A Plea to Pose Creators
Olo_Ordinaire
Posts: 742
I buy pose sets for each character generation I use. I use them as a starting point for a character's pose within a scene. They're almost never exactly perfect for the situation, but that's ok.
What irks me is poses that do waaaaay more than I think they should:
- poses that change the translation of the character within the scene - ZAP to 0, 0, 0 ! If I've already positioned the character within the scene and then change the pose, it's irritating to have to re-position the character.
- poses that change the expression of the character: I have one pose set that contains some neat poses, but the character immediately assumes a smile like a death rictus. Just don't do this, please!
- poses that change the eyeline of the character, meaning, the eye-tracking. I will manage the eyelines within my scene. Please don't assume my character is looking left and up just because his body is standing and leaning slightly or whatever.
- no more "Owww my arm hurts" poses. What IS that pose where the character reaches across its midriff to clasp the other arm? Just been to a medical clinic to have blood drawn? I have never, ever seen a human being stand like that.
Thank you. Minor rant concluded.
Olo
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Comments
To add my own request... fewer gender stereotypical names for pose sets?
Because you can be a feminine without being demure or flirty, and you can be masculine without being aggressive or cocky. Honestly nothing turns me off a product faster (other than sexy nurse uniforms - we're way more concerned with having deep pockets than a deep neckline and we're all tired of being sexually harassed because our job is fetishized but I digress) even if I would have otherwise had a use for some of what's in it.
Remember you can press control before double-clicking a pose and then untick the translation options and the character will pose in place.
Yeah, I understand that, but it's an extra operation, right ? I don't think a pose should alter the character's coordinates within the scene, at all.
Well, with the Preset Pose Load Options dialog (what you get with the ctrl-click), you can set your Preferred Options the first time (i.e., uncheck X and Z translation). Later, you press shift-click to apply the poses with your preferences. No extra operations, but you must rememeber to press the shift key when applying. It will probably become automatic after a little while.
I didn't know that! With some poses I've had to resort to locking the X/Y/Z translation sliders before applying them. This way sounds a lot simpler.
These are suppose to be Daz Law. XYZ translation is suppose to be done on the hip and not the character base. Expressiosn are not to be changed and neither are the eyes. That doesn't mean you wont come across it with older pose sets here but its been the rules for saving poses for a long time now, 9 years or so by my records.
there are lawbreakers
However I think there should be a special place in hell for the spinners
those who rotate the hip Y axis beyond +or -180° so loading a pose along the timeline makes the poor characters twirl 360°+
What Matty said. I was just coming in here to say NONE of the poses you purchase *should* do any of that.
I second the OP... but that's right, we rarely see Poses Presets with wrongly-set Transforms nowadays from THIS store as other said there's a related "Daz Law" for PAs to follow. There're still some wrongly-made ones from 3rd-party sites... BTW... I see animations from HEAT brigde that have transform values set on figure's root node... sigh.
Actually there're two types of pose products: "scene / theme dependent" and "use anywhere". For the former, hoding ctrl or shift before loading the preset will be needed if you don't want the figure jumps away.. for the latter, direct loading presets should be fine...
I'm familiar with the pose sets that are associated with a specific scene: groups of people talking or scene-dependent poses where characters are posed relative to a specific environment or prop.
I'll look through my pose sets to make sure I'm not looking at really old stuff. I stopped buying and using poses from other stores a while back, as they are often poorly-crafted disasters.
Okay, understood ! I don't buy pose products from other sites either , as well as less from THIS store as most of the poses are found to be very similar.
Agree with your other points - sort of disagree with this one as I've seen it quite a lot (assuming we're talking about the same thing) ... but mostly in younger people - it's a sign of nervousness or a kind of 'self hug' of reassurance ... or just when you're in trouble with parents/teacher/etc, lol. So if it fits the theme of a pose set, I'm okay with it.
This drives me nuts when I'm trying to simulate dforce.
I ask PAs to please NOT put their names on each pose. I want to click on "sit, or stand," and not PAArtist for every pose.
Sit or stand are pretty generic, but from what i have seen As geenrally use the set naem 9or an abbreviation), not their PA name (unless it is part of the set name). Folder names may well use the PA name, since Daz asks for that.
Besides translating position when it shouldn't, I've come across some poses that automatically change the character's scale. Even saving it as 100% is wrong since I may have tweaked the size to suit a particular character and it's a pain to change it back.
I also would really appreciate it if PAs created larger "tip" images for poses. The common smaller size makes it really hard to figure out what the hands are doing until you load it and discover they're giving you the finger or something (I exaggerate) :-) .
I will use the group function to avoid certain poses from moving, or that don't use the hip rule. This stops the character from moving and can be used to move character(s) to another spot in the scene.
My biggest peeve are new poses (since simulation became an option), that move a limb through the body. I kept having an explosion with a great finished pose, so I ran the simulation bit by bit and found one of the arms moved from the A pose through the torso to reach the final location behind the back. When I use that PA's poses now, I avoid any pose they created that have an arm behind the character. And I love their pose sets.
