First of all, let me point out that I've been using Poser 4, ProPack and P5 on two machines for over two years (well, P4 that is)... And - I am a very, very happy user - I feel Poser does things that once could only be "imagined" and is well worth the price.

However - I need a sanity check. I run W/2000 on 1.7 Ghz, 1 GB+ memory machines with over 600 GB disk each. Every OS component is up to date. All CL service packs, etc. are installed. But I constantly have crashes and hangs in the Poser User Interface, not to mention tons of just plain flakey performance. Example:

• After a render, poser just goes into space - 100% CPU utilization, no way to get it back. 10% of all renders end for me this way.

• All of a suden, most of the menus are grayed out. Within a minute or two - all goes dead.

• Poser looses it's place with respect to file location. Ie. successive imports of BVH files fail to go back to the last location, and instead go to some other strange directory.

Etc...

No other application of mine behaves this way...

I can live with this - but I am wondering am I the only one - and is there some other strange problem on my machines, or do other have this issue as well.

Thanks!

Lou

Hi I "feel your pain"-no I am sure you are far from the only one. Poser has dreadful memory leaks. Is this new behavior-or has it always done this? I am on a Mac-so I don't have exactly that problem-but I find that closing and reopening Poser 4 periodically helps free up memory and avoids crashing-I never do more than a few renders in a row-particularly with high poly figures with hi res textures- If I save often and restart Poser periodically I have few probs with P4.03 I recently got ProPak and am delving into bugs and crashes there also. Eric

I would guess you're having page file problems, since the hangs are common with that particular "feature". It will also stop you from rendering above a certain size, giving "Insufficient disk space" warnings. If you look on the CL website, there is a workaround for it.

Thanks for the reply! My problems became much worse after going to ProPack. I have used your method of closing Poser down and restarting frequently - but when you're in the middle of an iterative, creative session - I sometimes forget to do this, with usually disasterous results, since I also forget to do constant saves, since they take so long! I again, most of this can be worked around, and I was more disciplined, I would have fewer problems, but then again, it would be nice if the program worked (!) :)

Re: page file problems - no I have not had this problem in over a year - I adjusted the systems accordingly. One thing I have noticed that seems to make things worse is doing a "COPY" from the render window and then pasting into another application like Adobe Photoshop, which I should have mentioned, I often run at the same time for post work. Maybe I should do the Photoshop on another machine and keep one machine just doing Poser?

{One thing I have noticed that seems to make things worse is doing a "COPY" from the render window and then pasting into another application like Adobe Photoshop} Why are you doing a copy & paste from the render window? If you're going to take the image into Photoshop anyway, just Save the image as a Photoshop document. But, here are some more interface issues (in Poser 4): When rendering to a new, larger window, the new window may appear as a small square at the bottom of Poser. This makes it impossible to grab or move or save. I had to resize my screen to 1024x768 to see it... but then Poser moved all of the controls around and resized my document window from a rectangle to a square. I was then able to move the render window and save the document. When I went back to 800x600, the document window was still square and I had to fight with Poser to get it back to the original rectangle shape. Also, yes, if Photoshop is open at the same time, Poser will start to slow down after a few hours' work. This is probably due to Poser's known memory issues or it may be due to Photoshop needing a lot of memory. Either way, it may be best to quit Photoshop until you really need it. Or, close Poser and then use Photoshop. Or, continue pressing people to make Poser 4.5- a stable version of Poser 4, but without the Poser 5 non-working "features" (and slowness and bad render engine).

I hate to tell you this, but it's probably a very very pbad idea to run Photoshop at the same time as Poser. Poser 4, PP and 5 all have known serious memory leaks and running them at the same time as another memory hog is unrecommended. I had the opposite experience with you, up to a point. More freezes with P4 than PP, but I had plenty of freezes with PP. After a certain amount of time, it freezes. The same is true of Poser 5, very unfair since it takes a longer time to accomplish anything in 5 and still it wants to take a nap after 2 or 4 or 5 hours. If it were consistent or logical about it's freezes, things would be so much easier, but it isn't. At least try to learn to save often. I also forget and then have to reapply countless stuff in the material room. Makes me want to give up sometimes, but I don't. Short answer, there are plenty of other people out there like you. Emily

FWIW, I'm there with you. I really like some of the new features in Poser 5 (the nested subfolders and the cloth room), but the memory leaks and unpredictable crashes are just driving me to distraction. The only workaround I've found to help at all is the one Eric uses; shut Poser down every hour or two and then reopen the application to free up memory and re-stabilize things.

Of course, doing that still doesn't help with things like the freezes caused by the P4 lightset bug, or the intermittent render bug (same thing you described, where Poser just greys out and hangs indefinitely after a render), or the Wacom tablet bug, or the off-standard cr2 format that screws up the Tailor, or an awful lot of other very, very irritating problems. I've got a real love-hate thing going with Poser 5 right now.

Ordinarily I did close it down every 2 hours, but lately it's been taking a full reboot of the system, restart the computer, when P5 is having a hissy fit about finding textures to render. Yeah, it drives me to distraction. Pro Pack was definetly less buggy but I can't go back to that library nightmare! My dream is to set up enough firewire drives to have about 4 Poser installs-- one for fantasy, one for V3, one for Sci-Fi, one for a comic I never get around to doing. But you know I would need something from Fantasy in the sciFi one. Besides trying to keep track of textures and geometries. Why did I fall under the spell of this proggie? Emily

*All of a suden, most of the menus are grayed out. Within a minute or two - all goes dead.*Try clicking the Poser window. With the new parm dial palette, somethimes the window focus gets messed up.

If Poser wasn't so tantalizing, I would have given up long ago. But I look in the galleries and see the most incredible images made in the same buggy, aggravating app I'm using, and I take a deep breath and dive back in. If it's any consolation (and it is to me) most of my computer expert friends that have hung out here while I'm working are utterly appalled by Poser's crashes and weird little eccentricities. They can't figure out why any artist would be willing to suffer the level of sheer aggravation necessary to create art in Poser.....And then I take them into the Galleries and show them what's possible and their jaws drop! JohnRender (above) was calling for a Poser 4.5----a Poser that actually worked. No bells and whistles, no fancy features that are unuseable, just a Poser 4.0.3 that doesn't crash or leak memory or hang up on renders so often. I'd be willing to pay serious $$ for it, myself.

Hey, thanks for the replies... as I said, all of this is worth putting up with, it would just be nice if we didn't have to put up with it!

Yeah, there was talk about a Poser 4.5 in some earlier threads... by us people, that is. It would be P4 with P5's library management system and ALL the P4 bugs and glitches fixed, but no "advanced features" of P5 (read: the things that don't work consistently). But, the conclusion has been that CL will NOT be doing this type of coding. They (or their parent company) is fully committed to P5 for Windows and then for the Mac. There is no way they would go back and fix P4... especially when they consider P5 to be the "fix" for P4.

Attached Link: http://www.pcbos.nl

Yes, it is true. I write plugins for Poser 4-Poser 5, and the screen drawing routine in the program is by far the worst I've ever seen. In fact, it is so bad, that 23% of the code is there just for keeping things in track. The strange thing is, that in the Mac, screen redraw is done beautifully; but there, even more of the code is dedicated to keep the internal paths straight.. Hey, it's Poser you know, and it is still a great program- as long as you know what you're doing! Cheers, Paul Christiaan