Author Archives: jonahjameson

Yesterday I posted a install guide for 11.2. Today it’s the turn of the content bundles.

What’s actually in the ‘new and improved’ free content bundles for buyers and owners of the newly released Poser 11.2?

Below is my annotated listing of key .ZIP files. These are manually extracted, and then you copy-paste-merge the ../runtime/ to your Poser runtime directory/folder…

C:\Users\Public\Documents\Poser 11 Content\Runtime

Then they show up in Poser, once the re-indexing has finished.

1) Common Files:

HiveWire3D_BabyLuna.zip

HiveWire3D_Horse.zip

All the above are obvious. Look these up on the HiveWire Store if you’re unfamiliar with them. Baby Luna, and the generic Adult Dawn and her male partner Dusk. Dusk has a very good Gorilla makeover, for which there’s paid Poser Fur and a pose-pack at the HiveWire Store. I’m slightly tempted by the Gorilla, but without the paid-for fur and poses there’s not much point.

Also the Hivewire Horse base, for which there are many add-ons and makeovers at HiveWire.

LaFemmeContent_01.zip

LaFemmeContent_03.zip

La Femme is the flagship Poser female figure. This is not La Femme herself, but rather the freebie bundle with the extra content such as clothes, hair. I noticed Georgia and Bennie hair and also pose presets for these hairs.

Also noticed were two large sets of quality expressions. Girl Gear, Sweet Rebel and Elf clothing. Romantic Dress, Daisy Dress, some t-shirts and sportswear and other bits. For most people this will be a must-have for the extras, even if they already have the La Femme base. Apparently new first-time users of Poser 11 will now see La Femme as the default ‘start-up scene’ character, so I guess her base figure must be in the main installer.

On the forums it was said that La Femme would also ship with some new total-makeover characters, but I think what they meant was a set of slightly different Femme faces…

PoserPremiumContent_Figures.zip

Maisie with Tempesta3D’s ‘Angel’ toon makeover and matching hair. You may want to try to toon Maisie in Preview, so you’ll need to know how to make her control chips invisible. It’s a single dial turn…

A few other characters including a ‘poison dwarf’ (UniDwarf 2018), and an unusual skeleton.

PoserPremiumContent_3DScenery_01.zip through 03.zip

All good scenery and building items, you’ll want these. Also a folder for Bryce skies, ported to Poser.

PoserPremiumContent_PropsAndTransportation.zip

Again, useful bits and pieces (see some of the visual previews below). A complete detailed VW camper-van with paint presets which seems new to me. Cool fantasy spears and FX for them, and seemingly new.

2) Legacy Files:

ZLegacyContent_Poser-Props.zip

This also has modern thriller-style scenes that shipped with Poser 11 when first released. Also some natural plants, among other things. Worth having.

ZLegacyContent_Poser-Cartoons.zip

Robo-Kitty! Renderosity are missing a trick by hiding away SAK Robo Kitty (one of the best 3D characters ever made!) in this easily-overlooked legacy ZLegacyContent_Poser-Cartoons.zip file. Play to your strengths, Renderosity. Poser does superb tooning and this is still your leading free toon character, the toon equivalent of La Femme! Here, the Kitty is further hidden away, by being found under “Toys” once the .ZIP is installed.

The Robo-shark will also be fun for kids to make pictures with.

ZLegacyContent_Poser-Animals.zip

Some of the old Poser animals are still worth having, especially if you’re doing work with Poser’s real-time Comic Book rendering. The housecat still toons quite well. Some of the wild animals in particular are still useful, as they’re going to be in the distance in a scene and you’re likely to want a lot of them. They’re not heavy system resource users, so you can have herds and flocks in the hazy distance, or five giant octopii with poses etc.

ZLegacyContent_Poser-Hair.zip

You may also want this just for the P6 Jessi strand-hair, which can render relatively quickly in Firefly and then provides a good basis for over-painting or compositing more hair in Photoshop.

There are male James P6 equivalent hairs too. A pack of SuperFly shaders for this type of hair was recently released.

ZLegacyPoser11-installminimum_basic.zip

This has the useful ‘Primitives’ shape set (basic box, cone, pyramids, coils etc), and other things.

