Dracoselene’s Twisted Musings

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. (or possibly run for your life.) Thanks for visiting!

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.

Not everyone is as feminine as you are. Don’t expect deep emotional conversations from someone with a predominantly masculine personality. You complain about something to someone whose more masculine and they’ll try to fix it. They are NOT interested in the emotional ramifications of any problem, only the solution. You want someone to listen to you and have a deep conversation about emotions? Get a therapist or go visit a friend who is more femme. Trying to make someone into what you want is an exercise in futility and frustration. Save yourself and your loved ones a lot of trouble by not trying to change them into what YOU want. “Women marry a man hoping he’ll change and men marry a woman hoping she won’t change”. I can’t remember where I heard that but it’s true faaarr too often, and it’s a large reason for the increasing divorce rate IMHO.
Chivalry is NOT dead. Don’t believe this lie or let it perpetuate. There are still plenty of men out there who can and will treat women with respect and dignity. Being a feminist doesn’t give you the right to try to change the male sex. You want to try to change the way women are treated by society as a whole then I say “Go for it!”, but when you try to make individuals change who they are, there’s a problem. There’s nothing wrong with being a very feminine (or masculine) person. Yes, women are people and should be treated and paid the same as men in the workplace, but we shouldn’t be trying to turn women into men OR trying to make men into women. Be feminine or masculine and don’t let chivalry die!

Attractiveness is more than your appearance. Your outside appearance may play a strong role in whether or not you are considered attractive, but there are other variables which are just as important. Having good looks isn’t as important as just having a striking look anyway. One of the important variables in attractiveness is confidence. Your personal confidence levels make a big difference in how you look, sound, and carry yourself. Your attractiveness is also dependant on personal grooming. It doesn’t matter if you’re Aphrodite or Adonis if you stink and have greasy hair. Another thing that’s important is how you interact with others. Speak clearly and confidently, look your subject in the eye, be calm and never raise your voice (never raising your voice can also be intimidating as hell if they know you’re angry) and be polite and courteous. Finally, your mode of dress adjusts your attractiveness.
How you dress does not determine your personality, so don’t get that idiotic notion in your head. You should dress to suit your personality and your own personal sense of style. Your clothes should tell people who you are, not who you are attempting to be like. Be yourself, wear things that suit you. Keep your clothes clean and in decent repair. I know that some rips and tears are purposeful, but not all of them are ( I have jeans with torn knees but it still annoys me when they get other tears in them). Finally, do NOT let someone on TV tell you how to dress. I can’t stand to watch any of those makeover shows anymore after I saw what they did to some people. I wound up just trying to argue with the telly and wanting to write nasty hate-mails. Since when is someone’s personal sense of style a bad thing? I can understand getting people to have better grooming and cleanliness but who are they to tell anyone to stop wearing a particular kind of clothing?

I have seen the words “Feminine mystique” thrown around a lot and decided to strike back a little. It’s high time somebody tried to actually talk some sense in to all those crazy people out there with some idiotic notions about the female gender. I know I’ve written about beauty before but this is more of a sensible advice and information post rather than just a rant. I just decided to do something constructive instead of just bitching. ( I finally took my own advice, LOL). This isn’t just for biological women either, there are a lot of others out there who are at least in part, of the feminine gender (like me). There’s even stuff in here that’s just good general advice for anyone.
Why don’t we start with the number one thing that people need some serious help with. A number on a scale does NOT make you sexy. You wanna look good, check your proportions or your actual size. I don’t mean dress size either. I mean get a measuring tape or something and get measurements of your self that aren’t invented by some idiotic fashion marketing exec. Remember that muscles have much greater density (and therefore weight) than fat does. My wife Bri lost two or three inches off her waist and yet never lost a single pound. I’ve even seen people GAIN weight when trying to get into shape and fit smaller clothes. Look in the mirror and get someone to look with you. Ask someone whose judgement you trust if you look fat or fine. Do NOT gauge yourself based on celebrities and models you see on TV or in magazines, they only represent a small percentage of the human gene pool. Most of them aren’t as pretty as you might think anyway. The things you can do with make-up and good lighting are nothing short of magic. There is sucha thing as airbrushed make-up, and it’s been around for years. While I’m on the subject, I think I need to mention cultural differences in apparent beauty. Not everyone falls sucker to the crap that mass media is shoving down our throats. If people where you live think you aren’t attractive, that doesn’t mean that you aren’t, it just means that they don’t think so. Move to somewhere else or start spending your time with people that don’t say mean things like that. There are a LOT of women I have seen and think are attractive that others say are not attractive at all.

Quite some time back, like a year or two, Bri told me that I should write a book on how to be a better husband. I actually considered it until I realized that nothing that I could suggest would even come close to filling an entire book or even a chapter or two. So I’m just gonna put my advice up on my blog and maybe later I’ll compile all of it into a book or pamphlet or something. So without further adieu, here we go:

- Pay attention to the little things, they are the things that are really important to keeping a relationship together.
- Try to remember your SO’s favorite candy, cookie, flower, etc. Surprise them with it whenever you see it and        remember that they like that kind of thing.
- Do little favors for them, like getting a cup of coffee for them in the morning.
- Learn to cook and cook dinner sometimes, make it a nice sit-down affair if you can.

I’ll post up more little tips as I remember what they are. I do most of this stuff without thinking anymore, so it takes effort to try to remember all the little helpful things. Trust me, I speak from experience, you can learn a LOT from being divorced twice (if you try to actually learn from the experience).