I have a Pent 4, 1 gig mem, 2.4 ghz cpu and a Radeon 9800 V card.I run on Xp pro. Now, I can get a really nice render out of Poser 6 with that, providing I don't try to add a char like Vic 3. They sold me an unfinished product. I have no doubts about that. The program can't even remember the simplest of things like..what folder I last opened a render from. I have free programs that remember the last folder I went to. The memory leak problem is really bad. Whatever the cause may be, it is very "noob". I believe these issues rise from them building on an old foundation.It's like..get with today already..thanks. Don't charge me for a product you know darn good and well is not finished, and not a quality program. Even with the most basic of product testing they had to know it was not ready for consumers. So, basically we all bought stocks in a company, and we won't get any check in the mail at the end of the day. We MIGHT get a usable product. I am SICK of seeing...NOT ENOUGH MEMORY...right followed by...CANT FIND MAP LALLALLALA then LOCK UP. I have to reboot my comp just to get out of it all. /rant off... I had to get that out. Yes I was warned. But, it's all fun and games till you lose one of your best renders to date. Even my dog is crying for me 8( AND I SAVED OFTEN. Only when it asked me if I wanted to save when I had to reboot I said yes...BOOM BANG the save went to trash city. XoOXooX's Hailo PS If you value your sanity...don't purchase till you get the " ALLS CLEAR" 8)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=2255004

Once again, according to CL's May 3rd announcement: SR1 should be coming out any time now.

Or at least that's the theory.

Perhaps SR1 will make all of your difficulties vanish.

And mine, too.

Let's hope.

Message edited on: 05/14/2005 00:49

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2243391

"SR1 should be coming out any time now." bah!,you said that last week :) the did give away a bug last week..just not a bug fix : Cheers Stefan

bah!,you said that last week :)

I also said:

Or at least that's the theory.

At some point, we might want to get really deep and start discussing random probability theory...........

For some reason, it just feels appropriate.

It's rumored that this patch will also fix that "doesn't remember the last folder" thing, too. I was hoping for improvements in that area - more than one folder remembered, depending on whether you're opening or saving, say - and instead, it's even worse than P5. :-P

Also the service release is supposed to fix the bug in rendering refractions and reflections.

I also hope the fix sorts out the "can't find texture" from the P5 runtime!!! thefixer poser coordinator.

"Also the service release is supposed to fix the bug in rendering refractions and reflections." Gee, I hope so. That desperately needs fixing.

Yes, I am of the same opinion CL must do a SR1 to fix some bugs, but I think when people say that Poser 6 is a incomplete program, whe they say it is disaster and.....I think what program in the market gives to you Poser 6 gives and for less than $300. Hey people, sure all we have in mind a better program and many things do Poser better, but looking it we can notice that is a great character animation, with a good real hair creator(many $3000 programs have it only like a expensive plugin),a really good real cloth simulator(very good if you can compare it with some expensive plugins in expensive applications) and now, a good, very good render engine. Poser can be improved, sure, but don't say it is a incomplete program or a bad tool because it cannot remember the last dir you open....

Sorry, but I do think it's an incomplete program. Not because the folder thing, but because of the @#$% memory bug. It's unusable for real work, until they fix it. I've gone back to P5, at least until they release a patch.

"It's unusable for real work" For you, or for everyone? There's plenty of people I know of who are doing what I'd consider "real work" with it, despite the memory issue and all the other complaints. That's not to say they don't want to see those issues fixed, of course.

Not just for me, and not for everyone. For enough people that the program can be considered incomplete.

Actually, P6 served it's purpose quite well: Provided CL an influx of $$$. As long as they have customers willing to buy them unseen and untested, they'll keep releasing unfinished products.

