Well they added more rendering things, which are cool, but overall its just as flakey as P5 IMHO. 1. Duplicate magnet channels still are created. 2. Renders go into never never land with infinite loading texture message. No dump. No error handling. No time out. Nothing. No way to go through and check geometry etc to see what went wrong. 3. Cancel button does nothing of the kind. Nothing has changed here from P5. Whatever Cancel does it certainly does it very poorly. BTW god only knows what they are doing since you're simply cancelling a render. cancel should gaurentee exit from a render. There should be NO clean up or anything else. You're halting the render and dumping out. That simple. I am convinced, even though Cl denies this, that firefly is a seperate thread of some sort that Poser sends stuff to and communicates to via some sort of messaging system. Poser appears to have no real, direct control over firefly other than setting some options then submitting a render to that renderer. That would explain why cancel doesn't work since firefly crashes and Poser can only send a message to it to cancel. 4. Render an entire scene and no memory error. Render a small part of the scene and get a memory error. Neither condition exceeded my 2 gig mem. 5. GL preview looks nice and the preset material options are somewhat handy even though reflection/mirror didn't work right. 6. Speed appears faster but that directory switching is so slow. Overall I would trade off the point lights etc for fixes in bugs that have been reported time and time and time again. If nothing else, the cancel process or error process SHOULD have been improved. In fact, when talking to CL they promised better error handling. I don't see it here. I see the same voodoo crap P5 had. Since I get the same headaches in p5 I'll use p6 for the new features but am sadly disappointed by their lack of bug fixing. The lack of error reporting is really the hair puller for me. Gee dump to a log or something but tell me what crashed the system. as it is I might as well wear a scary mask and shake a stick at it. I thought Cl would do better than this. Yet another imple scene I must 3 finger and dump. 6.

Please email this to CL. Hopefully they will follow up on it for next SP release.

Cancel renders has always worked well for me in P5.

For me, this has been a needed, and welcomed update. I pulled my hair out many a times with both P4 and P5, and thus far with P6, the only problems that I've had is porting my runtime directory over, but that was more a user error than anything else. Here's the thing. This program is $300 for the Windows version, and is meant to be a HOBBYIST utility. I don't think that CL really realizes exactly HOW big Poser really is. I agree that there are some bugs that need fixing, but compared to the fubar that was P5, I'll glad deal with them. Also, don't forget that Poser has always had problems running on Windows, even when MetaCreations was doing it. I can remember having a snot load of issues with memory and renders with P4 and Win2K, and I had a gig of ram back then. And what processor are you running mason? My cousin is running an AMD64 3400+ (about $200 right now, give or take a couple of bucks), and P6 runs smooooooooooth as silk. When they give you the minimum requirements, remember that its the bare minimum to even get the program to BOOT UP at, not run well :)

"2. Renders go into never never land with infinite loading texture message. No dump. No error handling. No time out. Nothing. No way to go through and check geometry etc to see what went wrong." I have yet to encounter this problem personally in P6, but I don't use extremely large textures so that may be why. There is now an option to keep textures loaded into memory (as well as shadow maps), so that after the first initial test render, it doesn't subsequently need to keep loading them for every render thereafter. Apparently, there is a memory issue, which CL is aware of, and has acknowledged they will fix in a service release. That might clear up some of your problems.

"firefly is a seperate thread of some sort that Poser sends stuff to and communicates to via some sort of messaging system"

I don't know why they would deny this, since it is none other than the Renderman Interface Bytestream that Poser 5/6 uses to communicate with Firefly. Firefly = Tempest = Renderman-compliant renderer.

I can't say, that I do have any problems cancelling a render. One click on the button and after a couple of seconds the render is cancelled. No need to shut down Poser. If the render runs out of memory I get an error message suggesting to reduce bucket size, turn of texture filtering or to change another setting I can't remember now. I've tried with a pz3 file I never got rendered in P5... So far P6 wasn't able to finish it, but at least I get the message and can cancel the render to change settings without restarting Poser :)

I never had any big problems with Poser 5, and Poser 6 seems to run just fine as well. My computers haven't been the most powerful either.

5. GL preview looks nice and the preset material options are somewhat handy even though reflection/mirror didn't work right. (If I understand you correctly...) Open GL doesn't handle true reflection at all (reflections maps it should handle). You must raytrace for that. No apps I know of do realtime reflection.

