Sunday, January 16, 2005
Simple Tips and Tricks for Poser 5
Here's a collection of simple techniques for everyday use in Poser 5.
1. Minimizing parameter dials.
Poser 5 has a handy feature with parameter dials-- it divides them by type, and allows you to minimize their display with the "-" and "+" icons next to the dial groups.
After you initially set the morph dials, you probably won't use them again for the life of the particular figure. So it's very useful to go over every body part of the figure and set all the morph dials to the "+" state (i.e., minimized) so that it's easier to get to the positioning dials. When you save the figure or save the scene, Poser will remember these settings and keep them.
Of course, you probably want to leave the head morph parameters open; unfortunately, expression parameters are grouped with the morphs.
2. Maximize the parameter dialog box.
This is a "well duh" kind of thing, but since the box defaults to a small square, it might never occur to you to drag the lower right hand corner until the box is at maximum size. The parameter box is much easier to use when it's big!
3. Learn your keyboard shortcuts.
For instance, control + M returns you to the main camera, shift + control + N displays the parameter dials, and the 2 key takes you to the "body" setting for the current figure.
4. Materials room-- creating a new node.
The hard way to create a new node is to click on the icon in the upper right and select "new node." The easy way to do it is to click on the plug of the setting you want to attach a node to. This brings up a little window that lets you select new node; it also expands the drop down windows out to the right instead of the left, which if you're right handed, makes it easier to select the node type. And best of all, the new node is delivered with a connector already established to the setting plug you originally clicked on.
5. Organizing your libraries.
A big improvement of Poser 5 over Poser 4 is more flexibility with the organization of the libraries. You can now create a hierarchical structure of folders within folders within folders (I don't know what the limit is.)
It's worth taking advantage of this to make your libraries easier to browse. In particular if you're a Daz3d user, it's very worthwhile to organize your Pose files.
For example, I'm working on the following organizational scheme: at the top level, the first folders you see when you enter the Pose library, are folders for figure poses, figure morphs, figure mat files, clothes mat files, and hair mat files. Within the figure morphs folder, their are subfolders for V3 morphs, M3 morphs, etc.
I've encountered no downsides to this so far. It would be a problem if there is a file that some component needs to find, because if it's put in a subfolder the system won't find it. You definitely don't want to move your texture files around-- but texture files aren't in a library anyway.
6. Hunting for something in the library.
Even if you optimize your library organization, it can still be difficult to find something if you don't know where to look. The slow way to find things is to use the Poser 5 library navigation. The fast way (well, duh!) is to use your computer's own file browsing system to find the needed file, then go back to Poser 5 and navigate to it.
The library is in the Runtime folder, which may be in the Poser 5 folder or elsewhere that you've chosen to set up a library. Under Runtime, there is the Library folder, and within Library are folders for all the library categories (Character, Pose, etc.) It does no harm to browse these files, as long as you don't do something stupid like deleting something or moving it without a purpose. You want to avoid double clicking them, because it might cause your Poser session to crash.
For some reason, Poser's library browser is very slow and awkward to use. Most computer operating systems have far superior and more rapid systems, so why not take advantage of them?
7. Accessing advanced color options.
For some reason, when you select a box for coloring in the Materials room, it brings up a very crude color selection tool. Don't use this tool! Instead, find the square striped icon at the upper right hand corner of the color box and click it. This brings up the advanced color tool. Hopefully in some future release Curious Labs will realize that their crude color tool sucks, and will take you directly to the advanced color tool every time.
WARNING: The default color tool is buggy, and on several occasions I've seen it go into a loop, selecting multiple colors and tying up resources for several minutes. This apparently happens if your mouse slides around in the color selection area excessively. As said above, do not use this tool!
8. Zeroing all joints with the joint editor.
I've never got into using the joint editor for what it was designed for, but it comes in handy for something I do quite frequently-- zeroing out all the joint settings on a figure. I find this useful because it is often much easier to create a new pose when you completely eliminate all the settings of the previous pose.
To do it, just select a body part of the figure you want to zero out. Then bring up the joint editor (from the view menu) and click on "zero all joints." This does not have any effect on morphs or expressions; it does cause the eyes to turn front and center.