Well I bought it when it came out and although it has some problems, I am able to work around them until the update is released. I just wonder though, for all the people that rant about it, do they actually send their rants to Curious Labs? If they did, maybe CL would get a small glimpse at the frustration many people have. Regardless, Curious Lab is not the only software company to release their product bug-free. Most companies do it now and it would appear that when they get their bugs sorted out, a new version comes on the market and we start all over again!! :)

well for me poser is, and likely always will be a nice, user friendly previsualization character app to stage scenes /animations for export to Cinema4DXL where I do all of my final renders anyway. the Ao and IBL are nice but even when the memory problem is fixed Im just Waaay too spoiled by Cinema4DXL's ultrafast rendering an unlimited undo's etc etc etc .

"I think what program in the market gives to you Poser 6 gives and for less than $300."----------------------------Sorry I want a program that can do what is anounced to,no matter if it costs 30 or 3000 dollars :that is simply part of the deal. I guess Poser in common must have been programmed very sloppy .Poser 2 was very stable to me.The whole mess began when it got its Kai Krause-Interface (I hate it like hell)in Poser 3.The needed resources were low that days (compared with today) so bugs wasn't that obvious.It was getting worse the more features were added.Well I think Poser needs a total rebuild or Poser 7 will become even worse.To me Poser has always been a love/hate relationship.

;)ohoh,C4d-users shouldn't use Poser.C4d makes you very critical towards other progs.

I have no problem with the price of P6. I'm not sorry I bought it...because I trust CL to fix it. Eventually. I just don't think it's usable until they do. Otherwise, I love P6, and fully expect to switch over. When it's fixed.

I do wish they'd be a little more communicative about this isse. They apparently knew about it before the release, but did not warn customers adequately. Even now, they post messages about it here, but not everyone hangs out here. They haven't e-mailed their customers. We still get people wandering in here asking why the scene they worked on for hours was suddenly nuked with no warning. IMO, they should notify all their customers about the memory issue, not just the ones who complain. And they should keep customers updated via e-mail, not via Rosity posts. Even if it's just "We're working as fast as we can, we hope to have it out before the 4th of July."

Timberwolf what doesn't make poser Cl say it can do? I update to poser 6 from poser 4, and I can say it is much better than version 4, and I haven't any memory bug at this moment. I know this bug exist, but you have only to wait some days or weeks to solve it. Any program has bugs in its first realese, the problem will be that the creators of tahat software don't solve it by free, and I think CL do. The interface in Poser, metacreations interface, is the best thing in the program, Do you test for example max, you need all yor life to learn only the way to do things. And if you think Poser is getting worse the more features were added, the solution is easy, don't buy Poser 6.

I totally agree with Timberwolf. I'm still mourning the loss of my render 8( If all I wanted to do was render backgrounds I would have no complaints. If I want to do any type of model work I'm up the creek without a paddle.It's getting dark...the storm clouds are rolling in. I think to myself as I sit there, lonely, scared, and cold...now would be a good time to have a 12 year old bottle of scotch. Hehe if I can't be creative with my Poser, at least I have this forum and it's not broken.

I think Poser 7 will be total rebuild. I gather that Poser is still based on ancient Mac code, and that is what is causing a lot of the problems.

Bryce has similar problems. I think DAZ is going to have rebuild it from the ground up to make real improvements.

I do believe this is an issue of building off an outdated foundation. May be even because they were completely messy about it. There seems to be a lot of code conflicts with certain system set ups. So, what happens with SR1 ? It will fix some of us and break others. That's my take on it. Unless, it's mostly a matter of a messy build. In that case they probably do need a case of scotch, and a few bottles of nerve pills. Searching for code that A. is not needed B. is causing a conflict and C. can be removed without crashing the whole project...I totally wouldn't want to be them. However, they should have done all this before they sold the product to us.

