After years of using P6, and P5, and P4 before that, I finally entered the twenty first century, and upgraded to Poser Pro 2012.

Over the years I have answered a lot of questions in this forum, but not asked many. Now the shoe is on the other foot. As I try to catch up on the changes since P6, I suspect that I will be asking a lot of questions over the coming weeks and months. I only hope my tired old brain is up to absorbing all the info.

I also got a new-to-me PC. With my old system ,it was too painfully slow to use dynamics, so that is also a new field that I can now investigate. Much the same with material nodes and shaders. My old system was too slow to make experimenting feasible. Now that is another area I need to catch up in.

A lot to do and learn, but that's good!

If you have any tips on what a P6 user needs to know or do when he moves up to PP2012, I'm all ears!

One top: Enjoy it!

That's awesome Les. Congrats! :)

Laurie

WTG. Les!  You'll enjoy it a lot more once you get the hang of it! 

Tip number one in my book:

Don't open any of your old PZ3's. Build things from scratch and see how all of the new toys work. Expecially the lighting... MG... especially the lighting. It's heavenly. Throw away all your old light sets. They are no longer your friends.

Oh yeah. Get BB's ENVDOME, load it, save a copy with GC set to 1.0. It IS your lighting tool (along with one 10% infinite light to cast a sun shadow) in outdoor renders!

Get Snarleygribbley's EZSkin and quit worrying about setting up skin nodes. They'll be almost perfect every time.

If you get funky results using GC then run the Image Gamma script in the Partners folder under scripts. Set everything to 1.0 and try again. This corrects 99% of my issues.

Get V4WM. It's a game changer. Free over at Poser Place.

Ask questions. Ask lots of questions. You've helped me so much... I hope the above helps you.

There are several rendering and shader enhancements.  Image Based Lighting and Ambient Occulsion, Gamma Correction and Indirect Lighting, Sub-Surface Scattering.  Did P6 have point lights?  Those are quite nice.  :laugh:

There are also Dependent Parameters (the valueOpKey ERC type handles differently than the others and may interest you a great deal), capsule zones and multiple zones per joint, animated origins and weight-mapping.  There have been various speed and simulation improvements for dynamic cloth and hair.  The Morph Brush tool is quite useful now, after a couple of versions of development.

The new GUI and library are also very nice additions.  Luckily you missed out on the P8 growing pains for those.  :lol:

One key irritation to watch out for is the changed handling of .obj export when multiple objects are exported at once.  Generally, though, the new version is much better than the old.  I can't think of any other new bugs or new changes which arguably fail as improvements.  Poser Pro 2012 is my favorite version of Poser, of all those I've used so far.

And I'm just name-dropping features of interest.    The best resource for the rendering and shader improvements would be (as ever) posts by Bagginsbill, here and at RDNA.  Dependent Parameters haven't really caught on as well as one might like, so far, and the best documentation for those is probably in the user manual.

:woot: Yay! :)

Nice!

lesbentley:

Welcome to PP2012! I think you will really enjoy the improvements and inhancements. We all look forward to what you will be able to achieve with the newest Python script.

lmk

I would counter what basicwiz said, to a certain degree:

You might be able to salvage some old light sets, but they will definitely require adjustments. After loading an old light set into your scene, set the intensity values to about 150%-200% of what they originally were, and you may be able to breathe new life into some older sets.

Welcome to modern Poser :)

150%-200%?!?!? Have I not been screaming "too much light" for several years?!?

It's the opposite. Your main light stays about the same, but all your secondary "fill" lights should be reduced - 1/2 to 0 of what you have already.

Thanks everyone. :biggrin:

@basicwiz,
They sound like useful tips.

@Cage,
Yes P6 had point lights. Dependent Parameters are definitely something I want to learn about.

Quote - One key irritation to watch out for is the changed handling of .obj export when multiple objects are exported at once.

Yes I already discovered the ":#" in the exported obj's. :cursing: Very annoying. Not hard to fix if only exporting two or three actors, but I imagine it would be a real PITA for a whole figure. An environmental niche for a py script to fix the obj?

Play! Play is essential to learning so do lots of it and make sure you have fun. And fun is much under-rated.

This thread is useful, I've just paid for the upgrade to PPro2012 (from P7), downloading it as I type.

I wasn't sure I'd ever upgrade Poser, I've used it less and less as modo's toolset has grown (modo601 now has animation, bones and weightmapping, dynamics, fancy hair and skin shaders etc), but I've been wanting to get back into content creation for poser, so having the current version is good. And $125 was a good deal.

1 thing remeber keep your poser 6 on comp as programers dont seem have masterd p8, 9, 10, 12 when comes to reading some content from library.

If i want to see what some poses or props are with picture in library i use p6 or 7, so keep your p6 instaled as some figures if load into 10 or 12 take to long or come in corupted.

