...four...

...five...

...six...

Alright, I just caught my breath.... Here's the skinny. All these morphs are included in P5. And you aren't limited by twisting the dials... you can use our MorphPutty tool to "pull" on the nose to make it wider, "push" on the eyes to move them closer together, it goes on and on. Then apply the shape and/or texture to our P5 figures' heads, or spawn a new morph target to dial in just what strength this new look should have, or use a photo to make your new character look like whoever... Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this cool new technology!

Oh yeah, you can also take whatever look you just dialed in, and exxagerate it into a charicature!

I meant to spell that Kawrikatwoyour ;-) kupa

Ooooooooh, my heart be still...... :) How about the Mac version, kupa????????????? I'm almost glad I'll be away for 2 months in Sept and Oct, since it will, hopefully, make the wait seem to go faster. And I won't have to drool all over my keyboard when the Windoze renders start filling the gallerie....or so I tell myself. (Really, I just want my Mac version now!)

Ummm.... OK, I'm speechless! Can I give you my money now?!

Yes, please do, www.curiouslabs.com

Good point Kupa - I'd forgotten about (or actually, we didn't have enough information yet about) the face room. That should solve most people's issues. I think the face room may also be one of the best new features of P5 ;). 40 pre-scanned heads? cool beans!

Starlet, you mean it? we can order now...

Will we be able to use the face room on the other figures available, like the Millenium folk and Dina and Natalia?

Momcat, good question. The Face Room uses a 3D envelope that surrounds the head. The envelope is deformed with all the difference vectors and morph targets in the list above. The envelope has to be correlated point by point to the head that fits within it. Every non-standard head requires weeks of engineering time to hook up, correlate point by point, test and update. At this time the only heads that are currently correlated to work within the Face Room are on the shoulders of the Poser 5 figures. I expect this to change. More details as they can be confirmed. Non-P5 figures will work to degree, but the results will be unpredictable and potentially undesireable. BTW, all the P5 figures share the same head mesh, so they all share morph data. A note- If ANY 3rd party figure developers out there want to set their figures up to work in the Face Room, we'll invest the time needed to correlate those heads. But it does require a substantial amount of time and resources on our end to do so. Other than the Face Room, existing figures will work in every aspect of Poser 5. Hair, cloth, textures, materials, etc. will work on any other figure. The Face Room, just like morphs for Posette only work with the content they were created for. Steve Cooper

Mabye DAZ and CL can partner to work on the Face Room engineering for the Mil figures....I hope :)

1. Did everyone notice the dial names can now be long - without running into the setting numbers! 2. Can't even find sellion??? in my OED 3. Steve: message #100/first dialog/cheeks/2nd dial reads "round/grant", probably should be "round/gaunt" - just to prove we really are hanging on every tidbit you toss us! (More...Need More...Need P5...)

Is it possible to make a render of the rest of the family? TIA.

ANNOUNCER: the crowd stands in stunned silence as The Kupa slams one; not just over the fence but across the highway on the other side of the parking lot!!!!! [collective deep breath] CROWD: ayayayemeidid,ggnfldp!!!!!wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, wooh, yippee, yeehaw, Remember The Alamo!

119 posts and climbing ... run for your lives, it's the Revenge of California Dreaming!

Is that also only compatable with the P5 stock? How does that work?

Having dug around, I did figure out what a sellion is.

First of all, the word selliform is in the OED, and that's the clue. Selliform means saddle-like. Apparently, a sellion is a word used in anthropometrics to mean the dip at the top of the nose and more or less centered between the eyes or eyebrows.

(It's amazing what you can learn with a Google search!)

Another more or less unrelated thing. (I should mention that I am not a beta tester and I am not in any way affiliated with CL). I've seen some people mention the geometry of the new P5 figures. I'd just like to point out that one of the lsited features of P5 completely nullifies that point for anything done with the Firefly renderer -- polygon smoothing.

I use a similar feature in pretty much all of my Lightwave work, except that (from what I understand) P5 does it even better. Basically, the object is converted to Subdivision Surfaces.

