SPOTLIGHT

Author: ZORG
Source: www.epiciworld.com

My name is Robert Templeton. I am 43 years old and live in Colorado, USA. Growing up in Philadelphia working towards and expecting to be a fine artist, my ambitions eventually turned towards more technical arenas including physics, mathematics, and programming - despite my blatant lack of proper university education. Introspectively, I consider myself to be introverted and not much of a social animal. I play guitar and like to listen to a variety of music from Renaissance to Trip Hop. Since my early twenties, I have been an atheist (or, at least, a very strong agnostic) and skeptic espousing the propagation of science, reason, and humanitariansim. My other interests include sci-fi, fantasy, reading, hockey, and consuming beer. :)

When and where has your passion for programming started?
After graduating from high school, neither did I have the focus nor the finances to work on a particular life goal. I was not well prepared to follow my dreams and fight to pursue them. After some years of being in the ’bad crowd’, a chance encounter with my now dear friend Joe in the mid 1980’s opened a whole new world. He was a COBOL programmer and had a Commodore 64 computer. This was the first computer that I’d ever met face-to-face. He taught me the basic ideas of instructions, memory, logic, programming language structure, compilers, interpreters, and so on - which I put to use in writing little programs. As a creative type, I found the creativity of having a bunch of seemingly nonsensical statements letting you control such a device to be fascinating. And that fascination has persisted and progressed for over twenty years.

Which tools do you use?
For development, Visual Studio 6.0, Visual Studio Pro 2005, CodeWarrior 9, and Xcode 2.4.1 are my required build environments. Mainly developing plugins for Cinema 4D, I have quite a few versions of it installed for testing purposes on several systems. Further, developing plugins related to Poser, I have many versions installed as well as a large wealth of content. Dimension3D’s PoserEd has been indispensible for examining and editing Poser content files. All of my documentation is created using Word and SnagIt, the final PDF document created using Adobe Acrobat.

What sort of tools have you used as an apprentice? I mean, have you attended courses, read books, tutorials, etc.?
As noted, I have no formal training except as an Electro-mechanical designer-draftsman some years back. As such, all of my apprenticeship in programming has been achieved through Joe, textbooks, online resources, assistive collaborations with other developers, and good ole’ struggle. Being a member of both ACM and IEEE has provided an excellent haven for increasing my knowledge and resources as a developer.

InterposerPRO is a masterpiece, how and why did you built it?
It is definitely an unfinished work continually in progress. As Michaelangelo often repeated after Pope Julius II in "The Agony and the Ecstasy": "When will you make an end?" - "When I am finished." Nonetheless, any good program is never done and always being improved.
The interesting part about why it was built is the historical circumstances that led to its embarkment. Back when Poser 4 Pro Pack and Cinema 4D R7.3 were the latest, there was really no reason for such a solution. We all happily used the hosting plugin to import our Poser scenes into Cinema 4D and rendered with the more advanced and faster render engine making changes in Poser as desired. The hiatus that resulted thereafter left many without any solution as Cinema 4D was changing so quickly as to make the antiquated hosting plugin useless. There was an outcry for support and none came quickly. There were several plugins which mimicked the hosting plugin, interPoser Ltd included. Several developers bravely attempted the full import solution - to include rigging and morphs and whatnot - only to hit the wall on more accurate emulation due to the wide disparity between Poser’s and Cinema 4D’s interfaces and features. I, too, pursued the easy route only to find the solution wanting and devoid of merit. Any solution that would boast an even rude emulation would need to consider more than simple equivalences between these systems.
The reason why leads to how it was built. After a couple years of unsuccessful experimentation with fooling Cinema 4D bones into working with tri-axial Poser deformation weightings and rotations, I had had enough. It was clear that the real solution was a plugin bone that applied the deformations and rotations according to Poser’s rules - as they were not rules used by any other 3D applications. Albeit a non-trivial approach, it was definitely the one required to start the emulation process on the right foot. Wherever possible, Cinema 4D’s existing support is used, such as with materials, but when Poser and Cinema 4D disagree vehemently, it must be that arduous plugin solutions be provided otherwise.
The design process from that initial recognition to what exists today was an eye-opening one and a deep educational experience. Early versions of the plugin were horribly inaccurate, very crash-prone, and slower than molasses. Aiko 3 or Hiro 3 would take half an hour to import (!), if ever. Perpetual thanks must go to superb alpha testing by Adam Benton (kromekat) and similar results with beta testers which prompted careful redesign of algorithms and methods to introduce the stability and speed seen with the first release and the increases thereby since. Lessons were learned that increased my programming skills many fold so as to cater to the users’ expectations and not just to developer implementation laziness.

What is your point of view on the interaction between Poser and Cinema 4D?
Never have two more opposite systems met! It is a marriage made in hell, but we can assuredly say that hell has received a breath of fresh air from heaven. Despite their great disparities and the challenge of resolving them, the current solutions, whether via interPoser Pro, BodyStudio, or the upcoming Poser 7 Pro hosting plugin, finally provide the happy mediums for utilizing Poser content and scenes within Cinema 4D.

Do you have other interests in your professional and private life?
Professionally, my focus is undeterred. interPoser Pro is an incomplete Sistine Chapel and garners my unending attention. My gaze may stray from one feature to another within but when this project was started it was with the goal of starting the process and evolving it further and further towards a better emulation with fuller support than has ever existed. There are many other projects of interest but I am stalwart to delegate their resolution to others while this endeavor endures.
Privately, I am a guitar player. Have been since 1981. I don’t boast any proficiency, but it is an enjoyable pastime nonetheless. Development does take precedence and limits my practice time significantly. But I’ll continue attempting to make the guitar sing for as long as possible. Another area that was once of great interest but has subsided since is robotics and AI. Although these are very intriguing interests, the multi-disciplinary requirements and vast difficulties make it unworthwhile to pursue individually without pure dedication - and a healthy dose of formal education. I had some fun results with Lego Mindstorms robots and even played with neural networks, but I sympathize with Douglas Hofstadter in that we are far from achieving artificial intelligence, especially human-like.

Which are your projects for the future?
interPoser Pro? ;) While this in on my plate, I try not to cloud my view with other endeavors. The scope of areas covered by this plugin - deformations, morphing, IK, motion retargeting, animation, dynamics, shader nodes - provides me with continual learning experiences and challenges. Despite Poser’s low acceptance by those using more advanced 3D applications, it has exhibited some of the more complex character concepts for many years. Some recent additions even stump the professionals in emulation - shader nodes most notably. More than likely, by the time that iPP is reaching its finality there will be very different projects in my purview than those currently considered.

EPICIworld thank you for being here and for speaking about you and your work.

Thank you very much, Enrico, for the opportunity to expound on the continuing interPoser Pro effort and the philosophy behind it.

Robert Templeton
Kuroyume’s DevelopmentZone
http://www.kuroyumes-developmentzone.com