'3. Cancel button does nothing of the kind. Nothing has changed here from P5' That's one of the few things (in P5) that actually does work for me like it's supposed to. P6 hasn't arrived yet, so I can't check it. But you know what? I'm really beginning to think that, for whatever bizarre reason, poser runs differently on every computer. For example, just about everybody on the planet except me and a few other folk can get 'Show Figure Circle' and 'Show Camera Names' to go away and stay away. I can't. I've tried every combination of preferred state/looking in the xmls/preferred.pz3 and I cannot get these options to go. Every time I open a new scene, they're back again. This has happened to a couple of other people (Little Dragon is one, IIRC), but most people have no problem. Re P6 - My main concern (as I wait for it arriving) is that the focus issues haven't been fixed either. If I have to click all over the place to get alt-menu shortcuts to work, I'm going to be an unhappy camper. It drives me nuts in P5. 'Overall I would trade off the point lights etc for fixes in bugs that have been reported time and time and time again' Amen and Hallelejah, brother! I'd trade every single room (except the material room) for a program that has normal dialogs and a smooth workflow. mac PS Do other P5 users get these things? 1. Every library entry I make has Capital Letters, no matter what I type. 2. Every time I switch to the material room, the damn material library opens (and clicking in the main interface won't make it go away), then when I exit, it opens Poses for me. WTF is that about? And don't tell me it's useful. Useful like the library automatically closing when you start a new scene? The one thing you'll probably want to use closes?

Cancel renders has always worked for me in P5 but I will agree with you that sometimes it don't work in Poser6 and the rendering are going to the end and this only when I use to render a fragment of the scene.. OpenGL don't use in this situation reflections, it can be well better because the quality is not super but I am happy that Poser6 have finally OpenGL because it works fantastic with the transparent maps and if you set your graphic card good it will create nice quality for the preview renders... A disappointment is to big word here, I buy a Update and for that money it is almost free if you see all the stuff included + new features... I think CL will fix the problems for sure if they decide that this is a serious problem.. I render 3 days 1000 of renders with high firefly rendering quality.. no one time poser6 crashed while I was working on.. it works smooth and fast for me.. as never before

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2177044

1. On the thumbnail yes, filename no.
2. Yes. It has to open something when you leave the Material Room, as the materials library only shows up in the Material Room.

yes I was searching for the material library and that show only in the Material Room, but you know if you add the material to the prop and figure it is good if you do this using the material room as well, we work this way in Poser5 so I don't see big deal with

Canceling renders works for me most of the time in P5. It seems to be memory-related. A small, simple render will cancel quickly, no problem. A large, complex render will flirt with locking up, but if I'm patient, it will cancel. A really killer scene with huge textures will likely lock up Poser if I try to cancel it.

'Bad news on the focus front (see attached link). 1) On the thumbnail yes, filename no. 2) Yes. It has to open something when you leave the Material Room, as the materials library only shows up in the Material Room' Yep. I posted in that thread. Bad news indeed. Me too - thumbnail, yes. File name, no. But why? If I want caps, I'll use them. I hate apps that impose things on me. I know the material library is only available through the room. But I don't understand why. Still, I guess you're right that it has to open something when you exit. 'but you know if you add the material to the prop and figure it is good if you do this using the material room as well, we work this way in Poser5' I suppose you're right, catherine. I just don't work the way most poser users do. I make my own MATs from the .mt5 files, but I'm not always using the library. I'd rather it opened when I told it to, not every time I want to look at a material in a figure. I guess I'm just not a typical poser user. mac

'Canceling renders works for me most of the time in P5. It seems to be memory-related' It's exactly the same in daz studio. If you're doing something complex with displacement/refraction, it takes a minute or so to cancel. But it always does it eventually. mac

A wise person (I forgot who s/he was) once said " In Firefly, use Texture Filtering and limit your texture sizes." 1024 was the recommended maximum size. Maybe this will help. In P6, using the P4 Renderer, "rendering over a black background" does not work too well. I get a black ground and a black outline around my figure with the default background color. Is anyone else having this problem?

