Organizing all my STUFF

I spent most of the last week organizing my characters, clothes, props and scenes in Poser. Like everything else I tend to do, I started getting as much free stuff as fast as I could and then realized I couldn't find anything. Reminds me of my MP3 collection. So, I spent the week moving things around in the Poser Categories. This works a lot like Windows File Folders in terms of a hierarchy of things belonging to other things.

As part of my arranging things so I can find them, I decided to load a bunch of new content to my model libraries in Poser. Over the last couple of months, I have gone to a number of 3D model exchanges and download the internet their free items. It is amazing how many quality 3d models of everything from buildings, vehicles, weapons, furniture, etc are available for free on the internet. Unlike movies and videos, it appears that the 3D community is say more willing to share Intellectual Property.

The way I see it, most 3D modelers have developed the model for a specific reason like creating a scene, to support some project or just as part of their hobby. While there are plenty of people building 3D models and offering them for sale, I think a lot of modelers have already been paid for developing a model as part of a project or are just hobbiests and therefore are willing to offer their models to others for free. Also, much like the music piracy situation, there are programs that allow you to steal the 3D model if it appears in games or other 3D packages by intercepting it on the way to the video card. So, a determined hacker can get the model anyway.

Models come in a number of various formats much like images (gifs, jpgs, bmps) do on the computer. Of the various 3D formats I have been able to import 3DS, DXF, LWO and OBJ formats into Poser. The 3DS format is the format that is mostly avaiable in the free models you can download and also seems to be the format that will most seamlessly import into Poser. The other three formats usually require some amount of work on my part to texture or otherwise "fix up" the model. Unfortunately, a number of high quality models are developed in the two "high end" modeling package formats (3D Max and Maya) and then offered for free on the internet. These formats are proprietary and you cannot convert them to other formats or import them into Poser. These packages cost about $8,000 apiece, so, it doesn't look like I will ever be able to use these formats going forward.

Just as you would expect, I had a couple of hundred models that I had downloaded from the internet and then imported into Poser. So, even though I had organized my models earlier in the week, by the end of the week I had generated another mess to clean up. It looks like my new hobby is organizing content instead of using it. This weekend I will reorganize everything and then get back to exploring Poser for shooting scenes (now using all these cool new models) and maybe try my hand at animation in the package.

Here are a couple of examples of free models I was able to get into Poser: