Poser Building Block Tutorial #1

Poser 3 Building Block Tutorial #1
By Bill Allen / Images by the Author

Click to read this tutorial without frames

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Status: This tutorial was first posted 12 June 1999.

Purpose: This tutorial shows how to create a dining table using footCubes as the constituent building blocks, and in the process demonstrate the use of templates and a disciplined modeling approach.

Requirements: To do this exercise, you will need Poser 3.0.1, and you will either need to make a footCube from a Poser box prop according to instructions, or download the ready-to-use footCube1x1 and footCube8x8.

Note: For this article, the measure prop footCubes will be referred to as being in a Library\Props palette called "measures." If you put these props elsewhere, subtitute that location for instructions such as, "load a Props\measures\footCube8x8 prop."

Disclaimer: Everything in the main tutorial is within the scope of of Poser 3.0.1's documented features, except for section 2, where a light-duty use of "warp modeling" lays outside the approved scope of Poser abilities. While that instance should not pose a risk of crashing so long as the instructions are followed, some hard cranking on one or more of the workbench figure's parameter knobs could freeze the program or system. Experiment at your own risk.

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1 A table by design
1a__ Lets start with a plan. You can do this in a drawing program such as any version of CorelDraw, FreeHand, or Illustrator, or in an image editor such as Photoshop or Painter. Turn on the ruler and, if your application allows it, change units to picas. This tutorial will be shown in good ol' anachronistic American feet and inches, so picas and points (12 to a pica) will make a convenient analog.
___ The basic tabletop will be 3' by 6' by 3/4", will stand 27-3/4" off the floor for a total height of 28-1/2". The legs will taper from 3-1/2" square down to 1.5" square, and will have four 3-1/2"x3/4" reinforcing crosspieces underneath (furniture makers call these "apron" pieces). Here is the formula for calculating how to scale footCubes as a percentage number: decimal inches divided by 12 and multiplied by 100

A simple table template (table surface bottom view) created in Illustrator 7 with View/Show Grid and View/Snap to Grid both ON, and with the File/Preferences/Guides & Grid dialog set to Cyan color, Styles: Line, Gridline every: 1p0, and Subdivisions: 12. The drawn lines are at 0.1-point weight. This file could have been exported to TIFF, but it worked better to grab a screen shot with its grid lines. That was cropped down to the tabletop outline in Photoshop (Painter 3D would serve), and saved as an LZW-compressed TIFF.
___ You can create your own, or download one of these ready-to-go LZW-compressed TIFF templates: [_tbltoplo.tif (9K)_|_tbltophi.tif (29K)_|_about screen shots_] Decompress these TIFFs if using the original Poser 3.0.

1b__ Boot Poser clean and delete any figures or props that loaded by default. Work will be easier if you turn OFF Display/Ground Shadows and Display/Guides/Ground Plane.
___ Load one Props/measure/footCube1x1 and Figure/Drop to Floor. Scale it as yScale 6.25% ((.75" / 12") * 100). Then xScale it 600% (6') and yScale 300% (3'). Render/Surface Material for Object: footCube1x1_1 and Load Texture Map whatever file name you have chosen from whatever folder you placed it in (e.g., Runtime/textures/measures/tbltophi.tif). This is a good time to pick and start using a rich brown wood color, such as RGB 151,55,23, so assign that to Object Color. To flatten highlights, assign a dark gray such as RGB 47,47,47 to Highlight Color.

Tabletop object with tbltophi.tif applied as a reference map.

1c__ At this point we have one piece--the table surface. And we will end up with one conglomerate object--the finished table. But, in the process, we're going to create and assemble a number of pieces. You can do this equally well with two very different approaches: You can "wing it," creating and assembling on the fly. Or, as we'll do here, you can get organized and use a temporary Poser Props library palette. If you're a hotshot very comfortable with working in 3D space, "winging it" might be barely faster for this project. However, organization offers more flexibility, easier restarts, and could save your sanity when building anything more complex than a table.
___ Poser as of version 3.0.1 does not let you copy/paste elements such as the table pieces we'll be working with. (Prove this to yourself, if you like, sometime when you have nothing in a scene to lose from the resulting crash.) But, unlike 3.0, it does let you save elements to a Props library, and that gives you an essentially unlimited ability to copy and paste.
___ You can save any selected element to a Props palette, though, as Cecilia Ziemer suggests, you will want to give it a useful, distinctive name, because the little prop icon can be hard to figure out if it include lots of other elements in a scene. In general, it will be much easier if you can create a library of pieces before jumping into assembling anything very complex.
Note 1: Elements saved to a props library retain all their parameters. If you want to freeze something at a new 100%, you must export the object, such as to Wavefront OBJ. You then can either add it to a props library, or just import a copy when needed (usually with %sfs OFF). For Poser 3.0, importing copies is the only way to emulate copy/pasting. And, for both versions, if you want to save multiple elements as one conglomerate prop, you will need to first export them together, then reimport and save as a prop. You do need to hide any elements in a scene you don't want exported (turn OFF Edit/Properties/Visible for such elements), including the Ground Plane if you didn't turn it off already.
Note 2: Unlike clipboard-based copy/pasting, with the use of the Props palette, you are left with a library of objects that will need cleaning up, usually best done sooner than later after finishing a project.

