LOOKING DEEP INTO POSER 8

So for my last post here I want to talk about my experience with Poser 8. In a previous post I wrote that I saw no real reason to upgrade and that Smith Micro wasn't doing enough to push the program. Well, I still think Smith Micro could do a lot more to push their software, but after using Poser 8 for some time now, I can say that the software itself is absolutely amazing.I have been given more freedom and power to create than I ever thought possible!

First left me talk about the interface. At first glance it looks the same, though with a coat of professional interface paint seen in programs like Fusion or Maya. The real power, though, lies in the totally dockable, rearrangeable windows. You can tear off any window, move it anywhere and when you drop it, other windows will flow around it. You can drag them, scale them, float them, or otherwise make what you will of your workspace. Yu have complete control. If you only use a tablet, like me, this can cause a bit of trouble too, though. I have more than once torn off a window and dropped it somewhere else while meaning to move the camera or some other item. Luckily this is easily remedied by a setting in the preferences panel that allows you to have the windows return to default or your preferred state on startup.


Cool as it is, interfaces have never been a big deal to me. In most every software I use, I keep to the default and get directly into the meaty stuff. In Poser 8, the real power is found in the new characters. Now here I am going to make a statement that will probably have a lot of diehard DAZ users thinking I am insane. I believe these new Poser 8 characters are the best characters to ever come out of the Poser universe. I will make an effort to clarify that now. In the past I have always used DAZ characters like Victoria, Michael Hiro etc., not because they are the best character models around, but because they are the most supported characters around in terms of costumes and accessories. Don't get me wrong, they are very good characters, but one of the problems I have with Victoria and Michael is their body proportions. This is not because they are bad, but because they are good. Too good in fact. Few people in the real world have such proportions, and those few are probably underwear models. When it comes to making everyday real people, you may be able to turn on the "heavy" morph and add some flab here and there, but that's where they start to fall apart. I will try to explain this in a slightly different way.


Think of the Poser model Miki II. I have no knowledge of how this character was actually done, but it looks like a body scan of an actual Japanese woman. Well, what do I mean by that? Look at the length of the torso, the placement of the hips, the height of the thighs and so on, in comparison to a northern European body type. Go even further and compare it to an idealized northern European body type, which is what Michael and Victoria are. Their torsos are too short, legs too long and hips to high to even consider trying to make an east Asian body type out of them. The proportions are radically different. This is why I believe the new characters, Ryan and Alyson are perfect. Not perfect, perhaps, for those who wish to do pin up models, elves, and fantasy art type images. You may find Victoria and Aiko best for that, but perfect for doing every day, down to earth, real people.


Now, you might say, "But Terrence, your animation is usually sci-fi and fantasy!" This is true, however, when it comes to animation, the things which have held the most influence over me have always been those with more realistic designs, like Ghost in the Shell, Jin Roh and Ralph Bakshi's rotoscoped filmes. I love A Scanner Darkly too. With the new characters in Poser 8 , I can finally get close to those kinds of looks. These new characters come with as many morphs as you might expect to get in a paid for morph pack for other characters. Even though their default forms were a bit of a turn off, even for me, after playing with dials and realizing how much I can do with them, I was sold.


Another improvement which means a lot to me is the ability to display 4096 pixel textures in Open GL in Poser 8. This has changed the the way I create, what I can create and what I want to create! I can now make grater use of OpenGL, and its speed, which I could not do in Poser 7. This has allowed me to really expand what I considered myself capable of as far as producing a decent animated show at a good enough speed to be viable. The new content library navigation is also a big help. If your content library is as large as mine (approaching 50 GB) then you can imagine how the old system might become a pain. On the whole I very happy with Poser 8. I still have to fault Smith Micro, though, because they did not make me, an avid user of the software, aware that there are so many great things in it! If I had known I would have upgraded on day one. I hope that will soon change as the program gains more ground and more people begin using it on larger projects. I think great days are ahead for the Poser universe.

So this is my last post here on this blog. As I mentioned before, Blogger is shutting down my method of posting in favor of everything being hosted on their managed sites. The blog itself will always be here, but going forward I will be creating a new blog, integrated into a new branch of the site, and part of my new show. You will soon find it and all new animation here:

www.studioartfx.com/eternal

(feel free to ignore the temp pages for now)

THE END and THE INDUSTRY

This blog will soon be coming to an end. I've written those words before, but this time it is different. It is not because of anything different that I want to do, or am doing, but because Blogger is shutting down a critical part of their operation which makes this blog possible. They are, in the coming month, totally dropping support for blogs published via FTP to the users own server. I completely understand this move. Even had they not explained in email that 90% of their engineering resources are being used to support the less than 5% of their users who blog this way, I would understand them dropping this method because they must be losing so much ground to other popular blog services that "do everything for you" with no struggle or hassle. Other blog services out there let a user do whatever they want, even setting up the domain and web page for them, and the user can just start typing. Of course people would choose these over the complex FTP method Blogger had. Of course, there's the blogspot hosting, but that only works if one doesn't mind "blogspot" in their domain name. I would never use that.

So this is coming to an end primarily because of changes in the internet world. Also, the popular service which allows comments on blog, Haloscan, is shutting down completely. I don't remember the date. They may have shut down already. Either way, things are changing, and we have to change with it. I will soon be moving to using only the Anigen Final Secrets blog for both text and video posts.

So what does this have to do with the industry? Well, the industry is seeing great change too. As you may know, Autodesk, famous for their 3DStudio Max software, now also owns Maya, formerly from Alias/Wavefront, and Soft Image. They own the three big power players of professional CG applications in the industry. As you may also know, I don't use any of them. They are not really designed for what I do. Still, their seems to be an attitude that comes with their use. There is a thread about it in the Luxology forum that poses some interesting questions about this phenomenon. In response to that, I had to write:

The attitude that I've encountered in some groups is that it is a struggle to create great work in some of these "professional" applications. Studios employ teams of people to realize one shot. It's very rare that you find someone who can create, on their own, studio quality work in some of the Autodesk tools. This is not because the tools are incapable, but because they are designed to be a part of a studio pipeline where different people who specialize are assigned different tasks. They were never intended for one person to be able to grasp all that they can do.

Some of the so called smaller packages, however, allow one person to do it all, and usually without the struggle professionals are used to. Because of this, they immediately look down on work created in those smaller apps as though "the computer" did the work for the user because they didn't sweat blood to get their result.

I remember one of the first real studio jobs I had, people were trying to model characters in 3D Studio R4 (long before Max 1.0 even came out) and literally taking weeks to do so. I did a character in 2 or 3 days using one of the smaller apps at the time and started converting people. Studios will surely see the value of these apps if they can be shown, but telling them won't do the trick.

In that discussion, we are still talking about apps, though not as big and expensive as the power players, still get used in professional studios in games, TV and film. Apps like Lightwave, modo, Cinema 4D and the like. I don't even want to get started on the industry attitude towards the much much cheaper apps like Vue, Carrera or Poser. Those apps are, however, what I really want to talk about as I believe they are the future of, if not the industry, then the indie. So next I want talk in depth about my explorations into Poser 8.