Ok I keep hearing people talking about morphs and meshes and I think I understand morphs but not totally. Can someone enlighten me..OH and that reminds me..everyone talks about lighting...I am totally clueless as how to add lighting to my render.(hope that is the right term)


OH and can someone explain why I would need the morph manager and how it is used also is there anything else on the page below that would be useful to me and why
http://www.morphography.uk.vu/dlutility.html


OK one more thing....Magnets... How do you use these stupid things and when do you use them.

Boy am I full of questions. I am sure you will soon get tired of me.

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Shannon

I'll start out, and others can add more.  I haven't done a lot of morphing yet, but understand the concepts.  Lighting is easy so lets start there.

First, I must ask if you have looked at the tutorial and reference manuals that should have come with Poser.  Although they are not the best in the world, the basics of lighting is covered well enough to get started.

I'm working from the Poser 6 interface, which should be close to P5, but may be slightly differrent, so keep that in mind.  Also, I am going to assume little knowledge of lighting and proceed from the begining.  Some of this may be review.

First, I usually have my Preview window sized to about 1024x800.  It is kind of large and covers some of the controls, but makes it easy to see what I am doing.  So, set your preview window to something like 800 x 600 using the lower left corner and roughly center it.  You should now see several controls around your preview window.

The controls should be camera controls, light controls, editing controls, document styles and UI dots (are these in P5?) If you see these words around the desktop, but no controls, go to the "Window" menu in Poser and make sure the "Lighting Controls" are selected.  When you can see what looks like a little world with round headed stick pins in it, we are ready to start.

The little world represents the outside your Poser world with the character in the center of the ball.  The stick pin looking things represent the lights. Click once on one of the lights.  You should now see a scale representing light intensity with the left side being dark and the right side being brightest. Working around the bottom you should also see a little colored circle representing the color of the light, a light bulb representing light properties, a trash can to delete the light, and another symbol to create a light.  There should be a little triangle next to the Light Options directly above the these controls that has a pull down menu for doing some of these same things.

Now, if you haven't yet, create a new default scene, load a character and let's play with the lighting.

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Too many projects, too little time.

Now you should already have some lights set up by default. So let's start from scratch.

Click  on a light, and then click on the little trash can. Poser will ask if you want to delete the current figure. Select yes.  Do this to each light.  When you are done, your character will be completely dark since there are no lights.  

Now select the little Create Light icon next to the lighting controls.  Poser will arbitrarily create a light of some color and intensity.  Click the Light Properties icon and a Parameter Window for Light 1 should appear.  Take a look at these parameters.  You will notice that the light is currently a spotlight and has various parameters set. Move this window out of the way but leave it open.

Go back to the light controls, click on your light and hold the mouse button down.  Move the mouse around and the position of the light should change. This is how you can quickly position the lights around your figure.  Go back to the Parameters window and click the parameters tab.  You will see that besides controls for various spotlight aspects, you can also move the light using x,y,z dials.  Use the world controls for roughly setting the lights, and the x,y,z controls for fine tuning.  Ignore the other settings for now and click the properties tab.

Spot lights are good for highlighting, but it takes a lot of lights to set up a scene, so I like to use infinite lights to have even lighting so I can see what I am doing.  Once a scene is set up, I change, add, delete the lights to get the effect you want.

Before we change anything else, let's look at the other light controls.  

Change the spotlight to an infinite light.  Do this in the Parameters - Property window, which should still be open.  Just select infinite.  Move your light to somewhere left and above the left shoulder.  Your character should be lit on the left side from above.  You should see a circle with lines and arrowheads representing the direction the light is coming from.

In the preview window, spin your character and you will notice the back and right sides are pretty dark.
You can add backlighting and fill lighting to get your desired results, but for now spin your character back to a front view.

Now I should mention, that anything you can do with the graphical lighting controls can also be done in the parameters window (and more).

Back to the graphical lighting controls make sure your light is selected, and click and hold down you mouse button on the little dot under the light intensity indicator.  Move it back and forth and observe the results.  Set it about in the middle for now.  Click once on the colored dot and a light color window should open.  Slide your mouse around the colors and you should see the effect of changing the lighting color on your character.  The lighting color will affect the overal scene color and may change the look of your textures.  I usually set my working lights to white and then fine tune the color later.

