♥ PosetteForever ♥

I usually use 3DOC, which is free to personal use, but I've upgraded to 'paid' for more mesh export options. <br /> <br /> 3DOC can be a fussy eater. It struggles with some MMD PMD / PMX file-builds, and often scrambles MMD .X prop files. I've discovered that recent Windows updates have 'orphaned' its PNG texture handling, causing module execution exceptions when there's an Alpha Channel. With no easy fix, as the module's author no longer supports that code. 'Despaired of Windows', perhaps ?? <br /> <br /> Sadly, there are many MMD PNG textures with Alpha channels, as that environment lacks support for separate bit-masks... <br /> <br /> I'm slowly learning how to 'rip' such Alpha channel data to BMP for use in Poser. <br /> <br /> Must ask Irfan if his free Irfan View has obscure options that will let me paint a PNG's Alpha channel without altering the RGB image... <br /> <br /> D'uh... <br /> <br /> More-or-less by accident, I found free open3mod viewer, which is not as versatile as 3DOC, but can do a fair range of mesh conversions, is much less fussy and does not choke on Alpha channels. <br /> <br /> <a class="post-url" href="https://www.open3mod.com/" target="_blank">https://www.open3mod.com/</a> <br /> <br /> Comes in x32 & x64 flavours... <br /> == <br /> <br /> May I also recommend free XnView (personal) which can 'unpeel' and export PSD layers, should you not have Photoshop or grok GIMP...

Thanks for your HU, but I'm sorry to say, it don't open any files at all, and yes, I have all the VC++ and .net stuff installed. <br /> I tried both. The installer and the standalone version.

XnView is a real nice one. I'm using IrfanView since 20+ years now, and I'm used to it. It's quite similar, but don't have the unpeeling feature

Must be said that Zoltan will pounce on most 3DOC bugs. He recently fixed one that did not refresh the Open-GL cache when you switched between eg mesh, boned & textured. On-screen was correct, but an export to clip-board held previous version... <br /> <br /> Although its now-orphaned 3rd-party module crashes when trying to read PNG textures with Alpha-channels, 3DOC sometimes mis-wraps texture maps it *can* read. They render wrong, but hard to see exactly why... <br /> <br /> Ran into this a few days ago, with low-poly 'Easter Eggs'. Should have a neat ring of symbols around 'Equator'. Instead, fewer, distorted symbols appeared in 'High Arctic'. <br /> <br /> I've been playing with 'equi-rectangular' and other full-wrapping textures, so tried tiling the 'whole-body' texture. 1 H x 2 V worked !! Sent Zoltan the relevant files. This gave sufficient clue for him to deploy bug-zapper, roll out a fix within 36 hours !! <br /> <br /> As Poser can now import FBX models complete with rigging, I've collected some free, low-ish poly rigged models for study. Sadly, some FBX models are 'munged', will not import. Worse, FBX texture formats and usage seem very, very different to current Poser materials. Looks more like the comparative simplicity of P4 mapping. Whatever, the topic needs a lonnng tutorial... <br /> <br /> Stay safe, stay well, <br /> N

Came across this free tool for converting XNALara .xps, .mesh and .ascii models + props to MMD PMX format. Even reads files 3DOC cannot grok. <br /> <br /> <a class="post-url" href="https://www.deviantart.com/mariokart64n/art/Xnalara-to-MMD-Converter-789330400" target="_blank">https://www.deviantart.com/mariokar...erter-789330400</a> <br /> <br /> From that PMX file, free PmxEditor can export as OBJ/MTL but remember to 'mirror' if 'handed'... <br /> <a class="post-url" href="https://www.deviantart.com/inochi-pm/art/PmxEditor-vr-0254f-English-Version-v2-0-766313588" target="_blank">https://www.deviantart.com/inochi-p...-v2-0-766313588</a>

Okay, I've found a way to list all the materials in an MMD's PMX/PMD file. <br /> <br /> It is not pretty... <br /> <br /> 1) In PMX Editor, edit any 'non-Eng' material names and references to 'Eng'. <br /> 2) Ensure last material has text in 'memo' field. I add ##_place_holder_## to help search. <br /> 3) Export as CSV. Probably 2~~4 MB. <br /> 4) Load CSV into Wordpad. <br /> 5) Find the Materials section, which is some-where in the middle. <br /> 6) Carefully delete everything above and below. <br /> 7) Re-save the now slim-line CSV. Probably 2~~4 KB. <br /> 8 ) Open this in spreadsheet of your choice. Libre Office is *free*. <br /> 9) Compare to Materials list in PMX Editor. Note Editor counts from 0, Sheet from 1... <br /> <br /> Nik 04/04/2020 <br /> -- <br /> <br /> Am currently investigating CSU Comipo files. <br /> Comipo is NOT free, but happily imports OBJ and MQO models, and there are many, many community freebies. <br /> CSU is a proprietary format, totally mungs imports. Another issue is that it only has a limited colour palette, so apparently drops any named texture calls, converting them to palette references. $registered 3DOC can usually retrieve the mesh, but cannot yet find / read the palette references. At least it keeps the material groupings !! Situation akin to getting an OBJ without its MTL to specify what's what...

