but on the left it says Figure 1 is selected. But Light 1 is nothing to do with Figure 1, so it shouldn't show this at all. I) Sensible undo. Make a change to a pose; you can't see the effect properly, so you rotate the camera a touch. Now you see you don't like it - select undo and the camera change is undone, not the pose change. It would be much better either to have separate undos for scene and camera, or remove camera changes from the undo list. There are also far too many operations that can't be undone. J) Better terminology: it is a bit confusing the way the term "figure" is used. Any artist talking about the "figures in a picture" means the number of humans, not the number of humans plus the number of clothes. This causes unnecessary confusion. K) Better handling of morph targets. You can add a morph target, but you can't remove it or even rename it - why not? All right, you can if you get Morph Manager, but it ought to there in the program. L) I won't go into the grouping tool, but it is not very good that if you select one face too many you have no way to deselect it. Coding a better way is not exactly hard. M) Sensible directory handling. Why can't Poser remember which directory I keep morph targets in? If I want to add a whole bunch of morphs, I have to drill down the directory structure for every one. Again, this is so easy to code and saves so much time and effort in operation. N) Automate obviously repetitive tasks. How many times have you had to go through the same drill in the materials box for transparency? Change object colour to white; change the rest to black; set transp max to 100%; set the others to zero - why not one button to automate this common procedure? Isn't the job of computers to make things easier? I see there is now a python script that someone has written to do this in PPP, but it's the sort of thing that ought to be basic program design. O) Copy and paste. There are copy and paste elements in the Edit menu but I've never found anything they do. Poser must be the only 3D app where you cannot easily duplicate an object. There is a non-intuitive and cumbersome way to do it by saving as a prop and recreating from there and then deleting the library entry, but why not a simple duplication command? P) Better 3D axes. Nine times out of ten if you want to move or rotate an item, you want to do so in relation to the world co-ordinate system, and usually rotate with respect to the item's centre. Poser insists on using the origin position and axes of the object, which frequently get screwed up, and for a figure are not alterable, which can make exact positioning far more of a pain than need be. I won't mention copy protection again. It's so 80s.