No one mentioend yet the cases where they chnage Scale of you figure as well, had this happen in some interacting figures pose pack :D
Never mind I was blind.
Wondering though was there ever some script or tool that helps realign Hip and Object positions to same position. Often have to do this manually, especially when trying to dforce clothes falling on objects.
Poses are only endpoints, animations keeps track of the whole movement....
Which is why on some of the clothing sets I've done that are dforce and have poses with them, the pose artist has made simulation assitance animations. These are set up on a timeline and move various bodyparts and sometimes the whole figure to avoid clipping and other things that casue simulation explosions. These take a long time to work out and absolutely add to the time and difficulty of a pose set. However doing this for unknown clothing is nearly impossible, every mesh is differrent and has differrent stress points.
I did a quick survey of some of my pose sets and found these with less-than-optimal behavior. Started with a G8 or G9 figure in the standard A pose set to location X=100 Z= -100 and applied poses. Note: this is not an exhaustive survey.
https://www.daz3d.com/cayley-bundle-for-genesis-8-female-s ; product 48181 year 2019
Not only translation in the scene, but the added bonus of a death rictus-like smile applied.
https://www.daz3d.com/urban-ubiquity-poses-for-genesis-3-and-8-male ; product 56769 year 2019
Translation from scene position.
https://www.daz3d.com/em3d-cute-poses-and-expressions-for-kikii-and-kash ; product 92147 year 2023
Eye tracking changed when pose applied.
https://www.daz3d.com/z-everyday-standing-poses-for-genesis-9 ; product 87483 year 2024
Look, I'm really not trying to beat up on people. I appreciate the work PAs put into these products and I know it's not simple. But there has to be a quick, automated way to find these things. I mean, a pose file is just something like XML with nested attributes and values, I think.
So a script should be able to detect a value in the pose file with a translation of the root node to anything, right ? The same script could detect changes to face (expression) bone positions and eyeball rotations, as well.
Once again, I do appreciate the creators in here.
Ok, I took a look at some of the pose DUF files and most seem human-readable and are probably reasonable to parse and evaluate for violations of "DAZ Law." I will see if I can create a script or tool to check for "oopsies" of the type discussed in this thread.
I did notice that the pose DUF files for the "Cayley" set mentioned above appear to be encrypted. Is there a publicly-known key to decrypt these? Or is that a DAZ internal mechanism that us mere mortals can't use?
Thanks,
Olo
They would not be encrypted, just compressed. Use the Batch Convert pane to uncompress the duf files and you will be able to read them outside of DS. Of course if writing a script there is no reason to worry about this as inside DS duf files can be read regardless if they are compressed or not.
As well as removing the x.y, and z translations, you might want to also delete the x/y/ and z scale as well, as some poses set these to 100, which may override any scaling that has been done yourself.
Note that some free pose sets do everything on the main node, rather than the hip, including the y translations. If you remove the y trans for these, you may see the character hovering in the air after applying a sit or lay pose.
Thanks. I don't want to write a script to modify anything, at this point! I'm investigating what it would take to create a script to find these problems and call them out. Perhaps a content creator or the DAZ department that scrutinizes PA submissions might use it to screen poses before they hit the marketplace.
Perhaps the Daz "pose law" does not forbid movement of eyes or application of expressions with full body poses. Almost all of the G9 pose sets I have from the Daz Store move the eyes. A couple pose products that I tested even applied full expressions. If this is forbidden, Daz testing is not robust enough.
The thing about the eye rotations changing is that a lot of these sets rotate the eyeball bits inside the head. They don't use the "Look Left-Right" and "Look Up-Down" sliders, so you have to go burrowing into the figure's head to find the eyeballs and zero 2 or 3 rotations for each eye -- 3 because some even use the "Twist" rotation. It's just painful to deal with.
I like the more recent animated poses with animated expressions however I also wish they had with and without options, while I can drill down to head in the timeline with hidden, morphs etc checked and lasso and delete the keyframes (I often do) it's just a handier option if I already have other animated expressions applied.
My biggest problem is with female poses, knees turned inward, and backs arching in a ridiculous way. Good thing that one of the Build Your Own Pose set has a torso straighteining option.
If the product is suppose to include the facial expressions then it should state in the product description and its ok. BUT, if its suppose to be JUST the body pose, then no, no facial expressions should apply.
Here is my perspective of how Poses and Expressions should be labelled. We have a folder that describes the conents of the pose set. (It might also inclue the PAs name), Under the folder, the poses should be named by the poses themselves. (Sit, stand etc.) Because the poses are under a designated folder, we don't need to worry about mixing them up with poses from another set.
All items should be set up so we can easily find the poses in alphabetical order by their intended function. We lose that convenience when there is a "PA" name or other info in front of the Pose name itself.
Here is an example of a set that is useless to me because the PAs name is at the beginning.