This is my first post here in this forum. I have Poser5.4 and I have carefully organised our material in several Runtime folders. I have placed the DAZ files for Vicky2 and 3, StephaniePetite and Michael3 in the basic runtime of Poser. The characters, lights, hair, architecture etc have all their own Runtime which I also placed in the Poser5 main folder. But Poser is so incredibly slow now. Not only to start but also to load anything. A character, a pose, hair, light...it all takes minutes. Poser now has all the Runtimes in the library. This was not waht I wanted. I wanted it to start with the basic runtime, and me choose from the other runtimes when I chose to. When all is loaded, then it becomes slow, but the normal speed I remember. To explain a bit: normally it is my friend who worked with the computer, but he is too busy with his painting and his website, and I have been using his programs but I have never installed Poser before. So I remember that normally is was much faster. I cannot ask him as he is away for an exhibition, and also because I want to be able to do this myself. No problem for Photoshop or Cinema4D, but Poser...olala! My english is not perfect but you will understand me I hope. What to do to get Poser faster? It is not our computer as that is a fast one: 3GigaHertz with 2 GigaHertz RAM and a Radeon9800 videocard. I have many ideas but this is slow as a snail and that makes my creativity fall asleep. Thank you.

If you have been moving files and folders around a lot to reorganise Poser, I strongly suggest you defrag your drive. That may help increase speed somewhat. I'm also dubious about the value of multiple Runtimes. I prefer to use one Runtime with nested folders to keep the top level library folders down to a reasonable level. Poser seems to look only at the top level of whatever directory it's in, so you should not notice much of a slowdown when dropping to a deeper level, unless you have a ludicrous amount of subfolders in there.

I had trouble with multiple Runtimes in Poser 5. Once I put everything in one folder the problem disappeared, and it's so much better now! Though P5 can recognized multiple Runtime folders in theory, that doesn't mean that it's a good idea. :( Best Blessings, --Invidia

I started seriously using Poser 5 about 2 months ago. I had so much stuff I wasn't using half of it because I couldn't find it in Poser 4's one runtime. I've got 10 runtimes and don't have a problem with them. Cliff Bowman did a tutorial at DAZ on setting up multiple runtimes and it works well for me. And I can also find all my stuff now. The rendering is slower but I do see a difference in quality. So, all in all, I'm satisfied.

Here's the tutorial if you're interested http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=9060&start=0 My main complaint with Poser 5 is how firefly craps out on big scenes...that's pretty much all I do and I hope Curious releases at least a fix for this issue

If you have multiple runtimes actually inside the poser 5 folder, then why not just make it one runtime anyway?

If you want to keep the michael 3 and stephanie stuff etc seperate, then you could just make folders for each character and put the stuff in them.

Message edited on: 12/14/2004 10:26

Thank you for replying. I prefer to have the items in different runtimes because it's easier for me to work. I have set a personal interface in Poser with three lights classic studio (main, fill in and backlight, all thee white and no shadows), no character loading and Pose camera (rotates round character. very handy) set to focus50 with horizon 3/4 high from the ground). I deleted the Content room. I have a all Vicky etcetera Daz things in the basic runtime. Then I have Architecture; Cameras, Lights, Hands and Poses; Hair and Juwels; Characters; Props; Creatures and finally freestuff that I will not include like that in my runtimes (there are exceptions). My mistake was that I thought that Poser was like other software and that it was best to have everything inside the CuriousLabs folder. This is not true. I read the whole tutorial of Cliff Bowman and destillated the essence from it. I now have a folder in C where I keep clearly named subfolders with the runtimes in them. And the templates, the materials, the backgrounds, the tutorials...) All this is backed-up to a second hard disk and to a external hard disk. And this works fine and not very slow anymore. Poser is not like other programmes. It is like a very conservative old lady that wants you to respect her little manners. One thing I find strange, and that is why I call it an old lady, is that when you are rendering, you cannot do other things. I think it uses memory like Windows 98 did: not "that much is for me" but "eighty procent is for me" without looking how much there is. Two things I cannot do, and perhaps someone can explain: 1/ I use shortcuts for to twoggle between Pose and Face camera. It is not handy when I selected a leg that I cannot use the shortcut to activate the settings for it. (I do not like the tools icons as they are not precise and sometimes don't work). Is there a simple way to go between a camera and the item you are posing and then back? 2/ Some items I have are not for Poser 5. (material problems). Now when I set the nodes like they should be (in my opinion), how can I save this? Other point, off topic here: I have Autumn by Handspanstudios for V3. When I try to undo the changes with the rem option, Poser starts looking for files I don't have, even files of the girl. The only option I have after Poser (like an old lady) had her say (cannot find this, cannot find that, and when you think it is finished, it starts again...ahhh! old ladies!!!)is to delete V3 and start again. Thanks, and more next time.

