Poser figures in to TG2, with textures intact

scott8933 · January 08, 2008, 03:45:04 PM

Anyone have any luck with this? I can't get anything to import that doesn't come in black, and all slammed together as one object. If it helps, I have PolyTrans - so if they need to be exported as one thing then filtered, PT has lots of options. I don't mind baking in the UV's (would prefer it actually for project simplicity)...

Thanks all!

rcallicotte · January 08, 2008, 04:05:17 PM

16 texture limit prevents a lot from being imported from Poser. Miki 2 will come in almost all textures in tact. That's it, as far as I know.

scott8933 · January 08, 2008, 04:10:14 PM

What's Miki2?

Actually, if I could bake in all the vertexes that would be perfect - that way no need to even bother w/ textures. But the main problem I'm having it that the Poser models don't come in smoothed very well, and all come in grey or black.

Kevin F · January 08, 2008, 05:13:50 PM

Quote from: scott8933 on January 08, 2008, 03:45:04 PM
Anyone have any luck with this? I can't get anything to import that doesn't come in black, and all slammed together as one object. If it helps, I have PolyTrans - so if they need to be exported as one thing then filtered, PT has lots of options. I don't mind baking in the UV's (would prefer it actually for project simplicity)...

Thanks all!

Save the figure as an .obj in poser then open in Daz studio and re-save again with same file name. This will open in TG2 with textures intact (not poseable hair though).

scott8933 · January 08, 2008, 05:27:19 PM

Thanks! I'll give this a shot. Luckily, the poser model is pretty small in the scene.

I feel like such a whore though - when I went to buy Poser 7 (needed a PC version and only had Poser 6 on my Mac), they were having a special bundle where you get Poser 7 and Vue 6 Esprit for just $299. So now I have Vue as well as Terragen!

Terragen wins the atmospheric stuff hands down, but I do like Vue's vegatation. Nice stuff!

DeathTwister · January 08, 2008, 06:43:21 PM

Ah very cool,

I saw this post before, but before Peejay posted. Very clever bro. I will try this in Poser and also Daz and then out.
As for Max and there .obj and .mtl files? they suck, sorry to say that but they do, and not sure why and they have never improved on it on any versions and very short sighted of then if you ask me. So I take my Max models out in a .xsi file and into XSI, there I can get good .obj and very good .mtl files into tgd2 easy and any other app's for that matter.
I have Blender but shesh so many app's to work in unless I have to, I leave it alone. New learning curves and all that, but always good to have them handy. But I have been thinking of finding time to dig it bit deeper soon anyway. I will post on this after I have chance to play with it a bit.

DT

scott8933 · January 09, 2008, 03:02:39 AM

Well, seems formZ brings in all the hair intact (as wires. seventeen thousand wires, to be precise). Most importers are bringing in the model in just a few parts: skin, as a whole, shirt, pants, shoe (he lost one for some reason), eyeballs, pupils, and teeth.

So actually it wasn't too much of a tragedy to get the model in...mostly - and with formZ bringing in the hair, I could probaby use Daz to get the "textured" model input.

Which brings me to my next point - this is really stupid. I mean, how many modelers does it have to take just to bring in a simple Poser figure with colored vertexes? At this point, I don't even care about UV's - just ANY color would be fine, that wouldn't require me to launch every 3D app I have on my computer. What's the point of the .mtl file, if EVERY 3d app ignores it? Well, not Daz, the free one. That seems to bring it in okay. Some kind of inverse price to usefulness ratio? Groan.

Next question, if anyone has lasted this long through my ranting and raving:

Does anyone know if there are plans for Poser to directly link to Terragen in the future?
Does anyone know if there are plans for Onyx Tree to directly link to Terragen in the future?

I know this isn't the best forum to ask - just casually wondering...

MooseDog · January 09, 2008, 07:10:26 AM

Quote from: scott8933 on January 09, 2008, 03:02:39 AM

Does anyone know if there are plans for Poser to directly link to Terragen in the future?
Does anyone know if there are plans for Onyx Tree to directly link to Terragen in the future?

I know this isn't the best forum to ask - just casually wondering...

this may help with some answers:

http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=3031.msg30944#msg30944

scott8933 · January 09, 2008, 10:40:07 AM

Yeah, I'd scanned over that thread before even buying TG2 - I guess I was wondering out loud if they'd be supported via a plugin system (TG2 has a facility for one, right?)

Okay, better go read the plugin thread before shooting my mouth off any more.

But Poser figures aside, it -would- be nice if Onyx Tree/Tree Storm were supported, in the same way that xfrog models are supported. Which granted, I know nothing about, not yet having tried it and not being able to find any reference to it in the wip documentation.

