Adding Extra Cameras to Poser

Mini-Tutorial

This mini tutorial explains how to add additional cameras to Poser 4. It may work with other versions as well, but I haven't personally tested it with the ProPak or the Mac version, and of course have no idea how Poser 5 will deal with it.

Also please note that this is purely a technical hack of existing Poser features and it is not officially documented or supported by Curious Labs. This page is only intended to share my findings with others, and what you do with that information is your own responsibility.

The Explanation

I've always wanted to have more named cameras to pick from, and finally figured out how to get them. Usually when I'm about half way through a scene I've used up the Main, Aux and Pose cameras for specific viewpoints, all the UI dots have something going on, and I have about 23 different saved camera settings - all of which I can never remember which is which, so cringe every time I click on some camera-related thing.

So I started messing with pz3 files and realized you could add extra named cameras to them. This works well if you "Open" a pz3 with the extra cameras defined, but of course replaces your scene. Unfortunately, if you use the Import feature in order to bring them in and keep your scene, even use exactly the same pz3 file that worked from scratch, they don't get created properly. In this cases you end up with cameras that have only the Focal and Hither channels but nothing else.

If you start your scene by loading the extra cameras through a pz3 they seem to work fine though. They save to the cameras folder fine, seem to work with animations, and you can select the new ones without them stepping on each other. Then I tried adding them to the preferredState.pz3 so every 'new' scene would start out with the extra cameras, and that also seems to work fine.

I have only played with it a bit so far and so can't make any guarantees on if they will work with ProPack or the version 5 release, but here is the info I have determined so far. If any one comes up with additional insight and would like to share, let me know and I will either host it here or post a link to where you would like.

The final step was realizing that these could be placed in a cr2 file. This way they can be added to a scene and will be created properly. This handles the default "Main" type of cameras nicely, but when you start adding specific camera types that point at things, (ie pose, face, right and left hands,) it starts to get a little schizophrenic. The new Posing-based cameras seem the most stable, but the other three behave strangely.

For the Pose type, you can add several new ones, and they maintain their respective focuses. When used with multiple character's, some lock to a character, and some jump back and forth depending on the selected character. It seems kind of finicky with some times the first camera locking to one or the other of the character's, and other times it's the 2nd or 3rd camera that locks. Sometimes two cameras lock and other times only one locks and the other two jump. I'm starting to think it's all inter-related by which character was loaded first, which was selected when you brought in the camera, and how many Pose type cameras you have.

Feel free to play around with it though. I was trying to make it work first, and will figure out these nitty-gritty details as I get to them.

Download Samples Section

This latest version has the new cameras included as a character cr2 file. This is the only Poser folder I have been able to to successfully create new objects from. So even those these are in the Character's folder, they are not People, they are cameras. Unzip the Additional Cameras in to your main Poser directory, and they will create the proper sub-folder. In this case it will be call "dk enterprises", and will contain several cr2's for creating different camera sets.

Please note that the Pose and Special type of cameras are a little finicky. The Main cameras work very nicely and there are nine of them, so that should help quite a bit in most situations. If you really want to have additional Posing, Face and Hand cameras, please read those sections

How to use the New Cameras
Character Folder	Go to the main Figures folder. Click for the menu and browse down until you find the "dk enterprises" entry (Please note: the dk enterprises entry is all in lower case. Poser folder names are case sensitive so any folder names beginning with capitals will appear in the upper portion of the list, and the dke folder will be in the lower portion of the list.)
Add Main Cameras	Select this and then click the Create New Figure button to add three new cameras to your scene. These cameras are based on Posers default Main camera, and they behave in exactly the same way. There are three sets of these, and each one brings in three new cameras, so you now have an extra nine cameras to work with.
Add Pose Cameras	Select this and then click the Create New Figure button to add a new Pose camera to your scene. The Posing type of camera's can only be added one at a time, or they will not properly attach to the body. There are three different choices for adding a new Pose Camera 1, 2 or 3. Please note that these behave strangely by sometimes jumping to the selected character, and sometimes remaining locked to the previously selected character. Any body having the time
Add Special Cameras	Select this and then click the Create New Figure button to add a new Face, LeftHand and RightHand camera to your scene. Warning! These cameras behave VERY strangely. For example, they will only display the Poser default title above the channel dials. They do seem to be active in some cases, but whether they really are is not quite certain just yet.

New Camera Names