Poserfusion and LW 2015.3 LWSN

C

cyclopse

New member
I picked up Poser Pro 11. I was under the impression that fusion actually converted files to lightwave. It does not. (It converts objects, but all the deformations and animations necessitate a mirrored Poser environment). I'm using a small render farm for lightwave in my home (8 computers). When I try to render scenes, unless poser is physically on the node and licensed with all the libraries shared, the character won't move (frames rendered on nodes just hold the pose from frame 1). Is there a way to set up the nodes without having to buy Poser for every three computers? I mean hell... I'm not looking to actually USE poser on the nodes... just deform something I already did. Documentation for network rendering with poserfusion is... well... nonexistent.

Please don't say "just use DAZ." I have too much time invested in my Poser figures and animations to just switch to DAZ. Besides... DAZ may be free... but any content worth a crap is just way too much money, and great for still renders... but animations? Please.

Also, please don't say "just export the object to LW and rig it there." There's a reason I picked up Poser... no need to re-rig and create morphs for every expression and phoneme. I'm just trying to have the fastest workflow possible to turn around episodes (by myself) every couple of weeks. I have nearly 100 characters in this series, and don't want to die of old age before I start rendering.

I've tried:

Sharing the poser install directory from the master node as a logical directory
licensing (and then deactivating) the poser on the slave nodes (after making sure the plugin for poserfusion works).
Sharing the LW install directory and config directory from the master node as a logical directory

I'm using:

LW 2015.3 (Nevron & Chronosculpt)
Poser 11 (pro)
Dreamlight Constellation and DLI_SNUB (render manager for LWSN)
1 master node (8-core i7 5960x OC at 3.97GHz, 32GB DDR4 3.0GHz, 28TB RAID 0)
1 Dell R710 Poweredge server with Windows 10 Pro (dedicated LW render machine) - (2X Hexacore XEON 2.9GHz, 32GB DDR3, 500GB HDD)
6 various random windows machines (have some macs on standby, but don't like to mix kernels on anything with hypervoxels or proc textures for obvious reasons)
(a crapload of other stuff that's not relevant)

Please help. This is absolutely making me pull my hair out.
 
You are welcome. I might have a architectural job coming up where I will need little people walking around to decorate the building. I never used PoserFusion. Would this program be a good choice for creating animated walking figures for an architectural render? Another post on this forum lead me to look at Anima. (https://secure.axyz-design.com/anima-crowd-simulation-software-home). This software looks nice but it is overkill for my project. Plus I would like a solution that works on the Mac. As a PoserFusion user what do you think?
 
lertola2 said:
You are welcome. I might have a architectural job coming up where I will need little people walking around to decorate the building. I never used PoserFusion. Would this program be a good choice for creating animated walking figures for an architectural render? Another post on this forum lead me to look at Anima. (https://secure.axyz-design.com/anima-crowd-simulation-software-home). This software looks nice but it is overkill for my project. Plus I would like a solution that works on the Mac. As a PoserFusion user what do you think?
Click to expand...

Not sure about anima. But yes, Poser would be a good fit for it. VERY easy to do walk cycles with the walk designer, lots of prefab poses for sitting at desks and holding briefcases, tons of prefab props, etc. I'm not wild about the finer animation tools (the graph editor only uses splines... not beziers, so a bit clunky), but extremely quick for spanking stuff out and shipping it to LW, C4D, Max, and Maya with poserfusion. With fusion, you just open the raw poser file (no need to export, or go through collada). Not a lot of texture editing necessary after import either... pretty seamless.

My workflow with Poser:

Create environment in lightwave
Import LWO environment into Poser
Animate my poser figure(s) (individually)
Open Poser scene in Layout
Load items from scene (original environment)
Bake poser figure animation(s) (NOW... thanks to you)
Render image sequence (with depth pass (fixed distances), motion vector pass, no motion blur)
Use z-depth in AE to create DOF blur
Use Reel Smart Motion Blur Pro (uses motion vectors, and SUPER fast) in AE
Use the sync AE feature from LW to sync light and camera locations
Use Optical Flares (Video Copilot) for lens flares in AE
Render from AE to uncompressed quicktime
Edit in Avid MC
Color correct and film effects in Resolve (with Genarts Sapphire)
Compose Music with Presonus Studio One (export stems)
Final music mix and SFX in Pro Tools
Ship back to Avid MC for final render

(wow... that seems a LOT more complex than it is)
 
lertola2 said:
You are welcome. I might have a architectural job coming up where I will need little people walking around to decorate the building. I never used PoserFusion. Would this program be a good choice for creating animated walking figures for an architectural render? Another post on this forum lead me to look at Anima. (https://secure.axyz-design.com/anima-crowd-simulation-software-home). This software looks nice but it is overkill for my project. Plus I would like a solution that works on the Mac. As a PoserFusion user what do you think?
Click to expand...

I'll chime in to say I've used this technique several times for technical and industrial animations needing such background (and even the occasional foreground if the needed animation is simple) figures. As cyclopse says, there is a boat load of easy-to employ figures, poses, and no-frills walk cycles you can leverage easily. It works a treat and, of course, for performance and LWSN baking off the MDD is a must.
 
I've been having very good results exporting from Poser Pro 11 to LW via the FBX option. There are a few check boxes that need to be unchecked from the default preset such as for transparency and baking morphs (all my notes are on the other system though). I haven't experimented much with it yet yet but seems like add'l animation could be done in Layout on top of what was brought in from Poser as well. Motion Blur works correctly too whereas simply importing the Poser PZ3 file doesn't.
 
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