Let's go back to the light parameters for a moment.  During scene setup, I usually turn off shadows unless I need to see how they affect other objects.  This allows Poser to render faster.  Also, too many lights with shadows turned on will create an unreal shadowing effect as if you had more than one sun in an outdoor scene. After you have set up your scene's lighting, turn on shadows for the effectyou desire.

A word about light intensity.  As you add more lights, the preview scene may appear to "wash out".  What you see in preview is not what you will see in a render.  Start with a lower intensity in your previews and bring the lighting level up a little at a time while doing test renders to see the results.

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Too many projects, too little time.

That is the basics of lighting.  Once you understand how to use your lighting controls, it is mainly a matter of creating and aiming your lights, setting the light type and color, selecting whether the light will cast a shadow, and setting the intensity.  All of these are a matter of artistic taste and how you want your scene to appear.  

Some final thoughts.  Point lights are just localized points of light. They can be useful when you need to light one small section of a picture.  I have used point lights inside gemstones to make it look like the stone glows from the inside.  Only use the lights you need in the final render.  I start with 3 white infinite lights to provide even lighting all around.  As I proceed, these lights may get changed to spotlights, or deleted.  Other lights are added as necessary.   The more shadows you cast, the more resources Poser uses, so select which lights and characters/objects will cast shadows.

Expirement with each and do lots of test renders to see the results.

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Too many projects, too little time.

Here is a good tutorial on cameras and lighting basics.  It was written for Daz Studio, but the theory part applies to Poser as well.  You can skim through and ignore the specifics for D/S, but much of the terminology and such are similar in both programs.

There are lots of example pictures as well, which are useful for moving toward intermediate light setup and use.

http://digilander.libero.it/maclean/DStutorial.htm

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Too many projects, too little time.

AWESOME thanks so much I am saving it now.

I have tried to make sense of the manual that came with Poser 5 but it isn't very user friendly.

I truly appreciate your help.

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Shannon

You're quite welcome.  Sometimes the manuals can be confusing.

I'll try to write something up on basic mesh geometry this evening.  Morphing I'll leave for someone else, for now.  I haven't really had time to work with Morph Manager yet.

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Too many projects, too little time.

The Basics of Object Meshes.

Every object created in 3 dimensional space has to have some way to define it's geometry.  Once you know how this is done, the concept of the geometry or more commonly referred to as the mesh, become easy to understand.

So let's jump into Poser and open Posette (P4 nw hi resolution) and develop a simple knowledge of her mesh.

You should now have Posette in your preview window.  Look for the Document Display Style buttons.  Slide your mouse over the buttons until you find the one named Wireframe and click on it.  You should now see a series of interconnected lines. These lines are called the wireframe because they look like wires strung together.  This wireframe is the mesh of the object.  It's a little hard to see this way, so at your Document Display Style buttons find Flat Lined and select it.  You should now see both the wireframe and preview texture together.  

Position Posette so you can zoom in and see her upper body and head.You'll notice her mesh is composed of many triangles and polygons.  Every place that a series of lines intersect is a point in space (vertex).  As I mentioned, the placement of these points defines the object.  Pretty simple, huh.  Lines are drawn in by the program to play connect the dots because it is easier to visualize an object this way rather than by vertices alone.

To continue our discussion we will have to discuss some basic geometry.  Don't despair, there are no calculations involved, only some basic concept review.

Recall the Cartesean Coordinate system.  This is a way of mathematically defining a point's location in 3D space consisting of the x, y, and z axis.  Imaginary lines intersect at the origin and represented as (0, 0, 0).  So  the location of each vertex is defined by 3 numbers relative to the origin.  A table of these vertices would look like this:

(2, -2, 5)
(3.2, 3, 4)
(-8, -2, 4), and so on.

Just a couple more ideas and we are done.

Every object in 3D space has to be referenced to something and that is the absolute origin.  When you open any character, you will notice that it always starts in the same location.  open another object and it is also in the same location.  That is because the object comes into your scene referenced to the absolute and unchanging origin that was defined when the program was written.  That is, the center of the floor grid.  What happens when we spin the x, y or zTran dials?  Well, we have just changed her position relative to the absolute origin. Posette now has a relative coordinate for every vertex which is offset by the change in her position.  Don't worry. Poser calculates and remembers these relative coordinates for you.

At this point, we are pretty much done.  The geometry file is saved in a format that the program understands.  

