Can't see the Bee..Updated

Chibimonchichi

When I load the Calypso 2-Bee into my scene, it does'nt appear in the window. It shows in the scene tab though. I've looked through my runtime and everything seems to be okey dokey. The Aquad and Mini Sub that comes with the Bundle load fine. Uninstalling and reinstalling does'nt help. Oh, and i'm using 4.8 but I don't think that has anything to do with it. Any help would be really apprieciated.

mjc1016

Go into the Surfaces tab and look at the Opacity for it...make sure it's not set to 0%.

That's an older set and it's possible that it is suffering from the fact that Poser uses Transparency instead of Opacity. (100% transparency means 0% Opacity).

Chibimonchichi

Hi mjc, I checked the opacity. Says 100%. Another stange thing is when I choose "select all" in the scene tab and go to manipulate the Bee with that Pose widget thingy, I get this. It's like the Bee is there but somehow small? I checked the scale size. Nothing wrong there. It's really odd.

Chibimonchichi

I clicked on "show bones" and again it seems to be there somewhere?

mjc1016

I don't have this set, so I can't be much more specific help...but just load it and then select it.  Then click on the little square with a '+' in it along the right side of the viewport...does it zoom in to a tiny version of it?

Chibimonchichi

No it sure does'nt..Just this. I'd really hate to ask for a refund cause I've been wanting this bundle for a long time. I appreiciate the help btw.

Chibimonchichi

Been trying to figure this out and came across this little do-hicky called the "Region Navigator Tool". When I click it, this yellow line appears in the scene. I'm guessing that's the Bee but it's smooshed inside what I call the bounding box? Those 8 L lines that appear around a character or prop.

Chibimonchichi

Tech support responded and appears the Bee Blimp only works in daz 3. They said since it is an older item it most likely won't be updated.

mjc1016

One possible way of using it...if you don't need any movable parts to move, is to try importing the obj file directly.

NorthOf45

Loading the .obj, flipping it around the right way, scaling and texturing it gets you something, but is a poor solution for a product that is still sold for $20, and in a $100 bundle (of course, considerably less when on sale). Can't see anyone being satisfied with that. Faveral makes some excellent products, not sure why this unique item has to fall between the cracks.

Faveral

I'm really sorry about that, I didn't know it broke with the newer versions of studio. I'll take a look at it and update it.

NorthOf45

Wow, that would be awesome! I thought you knew about it, from the previous comments.

I tried exporting it out of DS3 and Poser 6 after fiddling with it hoping something would get straightened out, but nothing really changed, just the size of the bounding box around... nothing.

Thanks for looking into it.

BTW, there's a bad texture map reference in C2-Bee-SeatL.pp2 (line 2550)...

NorthOf45

So, any news? Progress? Nous l'attendons toujours...

frankrblow

I'd like to know, too. Waiting patiently.

NorthOf45

Well, looks like it's not going to happen. The Bee and the Calypso Bundle have been pulled from the store, just like every other broken product that doesn't get fixed.

NorthOf45

Just can't leave this alone. I was playing around with the various tools and noted something odd about the cable (the one on the winch for the cage/jumpseat). I deleted the cable parts from the .cr2 and bingo! there's the Bee! Fully rigged and textured, all in working order, except for the cable, of course. That could be substituted with any articulated rope or similar to get the basic functionality. Or, if someone knows hw to make the cable work properly...

NorthOf45

Okay, the light of a new day reveals a simple, elegant solution. This reminded me of a similar problem on another figure where a segment on a chain was scaled to zero to hide it, and squashed the whole figure. The same is happening here. The cable has 31 bones but segments 02 through 30 are vertically scaled to 0% by default, which collapses the whole vehicle, somehow.

So, load the C2-Bee, and expand the node tree in the scene tab pane, or at least from Cable01 down. Select bones Cable02 through Cable30, and go to the Parameters tab pane, click on the hamburger menu and select "Show Hidden Properties". Select all the bones in the Parameters tab (Cable02 through Cable 30) and set the yScale to 100%. If you did it right, the Bee should automagically appear in the viewport.

Still a couple of steps. If the Cable Up/Down controller goes negative, the Bee squashes flat again. The slider is set to no limits, so if you are not careful, you might wonder what happened. You can change the parameter settings to "Use Limits" and enter a negative limit of 0.0, leaving the upper limit as it is. One consequence of this is that the nudge value becomes rather coarse, so change it to 1.0 or 0.5, as you like. The slider will be quite sensitive, but that's the trade-off. Or, just leave it as it is and make sure you never set it negative.

Now you need to save it so you never have to go through this again. Export as .cr2 (if you have the Poser Format Exporter, or is that built-in?), or save as a new Scene Subset, or new Figure/Prop asset (a bit more work). That's it! Good luck, and I hope the powers that be can see that the product gets fixed and re-instated for others to enjoy.

frankrblow

Nice work, NorthOf45! I'll have to try out your technique. Thanks! 

EDIT: Worked exactly as you said. Thanks again!

SpottedKitty

Excellent! Fixed, converted and saved as a Figure Asset!

Looking at the way the body parts are set up, I suspect the whole problem is caused by the differences between Poser and D|S in the way scaling is inherited. I have a few other oldies-but-goodies that needed some poking and prodding at the scaling settings.

NorthOf45

Glad to help out.

Okay, now that it can be used, I have found a couple of quirks with the add-on props that need a quick fix.

1) The seats on the left and right load attached to null objects, uniquely named, which attach to the hull. The cage and jumpseat also load attached to null objects, but they not uniquely named, so the prop attaches to the first occurrence of the null object with the same name (one of the seats'), although the proper null is in place on the hook. For example, if you load the cage first, one of the seats will attach to the cage's null object, and lower away with the cable.

The seats use Dummy_1 and Dummy_2. The cage and jumpseat each use Dummy_1, so they need to be changed. Edit the .pp2 for each and change all occurrences of Dummy_1 to Dummy_3 for one of them, and Dummy_1 to Dummy_4 for the other. This will ensure that each prop is parented to the correct null object.

2) The Gate's left latch limits need to be reversed from -3.83/0.0 to 0.0/3.83. The latch should move to the right, not to the left, from the latched position. The right side is okay. The values are stored in the .pp2, but uses some scaling somewhere. Look for these lines and change them as indicated.

File C2-Bee-Cage.pp2, under actor LatchL:1

translateX xtran
 {
 name Push/Pull
 initValue 0
 hidden 0
 forceLimits 4
 min -0.0156977
 max 0
 trackingScale 0.001
 keys
  {
  static  0
  k  0  0.016
  }
 interpStyleLocked 0
 trackingScaleMult 1
 }

to:

translateX xtran
 {
 name Push/Pull
 initValue 0
 hidden 0
 forceLimits 4
 min 0
 max 0.0156977
 trackingScale 0.001
 keys
  {
  static  0
  k  0  0
  }
 interpStyleLocked 0
 trackingScaleMult 1
 }