My rather infrequent, and possibly apocryphal, 'books project'.

[3dcheapskate]

Latest version attached in two zips - probably best to delete anything you already have under :Runtime:Libraries:Character:3DCheapskate:TEST: before unzipping these. Textures are unchanged, but all files under Libraries and Python have changed and the geometries are now under Geometries.

Due to upload size limits I've only included CR2s for the stacks of 4, 8, 16 and 32 books which should be enough to play with - all were created by saving from PP2014.

 

[KageRyu]

I also missed the P5, but I heard it had its own quirks. It would be interesting to know how your home models perform in different versions.

The behavior was dependent on the model really:
Military Truck -
One was a military truck I needed, and at the time there weren't any close to the style I needed available for Poser (there are several now). I had a Renault military truck that was close to what I needed in Lightwave, so I decided to convert it over I used Carrara to convert it to grouped OBJ and bake the LW procedurals to texture images, then loaded it into poser and rigged the wheels to turn, and the back hatch to fold down). It took some time as it was the first mesh I ever rigged in Poser (using Poser 4 Pro Pack). I had it working well enough in P4, but when I moved to P6 and P7 and loaded some of the old PZ3s with the truck, or loaded the truck from the library there were issues. The back hatch did not load any longer. Spinning some of the wheels caused the polygons on the treads to blow out and enlarge.

Handgun-
Another item I did some work on with morphs and geometry swapping in P4 was a handgun that came in a free pack that used to be available from a certain brockerage. It was a revolver, but it was a static prop (all of the weapons in the pack were). I wanted the trigger to move, the hammer to move, and the cylinder to turn. I wanted to do this with a combination of Morphs and rigging. When I finally had it working in P4, later I tried loading it to P7 and moving either the hammer or the trigger seemed to move both, and turning the cylinder one way caused it to grow, and turning it the other way caused it to shrink - very frustrating.

I have not done a lot of base rigging though. I used to set up a lot of ERC on pre-rigged figures. Though it sounds like what @3dcheapskate is doing is way beyond my meager skills.

Yesterday I dicovered a backup of my old Poser 8 ISO (I never actually used Poser 8 because I ended up with Poser 9 digital for a bargain price before the Poser 8 CD arrived), so I installed it. Unfortunately it went the same way as my Poser 9 reinstall a couple of days ago - it installs okay, but when I run it the GUI starts to display... and then it crashes before the GUI's up.

So I'm limited to testing with Poser 6, PoserPro 2014, and Poser 11. Since everything seems okay with my bookstack figure in PP2014 I've decided to create the CR2s from this rather than from Poser 11. Over the past day or two I've got partway through the process, luckily just a short partway not a long partway, before spotting a problem I'd overlooked. This has happened a couple of times, but I think, fingers crossed touch wood, I've got past that now. So just a slow, tedious, but careful process now to try and avoid doing something stupid again...

@3dcheapskate This sounds all too familiar to me. May I ask what version of Windows you are on? I know Flash and Internet Explorer caused all sorts of library and display issues on Poser versions 8, 9, 10 and their respective Pro versions (2010, 2012, 2014). I may or may not be able to troubleshoot - first I need to see if I saved any of those troubleshooting pages before SM took everything down.

 

[3dcheapskate]

I'm using Windows 10. I recall only too well all the hassle the flash/IE dependency caused - I started/contributed to several topics on the matter, mainly at Renderosity.

Thanks for the troubleshooting offer, but I'm not really bothered about getting Poser 8/9 running - good old reliable flash-free Poser 6 is my favourite for backwards compatibility testing.

 

[3dcheapskate]

The reason for my CR2 proxies that just call Python scripts not working in Poser 6 appears to be that on my Windows system Poser 6 requires an absolute pathname in Windows format in the runPythonScript statement - see here Poser 6 'Cant open script for reading' (runPythonScript from CR2) | Renderosity.

Which of course I can't give in a freebie.

Waiting to find out which Poser version first had the valueOpKey, and which Poser version first allowed Mac format runtime-relative runPythonScript paths, and then I should be able to say which is the earliest Poser version that this bookstack figure stuff should fully work in.

In the meantime I'm tidying up the scripts (including adding more user selection options in the Randomize With Dialogs one) and adding a couple more - one for deleting a complete bookstack in one go (takes less than a second for a 64 book / 16 figure one in Poser 6), and one for applying each of the three texture options (pulp01, pulp02, Classics01) to all books in the stack.

I'm also feeling myself beginning to run out of steam on this, so I think I'll have to release this as a freebie quite soon, before I get bored.

 

[3dcheapskate]

Another reminder for myself - Poser 6 displays the 300x300 png images I've created for the Poser files at their full size.

 

[KageRyu]

I'm using Windows 10. I recall only too well all the hassle the flash/IE dependency caused - I started/contributed to several topics on the matter, mainly at Renderosity.

Thanks for the troubleshooting offer, but I'm not really bothered about getting Poser 8/9 running - good old reliable flash-free Poser 6 is my favourite for backwards compatibility testing.

I would be of limited troubleshooting as I have no experience with Windows 10. I am going to blame the issues on Windows 10 compatibility. While it may seem odd that earlier Poser versions than 8 and 9 work on W10 despite this, SM heavily altered many core features on Poser 8, 9 and 10 to rely more heavily on specific Windows features that change heavily from version to version. In fact one of these changes is what broke AVI compatibility in Poser 9, and then again in 10 (SM stopped supporting direct draw) and getting that information took months of arguing with one of their so called tech support people who kept blaming it on CoDecs when CoDecs had nothing to do with it. But I digress...

 

[3dcheapskate]

I've got all the basic scripts sorted out now, so to avoid losing them...

