I finally installed P6 today and have been messing with it for a few hours now. Here is what I found so far:

They finally changed the pallette colors to all light - yay!

You still can't change the background color - boo!

The P4 renderer is way slower than in P4 and even P5 - boo!

OpenGL works even on my old, lowly Matrox G450 32meg card - yay!

It bogs down much sooner than P5 and way sooner than P4 - boo!

Area Render works flawlessly - yay!
DAZ inj/rem pose files work fine - yay!

Libraries have the same space-hogging, useless folder icons - boo!

Focus/Hotkey problem fixed - YAY!!! (I know others reported that it's still a problem, but I can diddle with parameters and my hotkeys work fine without having to click anywhere.)

NO LOCK-UPS yet - YAY!!!

Questions:

What does "Keep textures loaded" do? The manual says it saves Poser from having to load textures every time you render. But, even when checked, I still get the "loading textures" message and it takes just as long. Same situation for "Reuse shadow maps." And no, I hadn't changed anything.

Is there a way to clear the cached renders?

Will uninstalling P5 have any effect on my P6 installation?

All-in-all I think CL did it right this time!

Message edited on: 04/02/2005 20:27

Message edited on: 04/02/2005 20:28

Is there a way to clear the cached renders? In General Preferences, under the Document tab, set the number of max cached renders to 1, then click OK. >> Will uninstalling P5 have any effect on my P6 installation? It shouldn't. However, P5 has some content not found in P6, so if you uninstall it, you might have trouble using existing scene files created in P5.

Thanks LD! "In General Preferences, under the Document tab, set the number of max cached renders to 1, then click OK." Yep, I knew about this. But I was hoping for some way to clear one or more cached renders on the fly. I'm aware of the content situation too. I was thinking more along the lines of registry settings. Thanks again for the response :)

Nerd3D Message edited on: 04/02/2005 22:12

Ah! Thanks Nerd. My mistake; I thought it was alt-click. Another Yay! Any insights into the textures and shadow map questions?

You can also select the paint bucket tool and click anywhere on a blnk space and changethe colour that way :) According to the reference card alt+click resets the BG to default. I think that the library icons actually take up more space now... I think that the only way to clear the cache is to restart your somputer.

Shadow maps are saved between renders. It renders them the first time and keeps them till you tell it to forget them. You have to click it before you render.

Same for textures.

Nerd3D P.S. It will still say loading textures, rendering shadow maps, but it happens much faster.

Message edited on: 04/02/2005 22:56

Open GL, is it something you have to turn on to see it work in the document window? I can't really see s difference between the image in the document window and the old unrendered image.

"Open GL, is it something you have to turn on to see it work in the document window? I can't really see s difference between the image in the document window and the old unrendered image." You can select OpenGL in General Preferences. You will notice the difference right away... As long as you've set your display styles to texture shaded ;-)

"You can also select the paint bucket tool and click anywhere on a blnk space and changethe colour that way :) According to the reference card alt+click resets the BG to default." I thought I'd tried the paint tool and it didn't work. But you're right...I just tried it again and it did work. Never even thought to check the reference card :/ Guess I was too awestruck to think clearly ;) "I think that the library icons actually take up more space now..." I thought they looked bigger, too. There was a way to get rid of them in P5 using Photoshop. Should be the same for P6. Have to find out what I did. "It will still say loading textures, rendering shadow maps, but it happens much faster." Hmmm. I haven't timed it yet, but both shadow rendering and texture loading sure seem to take the same amount of time on my machine. Will mess with it some more. Thanks all for the responses.

In the past when I've tried to change the "Easter Egg" and the background colors they always seemed to revert to the factory settings even if the preferences were set to "lauch to perferred state". I partcularly dislike this new "Easter Egg" face motif, but if it won't go away I can ignore it.

I don't see Open GL in my General Preferences anywhere. My video card supports open gl, did I do something wrong when I installed the software?

if you right click on the document window where you can switch your camera views there is also an option to use openGL or SreeD

In addition to right-clicking in image, Open GL is under pull-down: Render/Render Settings/Preview. (or Ctl-Y for Render Settings)-

In the render screen it seems to retain the last image rendered or that was opened in there. How do I clear that?