Poser 11 improvements and node-material saving

[kobaltkween]

Well, personally speaking only, just because it's the latest, doesn't mean it's the greatest.

Very, very true, but when it comes to Poser..... PP 2014 lacks _major_ advances that Poser 11 has. With Superfly we get real caustics. That revolutionizes things like jewelry, windows, bodies of water, glasses, etc. In PP 2014, if you don't make anything glass a separate object unto itself, you have to either use transparency and have the render grind to a halt when it tries to compute IDL with transparency, make the whole thing the glass is a part of invisible to IDL (kind of a mess if it's a window in a wall), or properly use refraction and turn off all shadows for the whole thing the glass is a part of (also a mess if it's a window in a wall). And that's just how PP 2014's shortcomings could affect your modeling and prop or figure set-up. I had to do all kinds of trickery, including involving textures, to give my tiaras' gems decent materials in PP 2014. In P11, even in Firefly, I could just use a PhysicalSurface node with colored transparency. In P11 Superfly, I could use real caustics and real gem IOR to model real gems, the way I did for my Iray version. Heck, I could convert a Prism based shader to Poser and have marvelous, fast, prism effects in Poser.

The layering system alone totally improves things.

And that's ignoring the improvements to the morph tool (always useful, but now even more so). Oh, and the addition of area lights. To imitate area lights in PP 2012 and 2014, I had to make a prop with several point lights parented to it. And even then, it wasn't as good as an actual area light. And Superfly gives us proper emitting meshes, not the IDL stuff that works messily and falls off inaccurately.

It's _so_ much faster for me to test render with progressive rendering.

For me, Poser 11 has been a _huge_ leap forward, and I don't even make conformers nor do I have a problem refitting with the morph tool, so I can't speak on the improvements made in the rigging and fitting rooms. If I, for instance, make another set of tiaras, it will be _so_ much quicker and easier than it was before. I'd actually have to see if the additional days of work it would take to make and test PP 2014 versions would be worth it.

 

[Ken1171]

The only gripes I have with Poser 11 is that it got slower than Poser 10, and the new HTML5 library is still not up to the task with multiple navigation bugs and lacking a few features we already had with the AIR version. Besides that, Poser 11 packs enough improvements to make up for all the other issues. I frankly can't go without them, especially on the content creation area with PP11.

 

[kobaltkween]

Oh, and just in case people didn't notice, P11 has partial mats. You can't save or set part of a node, but you can save and load selected nodes. Maybe I missed that in previous versions, but I'm betting I wasn't the only one. I've seen people ask for that feature since Poser added raytracing and noded materials.

 

[CWRW]

The only gripes I have with Poser 11 is that it got slower than Poser 10, and the new HTML5 library is still not up to the task with multiple navigation bugs and lacking a few features we already had with the AIR version. Besides that, Poser 11 packs enough improvements to make up for all the other issues. I frankly can't go without them, especially on the content creation area with PP11.

Interesting!! I have found P11 to be MUCH faster on my Mac and I much prefer the new library nav over P10 ( I literally have P10 not PP2014 etc) and have not had any issues with it at all. Even if I am running a Firefly render I much prefer P11 over P10 for that too. I only use P10 these days to occasionally make P10/Firefly MATs.

 

[Ken1171]

Oh, and just in case people didn't notice, P11 has partial mats. You can't save or set part of a node, but you can save and load selected nodes. Maybe I missed that in previous versions, but I'm betting I wasn't the only one. I've seen people ask for that feature since Poser added raytracing and noded materials.

Ooh, I am interested. Can you elaborate?

Interesting!! I have found P11 to be MUCH faster on my Mac and I much prefer the new library nav over P10 ( I literally have P10 not PP2014 etc) and have not had any issues with it at all. Even if I am running a Firefly render I much prefer P11 over P10 for that too. I only use P10 these days to occasionally make P10/Firefly MATs.

I don't know about the Mac version, but the HTML library on Windows has broken drag and drop, and keyboard navigation has unresolved issues with the treeview. The division bar between the treeview and the icons also jumps to random places whenever we start Poser, which is quite annoying. There are also missing features, like backspace to return from a selection. In the HTML library, it always breaks navigation by returning to the root node, so we no longer know where we came from. These are not the only bugs, but you get the idea.

Someone recently complained that P11 was slow, so I switched to PP2014 (Poser 10) and played with it for a while. To my surprise, it was indeed faster than P11. However, P10 has several bugs on content creation that makes it unusable to me. SMS has only fixed them on the current version, so P10 will remain as is.