So many timeshave i had load stuff into p6 then save to bring into later versions.

Never delete your old programs they can be a life saver.

What Ashley9803 said:PLAY!

and enjoy!

Attached Link: DarkEdgeDesign.com

Lighting is better than ever, 1, 2 or 3 lights and you are good to go, using PointLights a lot with great sucess.

Check out my tutorials page Making Props Into Figures as I show some DP work.

Good luck!

Good News, for all the users of poser pro 2012! Les your knowledge and tinkering has always been a great help to the community, now you have the new tools to help us all.

Cool beans, Les! 

I can't wait to see your avatar with SSS and a glowing cigarette...

Of course, I've had PP2012 since last Fall and have yet to rerender mine...

Quote -
If you have any tips on what a P6 user needs to know or do when he moves up to PP2012, I'm all ears!

One thing I noticed too is PP2012 is so stable. I really appreciate that SM worked on that.

Since you're so good with scripts, one thing you'll discover real quick is when you gamma correct at the render level, ALL the textures want to correct. I don't think the transparency or bump maps should be corrected. Maybe a script to turn all the texture maps plugged into transparency ports to 1.0 would be useful to you (and the rest of us...hint!). I don't think anyone has written such a thing yet, at least for hair.

Good luck

Snarlygribbly's Scene Fixer will fix you up, so to speak...lol. Sets things that need to be gamma 1.00 to 1.00 :). It's at Poser Place I believe. Do a search here for it tho...Snarly tends to post his awesome freebies in more than one place :).

Laurie

Quote - Since you're so good with scripts, one thing you'll discover real quick is when you gamma correct at the render level, ALL the textures want to correct. I don't think the transparency or bump maps should be corrected. Maybe a script to turn all the texture maps plugged into transparency ports to 1.0 would be useful to you (and the rest of us...hint!). I don't think anyone has written such a thing yet, at least for hair.

There's a script called "Change Gamma" included with PP2012.  It's under the scripts menu under Material Mods, IIRC.  Tell it to set 'All of the Above' to 1.0.. 

A script to find bump maps, trans maps, etc. and set them to gamma = 1.0 is actually included with PP2012. It's by Dimension3D.

[X-post]

Okay thanks...I still learning too.

Well done Les

Just thought Id ask a few questions as I too have just bought a new copy of poser 2012 it was 50% off great deal.

I am now using poser 8 only had it few months, but thought I would upgrade so i could use V4WM from poserplace.

My questions fro anyone please.

I am running windows 7 with 8 gig ram i5 PC

1. Should 2012 be installed as 64 bit or 32 on install? the installer suggests 32 bit

2. should I move all my external runtimes into the main 2012 runtime or will this cause major file finding problems?

Thanks for the replys I am being careful with my install so as not to cause issues later for myself. Rowlando

With 8 gigs, you're probably on the 64-bit version of Win7 so you should definitely choose the 64-bit install.

I thought so but it did not give me that option the installer had the 32 bit install box ticked and gave no other choice

cheers

IIRC, the installer is giving you the option to install the 32 bit version as well as the 64 bit version.  If you have a 64 bit system and OS, you don't need the 32 bit version.

Thanks cage you mean it installs both or I can just uncheck the box sound about right.

do you know about the using external runtimes or are they best in the main runtime?

I think that is correct.  If you uncheck the option, you should end up installing only the 64 bit version.

There shouldn't be any need to alter your existing Runtimes.  I am using my old Runtimes from P4, P5, P7, and P8 with Pro 2012, in addition to some custom Runtimes for special projects or categories.  Just import the existing Runtimes using the library.

Unless you mean the Runtimes are on an external hard drive which may not always be attached.    I'm not sure whether it might be better to relocate those or not.

Welcome to the modern world!

My runtimes are on another drive its an internal drive. I just want to make sure its going to work, I think I will post this on a new thread cheers

I have a wack of runtimes on another internal drive, no issues, and heck I recomend it.

I always install Poser and my runtimes on another partition; that way I can format and reinstall the OS without losing any data.  With Poser 7, reinstalling the latest SR will reset the file assiciation after Windows is reinstalled; I havent tried it with 8 and PP 2012, but I presume it will do it as well...

wooot, i too join the land of upgraded poser, my copy of poserpro 2012 just arrived by courier only took 3 days from the usa, now i can try all the things i hear you all talking about, well once i've installed it, created a network between my two laptops, sorted out all my old runtimes into the shared folders, done the dishes, made the tea, had a smoke, glass of wine etc etc etc

mysticeagle, I prefer to leave doing the dishes untill after the installation and configuration, etc. If you leave them long enough they will take on a very pleasant vredant green colour! But don't put off the glass of wine.