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Show Us Your Dawn Renders!
- Thread starter HiveWire3D
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- dawn dawn special edition
unreal
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Indeed. It's a pretty minor (code-wise) bug. It actually works pretty well. One thing I'm missing is the sun placement cursor (bug as well). The auto sun puts it in the right place. But the cursor to move it is gone. He really moved the code to Python 3 quickly. And it's such a handy tool. Save soooo much time ^.^
I've been playing with the shader nodes in the shadow catcher to learn how they work. First thing I learned: I know squat (of the diddly kind)
I didn't have the f-stop where I really wanted it for the DOF I was looking for. But I did learn a lot about shadow catching. Not least of which is: I'm really looking forward to CyclesX o.o
That's Hongu's Bikini 2 ported to Dawn - a very nice mesh to work with. Lisa's ferns peeking out. An old Daz palm tree trunk (jazzed up in shaders). Providing palm leaf shadows is actually some Lisa plant transmaps just out of frame. And, of course, Snarly's EZDome 1.7 (and EZCatcher). Paradise hair because: tails. With Ghostship's hair shader.
I'm really, really, really, (really? (really!)) looking forward to Dawn 2. Dawn is a fun mesh. But "2" = twice as fun.
The major issue with HDRI in Poser is the highly compressed sRGB color space it uses. Blender was also suffering from it, and it was fixed more recently. The whole point of "High Dynamic Range" images is exactly the high dynamic range color space, which sRGB cuts down. The result is lighting that doesn't render correctly, with low contrast colors, incorrect intensity, and incorrect light interactions with surfaces. The Blender Guru (Andrew Price) explains this in more details, and how it has improved Cycles rendering in Blender, making it more predictable and realistic. So even if Bondware brings CyclesX to Poser, it will still suffer from sRGB defeating HDRI with LOW dynamic range. This needs to be fixed like they did in Blender.
unreal
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Yeah, I wondered about that. Seems to me that it's right up there with unimesh, cyclesx, and micro subd. Core things without which it will not be able to regain parity and have any chance of moving forward.
I'll bet the Poser team has a formal (or informal) list of those capabilities. It would be nice to have more insight into what they're considering. We don't need another "SmithMicro"; that's the stuff of product nightmares
Considering how long that was, it's amazing Poser survived. Says something (good) about the users ^.^
unreal
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OOT has a nice double tails style (for G8/DS) that I went through the process of porting to Poser/Superfly. But the model itself is *way* too complicated for CPU renders. It requires something like 100 for minimum transparency to get all the way through the layers. Which is brutal for render times. It's sad (to me) that everyone got into nvidia. I have a monster of an imac pro. And for things that use Metal, the graphics are mind blowing. But Apple "SmithMicro'd" the graphics world for so long I'm not sure they can regain ground. A render farm of Mac Ultra's (or whatever they call them) would be crazy expensive. Oh well. At least the latest Blender can use Metal. So eventually Poser will.Excellent! I have that hair too, but haven't used it in a long time. It looks perfect on your girl.
I wonder how long it would take to completely skin Blender to look (and interact) mostly like Poser (or close to it)? A'la Blender for Artists.
unreal
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A new challenge for myself. Could I go backwards in age with Dawn? After about the 8th version, I realized a few things. One: I've never sculpted a young person before. It's really different. The proportions are whack! Two: Still learning to be careful with the mesh. Dawn has some mesh attributes which knock heads with standard sculpting tools. Like smooth. There are parts of dawns mesh where a loop is split to get higher resolution. And they are set distances apart. Sculpting smooth creates zigzags trying to evenly space the loops. I wish there was more control of the smooth in blender. sometimes I want the smooth to act only along the edge and only in a specific direction. Kind of like slide but with smooth.
I also find using a shiny skin when sculpting really highlights mesh mistakes in Blender. Something can look smooth but when subdivided and skinned you can see it's not. Especially visible around the face.
The symmetry in Blender has a weird time with some verts in Dawn. A lot of times it's better (especially around the eyes) to move it over to Poser, mirror the morph there, then pop back over to Blender. Of course I need to rewrite the unimesh since poser can't export a vert ordered welded mesh. One click and a split second in Blender
I have a "copy selected vert vectors to like-mesh" button. Discovered that I need to correct or "fade" the edge. The vectors are in absolute space (of course). I need it to copy a head shape regardless of how it's been translated. I think I need a diff.
This character is actually the same size as Dawn. Her skeleton is not changed. That was the first lesson I learned
I'm actually of a mind to create a dial that ages this character with a spin. Not sure it can be done. Challenge!
unreal
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I am learning so much about sculpting when I create a morph for Dawn then pose her. The rig is unforgiving. I need to learn how to move the joint centers. The automatic thing in Poser doesn't work very well for me.