I admit i might be to critical with Poser and I admit I don't have P6-yet-.But I renember P5's issues so I am watching and waiting for further SRs. Does collision detection work proper on fingers now? Does background movies have the right ratio in P6? Does hair collision work on every frame? Can you always use the scroling button of your hirachy editor? Does the fire fly engine still freeze when using big texture maps? And hey, I said love/hate not hate .I wouldn't complain that much if I just hated Poser.Animation Master 9.x is a 10000000 times worse. Nothing works there.I ripped my hair ,uninstalled it and gone.Poser can give great and fast results on animating characters ,its simple on one hand but quite tricky on the other.And : I am really spoiled by c4d too.Besides the other c4d pros I like the logical designed UI there .Poser has to many coloured funny buttons that wastes a lot of working space.Have you noticed it as well ?: the more funny coloured the UI the more the app tends to be unstable.

One main problem might be that Cl is without any real competition at that price.(DS is stll in beta anyway.)CL's success is mainly based on content providers I think.Do you add content to your Poser or do you add Poser to your content?

Attached Link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dm2/

Timberwolf wrote: " Besides the other c4d pros I like the logical designed UI there .Poser has to many coloured funny buttons that wastes a lot of working space.Have you noticed it as well ?: the more funny coloured the UI the more the app tends to be unstable." HAHahHa..hmmm I dunno that the color of the buttons is causing the issues. At this point I'm willing to consider anything though. You just might have a point. DEATH TO ALL FUNNY COLORED BUTTONS! 8)

ooops,maybe you caught me with some language deficits.Nevertheless you'll know what I mean.

Just a quick second to John's DialogMate link. It's a great utility that I have used for some time now to get around the inability of Poser 6 (or its predecessor, for that matter) to remember the last folder used for a specific class of file. This was and still is an unforgiveable omission under Windows, but I suspect its absence has something to do with retaining Mac compatibility across a common codebase. I don't count that as a bug, but I do count the memory error as a maximum critical flaw in the product that should never ever have got through even the most rudimentary alpha testing regime, let alone beta and pre-production. However, it hasn't stopped me from getting a lot of use out of P6 so I wouldn't say that it is unusable. After all, I've only lost three scene files through it :( And if you've got a couple of hundred gigs of free disk space it's no great hardship to save your scene with ascending version numbers every single time that you change one parameter dial ;) fwiw I have found that permanently disabling the rather flaky "Use Binary Morph Files" option seems to help prevent, or at least reduce it. I'm waiting anxiously for SR1, but I have a horrible feeling that squashing this one is going to take several attempts.

but I have a horrible feeling that squashing this one is going to take several attempts. That's my concern, too. We'll see.

Isn't it a shame though, that with such a large user base and so many users available and willing to test Poser b4 its release that CL never thought to take advantage of it. With all the cumulative hours of aggravation compiled by so many users, I think it is truly a shame that CL apparently rushed a prdcuct to market before its time. Top notch software should not be plagued by so many problems. There is a better way. Ask Adobe or Discreet

"It's unusable for real work"

Is it? AMD XP2400+, 1Gb Ram, Radeon 9600 Pro and P6 runs like a train (a fast train too). The only bug I've encounter is the memory bug when rendering a huge scene, so I'm avoiding those at the moment. P6 has problem with finding any textures and such. I've got 2 runtimes, 10Gb P5 and 2Gb P6 and no problems at all.

As for real work, I've finished 2 complete comics on P6 by now, one is already at the printer, they other one will follow next week. Both will see a first printing edition of 5500 copies for a nonprofit organization. More printing edition are following most likely. Each comic has over 26 scenes (the first one 26 and the second one 64) all with multiple people. A number of frames even have over 10 fully textured (high res) and dressed people in it ( a mixture of M3, Don & Judy) all with hair (some with dynamic hair). But that's really the limit for me, anything more will crash. I can live with that until the sr1 will come.

Message edited on: 05/14/2005 15:43

I agree with you mlofrano. However, beta testers don't pay to test a product. I'm guess their need/want for cash got in the way of logic on this one.

yes it is unusable for a lot of people. I would say for the majority of the people who purchased it. I can't render a scene with only one naked Vic 3 toon. I can render a background pic though.

I have a Pent 4, 1 gig mem, 2.4 ghz cpu and a Radeon 9800 V card.I run on Xp pro.

