1

If you reach the point where you want to do some textures yourself - clothing items, face, etc. - you may want to pick up the free classic version of <A href="http://www.uvmapper.com">uvmapper</A> which will create those unwrapped files for you.  Uvmapper is a must have that has been around forever, seems like.

 

2

Well, I screwed the link up again.  I thought I could post a formatted hyperlink, sorry. Previously, I tried clicking the little icon that the tooltip says is a "hyperlink" but couldn't figure it out.  I'll have to play with it again.  My bad.http://www.uvmapper.com Huh.

 

 

 

 

3 I haven't played with Poser since about version 3.  The visual quality sure has improved, judging by the examples.

e frontier have a bunch of stuff I'd like to play with, but right now I have neither the time or the money.  Nor a suitable computer, though I'll be correcting that shortly (which is why I won't have the money for interesting but not directly useful software...)

4

Up through Poser 5, one of the big problems they had was in how they handled certain extreme joints, the "crinkly elbow" problem.

I see hints that they have tried to do something about that. It doesn't retroactively fix the older models, but apparently new models designed to the new approach look better. That's one of the things I wanted to see.

I'm also hoping they finally straightened out the multitasking weirdness, and that they finally started using Direct3D interactively. Given that I've got a decent 3D chip in this computer, it would be nice to get some benefit from it.

5

Pixy, Poser has changed a lot since Poser 3.

As of Poser 5 they included a ray tracer. They've been improving the lighting algorithms. In Poser 5 they added a cloth conformance program. Before, making clothing stay with the character as it moved required the clothing itself to be a character, with individual body parts that were animated the same way the person was. But in Poser 5 it became possible to "drape" cloth over a person or thing, and it would use physics to figure out what the cloth would do. As a result, loose clothing on a person who was walking would sway, for example. There were a lot of other neat things you could do with that.

Their problem, of course, is that they need to keep coming up with new features in order to convince existing customers to upgrade. I'll be interested in seeing what kinds of things they've added in Poser 7.

The main thing I expect is that they've cleaned up the code a lot. The original program was written for classic MacOS, and it "knew" that it was the only program running on the computer. So, for instance, even in Poser 5 if you kicked in a long render it wasn't possible to minimize the window. You could run other things, but Poser would ignore "minimize" signals, and if you used the "see desktop" icon to minimize it, it would remaximize itself. That was royally obnoxious; I hope they've fixed it.