More v4 clothing ported to Dawn. And G3 running shoes (curtesy of DS export).
Hitting brutal bugs in Poser 12. A lot of times I'm in the mat page, applying mats and Poser just goes away. I've gotten into the habit of saving literally after every single thing I do.
Into setup room and back, And the animation window is always open into the Pose room. Any time after I open and lose the window, then it will always reopen when existing setup.
The "not drag dock enabled" has no effect (Poser 12 on Mac). The windows are always drag dock enabled. This, combined with a mouse bug (the mouse down is "sticky" and releasing the button happens half a second late). Sometimes a docked window starts dragging around. Often, in mat room, wires don't attach to node, they're still dragging for a few mm. In the library, it's a mess. It will try to drag something. Parameter dials get rearranged accidentally.
Sometimes the "render an area" simply does not work. It doesn't even appear to register. The material assign tab works only about 5% of the time., The rest of the time, it does nothing.
No matter how I save Dawn (or derivative), when putting some prop through setup, when I switch back, 1) the main camera is selected in properties and 2) Dawn is back to traditional skinning. Which, when using any bump maps with SSS, renders with lines at actor seams. I always have to switch the parameters to the just created figure, and switch Dawn back to unimesh.
In 12 (not 11) the mat room is brutally slow. Any GUI element with an image (and the image down through nodes) takes a few seconds to refresh. A bunch of nodes showing preview, each affecting the image and they all update the image sequentially, taking a few seconds for each. Sometimes it quits even trying, and gives me black boxes for the preview.
Sometimes the parameter window stops updating. No matter what actor I click on. Or how. I have to quit Poser and restart.
This is on a machine with 18 cores of Xeons, 128Gb RAM, ATI Radeon Pro 64 graphics. A brute of a machine. Completely untapped by poser. Yeah, I can spin up 36 threads for CPU renders and what used to take me overnight takes 15 minutes. It should take seconds.
Blender can do it. Although, Blender 3.1 spins up all the CPUs and the fans start going crazy and it stutters, when I'm just editing in the viewport. 2.93 doesn't. 3.1 uses Metal. I don't think it uses it well
Oh well...
Getting ready for first holiday in 3.5 years.
The auto adjust rig to shape in Poser generally works fine with Dawn, except that sometimes the shoulders and thighs may need additional manual adjustment. I think it's the same with any figure for these specific joints, depending on how much your shape changes the volumes. In my "Body Type" series, I drastically change the shapes, proportions, and placements, and that usually requires manual adjustments on the shoulders and thigh joints. That is normal, and kind of expected.
On this aspect, one thing that frustrates me is that the Poser joint coordinates cannot be used in DAZ Studio, and vice-versa. They use different units and scales, so I tend to use the wireframe as a reference to position the joints using the orthographic cameras. Another thing is that the auto fitting rig to shape is different in Poser and DS, so JCMs made for one might have an incorrect effect on the other, because the joint positions (animatable origins) are not exactly the same.
I am in Windows, and I am not experiencing some of the Poser issues you have listed above. Might be a Mac-only issue? There are things that only affect the Windows version, so that is not uncommon. The reason previews take so long to update in Poser is because they now use Cycles, since OpenGL cannot display PBR shaders. I usually collapse all previews to speed things up. Remember P12 is still in pre-release, so it's a WIP and should improve later on. Bondware made public announcements last year, saying they are bringing CyclesX to Poser, and make it unimesh. They have also mention something about real-time PBR previews. Good things are coming for those who wait.
A frame from the Foxy Tail animation post. This is DawnSE, morphs and textures by me. "Narrow Shoulders" and "Perfect Pelvis" body corrections were used here. Rendered in Poser with Superfly.
unreal
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I wonder where Poser got its scale... OBJ is the underlying tech and that's unitless. I probably would have made it such that one unit was 1 meter since metric is decimal and it's easy to change units by moving the decimal point. Then covert to Imperial/SAE/Archaic in the GUI.The auto adjust rig to shape in Poser generally works fine with Dawn, except that sometimes the shoulders and thighs may need additional manual adjustment. I think it's the same with any figure for these specific joints, depending on how much your shape changes the volumes. In my "Body Type" series, I drastically change the shapes, proportions, and placements, and that usually requires manual adjustments on the shoulders and thigh joints. That is normal, and kind of expected.
On this aspect, one thing that frustrates me is that the Poser joint coordinates cannot be used in DAZ Studio, and vice-versa. They use different units and scales, so I tend to use the wireframe as a reference to position the joints using the orthographic cameras. Another thing is that the auto fitting rig to shape is different in Poser and DS, so JCMs made for one might have an incorrect effect on the other, because the joint positions (animatable origins) are not exactly the same.