Sounds like a man on a mission.

PP 11.3 has *not* mended the quirks of the FBX importer, nor has it added a 'scale to figure' option per OBJ. <br /> <br /> When you've done a 'binary chop' on the scaling, anything between 0.5 ~~ 5000 of nominal 100%, Round#2 of cage-fight begins... <br /> <br /> A very, very few FBX figures arrive rigged, upright and compliant. As for the rest, well, if you're lucky everything arrives. Some have the body merged to one mesh, cannot be posed without surgery and rigging, both currently beyond my wits. Others are a loose formation of body parts. And, hierarchies ? <br /> <br /> Fortunately, I was informed that the easiest way to tame such 'swarms' is to parent them to a dummy figure. Free on R**y, Les Bentley has 'MinFig' [NOT MiniFig], while Anthony Appleyard has 'Dummy'. <br /> <br /> You may have to change the origin on latter, to allow twirling of 'bound' FBX without problems. <br /> <br /> D'uh, editing figure's zero/origin used to be *easy* in P4. In P11, I fumbled and blundered around parameters etc, eventually did it by accident. The on-line manual may have it, and it may even be easy, but I could not find the relevant search term. <br /> <br /> OT: It's obviously an American manual, the index auto-generated by sorting document paragraph & chapter headings. Which only works if you know what *they* call the topic. At work, I used to plow through our lab instruments' thick technical manuals, annotating such auto-generated indexes with essential page references that we'd otherwise only find by accident... <br /> <br /> I miss bound paper manuals...

Further to #5 above: <br /> <br /> The free XPS-PMX converter is now at version #1.30, but something about the .exe file made my Norton's 'kill it with fire'. <br /> <br /> Author notified, investigating. Probably a false-positive, worst case his cloudflare has been hacked...

Yeah, false-positive. Code is clean and check-summed okay, his Cloud seriously secure. <br /> <br /> In this context, that error code means, "Never heard of you, eff off !!" <br /> <br /> For a singular utility, which has been getting a small or large update each year for almost a decade... <br /> <br /> Author NOT amused.

I'm still wrangling file conversions. <br /> <br /> Biggest problem --After scaling !!-- with PoserPro and FBX is there's no 'browse' option as you get for eg OBJ/MTL imports. Which means if the external textures' folder is deep, deep within artist's C: drive and the call-path is 'baked in', you have a problem. <br /> <br /> Hand-loading 10 ~ 20 ~ 30 ~ 50 ~~ 90+ textures via material room is non-trivial... <br /> <br /> Easiest to do via reference to a bundled OBJ/MTL, else gotta open FBX in Autodesk's free FBX Toolkit's Explorer, dig down the Objects tree to Textures, explore them one by one... <br /> <br /> D'uh... <br /> <br /> I reckon the Poser import module wants FBX files that have embedded media rather than calling external files. A bit like the difference between stand-alone PP2 / CR2 and those that call an OBJ from the geometry folder... <br /> <br /> ( Remember when P3 / P4 OBJs were often parked any-which-way ? Sometime with the PP2/CR2, sometimes in an unexpected folder. Sometimes without a Runtime tree, meaning you gotta untangle the mess... )

Sounds like a lot of work. Lets hope it's worth it. <br /> <br /> "( Remember when P3 / P4 OBJs were often parked any-which-way ? Sometime with the PP2/CR2, sometimes in an unexpected folder. Sometimes without a Runtime tree, meaning you gotta untangle the mess... )" <br /> <br /> Well, these are plain text at least. You could simply look them up in a text editor...

