Ultimate Pose Master [Commercial]
V3Digitimes
Posts: 3,150
After long months of developments, Ultimate Pose Master is finally released, providing you an interface to create or modify poses which can be used in two ways:
- using it the "basic" way, you will be able to control all the bones of the figure using a synthetic interface organised by tab (by body area),
- using it the "advanced" way, you will benefit this synthetic interface, plus additional very useful tools driving hands and feet location in the scene and keeping their location (and/or orientation) as you pose the rest of the figure.
- You will also be able to display and update the center of mass of the figure, as well as the "axis of sight" of the figure.
More information in the following videos:
overview : https://youtu.be/yOtXjZJIq1o
posing a figure : https://youtu.be/GULy-U5Qh_s
posing trunk/keeping hands orientations: https://youtu.be/lSOX_8VqSdw
posing head and eyes: https://youtu.be/n3UxVjQdK8A
For any questions, remarks, concerns, feel free to post here!
edit: 18/09/2019: THE 1.1 VERSION (UPDATE) SHOULD BE LIVE NOW. This is the same as the initial 1.0 version, with in addition, some additional features requested here by the users (Store/Restore a pose at any time, delete or not all tools when you close the script, hide/show tools in render mode), and additional tools allowing a better workflow for people having performance issue (even if it seems to be a minority of people). These additional performance tools have been included at the bottom of the "Arms" tab, which was renamed "Arms/Conv." and include 3 convergence presets: Default (which is the default of version 1.0 and 1.1 and is ok if you have no performance issue), "Medium" (will require less time for the calculations, with a slightly lower precision), and "Fast", which is the minumum and fastest settings you can have, but you lower the precision of the hands and feet location.
Bellow the 3 convergence presets, you have 3 sensitivity presets allowing to define if the steps when you use the "+" and "-" around the helpers are 1, 5 or 10 cm. (so still in the Arms/Conv tab).
All these tools act both on hands and feet helpers.
You also have scene tools included in the two menus at the bottom right of the interface (where the "Close" button previously was), allowing to work on the various elements which can speed up your workflow, such as lowering the resolution of a figure, hiding (and showing) wardrobe and accessories of the figure, all hair, or all other figures, or all non figures in the scene, all this via dropdown menus.
The paper documentation was updated too. First you have a new parts detailing everything new in the 1.1 update. Then you have a "summary", and you can click on the various tiltes of the summary to be sent directly to the corresponding page in the document. Once in the document you can use the only "Bookmark" of the pdf to come back to the summary.
edit (21/01/21): Pose Master will be updated to support 8.1 figures. For now, it can do it, but with warnings: if you select the figure, you will have a warning message, and no interface BUT you can have it working if, instead a selecting your figure, you select a BONE of your figure (left thigh, right hand..). You may still have the warning, but the pose master will work (not entirely tested yet, but the helpers and body/limbs dials work). One thing that might not work is that the limits of the bones of the faces are not automatically on, I won't enter in the details, but it seems that setting limits to off in Daz Studio (F2 key/Content/Always turn limits off) should avoid 'over expressions' due to the usage of G8 expressions on 8.1 and using pose Master. This is mainly what will be solved in the update.
In brief, while you wait for the update for 8.1, you can still use it. In order to have pose master working on G8.1, select a bone of the figure instead of the entire figure, and make that either you don't use expressions 'above the limits', or that bones limits are off when you launch the script.
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Comments
Looks very interesting. Will try it during the weekend and see how it works.
Thanks a lot! It is made to be very intuitive to use ("dial and see"), but you anyway have a big documentation, paper and video :)
This looks amazing. Looking forward to testing it out!
Thanks! Have fun with it!
Definitely a must buy for me -and great with all the documentation
Thanks! Well, after more than four month scripting this product, it was not a problem for me to spend a few more days writing and filming a documentation :)
I picked it up and so far it looks really powerful and easy to use! The only issue I'm having is that there's a lot of lag in posing, even when setting the viewport to modes that usually eliminate it, and unfortunately that might limit its utility for me a lot. But I think that's likely due to my computer and not the script.
If you have an old computer, things should be better in "Texture Shaded" mode of course. My computer is 6 years old now and it works fine (but it was a very good computer on that time). But if you want to have less lags, and your computer is old, you can try to hide heavy elements of your scene (hair, outfits), or eventually set the figure resolution to "base". Otherwise, via the last tab of the interface, you can also be more "relaxed" regarding convergence settings criteria (less iterations/higher tolerance distance), and then "at the end" you set back more strict convergence criteria, and simply click on the "+" and "-" around one or two dials to activate the final convergence iterations. Last remark, is that if you have wearables with smoothing on, then the smoothing iterations are recalculated at each step, slowing down the process. You can set enable smoothing to "off" on the wearables, it will help your computer. This is an option I could add to the program.