Wavefront, who developed the format Poser uses assigned the .obj (object) file extension.  3DS Studio Max uses .3DS, Lightwave uses .lwo and so on.  Poser can convert some of these formats.  There are other programs that also can convert various formats.

All the character, pose, prop, face etc. files are nothing more that text files with instructions for the program to use to access the geometry of the object and create the changes. You can even open these files with a text editor and edit them the old fashioned way.  This is how 3D was done in the early days.

By now you are probably tired of looking at a flat lined Posette.  Let's expand on a couple of things and call it quits.  You may have looked at a 2D wireframe looking picture that is used for creating texture maps.  

Unless you have some really expensive and sophisticated software, it is hard to draw a texture on a 3D object.  So, there are programs that will take the verices of the mesh, unwrap them and create what is called a UV map in 2 dimensions.  The texture is drawn over the UV map, usually on a different layer in a graphics program such as PSP) is a bitmap graphics editor for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system that was originally published by Minneapolis-based Jasc Software. In October 2004, Corel Corporation bought out Jasc software">paint shop pro, and then the UV map is deleted and only the colored texture saved.

Some common terms you may hear.

Hi poly count - Usually an object with a very high number of polygons in the mesh, i.e. hi resolution.
lo poly count - the opposite.

That's about it.  Mesh is the most common term used when discussing geometry, although wireframe is also
appropriate.  Modeling programs that can create objects in 3d space are required to build a wireframe that is then saved in the required format.  UV mapping programs convert the geometry to a flat texture template.  A texture is then painted and you have your figure complete.

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Too many projects, too little time.

Thank you for your explanation professor melamkish     !! !

I've only to say that lighting is very important and that one can even learn some technique (how to place the light on a scene) reading a book about photography (I still have to do it )

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Thank you ...thank you ....thank you. I have some reading ahead of me. It will have to wait a bit I have a wedding cake this week so I have some cleaning and re-arranging to do as well as put a new baking element in the oven and OH get the air conditioner fixed in case it decides to be 80 degrees on Friday and Saturday so I don't roast myself while doing the cake for 300servings.
I will let you know as soon as I have a chance to play around with all of my knew info.

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Shannon

Thank you, Melamkish.

Thanks!

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Here we go!

I agree with one of above posts about photography books. Also, investing in a color wheel is a thought. I use one all the time in picking colors for my work. Another thaought about lighting: take a tour outside (day and night) and see how colors interact with things like fog, light direction and most of all TEXTURE! Even run your hands over different things like tree bark, rough and smooth stones .... things like that. You get a sense of how light reacts to theese things : shadows, sheen, reflection ...

Once you get the hang of lighting (dont rush, everything here is measured by pateince), you can start to experiment with the light properties themselves to create some really dazzling effects (like making a figure or scene "appear: to have complex textures, but it's really only a few lights ... you'll see!    )

melamkish gave you a great start to understanding meshes! A few words about morphs, which should answer your other qusetion about magnets. Morphs are the results of changing the 'shape' of the figure or geometry of what youre working with. It doesnt add or delete the number of polygons that melamkish told you about, rather it shifts their positions. Morphs are what enables you to make postettes forehead bigger, and make her ears stretch out ... A morph is what makes a ball 'pinched' or flattened ... anytime you change the original shape of your 3d object, you've just done a morph. The figures you see out there like V3, M3 and Posette all have morphs ... giving you the potential to have countless versions (or charactors) from the same original base figure. Changing the shape of the nose, eyes, lips, breasts, ect ... you create a whole new figure/charactor.

Magnets are one way to make morphs. They act pretty much like you would expect a magnet to do ... it attracts. So, if you have the figures head selected, go to your tool bar and select "create magnet", this will make a magnet around the figures head. In the properties box of the magnet, make sure that 'element to deform' is what you want it to be, in this case the head. Now, when you select the magnet, experiment by moving it along the X Y and Z axix and see what happens ... the head will get bigger and slope forward or backwards, It will stretch like a string bean ... all sorts of fun stuff! When you get to a shape (or morph) that you like, go to the tool bar and select "create morph" ... this will make it so when you delete the magnet, you can now select your new morph from the figure/head parameter box and simply 'dial' in the change. I think R'osity has a few tutorials on using magnets ... I'll look for them and post here.

Well, hope this helps!