Sub-D's (as lots of people call them) are a method of taking a low-polygon mesh and getting a very smooth model out of it. If you've ever worked with a program which will do a smooth subdivision of the polygons in your model, it works like that except that you determine how subdivided the model gets. In the case of the Firefly renderer, it can subdivide the model down until the polygons are less than a single pixel, meaning there are effectively no more polygons in your image.

This is looking like a really excellent release. Bravo, CL!

-Zak Jarvis
http://www.voidmonster.com

Momcat, another good question... MorphPutty will work on any figure's morph. Just click on a face or any actor with morphs and drag in the Pose room. And you'll be able to sort the morphs and create directories of grouped morphs, just like in the Face Room images above. So collect up the sculpt morphs and drag them all together in a new directory called "Sculpt Morphs". Create another directory called "Lipsync Morphs" and drag all your Mimic morphs or TextPuppet morphs into it. Collect all your naughty adult morphs into another set. You control what's in the directory and what's not. You name it. Plus you can lock it. That way you can preserve a group of sculpting morph settings and only "Putty" the expressions. Or lock the expressions and "Putty" the face sculpt morphs. You can also split a facial morph (or any symmetrical morph) into a left and right side morph. Turn a smile into a leftsmirk. It's likely that figure developers will set-up their new characters pre-grouped so that you don't have to go through the hundreds of morphs and sort them one by one.

and here's what the corresponding Morph Parameter Dials look like in the new P5 Parms Dialog with groups already set-up. BTW, I'll be hiding these CR2s on the Poser 5 Content CD. Dig around friends, you'll find them... All the tongue and facial morphs a user could want! Traveler, you rock! And to boot, there's a bunch of morphs from Jaager with full body settings including a full collection of breast and genitalia morphs. Yes we fixed Cross Talk! I know I haven't really gone into the "who" part of our content yet. Wait till you see the Content CD. It's a piece of art. Poser 5 contributing artist bios, lots of free additional content, images, animations. It's almost worth the upgrade price alone.

by "these CR2s" I mean these "overly morph loaded development CR2s". The standard "well morph-stocked CR2s" will be right where you expect them. In the Figures Library!

"It's likely that figure developers will set-up their new characters pre-grouped so that you don't have to go through the hundreds of morphs and sort them one by one." Warning: Random wild speculation ahead. I wonder if this is what DAZ is doing for V3. Sounds really neat Kupa. I can't wait to be able to place my order. Can Morph Putty be used to create new (from scratch) morph targets for figures and props, or do we still need magnets for that?

Kupa, you sound like a very proud father. I'm happy for you and so glad that many artists from this community will get the recognition they so richly deserve. Happy Birthday Poser 5. Many happy returns!!!! Q

Zak, Good work on sellions. Poser 5 users are going to be pushing the edge of charcater animation and set-up. And this goes way beyond what you'd expect to have control over in "ANY" 3D character system. And the detail on subdivision surfaces is correct. At rendertime Firefly will smooth polys to whatever degree you specify. There are certainly practical limits though. This way we can deliver figures that are about 24,000 facets/verts in size and these can smooth at rendertime to look much smoother than they appear in mesh form. BTW, the render time in Firefly for a higher res version of the image with the raytraced reflections and about 10,000 hairs with polygon smoothing and soft shadows (raytraced shadows on hair produce a hard edged hair by hair shadow, that looks very unrealistic, we can do that with Firefly if you really want that look) was about 1.5 hours.

Oh, neat! You have the Mimic morphs in their own group.

Kupa, Thanks. :) I'm a bit of a word-wonk, so I can really sink my teeth into a challenge like that one. Are joint-driven morphs possible? That'd be really sweet lacking a full physiology simulator (which, of course, is what I really want). That's really quite a decent render time for all the stuff going on there. I'd point out that reflected and refracted hair is currently only possible in Softimage and an obscure, unsupported test version of the Shave & a Haircut plugin for LW, so that's a nice coup, Kupa! One fun trick, since there's 3d-motion blur; you could use ray-traced shadows on the hair and use a spinning light-array to get nice area-light shadows on that hair. Rendering time would be a bit harsh though. The P5 Hair sim looks good. I'll know for certain when I get my hands on it, 'cause really, hair simulation is almost less about the possible results and more about the interface to get them. I'd like to see renders of people with a more real-world number of hairs and hair thickness. Is the full range of the materials lab available for shading hair? Two major features for realistic hair are translucency and anisotropic shading, and It doesn't (offhand) look like most of the P5 hair renders I've seen use them. I'm looking forward to playing too! -Zak Jarvis http://www.voidmonster.com