The "+" and "-" advice is true whatever the computer power. Use the dials handles only for large variations, otherwise for fine tuning, click on the "+" and "-" on each side of the dials. If you stay clicked on the "+" or the "-" you will be able to have a continuous, more fluid, variation (1 cm steps I think, and you can enter the exact value in the dial if you want it more precise).
I've gotten great use from your Ultimate Pose Mixer -- it's served my purposes much better than "Pose Blender," not that I'm trying to play favorites with content creators. This looks like a thing I would buy right away, but in the interest of healthier spending habits, I'm trying to make sure a product can serve my purpose beforehand, instead of making an impulse buy and then refunding for store credit if it doesn't.
My question is, would this tool be able to help me with creating certain kinds of animations? Specifically, for these cases:
I know the newest Beta of Daz Studio has some added IK features. I have not been able to look at them yet, because I've been having problems with getting the public build to work properly with old settings and scenes. Also, I just had a hard drive failure while in the middle of backing up a lot of my content! (is that irony, or just bad luck?) In any case, I would prefer to stick with the official version while things are stable, and if this product provides me with a solution where I don't have to learn too many new concepts, I'd be more than willing to pick it up.
Sorry for your hard drive failure... For your question, the answer is yes and no. The Pose Master does not work on animations, only on poses. Yet it can help you keeping the feet on the floor at a given location (and with a given orientation), and you can do the same with the hands, while moving the other body parts. It could also help you placing the hands correctly on a two hands axe. For an exact and very precise location, you can end the pose process with a final step with strong convergence criteria on hands and feet helpers. Yet, if you use this program, it would require that you create and save several static poses, and then reload them at different frames of the animation, and in this case, I don't know how it would behave because of interpolations "between the frames", which might move the body elements you don't want to move for this animation. This is why I'm not sure what the answer is...
The videos help a lot in explaining the tools. To me, the three main draws are:
Since I almost always have to adjust even very good pose sets for minor details because of the custom characters I use, this will save me a LOT of time getting that to work properly.
hm... this looks to be like a power pose with sliders.
Which can be still usefull, but there are some points, which prevents me from buying the product, is
Whilst I am not doubting this would be nicer as a plug-in, the script does include options to swap and move the cameras.
I understand. What you can do, if you don't need the helpers, is to immediately disconnect helpers (when you open the interface, you click on the button bottom left of the interface "disconnect helpers"). Then you can use the as a "simple synthetic global interface" without the smart features, which requires not a lot of calculus so is faster. What you can do then, for instance if you reach a pose you like but you want to adjust the arms or legs orientation after the hands and feet are "in place", is to "reconnect helpers" (using the same button), and then (via the collective actions of the "Global Options" tab), "Move All Helpers to Hands and Feet". Then once the helpers are placed back on the hands and feet, you can adjust the arms and legs poses after you posed the figure "without the smart features". And if you want to adjust the hands and feet location, you click on the "+" and "-" around each dial of the corresponding helper (hold on the click for a continuous cm per cm variation).
If you want to go faster, you can also reduce the number of iterations (Global Options Tab) to 4/5 for arms, and 5/6 for bent legs, 10/12 for "stretched" legs.
Well I'm not sure I'm clear, what I mean is that you don't have to always work with the smart features, you can do a LOT of the posing work without the smart features (disconnect helpers), and then "reconnect helpers" when you need them. And in this case, in "your" case, after you "moved helpers to hands/feet" rather use the "+" and "-" around the helpers location dials. I hope this helps...
Thanks, yes you perfectly understood some of the advantages!!! It should be very useful in your cases of figure!!! One thing to remember is that by default the helpers are connected when you launch the interface and you have the "connect/disconnect" button always visible at the bottom of the interface (disconnect if you want to use it as a "basic" interface without smart features). Also remember that if you pose the figure "disconnected" and then "reconnect" the helper, you have to "Move Helper to Hand" (for instance, available from several places in the interface) before you adjust the arms bones. Anyway, after a few minutes of practice, this will become obvious, or you can anyway contact me if you have a doubt.
This indeed looks like a power pose with sliders. The right/left/hands feet can be separately pinned. You have, in each dial for each helper, an individual option "disconnect helper" and to "reconnect helper". The global disconnection is only a way to gain time.
Yes, the script is not a tab, this is sad, because it would require it to be a pluggin in this case and I'm not able to create pluggins. Yet in this interface, tools are always accessible at the bottom of the interface to orbit and zoom the perspective view around an orbit node, select an orbit node, swap to right/left/front/back/bottom/top view or any camera view (but only the perspective view can orbit). But of course I admit it is not as comfortable as the viewport of Daz Studio. If you are very familiar and comfortable with power pose, I think you'd better not use my product, and go on with power pose.
