I crashed poser 6 about 8 times today. has skills But the last was my absolute favorite. I have a V3 character that I created way back in Poser 4. But I decided to redo her in P6 since I got it and was all excited. So I tried to apply the V3 INJ morphs in P6. After a hour and 3 crashes, I applied the morphs in P4, made a full V3 figure and just saved her to the Daz folder. Perfect, it worked like a charm. She opened, so I applied the face morph. Perfect. I went to the materials room, started playing with her face texture and her lips. Crashed again. Ok, no problem. Open it back up, repeat steps load figure, apply face morph, go to material room. Works like a charm. I save the PZ3. Go back to pose room, no cursor... What? No cursor? Move mouse around, watch various things highlight, but no cursor. Ok, fine. I close it and reopen using the PZ3 I just made. What? No V3... what? No textures... stares Go to open a old PZ3 in P4 to see if I can fix her up in P4 and save as previously done with the whole morph thing... P6 has overwritten all my old PZ3s... Very few of them still open in P4... Omg...

This has happened to me in P5 and P6. When it happens, I use the Alt-F key to get to the file menu, save the PZ3, exit, and re-start Poser.

First and foremost... ALWAYS save under new names. Always. I learned that back at Epyx more than a decade ago after a 3 day animation was corrupted and totally irretrievable. I'd saved regularly, every 10-15 minutes, because the computer was flakey, but nobody had told me about rotating my saves under new names. This is even more essential with new software or a new figure or a new computer or anything which can go blooey. Even something as reliable as PhotoShop won't open a file if the harddrive has decided to save it in spot which goes bad. (40 layer deep CD cover... but I had it saved under other names and could rebuild.) Yes, that is cold comfort now, but might save your time later. I don't use the gen 3 figures but others have said that they will open just fine no matter where the DAZ folders are located. Being able to link Runtimes helps. Do you use "save" or "save as"? You should always use "save as" because you then can determine the name, directory location, and other vital information. I believe that you can also at that point decide whether you want the morphs to be saved internally or externally. (This might also be set under preferences... I'd have to look.) If the morphs have been saved externally, the files might not open in your older program, but they will be smaller and faster loading. So do not trash the files... they might still open in P6. There is a known memory problem which is one of the things being worked on. That might affect your V3 depending upon size of textures and other stuff in the pz3. About the vanishing curser... I have no idea. That is new to me. Document it and send it off to CuriousLabs as a bug (and give basic info... WIN or Mac, how much RAM, the OS, anything which can help replicate it. The curser will change shape, depending upon the tool selected, but I haven't seen it pull a Frodo and vanish entirely... so there must have been something clicked on or selected or maybe no tool at all... strange. Carolly

Lol, it was saved under a new name. And in a different folder. And new folder I made specifically for my p6 pz3s. But as I went to my other folders to see if I could get her out of one of the older pz3s those were all converted over too. I have no idea how poser 6 accomplished such a task, lol, and as much as I should be really upset about this, I'm oddly not. Maybe I'm in shock, lol. But that's just it, the converted files open in p6, just not p4, which I need them to open in so I can edit them considering everything I edit in p6 likes to up and die. I explained it to a friend who is a non-poser user by telling them I had a program that thought it was a cult and converted all influenceable files to it's evil ways. Lol, I just wish p6 wouldn't crash all the flippin time. Then I'd have no problem. I was gonna trash p4 later on anyway. It just seems this will now be sooner rather than later...

I have had the disappearing cursor in P5 Mac OS X on occasion. I have two monitors and sometimes Poser 5 decided to hide the cursor on the main monitor. I could move the mouse onto the second and see the cursor, but not on the main with the menu bar. Had some interesting games of "Find The Menu" to try and save the open Poser scene and usually had to restart the OS to get the cursor back.

emerald_darkness, Good, I'm glad that you do save elsewhere. Let's see if we can get them unbrainwashed (love the analogy). Just opening the file may have been enough to move the morph data... like when opening a library file tells Poser to make or rebuild rsrs. I wonder though, if you try this, what would happen: in the menu, under Poser 6 Mac OS (or it's relative placement on your OS) find "General Preferences". It is a dialogue box with 4 tabs. The last tab is "misc". There is a checkbox which says "Use external binary morph targets" and another for file compression. I have the file compression unchecked, despite it being a space saver. I do have the external morph targets box checked. Look to see whether you have it checked or not, and try the opposite. Open a file which alread got converted and see if Poser converts it back. It may actually be something other than the morph data, but given that it is a loaded V3, that is where my first suspicion lies. Carolly

Found it flipped it, and playing around right now. So far, no crashing, but so far I haven't tried anything major, but I'll let you know. Right now I'm having too much fun with the lights and the whole AO deal. grins P6 let's me play with already created characters it seems; it has no problem loading any of my old complete pz3s. It just crashes when I try to build a character. Maybe I have to keep P4 around to build them and then just use them in P6. Maybe P4 is just crashing P6 to postpone it's retirement. Not sure. Anyway, I'm gonna go test the whole, building a character theory. And thanks so much for all the help! ~Jade

We will cross our fingers and toes and hope that was the culprit. There is so much stuff hidden inside this upgrade, and a few new methods of working are going to trip up us older hands. Carolly