1d__ That all said, use Props/Add New Category, call it "table", and go to that new library. Now select the tabletop object (footCube1x1_1), add it to the library with set name "tableTop", and delete the original from the scene. In fact, do a File/New to make sure you have a clean slate.

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2 A leg to stand on
Note: If you don't have an empty work window, go back one step.
2a__ Load a Props/measures/footCube1x1, xRotate it 180°, and Scale to 29.17% (3.5"). Load another footCube1x1, xRotate it 180°, xScale and yScale it 29.17%, drop it far enough to butt with the first footCube (about yTran -0.037), and yScale to 210.42%.
___ Note that, while this yScale is positive, the result is downward, which you might think is a negative direction. The 180° xRotate you did put the footCube's Origin Point on top, and the direction is relative to that. Seeing a prop's origin point can be very useful, so turn ON its Prop Properties/Display Origin. (A figure element's Origin Point displays only if the element is selected and the Joint Parameters dialog is open.)

2b__ File/Export/Wavefront OBJ to a new Runtime\Geometries folder named Runtime\Geometries\tableLeg. Call the file, "tableLeg.obj". Next, use Notepad or SimpleText to create a companion tableLeg.phi file with the text below:

Two footCubes in place and scaled, ready to warp-model into a tapered table leg.

footCube1x1_1

xRotate 180°

Scale 29.17%

footCube1x1_2

xRotate 180°

xScale 29.17%

yScale 210.42%

zScale 29.17%

yTran -0.037


objFile :Runtime:Geometries:table:tableLeg.obj

1 footCube1x1_1 xyz
	2 footCube1x1_2 yzx

The rotation order specified here as yzx for the second object is vital to the next step. (The order for the first object doesn't matter.)
Note: If your footCube have different extensions, such as _5 and _6, or _8 and _9, change the .phi file accordingly.

2c__ Save the PZ3 file if you like. Now File/New and File/Convert Hier File and bring in Runtime\Geometries\tableLeg\tableLeg.phi. Select footCube1x1_2 and play with the Taper knob. You could do an arbitrary taper and get good-enough results, but lets instead adhere to our plan above to start the 3.5"-square piece taper after the first 3.5" down to 1.5" square.
___ Turn ON Display/Tracking/Full Tracking. Bring in a new footCube1x1 prop, Scale it to 12.5% ((1.5"/12")*100), and yTran it to the bottom of the table leg, a move of about -0.321. Now, select the lower, taller footCube, and use its Taper parameter to closely approximate the width of this reference footCube. This is going to be done best in close, in an orthogonal view such as Front camera, and the Taper result should be around 39.6%.
___ Select the measure reference object and Edit/Delete Prop. This leaves the two original footCubes, which we now want to freeze together with fresh 100% parameters, so...
1) File/Export/Wavefront OBJ with any name to any folder that's handy,
2) either delete them from the window or do a File/New, and
3) File/Import the OBJ you just saved (with Centered, Place on floor, and %sfs all OFF).
4) Give the conglomerated object the same Object and Highlight colors as before [?]. If you find that you have two different "Preview" colors (e.g., Preview:1 and Preview:2), apply the same colors to both [Footnotes 1 & 2].
5) Save it to your Props/table palette with set name, "tableLeg", backup up this up as a new PZ3 file if you like, and clear the work window.

Although this didn't involve the fancy footwork used in the first tutorial, you did just warp-model a Poser workbench figure that was created briefly and solely for the purpose of modeling. Here there were two instead of three elements in the figure, and both were kept instead of just one.

Using a footCube1x1 prop (green) as a measure reference to correctly taper the bottom of the table leg (blue) in the workbench figure.

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3 Some assembly required
3a__ In an empty work window, load the Props/table/tableTop prop. Then load one Props/measures/footCube1x1, and xRotate it 180°, which makes the piece become flush with the bottom of the table. Use Render/Surface Material (Ctrl/Cmd U) and set the Object Color and Highlight Color to match the footCube to the tabletop [?]. The four crosspieces, or "aprons," are made of 1x4 lumber, which means about .75" by 3.5" by either 2' or 5'. So, with this footCube, zScale 6.25%, yScale 29.17%, xScale 500%, and save to your Props/table palette as "crosspiece". (Don't delete the original.)