My original intention was to create separate figures for stacks of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 books. But after creating the 4 book figure I realized how that would sap my will to live, and started on this nested figures approach. The biggest niggle for me with this nested figure approach is that when I export the final nested and randomized bookstack as an OBJ and reimport it to save as a prop only the first four book images are used as mentioned a while ago. So I may end up gradually creating larger bookstack figures probably starting with a BookStack8. With that in mind I've modified all the relevant scripts so that if I do this the scripts will still work for the new figures. That's the plan...

 

[3dcheapskate]

I've spotted why the scripts weren't working from the CR2s in Poser 6 - the scripts need to be in the main Poser runtime ( C:\Program Files (x86)\e frontier\Poser 6\Runtime\Python\poserScripts\3DCheapskate ). Simply moving the scripts from my mapped desktop runtime to the main one resolved the problem. Not sure which Poser version dropped this limitation, but I think probably Poser 7 or Poser 8 as I don't recall Poser 9 needing this.

So apart from the Splay and Oblique not working because they use the valueOpKey everything's now good as far back as Poser 6.

No idea whether the scripts will work in Poser 12+, but I changed all print "stuff" statements to print ("stuff") functions which is the one thing I know needs to be done.

 

[3dcheapskate]

...and even that "Splay and Oblique not working" shouldn't be insurmountable thanks to Bhāskara's 1350 year old approximation

(provided of course that Poser 6 really does support the other valueOp operations. All I checked was that when I loaded one of my bookstacks in Poser 6 and saved it as a Poser 6 CR2 all the value operations except valueOpKey appeared to be saved - I didn't confirm the functionality.)

Another problem I've only noticed in Poser 6 - the flat-spined hardback meshes sometimes deform. I'm fairly certain this is because I forget to move the top cover of the mesh down very slightly (I mentioned that before on this topic), which is something I should really fix. Butalthough it's easy it's tedious, so I may not bother.

I also noticed that Poser 6 displays my 300x300 PNG library icons at full size, which is a bit of a pain but not a real problem. I could create smaller icons specifically for Poser 6 and instruct Poser 6 users to copy these after unzipping the main stuff

So I even have a way to make everything work as intended in Poser 6

- - - - - -

I've also tried importing the latest (and hopefully release ready) CR2s into DAZ Studio and, to my surprise, it's almost all working ! See Importing a Poser CR2 with geometry switching and morphs - all okay except morphs - Daz 3D Forums, where I hope to get answers to remove that 'almost'.

 

[3dcheapskate]

Bhaskara's approximation (since the image I pasted has gone) is

sin x° = ( 4x(190-x) ) / ( 40500-x(180-x) )

I think it's the same approximation I used in the valueParm maths for my ERC opening book

 

[3dcheapskate]

Hmmm...

Bad news - the Poser crash appears* to be happening only in Poser 11 and it's nothing to do with Poser's built-in delete with 'delete attach' ticked. I just opened Poser 11, loaded a mid-sized stack, rendered, and deleted using my Python script, did that a couple of times, and crash-bang-wallop !

It could of course be that my Poser 11 installation has gone wonky. I think I'll just pretend that's what's causing it and ignore the problem.


*That's the only version I'm sure I've seen it in.

 

[Alisa]

SO much work! Look forward to the final version!

 

[3dcheapskate]

If it felt like work I wouldn't be doing it - this is actually quite fun !

Almost there now...

 

[3dcheapskate]

Freebie uploaded !

Multi-figure bookstacks for Poser - Poser - ShareCG

Multi-figure bookstacks for Poser | Renderosity (that's the topic in the FreeStuff forum - the upload'sawaiting approval)

 

[3dcheapskate]

Now approved at Renderosity - Multi-figure bookstacks for Poser (renderosity.com)

 

[3dcheapskate]

Thanks to MarianneR over at Renderosity there's a simple fix to two of the scripts (the two interactive ones) which should get them working in Poser 12+. I think the error only occured if you chose to abort the script and display more information about it. Regardless, the attached zip contains these two files in the :RuntimeythonoserScripts:3DCheapskate:Books: subfolder. J

So if you're using Poser 12+ just unzip and then copy the unzipped runtime folder to the runtime folder where you put the Multi-figure bookstacks for Poser - the two files withe the errors will be replaced by the corrected files.

I love those smileys that replaced parts of my subfolder path !

 

[Alisa]

Thanks so much

 

[3dcheapskate]

You're most welcome - it's been a lot of fun

 

[3dcheapskate]

Once again just posting so I don't lose this - a quick and easy little shader to create textures for the page ends of closed books. Simply apply it to a flat horizontal plane and render from the isometric top camera

Play with the fractal sum node values. Here's the sort of thing that comes out. The blender node is there so it's easy to change the colours.

I think I prefer to incorporate the end result into my book texture maps rather than using the shader with the books in Poser.

 

[3dcheapskate]

...and I'm still on a bit of a roll with this book stuff, so I'm playing with the single book prop. I've got two different UV mappings, my own and Xaa's (Jim Farris) poseable opening book. The page ends in the post above are to use Xaa's cover mapping with my non-opening books.
The mesh for both variants is book 1 of the BookStack4, which means that the plump, shear and twist morphs that I created for that work without any problem. I had to recreate a splay morph as I used a different approach in the figure, and I had to create an oblique morph from scratch - those two took less than 5 minutes total.

I'm back to playing with textures now. The two Hammett novels below use Xaa's cover mapping and my page ends from the previous post - The Thin Man uses just the colour image while The Maltese Falcon use just the greyscale for bump.

There's not much to these so I'll hopefully be releasing them rather more quickly that the multi-figure stuff.