Thank you for that honest answer
No problem! I prefer people buying less of my products but being REALLY happy when they have something from me. If I feel that they don't need it, just what I "feel" for you, I prefer they don't waste their money!
I think I'll give it a try, regardless. I'm doing this for a 2D project, and I still think of sprite animation in terms of discrete frames (Like a 16-frame walking animation). The idle could still be tricky, but what I might end up doing is something akin to stop-motion video, only with a digital model.
Okay, now that I've had some time to test it out a bit, the script feels very intuitive for me to use for the most part. I thought the eye target would work the way the helpers do, so that confused me for a bit (it doesn't matter that it doesn't, it just took me a bit to realise.) The camera limitations of being in a script make me sad, but I understand the limitation there, and things like the select orbit buttons in the fingers tab to quickly have an area that might be a pain to manually select is very nice. Also it's a lot smoother than I expected to jump in and out of the script if you do want to do things inbetween, and the updating helper positions have been perfect for me so far. Performance wise, arms are a lot smoother than legs for whatever reason for me, but everything runs just fine (using an ancient 2nd gen i5.)
I really appreciate the extensive, detailed documentation provided, and the balance between easy to follow and more background reasoning explained is perfect for me. Is there some way to navigate the PDF via an index or contents? I don't really know how to use Acrobat.
Overall, I'm really happy with the product.
A couple of requests/suggestions:
- The lack of an undo button is really painful for me, but I don't know if that's another script limtation, or if it'd slow things down too much recording each undo step between recalculating.
- I understand the sad limitation on camera control having to be in the script, but it'd be really helpful if there were controls to pan side-side/up-down along with the provided controls, and pan/zoom in the orthographic views. I don't know if this is hard to do or impossible, but I found myself missing those functions.
- It seems like it'd be more suitable for the helper objects to be hidden in render by default (if that's possible) and/or a cleanup button that removes all the extra elements that are created when the script is open.
Well, the choice is up to you. Just an advice to keep hands and/or feet at the exact same place with the exact same orientation on a surface: you have, just after launching the program, go in the "right (or left) hand (or foot)" boxes and in the option dropdown menu, immediately set (for each hand/foot) orientation as preferred orientation. Then the same way - in the same dropdown menu - set their limits to off (easiest way to use this, otherwise the desired orientation may not be kept while you pose legs/arms/body, because of the hands and feet limits). Then, when "try to keep orientation" is activated, each time you trigger a arm (or leg) calculus, the preferred orientation is applied. The preferred orientation is remembered as long as you don't close the script, meaning that during the session, you can change the orientation or the hands or feet, but as soon as you will activate "try to keep orientation", their original (preferred) orientation will be re-used. You can see the video concerning trunk/hands orientation, this illustrates how to bend the trunk while keeping the hands joined one facing the other (like in a "prayer" pose) which is the closest from what you need.
One more thing is that when you adjust the pelvis (with default "keep feet in place" option), this may become a bit laggy (this is the most memory consumming operation of all operations for this script). Several ways to counter this: use the "+" and "-" to control the pelvis orientation (hold on the left click on these "+" and "-" for a continuous variation, 0.5 degres step). Or disconnect the helpers (or choose the option in the pelvis box to let legs properties free), rotate the pelvis (the feet move away from the helpers BUT they will be replaced on it afterwards), reconnect the helpers (or change the option in the pelvis box so that feet must remain in place on helpers), and in the general options tab, choose the collective action "move both helpers to feet" (or you can do this directly by clicking on any "+" or "-" of one thigh rotation of each leg, which will trigger the calculus to bring the feet in place, or you can do this from individual helpers).
The tolerance is 5 mm in the default convergence. If you want something more precise, decrease this tolerance, and eventually increase temporarily the number of iterations. At any time you can check the distance between the helper and the current foot/hand node in the General Options Tab (check status).
Well, anyway feel free to contact me for any question, here or via PM.
Hello! Thanks for this feedback, I really appreciate. Yes, it is very easy to go back and forth between posing in the scene and posing by the script, and this was necessary because... it is a script and so sadly not a pluggin... I'm really happy that you are really happy with it :)
In order to answer to your questions:
The legs are a bit less responsive than the arms because if I move the foot helper I have an obligatory first step moving the foot away from the helper (otherwise I had convergence issues). This is why I have more iterations for the legs. This is only when the feet helpers move, otherwise, if you change the rotations of the legs bones, this first step is roughly not made (or not the same way), and this is more responsive.
Index: I have not made any index or content for the pdf for a "timing" reason. Making this took me sooo muuuuuuch more longer than I could have imagined, that at the end, I had an IRL deadline which forced me to choose between indexing the pdf precisely and commenting (text comment) the videos. I did the second.