Canceling Renders: I have had problems with this in P5 (still waiting for P6 box set to arrive) but have found that hitting my keyboards 'ESCAPE' key instead of Poser's 'Cancel' button works BRILLIANTLY :) ali x

Maclean: to make the part highlight go away perm, make the text edit you've attempted before. save the file. right click it in windows, and LOCK the file so it cannot be written to. fire up P5 and enjoy! BTW, I tried that a few weeks ago, and went nuts not having it, and then had a PITA trying to restore it.

The Cancel problem is very familiar to me in P5. Usually doesn't happen in the Loading Textures stage, but very, very often during the Adding Objects stage for the render (shadow maps have never been a problem). I haven't tried a really complicated scene in P6 yet. I tried to render a somewhat simpler scene (just Jessi Hires and a couple of environment props) at very high resolution and quality settings, and P6 told me it wouldn't be able to render it. P5 would have tried and gone into neverland. So P6 IS an improvement over P5 in this respect. OpenGL works as expected. Raytracing is just too computationally heavy for realtime rendering - not a single application/renderer/hardware combination that I know of can handle it. I usually set up complicated scenes in Poser, then export to Vue for adding environments and atmosphere. I then render in Vue. The OpenGL preview in P6 allows me to rotate a complicated scene much more smoothly than the software preview in P5. I'm a happy camper. Alas, canceling a render in P5 using ESC often didn't work for me. "It takes a minute or so to cancel?" Not for me, a few hours and it still was "Canceling..." on my Athlon64 3500+. Canceling in P6 worked in the very few test renders I've been able to do up till now. All in all, I think P6 is definitely worth its upgrade price. I'll probably run into limitations, glitches and bugs. I expect to, I have never encountered software that was perfect. So far, P6 doesn't seem to be more buggy than any other initial software release.

I see no reason to attempt a highly complex render all at once, especially in P6. I mean, if you have 15 characters in a scene, for instance, you can always render out in layers, and now with the new shadowcatcher, and the ability to render a seperate shadow pass, rendering objects/figures seperately to ease render burden is more than a viable option. Compositing the scene in post also gives you more control over the final result. Unless you absolutely refuse to do postwork (for whatever reason), I don't see a problem with that kind of workaround.

I don't do postwork. For a very practical reason - I absolutely suck at postwork. On the other hand, as a mathematician I'm very comfortable with working in 3D. And I love pushing an app to its limits.

I suck at postwork too. I've tried painting hair playing with brushes, layers, and filters, and I still get a fake looking effect. I can draw with pencil fine, but on the computer it looks bad. svdl, my twin brother is getting his PhD in mathematics... maybe I should try to get him more interested in 3D stuff although his interest would be geared more towards video games instead of poser...

Actually, I'm not a mathematician by profession or education. My job is teaching computer hardware, software design and networking at a polytechnical, my formal education is a masters degree in chemistry (and a minor in mathematics). Funny thing, as a kid I was rather good at pencil drawing too. And I also never managed to transfer that skill to a computer.

Well, compositing is postwork (I'm not talking about painting or anything like that). Simple compositing of layers without touchups doesn't take any real artistic skill, just some knowledge of the application.

Being that P6 can render shadows in a seperate pass, you wouldn't need to "paint" them in if you render in layers. There's a common misconception in the Poser community that the word "postwork" consists of painting things in after the fact, which is really just a very small niche of what 3D postwork is considered to be in the general 3D community at large.

Some postwork is rather easy to perform, especially the techniques referred to above. Rendering multiple passes and then layering them is easy and requires no painting skills. You use the eraser tool to rub-thru. Or composite masked cutouts. No brushes, no fancy painting. I use this method to isolate characters for applying motion-blur in PSP. Very simple, very fast.

Curious Labs has already said they will fix these problems with the next service release.

I have tried compositing in Photoshop 6. I never got rid of the ugly outlines around the figures I brought in. I've seen quite a few images in the Poser gallery suffering from the same outline problem. Especially hair was a major problem. Even when I rendered to .tif or .psd with alpha information. Feathering a selection didn't work the way I wanted. The best I managed to do was rendering "back to front" in Poser; rendering a scene without foreground figures, using the render as a background image, then rendering the foreground figures over the background image. Works pretty well in a single pass, with more passes (needed when the scene is REALLY complicated) the quality of the background image deteriorates quickly. No, it's setting up in Poser and rendering in Vue for me.