There’s no sign in this .ZIP of the PoserFusion plugins for Cinema4D etc. They’re not needed for Vue, at least up until Vue 2016. (I’ve no idea if the new subscription edition of Vue still works with Poser files or not). Where Maya/3DS/Lightwave/C4D users now get the PoserFusion plugins from is a bit of a mystery. Update: they’re here.

OK, I then merged the above extracted .ZIP files (but without Luna, Dawn/Dusk, Horse, Gorilla) into their own 10Gb runtime. Then I merged that super-merge with my existing Poser runtime, telling Windows to skip files if they already existed (“Skip these files”). Then I had PzDb re-index the runtime as a visual library with thumbnails. Here’s the pick result, had by scrolling through just “what’s new” for existing Poser 11 users.

Two big bundles of La Femme expressions. Here she has the Aurora La Femme character makeover.

Tropical desert-edge plants.

There’s much more than that, but those are my picks.

Now, finally, let your Poser re-index its content for 90 minutes while you go off and have a snack. It has a lot to re-index. Once the yellow wheel is pulsing (re-indexing), leave it to it, as you won’t find the new content otherwise and you may be wrestling with the software as the re-indexing process hogs your PC’s memory.

Also, I can confirm that drag-and-drop from the PzDB library software still works fine in Poser 11.2.

You have a complex scene in Poser. You load in a new prop or figure and… the new prop or figure is nowhere to be seen! You then have to tear your scene and carefully composed camera framing apart, to find the new item.

Is this is a problem you have, as a new Poser 11 user? Do you wish there was something like Poser’s native “Drop to floor” command, but named something like… “Centre selected item in camera”?

There is a way to do it, and it’s actually better than the native “Center item in camera”. It’s Ockham’s Python Scripts: SnapTo script. Only works on Windows. If you’re on Windows, here’s how to install and use it.

Update: There is now also a working Mac-friendly equivalent for it.

1) Download and un-zip. In Poser 11 you place the script in: C:\Program Files\Smith Micro\Poser11\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\ScriptsMenu to have it show up in Poser 11’s Scripts menu. It’s really really important to get right down to that last ..\ScriptsMenu folder and not stop at ..\poserScripts and think you’re there!

Then rename the script so that the filename has basic instructions. For instance…

SnapTo.py

becomes

SnapTo-SelectItem-StartScript-SelectDesination.py

The name of the script then serves as a quickstart reminder on how to operate it when you’re in the midst of creating a scene.

2) OK, so you built your complex scene. Load your character into it. Here we have Nursoda’s “Fon” character loaded into a scene via drag-and-drop from the PzDB library software, and… he’s nowhere to be found. He’s gone, lost somewhere in a vast desert. Could be anywhere.

So now we need to use the script we just installed. Find it at the top menu, under Scripts.

3) The name of the re-named script reminds you to:

  i) have the item selected that you want to move before you start the script;

  tip: ensure the item did not auto-conform to something when you dragged-and-dropped it. If it did then un-conform it — and also make sure you select with the main ‘Body’ element;

  iii) you then start the SnapTo script;

  iv) then you wait for the script to finish loading (there’s a progress bar);

  v) after a few seconds the progress bar should read “Waiting to select destination”. Then you simply click-select the item in your scene that you want the lost prop or character to move to.;

  vi) the script then moves the lost object.

Here I selected the observation deck of the steampunk telescope as the move destination. The script won’t also scale and rotate the moved item to match the destination, as I’ve done here with Fon to make a prettier basic picture. But the script moves things quickly and it saves a lot of trouble.

The only problem you may have is with a pre-dressed character loader-preset, as he may leave his clothes behind. You’ll need to re-dress.

Hopefully Poser 12 will integrate this operation as a native button, but until then Ockham’s vital script does the job fine in Poser 11. He also has a variant script, to “move the currently selected camera to the clicked location”, useful for working with very large or complex scenes, which can be used on a Mac. But note that the main SnapTo use Tkinter as part of the scripts, which means Mac users cannot run it — take it up with Apple and their fickle support-policies dept., not the makers of Poser.