THE POST BELOW IS MORE THAN 5 YEARS OLD. RELATED SUPPORT INFORMATION MIGHT BE OUTDATED OR DEPRECATED
On 03/04/2003 at 09:23, xxxxxxxx wrote:
These are some of the "deficiencies" of Poser about which I speak. Lighting in Poser is very primitive, renders are not as good and slower, and although Poser rigging uses IK, it really is not the best IK. C4D's IK and new Soft IK are much better (if not more complex to understand) especially for animation - which is the direction in which I'd like to head. I've used Poser's animation tools, but did not find them very intuitive or stable and this can be attested to by the fact that there are so very few Poser animations out there.
And, as you say, the plugin from CL isn't good at all. That's why some of us are taking on this ourselves. :)
I'm grateful for your help so far and it's great that you make your plugin available free of charge - which is amazing considering the amount of work involved, as I am finding out. ;)
As for the PZ3 files, you'd be amazed at how fast you can parse them - even at 15MB or more. Of course, my benchmark is on a 2.54GHz P4 w/1GB DDR memory, so it may be slightly biased! ;0)
In my case, instead of parsing, setting, parsing, setting, I waste some memory and parse the entire file into appropriate classes (PoserScene, PoserCharacter, PoserObject (for props, actors, lights, and cameras), PoserFigure (added to PoserCharacter for rigging and hierarchy), PoserChannels (within each PoserObject), and so on). Then all of the necessary information and, most importantly, the linkages (fields in the file that point to other actors, props) are set and available for building the scene.
Poser, like C4D, is a tool. In this case, I like the "extensions" (pre-configured characters) better than the tool itself. Since these "extensions" can be fitted to work with another better tool, C4D, I am willing to spend time making the necessary adapter so that the extensions can be used there.
Robert