9. Keep lighting simple.
Poser defaults to having three lights. But for 90% of renders you only need two lights; it's best to delete that extra light until you need it.
Also, Poser defaults to colored lights. It's best to change the lights to white or grey, unless you're trying for a particular effect. In fact, it's generally better to create chromatic lighting effects after the render, in Photoshop; colored lights yield some odd, unwanted effects.
10. Create a collection of eye poses.
Posing the eyes is frustrating because generally both eyes require the same setting. Oftentimes you have to try out half a dozen eye poses before you get it just right, which is twice as many parameter settings as you need for any other body part. But a good set of partial poses can streamline the process considerably.
You need to know how to save partial poses to your pose library; it's described somewhere in the Poser online manual (not the print manual) or you can go to this Daz3D tutorial.
What I built were poses of the eyes that change in increments of 5 degrees, from +20 to -20 side-to-side and from +10 to -10 up and down. That's 45 different eye settings. To make them easier to find, I divided the collection into eyes up and eyes down (inc. eyes at zero).
Note: figure out what you're going to name these poses in advance, so that they sort in an order that's convenient to you. If you name them "down5" and "down10," the second pose will sort above the first pose; but "down05" will sort above "down10."
11. Use only what you need in rendering.
Poser 5 comes with advanced rendering options. But depending on what you're doing, you may not need these. There is little discernible quality difference between rendering in draft mode with the Poser renderer, vs. rendering with the firefly renderer, which takes a lot longer to run.
Also, don't use the bump files setting unless it's really going to make a difference-- "bumps" usually aren't noticeable except on large closeups.
Rendering shadows adds a lot to render time; depending on what you're rendering, you don't necessarily need to cast shadows. And if you're using multiple lights, it's likely that you only need for one or two of those lights to cast shadows.
12. Always render to a new window.
The render options screen gives you a choice between rendering to the current document window or rendering to a new window. Always choose the latter, even if you're rendering is the same size as the document window.
Why? Several reasons. First and most important, Poser has a feature called masking; it causes an alpha layer to be created in which the rendered character is presented in silhouette, and the rest of the background is masked off. This masking supports saving the render as a PNG file in which the figures appear against a transparent background (see next tip.) But when you render to the main document window, masking doesn't work properly; it's a bug in Poser 5. If you want proper masking, you need to render to a new window.
Rendering to a new window is also more convenient. When you render to the main window, it takes several seconds for the the screen to switch from render mode back to refresh mode; if you render in a new window, you can simply close that window and you're ready to continue.
Also, rendering to a new window makes it simpler to save your work, because you save the render separately from the scene file. You can do the same with a main window render by choosing export image; but it's less convenient.
13. Making backgrounds of renders transparent.
Poser creates a mask around the figures during rendering (see tip above.) This mask will cause the background to become transparent if you save the render as a PNG file. Note that the transparency is only in effect for certain graphic applications, including Photoshop; in some apps, such as Quicktime, the background is visible. I have no idea why.
A transparent background is very useful when compositing the render into a finished picture. It makes it easy to change the background behind the figure, for adding shadows and other revisions.
Note that the masking doesn't make the background 100% transparent-- there is an almost unnoticeable fringe of telltale pixels around the figure that are inherited from the background at render time. So it's best to render the figure with the background visible-- that way, the telltale fringe will match the background of the final picture.
14. Tips on saving work.
Poser is a crash-intensive application, and you have to take that into account; so save your work often, especially when you've got considerable effort invested in it.
Always save your scene file before doing a render, because the render process is particularly prone to crashing. The normal work flow should be: save the scene, do the render, save the render.
Also always save your scene before adding a new figure or prop to it. A new addition can cause a crash; also it's easy to make a mistake, like replacing a figure instead of adding a figure.
If you make a minor change and don't want to wait for a save, you can save the change in a less time-consuming way; for instance, you can save a lighting change by simply adding the light settings to your lights library; a pose change can be added to your pose library. It's a good idea to keep "temp" areas for this purpose-- these saved settings end up getting re-used for other scenes!
15. For long sessions, shut down and restart periodically.
Poser 5 is a resource hog, and apparently over time it eats up more and more resources without releasing them. Therefore, after four or five renders or after working an hour or two, it's a good idea to save your work, shut down Poser and restart it. That frees resources and causes Poser to work faster. And most important, it may prevent a system crash.