Down-loaded a DA PMX freebie. Exported to OBJ/MTL, played with its simple texture map. Realised I could do a lot more with it if I could split the 'glass' top from the 'rock' base to allow separate texturing... <br /> <br /> ( Or kill the 'glass' from one, the 'base' from other then re-assemble. Or allocate all the points from either glass or base to a sub-object. Or whatever... ) <br /> <br /> So, after a couple of years, of avoiding it, I installed Blender. <br /> <br /> D'uh, and I'd thought GIMP, Unity and TurboCAD UI were intimidating, D*z Studio infuriating... <br /> <br /> I've tried, 'struck out' on G & U, but I used to be good with TurboCAD, hope to re-boot old skills. <br /> <br /> Today, though, IMHO, Blender's default UI must set some sort of record for ghastly ergonomics. <br /> <br /> Happens, when I got Blender, I also got a hard-copy of 'Blender for Dummies'. Have found on shelf, dusted well, will peruse... <br /> <br /> ( Sadly, no use my watching YouTube tutorials, my wits don't work thus... )

Wouldn't good ole UVMapper do this job in this case? <br /> If you have separate materials for the orb and the rock already, you could simply assign separate groups to each material <br /> and import into Poser (delete or rename the original mat file before importing, UVMapper saves this information directly to the obj) Use the Poser grouping tool to spawn props for each group, much simpler than fiddlig with blender for this job IMHO. Blender is great but a real overload <img src="https://www.posetteforever.com/images/smiles/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

It is two meshes --Sphere + Base-- saved as one object, so one material, but your suggestion to use Poser's grouping tool is *excellent*. <br /> <br /> IIRC, I played with grouping in my P4 days, made some body-armor for Posette... <br /> <br /> Hmm...

Poser's grouping tool is neat, but the interface is a tad clunky... <br /> <br /> Tried reading 'Blender for Dummies' again. Got one (1) chapter in, again totally failed to grok the surfeit of hot-keys required for even basic navigation. I haven't seen so many since a certain 'word processor' from PC pre-history... <br /> <br /> Then I remembered that, a year or three ago, I'd downloaded *free* Hexagon from D*z. <br /> <br /> Have found it in my archives. Interface looks more like CAD than Blender. Will install and report...

I think I nabbed that Hexagon as well.

Ditto. Installed it years ago, but never had a closer look <img src="https://www.posetteforever.com/images/smiles/connie_ashamed.gif" alt="" />

Downside of converting files is discovering you can't render them effectively in Poser... <br /> <br /> I converted a *free* MMD PMX 'stage', a modular park scene, to OBJ/MTL. Only half-a-dozen materials, one texture each. Path tiles, lawn, bench seats, lamp standards, lamp glazing. Poser figure in the middle. Dial up lamp glazing ambiance to 'self-glow', render in Superfly. <br /> <br /> <br /> No, sorry, Superfly doesn't want to know. Multi-core CPU or twin GPU cards, progressive, back-ground or whatever, I got either black screen or beige, but blank. Doesn't look as good in Firefly, certainly no super-ambiance. <br /> <br /> After some trial-and-error, I shut Poser down and had dinner. This time around, I'll try to be a little more scientific... <br /> <br /> Plan_B, of course, of course, is to shoe-horn a point-source light into each street-lamp...

After much research, I learned I had to enable 'SCUDA' via Nvidia's control panel for my twin GTX 750 Ti GPU cards. Note NO RegEdit required. Just do via 'global' as only found P7 not PP11... <br /> <br /> Each of my cards has 640 cores. With hardware assist available, I set Superfly's bucket size to 1200, leaving a few for the PC. There's an *acceptable* Windows UI lag... <br /> <br /> NOW Superfly is turbo-charged. Even so, there is a limit to what PC will handle. If scene is just a bit too complex, comes out blank. That aside, I began increasing the super-ambience of the scene's street lights, reducing the Poser lights. Renders needed more and more pixel samples... <br /> <br /> Then, a new failure mode. super-ambience stopped working, everything rendered in greys. Back-tracked a long way before realising problem. <br /> <br /> NOT superfly, but PPro x64 needing more than ~3GB RAM and not loading textures correctly. I cleared out render cache etc and 'normal service resumed'... <br /> <br /> Currently running a 99-pixel night render of scene using only the set's street lights...

I found a work-around for complex scenes that refuse to render in superfly. <br /> <br /> Using 'progressive' and both 640-core GPU cards, I iterated 'buckets' from nominal ~1024 through 512, 256, 128 all the way down until render ran. I've recently had to set 16 buckets, which was s-l-o-w, but worked... <br /> <br /> After, be sure to export your render ASAP, certainly before you adjust view-point, lest PP's clunky garbage collector crash the UI... <br /> <br /> I'm still looking for a friendly 3D editor that won't give me prompt migraines. <br /> <br /> I tried Hexagon, but it promptly choked on a complex OBJ, shut down without warning. Which was not too unexpected, given its age makes it an x32... <br /> <br /> I tried freebie MeshMagic, but it covertly loaded links to rest of NCH office suite, which took a while to pry loose, then trash. <br /> <br /> Also, though I *may* have been using MM wrong, zoom seems to scale the model, not the view. This is *very unfortunate* if you're trying to carve a complex set into convenient modules. After some digging, I did find how to 'dial in' XYZ offsets, allowing better than 'By Eye' placement. Will try again... <br /> <br /> Turbo CAD has had OBJ & 3DS I/O for ever and ever. I've just discovered that TurboCAD Pro 2020 has 'automatic' FBX import / export, whatever that means. There seems no plug-in for my '2016 version, whose UI still confounds me. Sad, really, when I remember how productive I was with the 2003~2010 versions. But, hey, a dire decade out will do that to your 'Minds Eye'... <br /> <br /> I could just about afford the discounted upgrade from '2016 to '2020, although that would be a total waste if I can't make it 'play nice'... <br /> <br /> D'uh...