It might be that differences between Windows and MacOS might affect application performance. All I know is that I did notice a better overall performance when switching back to P10 (to my own surprise).

 

[Sunfire]

Oh, and just in case people didn't notice, P11 has partial mats. You can't save or set part of a node, but you can save and load selected nodes. Maybe I missed that in previous versions, but I'm betting I wasn't the only one. I've seen people ask for that feature since Poser added raytracing and noded materials.

I too would be interested in some elaboration.

 

[RAMWolff]

Just got a newsletter from SM.... says that Poser 11.1 is on the way with UPDATES to the current figures with improvements, new maps and from what I can see some nice face morphs (Asian and African).

 

[eclark1894]

I too would be interested in some elaboration.

Hi, guys, just popping in to say hello and answer this question. This has been a feature since at least Poser 9. Poser will let you save an entire or partial material set up. It gives you a choice of saving the entire collection of nodes or only the ones you select. And it will do it for Firefly, Superfly and even Cycles.

 

[Ken1171]

Hi, guys, just popping in to say hello and answer this question. This has been a feature since at least Poser 9. Poser will let you save an entire or partial material set up. It gives you a choice of saving the entire collection of nodes or only the ones you select. And it will do it for Firefly, Superfly and even Cycles.

Let me see if I got this right - are you referring to being able to select which materials from a collection (MC6), or which material components from a particular material? I knew about the checkboxes when saving a material collection, but I was hoping it would be the latter, for I would love to be able to set, for instance, only the transparency map from a material, without having to affect everything else.

 

[NapalmArsenal]

Hi, guys, just popping in to say hello and answer this question. This has been a feature since at least Poser 9. Poser will let you save an entire or partial material set up. It gives you a choice of saving the entire collection of nodes or only the ones you select. And it will do it for Firefly, Superfly and even Cycles.

I asked Netherworks about it some time ago for P10, and you can't easily or even not easily save out the transmap in Poser without it effecting the rest of the materials and getting Uber scripty on it and then it might not even work. I do know about the nodes, but having tried this myself in P10 I could never get it to correctly save out only the portion I wanted and not effect the existing settings.

Believe me, I have tried and one reason my Spring Pastels Tulip texture set has 138 different material settings for Poser and Daz only has 36.

So you are saying that P11 will allow you to do this, and not have it effect anything?

 

[Sunfire]

Just got a newsletter from SM.... says that Poser 11.1 is on the way with UPDATES to the current figures with improvements, new maps and from what I can see some nice face morphs (Asian and African).

And you can upgrade for 50 dollars.

Let me see if I got this right - are you referring to being able to select which materials from a collection (MC6), or which material components from a particular material? I knew about the checkboxes when saving a material collection, but I was hoping it would be the latter, for I would love to be able to set, for instance, only the transparency map from a material, without having to affect everything else.

Or changing a color without having to save the whole thing again with the new color/colors.

 

[RAMWolff]

I already have Pro so I don't need to do a thing. Not that use Poser much but I'm guilty of the upgrade for each new version! lol

 

[Ken1171]

I asked Netherworks about it some time ago for P10, and you can't easily or even not easily save out the transmap in Poser without it effecting the rest of the materials and getting Uber scripty on it and then it might not even work. I do know about the nodes, but having tried this myself in P10 I could never get it to correctly save out only the portion I wanted and not effect the existing settings.

In my tests, changing only the transmap part without setting everything else explicitly will cause Poser to create new default values to override whatever was in the material before. If you don't set a diffuse color, Poser will automatically create a random one. That's a bummer we have to deal with.

 

[kobaltkween]

Let me see if I got this right - are you referring to being able to select which materials from a collection (MC6), or which material components from a particular material? I knew about the checkboxes when saving a material collection, but I was hoping it would be the latter, for I would love to be able to set, for instance, only the transparency map from a material, without having to affect everything else.

The latter.

I asked Netherworks about it some time ago for P10, and you can't easily or even not easily save out the transmap in Poser without it effecting the rest of the materials and getting Uber scripty on it and then it might not even work. I do know about the nodes, but having tried this myself in P10 I could never get it to correctly save out only the portion I wanted and not effect the existing settings.

Believe me, I have tried and one reason my Spring Pastels Tulip texture set has 138 different material settings for Poser and Daz only has 36.

So you are saying that P11 will allow you to do this, and not have it effect anything?

According to eclark1894, any version of Poser after 8 (P9+) will _kind of_ do this.