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1. Minimizing parameter dials.
Poser 5 has a handy feature with parameter dials-- it divides them by type, and allows you to minimize their display with the "-" and "+" icons next to the dial groups.
After you initially set the morph dials, you probably won't use them again for the life of the particular figure. So it's very useful to go over every body part of the figure and set all the morph dials to the "+" state (i.e., minimized) so that it's easier to get to the positioning dials. When you save the figure or save the scene, Poser will remember these settings and keep them.
Of course, you probably want to leave the head morph parameters open; unfortunately, expression parameters are grouped with the morphs.
2. Maximize the parameter dialog box.
This is a "well duh" kind of thing, but since the box defaults to a small square, it might never occur to you to drag the lower right hand corner until the box is at maximum size. The parameter box is much easier to use when it's big!
3. Learn your keyboard shortcuts.
For instance, control + M returns you to the main camera, shift + control + N displays the parameter dials, and the 2 key takes you to the "body" setting for the current figure.
4. Materials room-- creating a new node.
The hard way to create a new node is to click on the icon in the upper right and select "new node." The easy way to do it is to click on the plug of the setting you want to attach a node to. This brings up a little window that lets you select new node; it also expands the drop down windows out to the right instead of the left, which if you're right handed, makes it easier to select the node type. And best of all, the new node is delivered with a connector already established to the setting plug you originally clicked on.
5. Organizing your libraries.
A big improvement of Poser 5 over Poser 4 is more flexibility with the organization of the libraries. You can now create a hierarchical structure of folders within folders within folders (I don't know what the limit is.)
It's worth taking advantage of this to make your libraries easier to browse. In particular if you're a Daz3d user, it's very worthwhile to organize your Pose files.
For example, I'm working on the following organizational scheme: at the top level, the first folders you see when you enter the Pose library, are folders for figure poses, figure morphs, figure mat files, clothes mat files, and hair mat files. Within the figure morphs folder, their are subfolders for V3 morphs, M3 morphs, etc.
I've encountered no downsides to this so far. It would be a problem if there is a file that some component needs to find, because if it's put in a subfolder the system won't find it. You definitely don't want to move your texture files around-- but texture files aren't in a library anyway.
6. Hunting for something in the library.
Even if you optimize your library organization, it can still be difficult to find something if you don't know where to look. The slow way to find things is to use the Poser 5 library navigation. The fast way (well, duh!) is to use your computer's own file browsing system to find the needed file, then go back to Poser 5 and navigate to it.
The library is in the Runtime folder, which may be in the Poser 5 folder or elsewhere that you've chosen to set up a library. Under Runtime, there is the Library folder, and within Library are folders for all the library categories (Character, Pose, etc.) It does no harm to browse these files, as long as you don't do something stupid like deleting something or moving it without a purpose. You want to avoid double clicking them, because it might cause your Poser session to crash.
For some reason, Poser's library browser is very slow and awkward to use. Most computer operating systems have far superior and more rapid systems, so why not take advantage of them?
7. Accessing advanced color options.
For some reason, when you select a box for coloring in the Materials room, it brings up a very crude color selection tool. Don't use this tool! Instead, find the square striped icon at the upper right hand corner of the color box and click it. This brings up the advanced color tool. Hopefully in some future release Curious Labs will realize that their crude color tool sucks, and will take you directly to the advanced color tool every time.
WARNING: The default color tool is buggy, and on several occasions I've seen it go into a loop, selecting multiple colors and tying up resources for several minutes. This apparently happens if your mouse slides around in the color selection area excessively. As said above, do not use this tool!
8. Zeroing all joints with the joint editor.
I've never got into using the joint editor for what it was designed for, but it comes in handy for something I do quite frequently-- zeroing out all the joint settings on a figure. I find this useful because it is often much easier to create a new pose when you completely eliminate all the settings of the previous pose.
To do it, just select a body part of the figure you want to zero out. Then bring up the joint editor (from the view menu) and click on "zero all joints." This does not have any effect on morphs or expressions; it does cause the eyes to turn front and center.
9. Keep lighting simple.
Poser defaults to having three lights. But for 90% of renders you only need two lights; it's best to delete that extra light until you need it.