Undo: I agree that an each step undo would be great, better than the current global "undo" of Daz. One of the issue is that I have never been able to make a partial undo in a script (some know how to do this, but I always failed, still don't know why). The second issue is that, when you move a rotation slider for instance from 5 to 10, for you this is a single action, but the script launches MANY times the same rotation function because the step for it is really smaller (0.1 or smaller, so a single step for you can be 50 for the script). So this is not easy to know where the undo starts and where it ends. Well I have no short term solutions even if I know those solutions exist. I know it would be better with this, this is why I provided the "reset pose" choice in the General Options Tab, but of course it resets it all... not perfect but better than nothing. So there is both a script (50 functions 1 undo?) and a "I'm sorry I never managed to do it" issue.
Camera: I had an issue with the orthographic view "zoom". I could not really "zoom" them, but I could "frame" something in the view. This could be improved, at some stages I had a solution to change the frame (via the frame size or the focal not sure which one) of them, but it created a lot of other issues when I swapped back to perspective view after using this. So I removed this bad solution that I had, and I rather chose to have a "frame node"/"frame object" choice which was a compromise between nothing and a solution which messed up the perspective view afterwards. For the perspective view camera pan, it is not really possible the way it is scripted. Indeed the perspective view location / orientaion is based on a sphere which center is on the orbit node, and I'm afraid it would very likely mess up the Perspective view control via the script if I tried to add the pan.
Hide/Delete Helpers: You have an option in the general options "Hide Hands And Feet Helpers" (this can also be done from individual helper box). The other elements are "nulls", and are not rendered (but indeed these nulls are visible in Iray preview mode). The eyes axis can be hidden from one choice menu in the eyes box, and the Center of Mass from a choice menu the center of Mass Box (and is not visible as long as you don't create it. But indeed, I could add in the general options tab, in the menu of the "Show/Hide ALL helpers" box an option to hide ALL, i.e. as you mentioned, everything which was created. Yes!! this I'm able to do
. I don't think about creating a delete because if someone deletes them, does not close the script, and tries to use the helpers, it could lead to a nice crash!
I hope this answers your questions!!!!!!
Ahh, I figured it was mostly limitation problems. For the delete thing, couldn't it just be "delete all helpers and close" with a confirmation box or something? Or just hide all would be fine too.
Thanks for your answers - you've done an amazing job with this product!
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! Really good to read this!
This is very intuitive and I'm glad I purchased it. . Unfortunately for other vendors, between this and recently picking up the Ultimate Pose Mixer, I'll be saving money buying extra pose sets!
One thing I noticed was that it leaves all the posing objects/props attached after closing the pose helper. Is there any benefit to them being left in the scene? It will recreate them if deleted, so I was wondering why the script doesn't just clean them up afterwards. I'm assuming it might help with speeds, but I didn't notice it being any faster loading it with the objects still in the scene.
Yes very intuitive, I also wonder why I make so much documentation for such an intuitive product XD. Thanks for this very nice comment!
Concerning your question, indeed, there is a benefit leaving them all in the scene. This is not a matter of speed, but this is that this way you can place the helpers before you launch the script, and then you just have to make "place hands on helpers" or place feet on helpers (or only the hand/foot you want). This is a feature that I use, and I did not want to prevent people from being able to use this too. For the eye axis it is also interesting to keep it even when the script is closed because it remains an indicator of the direction the figure is looking into while you pose it (as long as you don't rotate the eyes, because it is parented to the head an not to an eye).
I thought that when people would not need the helpers any more, they would just hide them using the interface option. Yet, since you are the second one to make a remark about this, I'm gonna write and post here a script allowing to delete all the elements added in a single click (not immediately but soon). Then I'll probably update the product to add this second "deleting" script, this way everybody will be able to choose when they want to "definitely" get rid off the additional tools.
First of all, this product looks interesting. Second, omg! You're going to put me out of business! (j/king. I know people will always want/need pose sets.)
I'm actually intrigued to try this out, as I have situations when I need the hands to stay in a certain location. I usually use the pins to do this, but looking at your product here, I'm thinking it might be a better option. I'll have to pick this up when I have the funds to do so.
Thanks! Yes for the center of gravity, I remarked that a lot of poses are much more well balanced than I initially thought (the contact point being in the right area). Take care anyway, even if the fully automatic update of the center of gravity is possible, it may slow down the process (depending on your computer). My computer being pretty old now, I finally often used the manual update of the center of mass in order to go faster on the rest of the pose process. But maybe it has less influence on newer computers.
For the "partial" undo this is a good idea knowing that I already have the initial pose saved in a temp folder (which allows the reset). It would make me do the same but at a different time. A kind of "store" and "restore" to add in one of the existing menu (because there is no more room in this interface). Thanks a lot for the idea.
Lol!
Don't worry as you say people will always need pose sets! I really hope this will help you in your workflow :)