In my installation of P6 on W2K, the Cancel button works fine but the ESC key doesn't. Pressing ESC dismisses the Cancel button but the scene keeps rendering till the end. I'm not talking about large, complex scenes hanging and crashing the app. A basic scene with James, the default lights, and tested with Firefly draft/production & P4 renderer all have the same results: the ESC key doesn't cancel.

I not sure if this is a bug or a change in the default behaviour?

This compositing meathod is also most commonly used by professional studios for rendering 3D movies/animation. It's far more "technical" than artistic in practice.

mason, My experience = post14 or randy77 above. can you post your hardware and also an image of a scene that you would approach with trepidation becuase you fear you won't be able to cancel render? why do I ask? because most people do not have your problem on a regular basis, and without your specifics, how can others comment or judge if your issue is 1) you are expecting too much given your scene complexity & hardware; or 2) your hardware is okay and scenes are reasonable, but something is not set up right in your world, hence you are plagued by render bail-out grief. ::::: Opera :::::

Wacros? Wacros? Check the material room at the top of the material preset list. Is that "Wacros" I see? Also, saving a figure with the + can now create a problem. The delay is pretty long but worse, the system is still able to let you click on other items AND the + sign again. I would imagine this will create some issues with accidently saving the wrong figure or bringing up a save twice which may lock you up. The hardware I use is p4 3.2ghz with 2 gigs of ram. Winxp. The scene uses darkplaces back alley figure scene with a vicky figure with just expression injections.

I too cannot get p6 to render correctly. Keeps freezing when the render should be done...nothing, nada, zilch. No special backgrounds, no special textures, just that stinking winter queen sitting on air....who after one successful render, was half blacked out from shadows. Its awful tiring to pick every body part and turn them off, is there a better way to do that? I've only had 5 for like 2 weeks, no problems rendering, with 6, I can't even use firefly, I have to use poser4 settings to even see anything. Crtl+Alt+Delete has become my best friend.

lzy724, your problem sounds more like it may be related to that memory issue CL has mentioned. Can't say for sure though. Do you have trouble rendering simple things, or the lo-res figures? I haven't been able to reproduce any of the symptoms you have given, even with the WinterQueen content.

Quite often I've had the "firefly" render hang [P5] and pressing "cancel" has resulted in waiting and waiting and waiting, zzzzzzzzzzz. Eventually I have to 3 finger it and usually more than once to shut it down.

I don't have most of these problems. Cancel has worked for me so far and I've used multiple figures with multiple hires materials and some of those were done with a very complex node structure. I can switch runtimes in a matter of seconds. I've actually seen more "out out memory" errors in ProPack - not once on P5/P6. I'm not sure about the Magnet thing. Do you mean a second magnet comes in as Mag 1? I've had that happen a couple of times but I renamed it to Mag 2 and it has saved and reloaded fine. I think that user experiences vary quite a bit from individual to individual. I've had Materials not show up in the library when going to the material room but show up when I refresh the libary. I've also seen a couple of times where I did a render and then went back to the preview window and nothing is there - but this is Opengl related. Going back render options dialog and back sets it right.

Spent most of the day rendering the same scene over and over again, 1024x768, (large mirror) reflection, raytraced, AO, IBL. Saw no results, and "Poser not responding" in task manager. Hard re-booted several times.

Then thought "self, why don't you just let it do its thing". Turns out that "Poser not responding" meant it was doing intense number crunching and needed time to create the solution. Yes the same render (with periodic updated minor tweaks on P4 3.2 gHz, 2.5gB RAM while surfing the net on different system ;) took a good 45 minutes each time in my case. The point is that maybe a hang is not a hang at all....