Fantastic. Might just be the shadows, but it looks like the armpits are too high (not enough thickness in the arm to shoulder area). Well, can't wait.

Zak, There's an anisotropic shader in FireFly, it would work well for hair. I'll also have to tweak the translucence settings to see how it looks. Thanks for the suggestion. BTW, our skin shader is a blend between Blinn Specularity and Translucence. Joint Driven Morphs were in development by one of the masters, and likely will be deliverable, but not the time we ship. Also raytraced reflected hair is no small feat. Thanks for the kudos. We're in a good list there I'd say. I hope you can get great results out of our hair styling interface. Neftis took to it immediately. Within a week of working with an early Alpha build, Mychelle-Anne was cranking out hair styles that still amaze me. We gave her very little direction, just a basic overview, and boom. She was styling... Very cool to see. We'll have to talk her into some tutorials... It's different, yes. But it can be driven to work pretty darn well.

here's a shader set-up with an Anistropic Specular shader pluged in. That took about five seconds to set-up.

I wote for a render of the rest of the family next, after all this thread is named: Want to see the Poser 5 figures rendered? Yes please! :-)

I do hope the manual will be explaining all this coz Anistropic Specular shader means nothing to me.

zrincx, That's next on my list of renderings. The whole Robinson crew. Too little time, so many cats to wrangle. kupa

Cool.. its 06:35 in the morning here, so I deserve to get a peek before headin for bed :-P (The whole Robinson crew!! LOL :-)

I-- I can't resist-- futile--I'm getting on the bandwagon for P5 even if the next Mac version is behind, even though I'll HAVE TO BUY A BRAND NEW MAC to run it... Mimic still relevant... My will is gone. I've been (to quote Mr. X elsewhere) tamed. Oh, and for the record, hallelujah for using the same head mesh for both figures. If you've done the same thing for the hands and feet so much the better. Would it be pointless to see a Firefly render of the older P4 folk just to see how the poly smoothing treats them?

Kupa,

Skin shading is near and dear to my heart. Lately I've been totally enamored of sub-surface scattering even if it is the most terrifyingly slow thing I've ever rendered (I can easily imagine setting up still images that take months if not more than a year to render, and I'm not using hyperbole).

The above picture is Victoria 2 (converted to sub-d's), the millenium teeth, the stock Vicky texture, a single ray-traced point source light, no radiosity and the OGO_Hikari plugin for Lightwave. It took... Er. Like 20 hours to render, as I recall. That bit of grunge around her eyes is because I skimped on the quality a bit so it'd finish within my lifetime. Moral to this story? SSS looks great. Renders slow.

I'll really be looking forward to playing with the P5 skin shader. Sounds like it should be a good compromise for quality/speed.

Is it possible to hook up parameters to angle of incidence? I've been finding lately that one thing that can make skin look nice is hooking the specular up so it's stronger at extreme glancing angles.

-Zak Jarvis
http://www.voidmonster.com

Zak, That's how our skin shader is set-up. And you can duplicate the effect with all the components. I couldn't tell you how though...After a little more time, perhaps.

Pros, Cons....discuss them all......me, I'm buying P5 ASAP. I'm not a Graphics Pro, or an art student or any of that stuff, I just like Poser as a hobby, it's fun and challenging. Poser, any version, is a great product, and THAT is why I use it and THAT is why I'm going to buy P5. Chris

WARNING! WARNING! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!I MUST PRE-ORDER, BUT I CANNOT SEE WHAT I AM DOING! MY HEAD HAS EXPLODED! DANGER!