And now I find myself even more confused - several threads allude to the .mdl file being usable by TG? Is there a definitive answer and procedure for this? TG, for me, always brings in my .obj's black (using the obj loader node). I have to re-texture them w/in TG, which has been limiting to say the least.

MooseDog · January 09, 2008, 11:11:43 AM

strikes me that the subject of objects is a work-in-progress (like tg2 itself

) and workarounds and patches is the order-du-jour.

scott8933 · January 10, 2008, 11:09:10 AM

Yes, easy to forget that considering how complete and TG2 is, and being more stable than some apps I have that are well into years of development.

Anyway, here are the results of a trip to Terragen from Poser. As you can see, he ripped his shirt along the way. It wasn't an easy journey, and he in fact lost his other shoe and has a hole in the one that's still on (which is inexplicably clean).

It was about 50-50 with the UV maps working. Luckly his skin and face worked. Pants, eyes, shoe, did not and had to be replaced with straight t-maps. I couldn't figure out what the breaking point was, why some UV's stuck and some didn't. Lastly, the figure had to go through Lightwave to be upsampled and smoothed (whatever the function the Tab key activates). Texture UV's still stuck, even after doing that.

(He will be inside a ditch looking at something big, hence the hand/head position)

At some point, I'd like to figure the whole thing out then write up a clean tutorial. But for now...

rcallicotte · January 10, 2008, 01:17:55 PM

Scott, if you do a search here, you'll find many instructions and tutorials about this subject. There really isn't any point in workarounds, in my opinion. Someday, we'll get what we need through updates. In the meantime, it's possible other programs could utilize Poser in an easier and more productive way to amalgamate Poser with TG2.

I'm pretty sure it will not be quite possible to do a complete Poser integration in the way you might like, no matter how long we wait.

scott8933 · January 10, 2008, 02:15:39 PM

No, actually a I did a ton of searches this forum, on Flay, and finally on Google - and came up with very little usable info... I must be doing it wrong. A search of "Poser" here comes up with four pages of hits, but no real workflow methods.

It actually wasn't even that which directly started my search - it was being able to import several models from Electric Image and Onyx Tree where the vertexes came in fine (colored), uv's came in fine, geometry was smoothed where it was supposed to and they even showed up as geometry in the preview window. For whatever reason, the PZ stuff was coming in black and as bounding boxes.

Correction to the above, yes, in the 4 pages of hits on Poser, there was one thread that on the last page had one post with a workflow that got textures in properly. I missed that one the first time around, but think I still would have blown a whole day on the thing though - at this point the object import features still seem to be a little inconsistent, depending on what app they come from.

Not a complaint, just an observation.

Quote from: calico on January 10, 2008, 01:17:55 PM
Scott, if you do a search here, you'll find many instructions and tutorials about this subject. There really isn't any point in workarounds, in my opinion. Someday, we'll get what we need through updates. In the meantime, it's possible other programs could utilize Poser in an easier and more productive way to amalgamate Poser with TG2.

I'm pretty sure it will not be quite possible to do a complete Poser integration in the way you might like, no matter how long we wait.

neon22 · January 10, 2008, 06:05:14 PM

Deep Exploration version 5 has several tools to help users get materials down to a smaller number.
You can combine UV maps, remap an object, merge materials.
Its not a silver bullet and its not free but you could find it useful...

Oshyan · January 11, 2008, 02:18:43 AM

TG2 does try to respect .mtl definitions. The problem - which most people are unaware of - is that the OBJ (and by extension the accompanying MTL) "standard" is really not a standard at all and there are many variations on the implementation. We've tried to stick as close to the most "basic" implementation as we can and other applications choose different approaches. Some programs have notoriously bad OBJ output and plugins have even been written specifically to address these issues (Cinema4D comes to mind). So although TG2's object import support could definitely use some work, it's also just a fundamental flaw in the industry with the lack of a really good universal standard. Hopefully we can support something like FBX in the future which would at least be supported by most newer apps and *is* a standard.

For now Xfrog "support" is limited to the basic OBJ import, although we did work to particularly support the OBJ variant that Xfrog produces and have done more testing with their objects than any other. That is simply due to the high quality of the models relative to other options and their obvious value in TG scenes. We don't see Poser as being as much of an interest for our typical user, although of course many people here do use it.

TG2 will have an SDK in the future which will enable plugins to be written by 3rd parties. Once the SDK is available something could certainly be written to directly support Poser or Onyx or any other application, and I hope such support is undertaken by the respective developers of those programs. We will necessarily be devoting our resources to improving the core features of our application. Further work on improved import and export support should improve overall interoperability with any application that supports standard or common formats.

- Oshyan