Also, Poser defaults to colored lights. It's best to change the lights to white or grey, unless you're trying for a particular effect. In fact, it's generally better to create chromatic lighting effects after the render, in Photoshop; colored lights yield some odd, unwanted effects.
10. Create a collection of eye poses.
Posing the eyes is frustrating because generally both eyes require the same setting. Oftentimes you have to try out half a dozen eye poses before you get it just right, which is twice as many parameter settings as you need for any other body part. But a good set of partial poses can streamline the process considerably.
You need to know how to save partial poses to your pose library; it's described somewhere in the Poser online manual (not the print manual) or you can go to this Daz3D tutorial.
What I built were poses of the eyes that change in increments of 5 degrees, from +20 to -20 side-to-side and from +10 to -10 up and down. That's 45 different eye settings. To make them easier to find, I divided the collection into eyes up and eyes down (inc. eyes at zero).
Note: figure out what you're going to name these poses in advance, so that they sort in an order that's convenient to you. If you name them "down5" and "down10," the second pose will sort above the first pose; but "down05" will sort above "down10."
11. Use only what you need in rendering.
Poser 5 comes with advanced rendering options. But depending on what you're doing, you may not need these. There is little discernible quality difference between rendering in draft mode with the Poser renderer, vs. rendering with the firefly renderer, which takes a lot longer to run.
Also, don't use the bump files setting unless it's really going to make a difference-- "bumps" usually aren't noticeable except on large closeups.
Rendering shadows adds a lot to render time; depending on what you're rendering, you don't necessarily need to cast shadows. And if you're using multiple lights, it's likely that you only need for one or two of those lights to cast shadows.
12. Always render to a new window.
The render options screen gives you a choice between rendering to the current document window or rendering to a new window. Always choose the latter, even if you're rendering is the same size as the document window.
Why? Several reasons. First and most important, Poser has a feature called masking; it causes an alpha layer to be created in which the rendered character is presented in silhouette, and the rest of the background is masked off. This masking supports saving the render as a PNG file in which the figures appear against a transparent background (see next tip.) But when you render to the main document window, masking doesn't work properly; it's a bug in Poser 5. If you want proper masking, you need to render to a new window.
Rendering to a new window is also more convenient. When you render to the main window, it takes several seconds for the the screen to switch from render mode back to refresh mode; if you render in a new window, you can simply close that window and you're ready to continue.
Also, rendering to a new window makes it simpler to save your work, because you save the render separately from the scene file. You can do the same with a main window render by choosing export image; but it's less convenient.
13. Making backgrounds of renders transparent.
Poser creates a mask around the figures during rendering (see tip above.) This mask will cause the background to become transparent if you save the render as a PNG file. Note that the transparency is only in effect for certain graphic applications, including Photoshop; in some apps, such as Quicktime, the background is visible. I have no idea why.
A transparent background is very useful when compositing the render into a finished picture. It makes it easy to change the background behind the figure, for adding shadows and other revisions.
Note that the masking doesn't make the background 100% transparent-- there is an almost unnoticeable fringe of telltale pixels around the figure that are inherited from the background at render time. So it's best to render the figure with the background visible-- that way, the telltale fringe will match the background of the final picture.
14. Tips on saving work.
Poser is a crash-intensive application, and you have to take that into account; so save your work often, especially when you've got considerable effort invested in it.
Always save your scene file before doing a render, because the render process is particularly prone to crashing. The normal work flow should be: save the scene, do the render, save the render.
Also always save your scene before adding a new figure or prop to it. A new addition can cause a crash; also it's easy to make a mistake, like replacing a figure instead of adding a figure.
If you make a minor change and don't want to wait for a save, you can save the change in a less time-consuming way; for instance, you can save a lighting change by simply adding the light settings to your lights library; a pose change can be added to your pose library. It's a good idea to keep "temp" areas for this purpose-- these saved settings end up getting re-used for other scenes!
15. For long sessions, shut down and restart periodically.
Poser 5 is a resource hog, and apparently over time it eats up more and more resources without releasing them. Therefore, after four or five renders or after working an hour or two, it's a good idea to save your work, shut down Poser and restart it. That frees resources and causes Poser to work faster. And most important, it may prevent a system crash.
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