I also don't like this idea of multiple runtimes. I use a folder hierarchy which works really well for me. In my "poses" folder for instance I have sub divided it into other folders like "mat poses", "positional poses" "inject poses" etc. etc. This seems to work really well and I've done similar things with the figures and props and you can further sub divide the folders with no slow down in performance.

My mistake was that I thought that Poser was like other software and that it was best to have everything inside the CuriousLabs folder. This is not true.

Yikes. I didn't know that. I've been thinking about moving my runtimes from the Poser folder to another hard drive, because my C: drive is starting to fill up, and drive M: has lots of lovely space on it.

I hadn't noticed that P5 was slow, but maybe I'm used to it. Or maybe I don't have enough content yet for it to get slow.

2/ Some items I have are not for Poser 5. (material problems). Now when I set the nodes like they should be (in my opinion), how can I save this?

You could just save the item to your library. It should keep the nodes.

If you want to save just the MAT files, use the free P5 Mat Writer from Netherworks. (Read the instructions first!)

I like multiple runtimes. At this point, I'd find it very frustrating to work without them. I have one for each major character (V3, V1/2, the MilKids, SP, etc.). I also have "theme" runtimes: contemporary, SF, fantasy, horror, toon. And a "hair" runtime, because you can use hair on any character. Really improves workflow, IME.

I've been thinking about moving my runtimes from the Poser folder to another hard drive, because my C: drive is starting to fill up, and drive M: has lots of lovely space on it. < From what i understand if the runtime is on a diffrent drive (not just a diffrent partition of the same drive) from your virtual memeory paging file it will make it faster. I have my runtimes on a diffrent drive on my desktop computer and it seems much faster....but then my desktop has twice the ram that my laptop so it may not be that big of a diffrence. :D

My main P5 runtime is very lean. Just the content that came with Poser, and of course the !DAZ folder(s) from all my other runtimes. But my Downloads folder is pretty huge. It's sort of become my "outdoors" folder, with environments, plants, rocks, terrains, etc. Do you think I should try to keep my Downloads folder lean as well? That one can't be moved, right?

i think you can move your downloads, you'll have to redirect poser to look for it in the new place but it should be movable. My download runtime has become a catch-all for what doesn't fit in my other 8 or so runtimes....mostly it has p4 characters, aliens and robots/droids.

P5 has a harder time finding textures than P4. It is therefore more necessary to run CorrectReference (free from hogsoft) on all library items against your texture directory) so optimize run times. P5 boots really slow, but renders are fast so long as all texture files are optimized. The need to set up separate runtimes isn't as useful in P5 since you can have multiple levels of library items.

Poser's usually working slower and slower because there's too much poser stuff out there with paths to textures etc. that are completely wrong, so the more you add to your runtime, the longer the time for poser to load. Multiple runtimes really only help, if you organized them in a manner that you only rarely have to switch between them (otherwise you just waste time while switching runtimes instead of losing it at poser's startup). Defragmenting of course does help, as does a faster hard drive if you're still using one with less than 7200rpm. Using correct reference (pro) will also drastically improve the situation if there are lots of incorrect references.

Another start up speed up tip: Create a folder, call it something like 'null runtime', install =absolutely nothing= in it, and get into the habit of setting P5 to that runtime before you close it. P5 reads the file structure of whatever runtime is selected at start up. If there is nothing to read, it goes on its merry way loading. You should go from click on the icon to a ready to run Poser in 15 or so seconds. When you switch to a runtime with content you will have to wait while Poser reads....but it only reads a library when you open it. And the reading goes much faster than at start up, simply because your system isn't trying to do 15 things at once.

That's an interesting trick DaleB....I'm going to give that a try. I have 10 runtimes. None of them are on the C drive, but all the geometry files are. What I've found is that Poser 5 seems to be a lot more fussy about where the geom's are than anything else. All my runtimes and my textures are on an external Maxtor USB drive. I also have everything I've ever purchased backed up to CD at least twice. The biggest time consumer is the initial bootup. Reboots are relatively fast. But I might be able to speed things up even more by following DaleB's advise and use my empty C drive runtime as a startup and endup point. What I find slows me down is runtimes that get too large. 20 small runtimes are better than 5 very large ones....at least on this machine (1.7ghz PIV with a gig of ram) I also use CRPro to direct path all my textures and injection files......anything that references another file.....and that's located on that Maxtor (G) drive. That really speads things up. But leave the Geometry files on the C drive. Even creating a direct path on a different drive is not as fast as relative path on the C drive where the geometry files are concerned.

I've heard that some people keep all the OBJs and textures in the main runtime. That would be great, because some items for different characters use the same OBJs or textures. But it doesn't seem to work for me. Poser doesn't seem to able find them if they aren't in the same runtime. I tried running CRPro, and it acts like it fixed the references. But it doesn't.