In my tests, changing only the transmap part without setting everything else explicitly will cause Poser to create new default values to override whatever was in the material before. If you don't set a diffuse color, Poser will automatically create a random one. That's a bummer we have to deal with.

So, it won't do exactly what you're asking, but I don't think you're using the feature. Go to save a material using the Poser library (I've been using Dimension3D's version for ages, and it doesn't support this). You'll see these radio buttons : Single Material, Material Collection. Under the Single Material option, there's a check box for "Selected nodes only." If you click that, the preset that is saved will only be the nodes you selected, even if that's just one node. Once you've saved that specific preset, you can, as with most library types, either _replace_ what's in the scene or _add_ to what's in the scene. If you choose add to, it will just add that node, unattached, to the scene.

The most efficient use for this is compound nodes. You make your own compound node, you save it to the library, you load it into your material when you need it.

You can't change parts of a node, and I don't think you automatically replace one node with another. That said, there is a "Replace" option in the right click menu that kind of does to Cycles nodes what it does in Blender. It will replace the selected node with a node (or nodes?) you copied, but unlike in Blender, you have to copy something first and it loses its connections to other nodes. Also, in the right click you'll see "Apply to all...", which brings up a dialog that says, "Apply selected nodes to all materials available to this object? Wires to the PoserSurface node will override existing connections, but no nodes will be deleted."

So there are lots of ways to setup workflows and materials to allow much quicker adjustment and replacement than plain old material loading and copying and pasting.

 

[phdubrov]

@NapalmArsenal re: node saving-loading
As @kobaltkween wrote before, you can anytime save only selected nodes of the material as a .mt5 file.
And you can load it as regular .mt5 replacing all existing nodes via single check button or paste it inside existing material via double check button. All inside MatRoom.
The selective update of the material requires scripting, and you can't simply save the part of the nodetree for it. You can only save it into the script by hands or by another script.
For now, I'm going with by hands - Christmas material packs I'm finalizing now will work this way - base is loaded as standard .mt5 and adjustments of colors, scales and so on are loaded via the library in MatRoom and are scripts relied on the scene.CurrentMaterial() and naming convention .
Only troubles I had with this way in P11 is setting values in compound nodes directly.
I want the script to simplify this, but can't get myself to properly study Poser Python UI.

 

[Ken1171]

So there are lots of ways to setup workflows and materials to allow much quicker adjustment and replacement than plain old material loading and copying and pasting.

Oh, I haven't used Single Material in a long time - that's why I didn't see the options. The bottom line is that it still can't replace part of a material, which is the big bummer we have to deal with. For example, if I remove a transmap and then want to make a preset to add it back, I can't.

 

[Deleted member 325]

@NapalmArsenal re: node saving-loading
As @kobaltkween wrote before, you can anytime save only selected nodes of the material as a .mt5 file.
And you can load it as regular .mt5 replacing all existing nodes via single check button or paste it inside existing material via double check button. All inside MatRoom.
The selective update of the material requires scripting, and you can't simply save the part of the nodetree for it. You can only save it into the script by hands or by another script.
For now, I'm going with by hands - Christmas material packs I'm finalizing now will work this way - base is loaded as standard .mt5 and adjustments of colors, scales and so on are loaded via the library in MatRoom and are scripts relied on the scene.CurrentMaterial() and naming convention .
Only troubles I had with this way in P11 is setting values in compound nodes directly.
I want the script to simplify this, but can't get myself to properly study Poser Python UI.

Was this in documentation and I missed it?

 

[phdubrov]

Scripting part - definitely no, only python methods. And by "save to script" I mean not a script that parses a .mt5 and replaces nodes in a nodetree, but a script that adjusts/replace values in existing nodes.
Save selected nodes to mt5 and load it?
Double check behavior is not documented AFAIK. But is assumed in "Saving Compound Node Fragments to the Library" section.

 

[eclark1894]

Oh, I haven't used Single Material in a long time - that's why I didn't see the options. The bottom line is that it still can't replace part of a material, which is the big bummer we have to deal with. For example, if I remove a transmap and then want to make a preset to add it back, I can't.

The only way I know of for you to do what you want is to simply make and save a preset with the transmap, and another preset without. After that you should simply be able to drag and drop the presets as you wish to switch them out. Assuming I understand what you're asking to do.

 

[Alisa]

Hi, all - I moved this discussion out of the "HiveWire To Support Poser 10/Pro 2014 And DAZ Studio 4.9 And Above" thread as it was taking on a life of its own and this way it can grow here .

Let me know if you think there's a better topic name for the thread!