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Monthly Archives: March 2021
Squid’s in…
Here’s a demo of AntFarm’s Squid Mech in Poser’s Comic Book lineart. Looks very nice in Comic Book Mode. Regrettably the textures are very heavily dark and grungy, though, and there are no alternative MATs. But one can use the gamma-lift script in Poser, and then put a ring of bright lights on it.
Gilbert the Goldfish, also fished out of the DAZ Store bargain-bin for a few $s, was less of an immediate success. Trans-mapped fins mean he doesn’t toon well. But they are at least the right shape in geometry, so the trans-mapping can be replaced with toon-edged textures and then coloured toony hair material images applied. Then in the Material Room : Simple set a Transparency edge on them of 82%. Save as “Gilbert2021” in his folder, which is ‘FishFriends’ rather than Gilbert. Evidently a whole series of toon fish ‘FishFriends’ was once planned.
Still not ideal, but he was only about $2.50. Could be useful to comic-strip artists as an artists’ reference model, hand-drawing over the base render.
The discounted ‘The Back: Lite’ was also only partially successful. Skimpily documented, it needs one of the backdrop sets for me to be able to discover how it works, re: the required correctly-proportioned picture sizes and node connections for the backdrop. The ground morphs work fine and show in Comic Book mode. There’s obviously more to it than just loading a 2D picture into the back, re: getting the picture to fit properly.
Update: It shows up on Props and Poses as “OOT The Back”. Textures are under ..\Runtime\textures\outoftouch. It you get the Space Gate pack, you’ll see what the sizes are. Transparency is always “on” when a Floor loads, and needs to be manually tweaked back again. But otherwise it all works in Poser 11.
Poser: the Chain Break tool
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use the “Chain Break” tool, aka the “Chain Tool” in Poser. Ever wondered what it does? Here’s how it works.
1. Inside a Poser figure is a simple ‘chain’ skeleton that allows it to move. This is very useful — for instance, when you pull on a hand, the arm will follow along with it and the figure will start to bend over to one side from the hip. Sometimes you need to temporarily break the chain skeleton inside the figure. This is what the ‘Chain Break’ tool does. To get to it, ensure you can see your Editing Tools panel of icons.
2. First, place a figure on the Poser stage. Ensure the figure is selected. With the Editing Tools panel and its buttons visible, click the ‘Chain Break’ icon (or press the ‘l’ key).
3. Now simply click on the body part you want. After your click, the body part will now have a little icon on it. Its skeleton chain has been broken off from body parts further down the chain. (You will also see one on the hips, but that one cannot be removed).
4. Now, if the figure’s hand is selected and moved, the lower arm will no longer follow along with it. Select the Translate/Pull tool (press the ‘t’ key) and try it. The selected body part is no longer part of the skeleton chain. You will see however that the wrist, hand and fingers can still be moved, even while the lower arm stays put. The rest of the figure’s torso is also unaffected when the hand moves.
5. Once you have made your adjustments to the hand, click the ‘Chain Break’ icon again (or press the ‘L’ key). Then click on the icon on the locked body part. This will re-link the skeleton and the figure will be back to normal.
6. The re-posed hand will stay as you posed it, and will not suddenly be jerked about once the skeleton chain re-connects. For instance if you now move the arm and tilt the figure’s torso, the hand will not change. This does not mean it is locked, just that it is at the end of the arm chain and thus it has no further IK ‘chain’ pulling on it. However, if you have parented a prop to it (e.g. a battle-axe) then you will have effectively extended the chain. Pulling on the axe will move the hand.
The tool works on more than arms and hands, and can work on nearly all chained body parts (except the hips).
Mastering Animation in Poser
Coming soon and booking now, Mastering Animation for Poser 12 webinars with Charles Taylor. Also relevant for Poser 11, of course, it’s just that 11 users won’t have such swift SuperFly rendering or some of the new Cycles nodes. But that won’t matter much if you’re using Firefly, Sketch, Comic Book, or Preview PNG sequence + Photoshop filters/actions.
Poser 12 Early Access updates again – now has new PDF Manual
Poser 12 Early Access has updated again. Now at 12.0.421 (2nd March 2021). The main thing is the Manual.
* “Major updates to Poser Manual to cover Cycles updates and other new features”. Related to this is “Several Help menu commands are correctly linked” in the software.
Beyond that, more tweaks to SuperFly, which is Poser’s implementation of Blender’s main Cycles renderer…
* “SuperFly using Infinite lights [now] consistently renders specularity on sequenced images”. Which appears to be a useful fix for animators.
* “Fixed HDRI background images corruption, no longer previews or renders red or black.” Also, SuperFly render size was being constrained in size by a 4095 pixel limit on background images. This limit has been removed.
And some Python scripting things fixed, presumably ahead of a big update for the bundled scripts and more (said to be due in mid-March), such as…
* “Bundled Python command-line tools and apps now have the correct library load path attributes.”