Thursday 22 December 2005

Outlining problems

Poser 6's toon shading facility has thrown up a couple of problems. When I try to add an outline to figures that I've made and rigged myself (like my Mr Snout figure) when rendering in toon style, the outline refuses to appear in the render. And when I try to add an outline to imported objects in either .3ds or .obj format, the objects turn black in the render. A possible remedy to the second problem, one that I haven't tried yet, would be to turn those imported objects into Poser figures or props first by adding them to the library.
The first problem isn't the only one I've had with my own figures. I tried adding a texture to the Mr Snout figure in Poser 5, but the texture just wouldn't appear on the figure.

Sunday 18 December 2005

Poser 6

I've finally updgraded to Poser 6, having resisted the urge to do so for a long while because the new features didn't seem all that plentiful or worth upgrading for. However, I was sold by the work that someone else has posted on his website that uses Poser 6's toon shading to beautiful effect. Having got the new version installed on my computer, I've been spending the past week trying to work out how to use it to get that Anime look.
Finally, my experimentation yielded some results, as seen above. The wonderful thing about Poser 6's toon shading is that, unlike the technique that I've been using with Poser 5 renders, it doesn't require any postwork, and you can use textures on figures - although it is likely that most textures will have to be altered to make them look a bit more toon-like. You also don't have to have a ground object for the character's shadow to appear in the render.
Work on the website has ground to a halt for the moment, but hopefully it will start again sometime after all the madness of Christmas has died down.

Monday 5 December 2005

Lionheart

Another image done using one of Lemurtek's characters (Lionheart). Also uses a temple produced by someone and an alien by someone else. I'll post credits to them as soon as I can remember who they were - this is the problem, I've been downloading stuff at a massive rate since purchasing Poser, and have just lost track of who has posted what.

Saturday 3 December 2005

Website

Have made a start on a new website, showcasing some of my 3d stuff, hopefully to give it a bit of exposure, since it seems pointless doing the work if nobody sees it. The difficult thing is knowing what to put on the website and what to put on this blog - it would be better, if possible, to avoid posting the same stuff twice. Ultimately, this blog may end up becoming completely redundant.
At present I am planning to have several pages covering different categories:
  1. Links to various handy resources on the web (having come across a fair number in my obsessive searching of the last couple of years).
  2. Humourous work - I have done a bunch of models in Wings 3d and have turned a couple of them into Poser figures and used them in scenes.
  3. Razorback. Scenes and figures, and maybe the first chapter of the story for download in pdf form (if I can figure out how to do that!).

I originally planned to make some of my models available on the web to download, as Poser figures, but the process of rigging models in Poser turned out to be more teeth-grindingly, frustratingly difficult than I anticipated, and the results, while usable, would be a bit embarrassing to release to the Poser community.