To avoid having any issues with my runtimes and libraries I installed all my content over again into Poser 6. Now I have a huge chunk of disc space used up. Does it still have the texture issue? Yep it does. It happens every time the program locks from lack of memory. Bottom line is when it messes up it can't find texture files installed directly to it's runtime.

Worse is when you have to end the program it takes forever to get out of it. It will ask you if you want to save your stuff before it completely closes down. If you say yes the whole file gets destroyed. That is basically what happen to me last night.

Message edited on: 05/14/2005 15:55

"Is it? AMD XP2400+, 1Gb Ram, Radeon 9600 Pro and P6 runs like a train" "A number of frames even have over 10 fully textured (high res) and dressed people in it ( a mixture of M3, Don & Judy) all with hair (some with dynamic hair)." Interesting. I have the same spec machine except that my graphics card is a GeForce FX5200. I think you are a very lucky person indeed to have got Poser 6 to render 10 hi-res, clothed and dyna-haired characters in one scene without the infamous memory bug hitting you. Which just goes to show what a swine this bug is going to be for CL to track down and eradicate! I can get to three M3/V3/S3s with textures, clothes and hair, plus a few props and then the Dialogue Box of Doom pops up: "Poser 6 has decided to report that it is out of memory, even though that isn't really what has happened. Your scene has now been irrevocably corrupted and your work has been lost. Even if you now exit without saving, your current project will be overwritten with a zero byte file. Thank you for flying Curious Labs. Have a nice day." ;)

I feel sorry for you (really). It looks like a nasty bug to track down and it seems that it's not bothering everyone in the same way. I know quite a number of people having not many problems with P6 at all, while other are haunted by the bug all the time. Looking at how long it takes CL to release the SR1, it must be a nasty bug to track and get rid of.

Or it might be a series of bugs that give the same error. I get the out of memory error whenever I use a background picture. I'm not going to use P6 again until SR4 comes out.

AMD XP2400+, 1Gb Ram, Radeon 9600 Pro and P6 runs like a train (a fast train too).

FWIW...this bug appears to relate to the old Windows 2 Gb limit. People with less RAM seem to have fewer problems than people with more.

I love Poser, but not enough to rip out half my RAM for it. :-P

Some people have NEVER hit the memory leak, and didn't know there was such a thing until after release and the high-end users with complicated scenes complained. After months of using it, I finally got it to crash, while beta-testing something else, and it was due to my error in saving/applying a pose where some of the information was in an external file. Neither of my testing systems (4-year-old PC and new MacMini) has over a gig of ram and both are spotless (Poser is the only application besides newly-installed operating systems) and neither is connected to the Internet. They are set up as working beasties, not game machines. Winnowing down exactly what causes a problem and being able to repeat it is the only way to fix it. Unless each of you tells CL your system specs and what you were doing when it crashed, it makes defining a bug that much more difficult. How do you determine the common denominator without data? Ranting over losing a file makes you feel better, but it does nothing towards solving anything. We all hurt when time is lost. So, what else did you have running (your toolbar(s), other applications)?, how many hours did you have it going? was it running hot? were there any warning signs? any error messages? how many figures or approximate polygon count? were you calculating hair/cloth or rendering a final scene? and, of course, your system specs. Maybe it only happens to scenes with dynamic hair on gen 3 figures with oodles of third-party morphs shot with no backdrop for the depth-of-field calculation, or maybe it only happens if Poser is fighting for memory with the browser because you were downloading a movie-trailer while rendering, or maybe it only happens if there are > 144 separate mesh units in the scene regardless of whether they are objects or figures, or maybe it only happens with a certain lighting rig and cast shadows with a particular video card and more than 2 gigs of ram. If you have a repeatable bug, the best solution is to use the contact form and let CL know what happened. Calmly and clearly. They will keep working on tweaking this, but you can either simmer on the boards or you can help by giving them the necessary data. Carolly

The last time I checked I wasn't on their pay roll. Second, I bought I product that should have been tested proper before they put it on the market. Had they asked me to beta test BEFORE they sold it to me I probably would have been happy to help. They can certainly gather plenty of very useful information from these "complaint" threads. These threads are inpart a good way to inform others who haven't purchased the product yet of the known issues.

