Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I have been hankering to build my own clothes for Poser. To do so, I had to come to grips - to a small degree, anyway - with a program that could work with meshes, in this case the powerful, quirky, open-source Blender. The various tutorials I have read (see, for instance PoserFashion) always seemed to start with exporting a figure from Poser and then importing it into the 3d modeling program to use it as a dressmaker's form. I started with an installation of Blender 2.32, and discovered that there were no file formats that Poser exported that Blender could import. So I surfed, and I found my way into the fringes of Python import/export scripts. Fortunately, before I tackled installation of same on the Mac (Panther on the G4, by the way, runs Python), I had the bright idea of looking for updates. Bless them: in the latest update (2.35), they have bundled a whole bunch of Python import/export scripts. I exported the basic 'judy' figure from Poser in every format offered and tried importing them one at a time. The .lwo one works. It is TEENY when it gets in there, just a little dot, but I had been warned in some of my surfing that there were scale issues, so I now know how to resize in Blender. Now, working with Blender required figuring out key strokes for the other 2 keys in the 3 button mouse and even more, finding and turning on numpad emulation. Once I succeeded in doing that, I tried various tricks like - starting with an imported torso and straightening out and extruding (modeller jargon) the bottom border to add a skirt to a top. Then I worked out how to start from scratch and do a plain skirt. And then I encountered what I think is the famed normals problem. Basically, Poser thinks of things as one sided. It doesn't render the back sides of things normally. It doesn't even display them. I'd build a skirt, export it from Blender, import it to Poser, and it would look like a bunch of ribbons. It would drape more or less OK (dynamic clothing covers a multitude of sins), but the color would render banded. Somehow if I do more than make a tube - if I move vertices around - the normals get flipped ... Gnnch. So the next time I have a chance to spend some time on it, I will be tackling the normals problem (maybe this is why I haven't yet found a tutorial on modeling Poser clothes in Blender). For this and more on Poser's dear little ways, see 3d model creation for Poser which is so enlightening I will forgive the silliness of spaces in a for-the-web filename.

And then there's Vue. I love my Vue. Despite the crashes. So when Vue5 was released, I bought the upgrade. Only to find that the minimum system configuration required twice the speed of my little G4. I thought what the heck, and installed it anyway. What I wanted was trees, and there are more trees in Vue5, (not to mention a renderosity renderer. Renderosity gives the effect of colours reflecting upon each other, the effect I was trying for in the Demish entryway. [We will leave aside the 26 light sources. I was very young in the craft then.].) I hit the tree button. And it crashed. I turned off all the known incompatibilities (that I'd learned to do with Vue4) and it crashed. I thought, this is a new release, I wonder if it needs patched. Lo and behold, it had gone from 5.01 to 5.02 while I dithered about the installation, and I upgraded and it does run (though I haven't tried any of the advanced features, like that renderosity renderer. Yet. Stay tuned for lamentations on how my Mac melted). I have a whole lot of funky alien plants, but I still have no nice willow tree.

(By the way, with the introduction of Vue5, Vue4 dropped to a third of the price. E-on keep older versions of their software on the market - very kind to users of less powerful machines. Most manufacturers, they upgrade, that's it.)

So then I had the idea of trying another search engine than Google, popped over to AltaVista, thought I would look for scripts rather than models, and found POV-tree, which is a GUI interface on top of a POV-Ray (another open source modeler/renderer) script for building trees. Java is installed in the Mac. I downloaded the program, opened it, made a maple tree, just like that. Unfortunately, the current version of the program doesn't save anything besides POV-ray meshes; the author has disabled the exports for .obj in expectation of a commercial version but doesn't know when it will come out.

So now I'm going to have to find a way to get the POV-ray mesh into Blender (more searches for Python scripts - heaven forbid I have to learn POV-ray), and then export it as .obj or .3ds, both of which I know I can get into Vue. Unfortunately my job is about to eat my life, except for the little bit reserved for my History class paper, so it may be a while before I can offer a solution to that, as well.

There was an interesting article about technology development and simplification in the Economist, with the usual little barbs about techno-illiterate over-25s who will never adapt - I mean they don't use IM. I am tempted to write a letter to the editor pointing out that there are many more interesting things to do with technology than use IM.
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