It took me quite some time to be able to make some of the 3D pieces as quickly and easily as I do. Maybe after reading these tips that I have learned, you too will be able to turn out some great pieces quickly. I don’t know how much of this will apply to a current version of poser but many of these tips and tricks work on most of the versions I’ve used.
The first tip I have is to use the “preferred state” setting in general preferences. It doesn’t JUST save the document settings. It will apply to every new scene you start and it holds settings for rendering, cameras, lights, clothing (I learned this one the hard way when I forgot to clear out a previous cloth simulation before setting preferred state.), and many other things. Set up your interface the way you like it, load a character, set up your cameras and lights, set your render settings and dimensions, animation settings, set it ALL up as if you were starting up a new piece of work. Now, you can hit the preferred state button now or do what I do. I delete the character and anything else I don’t use for EVERY scene before I set the preferred state. Now set poser to open to previous state, and you’re all ready to start making great pieces every time you start a new scene, not to mention poser will open and load faster with nothing in the default scene and you’ll be using up less memory since there aren’t any props or characters in the scene until you put them there. That’s how I start every pinup I make. Work smart, not hard. this keeps me from fussing about with lights, cameras, render settings, document sizes and so on until I need to make a change to an individual piece.
So the next tip in the same genre is to USE the library. Don’t use it just to load up that new prop or material you just downloaded, use it to save things you labored long and hard to create. It took me months and months to come up with skin that looks pretty realistic and still look good and render quickly so once I had it made, I saved the material set. I also made sure to select ONLY the materials I rarely change. I didn’t save the eyes as part of the material set for example but I did save the cornea material. Now all I have to do is start a new scene, load a figure, apply my material set and viola! ready to start posing.
Back to the setting your preferred state or PS for short. Let’s talk a bit about what kind of settings I always start with. I learned to always start with a square document area so I made it take up as much space as it can without obscuring anything else. Remember, your document size is NOT your render size, that’s another setting. You can make them the same but you don’t have to. I render at 2000 x 2000 pixels and generally work at 610 x 610. Even when I render a non-square image I still keep my document window the same.
Next big annoyance and problem, Lighting. It used to be a dirty word to me until I learned that lights got saved with the PS. I set them up once, save them in my PS and now I just make small changes. What kind of lighting do I use? I have one spotlight and one IBL set up and that’s all. I never really knew how awesome and easy IBL was until I found a good tutorial on it ( Poser 6 IBL Ins and Outs By Olivier) and I HIGHLY recommend you read it. My own two cents: put your IBL at 0,0,0 so you don’t get confused trying to do complex geometry to figure out left and right. The spot is just for effects, shine, and shadowing. Take a look at my fairy image, I made that one to teach myself advanced lighting techniques. I used one spot and an IBL with the map and mapping techniques from the tutorial. I have the IBL AND it’s map saved in my PS! The only messing about with lighting I have to do with every new scene is to make sure the spot is pointing at the right place ( ‘object’, ‘point at’, select figure). I also set all my light intensities and colors (All white) and only change the colors with materials. A couple other things to keep in mind with lights, especially spotlights; map size and shadow. Map size is how sharp and detailed shadows will be and it’s set at 256 by default. I set mine at 512 which seems to be a nice balance between detail and speed to render. The shadow dial tells poser the intensity of the shadows with a 1 being %100. I set mine at about .4 or .5 to get good shadows, but you can crank it way up for that old horror-movie look. In older versions of poser I used three spotlights all set to white and %50 intensity. One front, one upper rear left and one far right, all pointed at the figure that was the focal point of the scene.
Another thing I set up is my cameras using some tips I found and a few things I learned over time. Poser sets the focal lengths waaay too low. turn them up to about 100 and notice the dramatic change. I also learned to set the hither and yon dials so I don’t see weird transparencies when I’m working. trying too see how a facial expression will look with the main camera is a little hard when the figure’s lips and nose have vanished. I set my main and posing cameras at 100-120 and my face camera at about 150. Something else about cameras I do is that once I have my main camera set the way I want it, I NEVER move it again. That’s what the posing and aux cameras are for. I also recommend setting all the orbit settings for the main and pose camera to 0,0,0 as well as the ‘dolly X’ dial. I set poser to use imperial units so I can set the cameras and lights in rational rather than arbitrary locations. main camera dolly Z at bout 18 feet and dolly Y at about 6-8.
Next tip is about figures. I use V3 for most of my pinups so I have a zeroed out V3 with ALL the morphs added saved in my library. She takes a while to load but makes character design much smoother. All the morphs are organized in a tree broken down by type and category so I don’t have to scroll through hundreds of body morphs looking for the nail length dial. It took the better part of a day to load them all in and organize them, but after I had done it once and saved it in my library, I just load up my allmorphs V3 and start working. I also clicked on ‘edit’, ‘memorize all’ while I had her fully loaded and zeroed out (hit the zero figure on the joint editor). This makes getting dynamic clothes to fit a morphed character go just a little faster. For instance, I have my PS set with 8 frames of animation and it STARTS me out on frame 8. Sounds strange I know, but all I have to do is go to frame 1 and hit ‘edit’, ‘restore figure’ and zero her out with the joint editor and she’s all set up for fitting the clothes onto the morphed and posed character at frame 8. Beats the hell out of the 4 hour mess that I used to go through if I morphed her at frame 1.
That’s all I have for now, I’ll add more tips as I remember them.