I am in Windows, and I am not experiencing some of the Poser issues you have listed above. Might be a Mac-only issue? There are things that only affect the Windows version, so that is not uncommon. The reason previews take so long to update in Poser is because they now use Cycles, since OpenGL cannot display PBR shaders. I usually collapse all previews to speed things up. Remember P12 is still in pre-release, so it's a WIP and should improve later on. Bondware made public announcements last year, saying they are bringing CyclesX to Poser, and make it unimesh. They have also mention something about real-time PBR previews. Good things are coming for those who wait.
It would be nice if decimal precision could be specified. It's annoying to type 0.350 in the GUI and see 0.2999997 when expanded because it's using floats.
Probably mac issues. And I don't see a point in filing bugs as they're doing some fairly deep surgery in Poser (unimesh, cyclesX) and some bugs may go away and some new ones may come. I'd rather have the those features than the bugs fixed
I do the same with the cameras. It's really the only way I can grok what's going on.
unreal
Noteworthy
Is she part of fox force five?
Did you keyframe the walk cycle by hand? Any helper scripts, if you did?
Poser has invented its own niche and market, so I guess the scale it uses came out of nowhere.
Whenever we manipulate vertex data, rounding errors are inevitable. That's why when we work with floating point numbers, comparing 2 numbers to see if they are the "same" can be a blurry concept. For example, if we just compare 0.02 to 0.01999999, and they equal? Maybe, but the equality test will fail.
Probably mac issues. And I don't see a point in filing bugs as they're doing some fairly deep surgery in Poser (unimesh, cyclesX) and some bugs may go away and some new ones may come. I'd rather have the those features than the bugs fixed
Indeed, unimesh and CyclesX integration are a HUGE undertake. Fixing exiting bugs may be pointless at this point, since the core is being rebuilt from scratch. Even rigging will have to change since the mesh will no longer be split when loaded. At least in theory, the new unimesh workflow should simplify things and be much faster and efficient.
Nope, just a random character. I just wanted to do something with the Aranya hair I bought but haven't used until now. What is fox force five?
There was this base motion I have imported from DS, cleaned it up, retargeted to DawnSE, and then added the secondary motions with manual keyframing.
unreal
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Very cute!
unreal
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There has to be some reason the first character for Poser was sized the way it was. Just curious as to how that size came about. Clearly, the mesh was made in some external program then exported to OBJ. I wonder what that program was.
It will be interesting. About 25 years of experience and tech advancement. All those "wish I could" over the years for the developers. And just heaps of really libraries to handle almost everything.
In the movie Pulp Fiction, that was the unaired pilot that Uma's character (Mrs. Wallace) had been in. She explained: Fox because they were "foxy chix". Force because they were a force to be reconned with. Five because there were five of them. She then went out with Vincent Vegga (Travolta) and did that now classic Pulp Fiction dance. IU think that movie brought Travolta's career back from the train wreck of "Stayin' Alive".
Sounds difficult O.O
There has to be some reason the first character for Poser was sized the way it was. Just curious as to how that size came about. Clearly, the mesh was made in some external program then exported to OBJ. I wonder what that program was.
Your guess is as good as mine! LOL Since Larry has originally created Poser for posing reference, I don't think there was any concerns about the scale.
I have tried making a script to automate part of the work I have to do on the motion retargetting, but the problem is when the skeletons have different number of bones, and there is no 1:1 match. It is indeed a lot of work to do it manually.
unreal
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Wouldn't Larry know? I would think it's tied to the first figure(s) that were made for poser. I wonder how they were made.
Ah, geometry
I suppose that some of the bones are easy enough. The extra articulation in Dawn's back and neck can just be split evenly between the two bones (or fused, if that's the need). And things like the individual toes are easily ignored.
Sometimes such stuff makes me wish I remembered more of my geometry classes.
I knew someone long ago (15 years), who I later met and worked with at a completely unrelated job (@ Google - we're network/security) who had written some python scripts for cleaning up bvh for use between different rigs. I wish I still had those. They worked pretty well. His obsession was mocap and we spent time working out various home/garage solutions. Learned a lot about rfid sensors, frequencies, and precision. And why the human body (sack of salt water) is so difficult to work around
Mocap is basically trigonometry, where each triangle is calculated in relation to its parent in the hierarchy. That on its own would be simple. The major problem with angles is that sin/cos/tan have discontinuities in the rotation intervals. Poser also uses canonical matrices that alter the original angles we work with, which can make things even more confusing. We end up with 2 angles that represent the current rotation, the one that shows in the Poser dials, and their canonical representation. Due to discontinuities in trigonometry operations, sometimes it is ambiguous in what quadrant the angle belongs to, so we need 4 different formulas to decide that. Part of this can be alleviated by using quaternions instead of Euler angles, which is supported by the Poser API, but not completely. This ends up being more complicated than it needs to be.