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RELEASED The "Scatter Tool" plugin for Poser
Thanks! Well, they let me share the page, not the image link. And HW doesn't allow posting animations due to file size limitations. Animated GIFs have a very poor file compression, so files tend to bloat up quickly. Flash could make it way smaller, but it was killed-in-action, so we're left with no options. -___-
Actually, I was able to link animations from DA in some occasions, but it's a hit or miss case. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
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Oh, and I'm so glad you did!! If I'm understanding that video, this tool will ultimately let you choose EXACTLY where you want to set up your scene. Damn, I can't wait to get my grubie little hands on it.
Oh, and I'm so glad you did!! If I'm understanding that video, this tool will ultimately let you choose EXACTLY where you want to set up your scene. Damn, I can't wait to get my grubie little hands on it.
It scatters wherever your scatter object is, using its vertices as reference. So basically, wherever your scatter plane has vertices, chances are something will drop at those locations. The more vertices, the more locations become available. For that forest animation I have used the default Poser plane, but I had it reset to 100% scale, since the default is 400%. Making it smaller not only reduces the populating area, but also packs the vertices together, making the spawned objects get closer together.
Hope that helps understanding how the scatter plane works.
It does, thank you.
Sadly DA has made a number of behind the scenes changes to prevent and discourage hotlinking and sharing of images and videos. While this has been done to curb IP theft and use by disreputable agencies (a certain well known poster/t-shirt company comes to mind) it has made it impossible for the artists to directly share elsewhere. I do wish they would provide an option to link or share as youtube does. When combined with DAs upcoming forced upgrade to eclipse it is very likely I will be at the least no longer maintaining my gallery there - if I don't pull everything down and leave outright. I am just unsure what's left for artists in terms of free public galleries online that wont try to monetize the uploads for their own use.
Still dreadfully making promos... Here's a little Southwestern desert with a couple of cacti + a rock. This is [again] the default Poser ground plane, sculpted with the Morphing Tool to look more like a terrain.
We can do so much with so little using this tool.
We can do so much with so little using this tool.
Good news - HW has accepted the product submission, so now it's with Alisa and her QAV team.
Who knows? If you'd asked this a month ago, if I would create a Poser plugin, I would say you're crazy. LOL
I think Poser did support MetaNURBS back in the early versions, but then they removed it later. Poser 3 was from MetaCreations, which came up with a MetaNURBs implementation, and [I think] they've added it to Poser. It's hard to remember when that was 21 years ago.
Who knows? If you'd asked this a month ago, if I would create a Poser plugin, I would say you're crazy. LOL
Metanurbs?
I think Poser did support MetaNURBS back in the early versions, but then they removed it later. Poser 3 was from MetaCreations, which came up with a MetaNURBs implementation, and [I think] they've added it to Poser. It's hard to remember when that was 21 years ago.
YAY!!!
**Note: this issue has been resolved later below.
So here's the result of my investigation. Whenever we set XSCALE or YSCALE to a negative value, PoserPython will apply the positive scale to the respective X or Y parameter, but then apply the negative sign to the ZSCALE value. This appears to be a bug with the API, because we can apply negative scale to X and Y in Poser itself, but not with Python.
So in short, when we use Python to set either XSCALE or YSCALE to a negative value, X and Y scale get the correct value, but it is ZSCALE that gets the sign inversion. This makes it impossible to apply negative X or Y scale to an actor using Python. It appears we can only do that with the ZSCALE, which is not what I want.
Since this is a bug in the API, I cannot fix it in my code. Whenever we enable "Allow Flipping" when using billboards, Poser will apply the flipping the Z axis instead of X, which is obviously wrong. What I can do is to leave the code as it is, and wait for Rendo to fix the PoserPython API, for then the code should work as expected.
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That, of course, is assuming the Dev Team actually "knows" there's an error.
Certainly. I would like at least 1 person to confirm this issue before I report it to Bondware.
*UPDATE: This only seems to happen to objects that have been duplicated, and then applied a "look at" constraint, so it might not be so easy to replicate.
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Alright, I have found a way to stop PoserPython from setting the wrong parameter. Looks like things have to be done in a certain order when setting up an actor to work as a billboard. If I setup the origin and end-point AFTER scaling, Poser assigns the scaling to the wrong parameter. So all I had to do was to move the scaling command a few lines below, after all the actor setup was done, and now it sets the right parameter. I am still convinced something is wrong with the API, for this wasn't supposed to happen, but what matters now is that I have found a way around it, and everything works. Yay!
I have sent the update to Alisa.
I have sent the update to Alisa.
Now that I had the tool submitted, I have more time to work on tutorials, so here's the first one. In this video, I am demonstrating how to create a billboard tree out of a 3D tree with a single render, and then populate a whole forest using the Scatter Tool - all this in less than 10 minutes without ever leaving Poser.
With this, you will have a first demo of how quick and easy it is to create complex scenes with the Scatter Tool in seconds.
With this, you will have a first demo of how quick and easy it is to create complex scenes with the Scatter Tool in seconds.