Wowsers! Well, I'd like to see more images, too. (I have a lo-o-o-o-o-o-ong list of what I'd like to see.) However, I'd also like Steve to get some sleep, or at least a catnap or two. Since Curious Labs is in the last couple of weeks before release, they are furiously hunting down bugs, polishing code, checking links, and deciding what is vital and what has to wait for 5.1... and all this responsibility is on his shoulders. So, I will merely say THANK YOU for what he is showing us, for the gift of time right now is a precious one indeed, and suggest that we wait with our petitions until he says that the golden master disk has been released? As a developer I know that a few hours can make a difference as to whether a feature makes it into a product or not... let's give him those hours. Carolly

This is all very fascinating and can't wait to get my copy.. I do have questions though.. I am not sure what this "Firefly renderer" is... will that work on my win98se high end machine? Or will I have to resort to the P4 renderer until I go to win2K? And with all this talk of smoothing a mesh with the render.. does this mean that if I export a P5 person for use in Vue that the human will be a rough figure in need of further smoothing? This would be awful! Sorry for my confusion on this issue.. P5 figures seem to be such a new (low res??) different mesh. I am also wondering with all the morph possibilities in the (wow!) Face room, can you save the morphs themselves like you can in P4, or at least the whole figure with the morphs in it? Again, sorry for my confusion.. It's all so fascinating, yet complicated looking on first look! I too thought the new female looked a bit weird, but with the explanation of how the faces can be molded and created to look very individual then it is pretty neat! Let's hope that there will be artists who will create these pre-set new people for us folks who don't have the time! I might have missed it.. can the figure have the pretty LONG eyelashes that Vicki and Steph have? At this point I am glad that I have Vicki and Steph with their face morphs and the special high res maps I have bought for them.. they are ready to go and do not need to be 'built' to look pretty or interesting... Which brings me to my next question! Can folks who do this sort of thing sell or share the P5 cr2 morph sets just like for P4? I would think that someone would offer hair styles too.. ! It does create a whole new people market I would think, depending on any restrictions... ? Lyne

When you wake up, Kupa :) can we set independent colors in the interface for text and background and stuff? From the screenshots it looks MUCH easier to read than P4 and for that I am soooo grateful, but the white against the beige is still a bit difficult. Am just sitting in awe over everything here!!

The Money I have set aside for Poser5 is now screaming at me to pay it to you, please don't take too long to release poser5 I don't think I can stand the noise for much longer :) Important Question Will the Content Paradise be just for buying & selling or will there be space for freebies too? Important Question Rob

Boy, Kupa's pics of the dial made me go gooseflesh.... This is gonna be FUN! I hop all those morphs stay in the final characters - I want a LOT of dials. Gives me more to play with! My Vickis are up to nearly 1200 morphs now, and growing.... A question - will a P5 pose file save Body values? And will it save scale values if I want it to? The ideal is as follows: You save a pose to pose lib. Popup gives you the usual choices, plus: "Should the folowing be included in the saved pose? 1. Position of body/object 2. Position of parts 3. Scale 4. Morphs" Or something similar. I'm assuming here that materials will be saved in a different way to creat MAT files, and don't need to be included in the list. :] WishNose

I second this question: 'Can folks who do this sort of thing sell or share the P5 cr2 morph sets just like for P4? Any restrictions?'

Kupa, and the team; Bravo. Can't wait till payday! And I hope Dacort and DSI are going to get Natalia and Dina arranged for the face room!

Yes, I would very much like to get Natalia and Dina set up for the face room. I would like to take Curious Labs up on their offer of help in this regard.

Yes, Dina and Natalia should be set up for the face room, that's a great idea.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=879720

Hey Kupa, Up in post #132: "Also raytraced reflected hair is no small feat. Thanks for the kudos. We're in a good list there I'd say." ...but, no one but you has been able to achieve it due to either bugs in the ray-tracer, or lack of understanding of how to set up the material settings. Could you please take a look at the linked thread? Were you using the production version of the code when you rendered post #31 above? Or did a bug slip in between then and ship? If there's some setting we're all missing, we'd love to hear about it ;). Thanks, - Keith