3b__ Because Poser 3 doesn't have an orthogonal bottom view camera (Poser 4 will), you should set up such a camera view. For instance, Select Camera/Posing Camera, Yaw 90°, Pitch -90°, get the object centered and square in in the window, and set Focal to 0mm. Any further moving with this camera will be best done with its DollyXYZ parameter dials. When satisfied, set a Camera Dot.
___ If not viewing all elements in Texture Shaded view, make it so. Furthermore, you may need to do test renders to see clearly how the crosspieces line up with the table template. This will be aided by moving your lights to light the bottom of the table evenly, and by either severely diminishing or turning off Light Properties/Casts Shadow for two or all three lights shining on the bottom.

3c__ Use zTran to move the original crosspiece to the inner front line of the template. This move is about 0.125.
Using the Main camera view can be useful for getting an idea of what you're doing, but probably will not show the pieces lined up with the template. Use an orthogonal bottom view for that.

Using the Main camera view can be useful for getting an idea of what you're doing, but probably will not show the pieces lined up with the template. Use an orthogonal bottom view for that.

Go to Props/table and load a second crosspiece prop and zTran that to -0.125. Load another crosspiece, change its xScale from 500% (5') to 200% (2'), yRotate 90°, and xTran it to -0.315, to line up with the template. Load one more crosspiece and do the same, except xTran it to 0.315.

___ If you get in real close, as shown here at 763% Scale on the Posing Camera with 0mm Focal, you will see that the pieces fit together well enough for Poser work, but one could fine-tune the longer crosspieces to be at zTran 0.123 (shown here), instead of the 0.125 specified earlier, for a better fit. Both crosspieces seen here now lie just inside the template's thin black reference lines. If you make any adjustment to either of these pieces, make sure to do the same for its counterpart.
___ One could also change the length of the long crosspiece (seen as vertical here) very slightly for a better fit, but, before fussing with this, lets go through the next step: adding the legs.

Close enough for Poser work, seen from bottom orthogonal view.

___ Load a Props/table/leg and eyeball it into place, then zoom in and put it where you want it exactly. Here you see xTran 0.306 and zTran 0.114. Once happy with placing one leg, then it only remains to place three more and move them to the corresponding corners, and you don't even have to zoom in close to make sure it worked: -0.306/0.114, -0.306/-0.114, and 0.306/-0.114.
___ Look like a table, alright, but notice the smoothing on the legs, which you might like a lot or not at all, and a definite difference in coloring between the tapered leg part and the rest of the table that you probably won't like. Before making any further adjustments, however, save off a PZ3 file to your working directory so you can come back to this point and try variations.

Almost done, but note the surface color variations.

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4 Final work
4a__ Until there's some time to finish up this tutorial in better detail, there are three main things to tell you here:
1) Export the finished table to OBJ, save a PZ3 backup, if you haven't already, then do a File/New and import the table OBJ into Poser. At the import dialog, turn OFF %sfs and turn ON both Centered and Place on floor. The last, Place on floor, is what raises the table to stand on the ground plane (you built this with the bottom of the tabletop flush with the ground plane). Export/import freezes the table as one conglomerate object, ready to save to a props palette from which you can place and manipulate it in any scene without umpteen table parts all showing in an already overly-busy element selection menu.
2) Save the table to a Props library.
3) If the different parts of the table have different colors, like you see in the image above, the easiest, and maybe only, way to deal with this is open its prop .pp2 file in Notepad or SimpleText and make all the groups have the same material name: "usemtl Preview:1" or something similar. (Don't make something up; it has to be one of the materials specified in the .pp2 file. More about that later.)

And, oh, if it's still there, you can remove that table template image now!

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5 Conclusion
5a__
(Coming.)

[That's all folks!]

Footnotes
(1) Before import, you can open the OBJ file in Notepad or SimpleText and look for the lines that read "usemtl Preview:1" and "usemtl Preview:2", and either delete them or change them both to read exactly the same. Either way, the conglomerate object will take only one set of Object and Highlight Color attributes, making control simpler and more foolproof.
(2) Even if color attributes are assigned separately to the two conglomerated footCubes that make up this table leg, the same is not true for texture maps. A map assigned to one will also be applied to the other. Because the two footCubes are scaled differently, one map probably won't work on both equally well. So, if you planned to use texture maps, and, if the upper footCube would be visible in your camera shots (probably not), you would need to save the two props separately.

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3DA#36 supplement [3DA#36]

Revised: 16 June 99
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