The free Open 3D Model Viewer I've mentioned previously has unexpected talents. <br /> <br /> I've been using it to study FBX rigging, trying to spot which models, which style of 'trees' are compatible with Poser. Short answer, only the 'trad' type... <br /> <br /> Then, serendipitously, I noticed it claimed to open Blender. <br /> Yeah, right... <br /> But, so far, it has opened every '.blend' I've tried !! <br /> <br /> O3DMV has *some* export options, but only the 'solid' OBJ/MTL & 3DS are *directly* accepted by Poser. Curious, I opened an un-rigged Blender figure I'd found some-when (*), exported it to optional DAE. Autodesk's free FBX toolkit converted this to FBX, which Poser duly imported at 100% default scale. Not a 'first', but rare... <br /> <br /> Un-rigged, of course, of course, and one solid figure rather than a shower of body-parts... <br /> <br /> Well, actually two figures, overlain. <br /> <br /> So, I swivelled them apart, applied their full-body texture and highlight maps, rendered in superfly. <br /> <br /> *) I think was Deemona by Vlthar on DeviantArt <br /> <a class="post-url" href="https://www.deviantart.com/vlthar/art/Deemona-842931010" target="_blank">https://www.deviantart.com/vlthar/art/Deemona-842931010</a> <br /> But he seems to have replaced it by a v1.0...

The free open3D viewer has unsuspected talent. <br /> <br /> I've just noticed it will usually open Terragen's otherwise intractable .TER files. And, yes, export to the 'Usual Suspects' such as OBJ+MTL. <br /> <br /> Snag is a 514 KB TER file goes in, a Poser-choking ~ 35 MB OBJ writes out. I make that x70... <br /> <br /> So, I've begun hunt for way to convert such half-million poly mesh to something more friendly. <br /> <br /> Conversion to a height map would be neat, but non-trivial due to non-uniform mesh. Given even that might need lower poly count, I took a look for budget ways to 'lean down' mesh. <br /> <br /> Yes, there's a free tool built into eg Blender, but I cannot work the UI. <br /> <br /> I found Autodesk's free 'Meshmixer' which also has such a tool. <br /> <br /> <a class="post-url" href="https://www.meshmixer.com/" target="_blank">https://www.meshmixer.com/</a> <br /> <br /> I'll let you know how it fares...

It didn't work. Only seems to apply while you are creating the mesh. Can't high-light or select, then down-poly. <br /> <br /> At least not for me, YMMV. <br /> <br /> Still searching for budget solution... <br /> <br /> Some-what off-topic: <br /> To get 2FA via SMS to my PC's 'Desk with No Bars', per Yahoo, PayPal and, now, my purblind bank's increasingly urgent demands, I've had to buy a hi-end, $$$ wireless router that takes a SIM card, too. First had an intractable firmware bug, went back in disgrace. Configured unto 'Tethered', hung in window that gets a few bars, attached to far, far end of my home network, the second, a rival brand, seems to be working. Well, sorta. Still testing... <br /> <br /> Downside, is I now can't afford $$$ AC3D CAD, the one with OBJ+MTL support, until November at earliest... <br /> {Sulk... }

... might want to give this a try -> <a class="post-url" href="http://www.micromouse.ca/" target="_blank">http://www.micromouse.ca/</a>

Thank you for that link !! <br /> <br /> I was surprised to find it was already bookmarked, but deep in 'check-back' zone. <br /> <br /> Serendipitous spin-off from a Rendo thread: <br /> <br /> Seems PPro_11.3 has a well-hidden 'reduce polygon' facility. One tool simplifies 'characters', other does 'objects'. Seems associated with preparation for FBX export... <br /> <br /> It's in the Poser PDF manual at pp 999~1002. <br /> <br /> Proviso: Even if I can get facility to 'play nice', it still requires me to actually import too-hi-poly model. Of course, if I delete my default start-up's LaF figure, swimsuit, ground plane and sky-dome, that might help...