Dino Rider - update in P6

[Gare]

Hi Crow Haven--
EXCELLENT Poser work and PS retouching! How's Poser 6 on your machine? I haven't played with it much; I can't get the Face room to display.

Anyhow, keep up the great work!

My Best,

Gare

[Crow Haven]

Hi Gare -- and thanks so much for the encouragement! Your works are of great inspiration to me always, and one of the reasons I am enjoying getting into 3d.

About Poser6 -- I have left the majority of default settings in place with my 3d apps and so my display comes up in that form and all the tabbed rooms are there and complete. The Face Room contains all that it had in P5 and looks very similar, and the popup window for Face Room Help is there as well. I have in General Preferences everything set to launch to factory state. I have also installed the recent P6 Content updater from the Content Paradise site...it's about 25 MB and addressed many issues. Other than some settings adjustment perhaps stopping it from displaying in someway for you, the tab for it ought to be there right in line after the Pose and Materials tabs under the main tool bar. John Logan here has used the Face Room pretty recently also and didn't mention having any difficulties in getting it to work on his machine...so my guess would be it's something to do with display settings somewhere.

P.S. -- BTW, what I like about P6 is the new lighting and shadows especially, things just look better and crisper, more detailed, easier to adjust, imo. I have found P6 to be a bit particular when it comes to using scenes with lighting set up previously in P5, or P4 -- seems it doesn't always like the old lighting brought in and doesn't want to play nice...then at times just choosing to use the "import" option for the P5 files brings it in without a hitch. The two Poser versions don't always play nicely and this may get helped later as bugs are worked out. Right now I have left my models in my P5 Runtime as recommended in the manual, and just added that runtime to P6 (but others have found the app works faster with large Runtimes by setting up separate outside Runtimes) so I am still using both versions of Poser when one gets odd or buggy about something. I strip out the lighting from P5 wips and then import into P6 for the lighting. I've also been learning my way around VUE 5 Infinite and love a lot of the things that can be done with it, I really enjoy that app a great deal (it will use P6 imports too but seems to prefer that you keep P5 around as well)-- sometimes working with creating backgrounds and lighting looks even better there and I just import my other models right into Vue instead and create more models within VUE to fill things out in the background. I enjoy MojoWorld3 also for more alienscape-ish worlds, and Terragen (I'm waiting for their newest version) for really beautiful atmospheres and water. With Lightwave I am concentrating on learning modeling, and I want to eventually be able to use all of its features well and I've got 3 great books of tutes coming in the mail, one of which also deals with texturing -- I have a great book on digital lighting by Jeremy Brin I just love)...I really like that LW gives you everything to work with right out of the box. I have C4d 8.5 also, but I don't like the idea of having to buy ever more expensive modules and plugins for features LW comes supplied with as standard. But I will also use C4d in modeling and rendering, and between the 2 will eventually decide what I prefer to use most... I have found MAYA PLE very pleasant to use too...so as odd as that might seem, I'm learning with them all, and find things are often explained better in one app than another with tutes, etc. and then I get the hang of it in different apps from there. I guess I have a weird learning style.

Always learning!
---Maya

[Gare]

Hi, Crow!

Thanks; glad to see I can still be a target for inspiration! I'm working with Photoshop now to get two digital photos of me (like in the Post Office; one full-face, one side view)to basically match the template shown in Poser's Face Room--I figured that if this suceeds, I can use photos of celebs and whatnot for new Poser heads.

Then comes the animation! You try this yet? My first go-around produced absolutely hideous results.

My Best,

Gare

[Crow Haven]

Yep, Gare, you are! You certainly can have lots of fun applying your own mug shots with the Face Room and sticking them on the Poser folks -- I see some are creating face props they have modeled also so as to apply these over the heads of the other DAZ models...there's all sorts of ways to use this.

I haven't tried animating in P6 yet -- as I'm such a rank amateur at that I would expect my own hideous results at first would boggle everyone here...BUT it can be done! Others have gotten some nice results so we can too.

I just got my 6 inch tall stack of Lightwave tute books yesterday(Dan Alban's "Inside Lightwave 8," Timothy Albee's "Essential Lightwave 3D (8)," and "Lightwave 3D 8 Texturing," by Leigh van der Byl) so I'm going to be seriously hittin' the books and doing the tutes next...... P6 may have to wait on me a bit, my first LW modeling tute leads into also texturing and animating a simple butterfly with it's flight path.

[RAMWolff44]

Nice improvements there Maya!! Still in love with D|S though so haven't really explored the Poser 6 interface too much. I do love the option for a simplified Material Room!

I'm kinda torn between the stronger shadow on the first updated image from the 2nd. I'm leaning more towards the first one as I know if the sun is bright enough it can create some very strong edged shadows. So yea, I think the first update is the one I prefer!!

HUGZ

[Mike Bailey]

I just got my 6 inch tall stack of Lightwave tute books yesterday

Maya, it sounds like your gonna be making some wonderful stuff.

I've been digging into P6 and V5, Just getting familiar with the Firefly renderer and the material room, displacement mapping, bump mapping, specularity mapping, ZBrush is going to be real handy. I did the dynamic cloth tutorial today, Cool beans.

Did a Vue5 experimental, I imported a simple UV mapped ZBrush model, applied a Vue material to it, then exported the obj, texture map and bump map made with the V5 material. Imported that into P6, applied the maps in the Mat room. So many possibilities.

[Crow Haven]

Hi Richard! HUGZ2! Glad you enjoyed this one, I love having the options ya know.

You're doing such great stuff with D/S -- there's so many improvements in the new D/S it sounds like -- but you'll probably find some great ways to use P6 right along with it, and you'll just love the new Bryce version too! The fun with scenery really gets a hook into you...I often just start with making a background, not having anything especially in mind for the rest of the image, but then the rest just evolves into more and more ideas.

Hi Mike! Yep, I'm gonna get serious on the modeling/texturing and figured I'd apply what I glean from study and working with LW into the other apps, there's so much great material info, tutes for LW, and that's very helpful to me that everything is covered, any type of modeling, etc.

I love what you are doing with your 3d skills and imagination, and now taking those into even more fun and cool works in P6, V5 and ZB also = it's just like you said, there's so many possibilities and ways to use all these apps together to create things just the way you dream of...and the results are even more unique. It seems each apps does have its special advantages and there you only gain in combining them. So COOL!!!

Hey, btw, your mouse in the last defiance pic makes a strong case for "the Millenium Rodent" -- a model who's time has come!