... so much for being part of the solution! You have a perfectly valid right to complain wherever it is legal... you can walk up and down with a posterboard or skywrite your grievance... but wouldn't it be better to list the problems and send it to the guys who can actually fix them? Carolly

You seem to be under the impression that none of us have sent in these complaints to the company. The complaints have been sent to them.Probably hundreds of complaints. They are well aware of the issues with their product. I believe they were well aware of the issues with the product before they put it up for sale. I understand that Curious Labs probably doesn't like threads like this one. However,this is not a "bashing" thread. I haven't seen a thread yet on this subject that could be considered "bashing" the company. I love Poser. I do not love the problems associated with Poser 6. This is a discussion thread based on the issues with the product, and the sharing ideas as to what we speculate might be causing them. If you don't appreciate reading threads like this. Threads where people gather to share their feelings and idea's about things. You have a perfectly legal right not to read them.

What Hailo said. CL knows all about the problem. They knew about it before it was released.

The ones who don't know about it are the buyers. And if it weren't for threads like this, the only way they'd find out is the hard way.

HOW do you know that they knew about it before the release? You have made that claim before. Show me the evidence. Carolly the Curious

They said so. It was in posts to this forum, I believe. They said they found the bug, but didn't have time to fix it before the release.

On second thought...it was in a message on their Web site, which was re-posted here by people who saw it. They said:

*"With several hundred bugs fixed during the final weeks of Poser 6 development, there were a few things unfortunately that broke at a very late point in time and didn't get caught until the product was in manufacturing. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by those issues.

We're currently working on resolving those issues, and will make a freely downloadable service release available as soon as possible."*

This was posted so early on - mid-March - that most of us had no clue what the problem was, since we hadn't yet set our mitts on P6.

randym77, The reason I ask is that I am a beta tester and have the release notes for the various betas... lots of them... notes which mention things fixed and known isses at each stage... including the notes for the release of the final version... and see nothing in there which validates your repeated claims of foreknowledge that there was a remaining memory problem or a major memory problem or any sort of remaining memory issue. If CL knew about it before release, it would be logical for them to want US to know about it so that isolation of the problem could help solve it. Say that I was QA'ing a game and heard that if a player walked backwards down the hall the monsters would turn psychodelic. I'd tell everybody working on the game to be sure to walk backwards down any hallways until someone discovered that it only happened on a certain floor or when holding a certain object. Under Known Issues would be "walking backwards/palette problem" until the trigger for it was isolated and stomped on. So you have no proof that this severe memory leak was even one of the things found when the disks were gold and in manufacturing? It could well have been found after it had shipped and got into the hands of thousands of users... at which point it is like words spoken and hanging on the air, a bit too late to retrieve. The guys at CL are still working at fixing things and still sending out updates, so it isn't like they are all sunning in Baja with funny parasols in their drinks. But, as mentioned above, the more concrete information they get back, the more quickly bugs can get squashed. It is possible that this isn't a single issue memory leak, it might be 2 or 3 memory bugs all exhiting the same symptom of crashing (is that red rash measles or chickenpox?... the patient who is itching doesn't care, but the doctor still needs the rest of the history before writing a prescription). Carolly

Do you have proof they didn't know about it? You seem to be more upset that we discuse the broken product, than we are that they sold us a broken product. I think you have blown this thread completely away from it's original topic, and turned it into a means to argue. Since you are a beta tester, and seem very passionate about working to fix their broken program...by all means enjoy yourself. The rest of us are happy to inform them of their broken program, discus it amongst ourselves, and inform others of the known issues with it. You do your thing, we will do our thing...everyone is happy /smile