Message edited on: 03/26/2005 04:51

Outlines? How do you get ugly outlines? Almost all my gallery images are composites, multiple renders with different figures/props/BG switched on or off. As many as 8 or 10 sometimes. And I never have had any kind of outline, every pixel is exactly correct (all Poser versions) when I use them in Photoshop. I wonder what you're doing... I save in PSD format of course. :] Fish

mason, with that hardware and the relative simplicity of scened you are describing, FireFly should be able to succeed, although I do not know how intense a resource drain darkplaces back alley figure scene is. P6... one can't evaluate yet, definitively, because there is a specific problem that is being fixed as we speak. squid69 I can almost BET people are assuming the sys has hung when really it is just sys needs another 15 minutes before you see anything happen. The other posters here are indicating that P6 is better at reporting these delays. ::::: Opera :::::

Opera.. I know CL said they had a patch coming out, but id you see anywhere what issues are going to be fixed in the first patch?

once again I ask. Are we using the same software? 1. Duplicate magnet channels still are created. can't answer this one, never used them. 2. Renders go into never never land with infinite loading texture message. No dump. No error handling. No time out. Nothing. No way to go through and check geometry etc to see what went wrong. never had this, even in very complex scenes. 3. Cancel button does nothing of the kind. Nothing has changed here from P5. Whatever Cancel does it certainly does it very poorly. BTW god only knows what they are doing since you're simply cancelling a render. cancel should gaurentee exit from a render. There should be NO clean up or anything else. You're halting the render and dumping out. That simple. I am convinced, even though Cl denies this, that firefly is a seperate thread of some sort that Poser sends stuff to and communicates to via some sort of messaging system. Poser appears to have no real, direct control over firefly other than setting some options then submitting a render to that renderer. That would explain why cancel doesn't work since firefly crashes and Poser can only send a message to it to cancel. erm, Cancel works fine here. hit it, wait a coupla secs, and I'm out with a render screen that retains what was done. 4. Render an entire scene and no memory error. Render a small part of the scene and get a memory error. Neither condition exceeded my 2 gig mem. again, I never get this error and I have 512mb ram. 5. GL preview looks nice and the preset material options are somewhat handy even though reflection/mirror didn't work right. please name some software that does.. I've never found any that do... 6. Speed appears faster but that directory switching is so slow. simple answer. split your runtime done. it makes no difference changing the software to try increase speed here if the folder is 40gb+ - there are practical limits on this. (I learnt this programming Databases! lol) For the record - I'm running P6 on a 1.2ghz Athlon with 512mb PC133 Ram. not a super machine by any standards, but it runs fine here (except for a minor glitch early on caused by me). I can't understand why the problems?

BOTTOM LINE, that's why i didn't buy Poser 6

'Maclean: to make the part highlight go away perm, make the text edit you've attempted before. save the file. right click it in windows, and LOCK the file so it cannot be written to' Garee, I don't know if we're talking about the same thing here. I've modified my poser.ini to not show the vertice lines and it doesn't need to be locked. It just does it, same as P4. The problem I have is killing 'show figure circle' or 'show camera names' (in the Display menu). I've been through all the xmls, and sifted through the preferred.pz3 with a fine toothcomb, but I can't find any options for these settings. From what other people have told me, they just unclick them and save a preferred state. But poser doesn't save it to the .pz3, and I don't know where it does save it. That's why I can't lock the file. mac

FWIW, I've been using Back Alley for a few renders and it does seem to be pretty hard on the system. My system isn't the best for 3d, but it isn't all that bad either. Seems like it will nearly always render if texture filtering is shut off. In order to use texture filtering I had to shut textures down to 1048. (Your milage may vary) In Poser 6's favor, it did give me the message about not being able to complete the render instead of locking up, like P5. I did appreciate the second chance at saving the scene before continuing. :-)

Ah, Mac, I thought you were still having the "highlight part" issue. I disabled that, and found poser much harder to work with, but re enabling it was a pain, because poser kept resetting it. I finally just locked the preference file, and that took care of that! ;)

By the way, this is Winter Queen Jessi (dressed for summer) "out of the box", with just a few expression changes and the Bump Maps applied. Also with blonde instead of white hair.

Yeah, I get that too. Why not just change the background shader to black and render over that?

I do have problems wrong with the canel buttons also.

Changing the background color or shader to black works, but I don't like it for preview. I'll just have to learn to love FireFly and DNA Microcosm!!

I have every problem Mason described with Poser 5, haven't fooled enough with P6 to know if they all exist there yet... but I fully expected going in that it would take at least a couple service patches to get everything shipshape. Right now I'm happy staying with P5 for the most part and slowly easing into P6 while waiting for CL to release their patches.