I'm currently making a scene in P6 that incorporates more than two V3 figures in it. However the program runs as slow as hell when I have this amount of figures in it. All V3s in my scene have custom morphs as well as Wyrmmaster deformers. But I really would like to know how I can manage this scene better. Do I need another program that supports Poser scenes like Vue? I welcome all advice posted in this thread. Thanks.

Hmm. Up to 5 V3s worked fine and reasonably fast on my system. It's pretty high end (AMD64 3500+, 4 GB RAM, GeForce6800LE tweaked into a QuadroFX4000), which certainly helps. You could hide figures that do not interfere with placement/poses of other figures. I often hide the clothing and hair while doing the poses. Then just before rendering I unhide everything. Vue can help, but not by very much. If you have multiple Millenium 3 figures in Vue, each and every move/rotation will cause a temporary view degradation - the figures will be represented as cubes. Responsiveness is better, but placement of the figures is more difficult. I use Vue mainly for the rendering and materials, I do scene setup and composition in Poser.

Unfortunately, Poser has short-shrift limitations on just how many figures & props it'll tolerate in a scene before the render engine locks up & refuses to go any further. It's a source of great irritation that sometimes it only takes as few as 3 V3's to give the render engine fits. Even on high-end PC's. And, yes, morph-laden figures and hair can drag your system down to a crawl.

I assume that you are having rendering problems. If so, then here are a few options:

1. Depending upon the number of the figures in any given scene, save several copies of your file. Keep a copy or two of the complete file as it is -- for backup purposes. Then open up the file copies, and delete different figure(s) from each copy. Render the partial scenes that you've thus created separately, using exactly the same render settings on each one. Then, merge the partial renders together in Photoshop (or another photo-manipulating program) to get the "final render" that you wanted.

This method will not work well with all scenes, depending upon how your characters are posed in relation to one another. You might want to try deleteing one character from one file, while leaving two characters together in another file. It's easy to split the scene right down the middle, and then combine the two rendered halves together in Photoshop.

This method also has the effect of creating smaller files sizes, and thus less demands on system resources. And thus more speed.

BTW - currently, this is the main method that I use with complex Poser scenes.

1. As you yourself have suggested, Vue is an excellent option. Just keep in mind that Vue doesn't handle skin tones very well on its on -- however, there is a recently released shader product called SkinVue that can help with this. You can take a look at it over at 3DCommune.

Otherwise, it's a snap to import Poser scenes into Vue. Easy as pie.

1. Try the standard "tricks" for rendering -- under Render Settings, reduce the bucket size/lower the texture load size to a smaller number. You can also reduce the size of the render itself under "Render Dimensions" on the menu. That sometimes helps, too.

XENO's method of chopping up the image and making multiple renders is the way I have worked since Poser 4. Sometimes it's the only way to get your image finished. There are one or two images where I've thrown everything in and left the computer for a day or so but they are few and far between.

Attached Link: http://www.avbros.com/english/products.html#scripts

After you have all the props and figures posed, with custom morphs, and textures, export everything out as one .obj file. Import that file back in and set up your lights. Your scene file size is now just a fraction of what it was originally. See if that helps. Or you go XENOs route and have Photoshop CS or CS2 this little PS script will collect all your renders and put them on separate layers in one PS file (linkCollector 1.0)nice. MeI just render in Cinema. SWAMP

SWAMP -- Thanks for the link to that script. I have CS -- and will most likely upgrade to CS2 in the near future. That's a neat little trick. It might prove to be a real timesaver.

Svdl, my comp's specs are: AMD Athlon XP 2800+ 4.48 GB of RAM NVIDIA GeForce MX 4000 Do you also have to have a certain amount of free disk space in order to have P6 run more efficiently?

I'm currently working on a scene in Bryce which currently holds 22 M3s. Its just starting to get unweildy. I haven't tried more than 3 V3s in poser though and it went OK. I didn't know Poser couldn't handle more than 5 or so.

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I'd suggest spawning morphs in the Vicky's and their clothing from Wyrmmaster's morphs, and deleting the magnets. Considering that there are 2 magnets for each body section on each Vicky, one for her, one for the clothing, this will slow down Poser by a ridiculous amount, turning the magnet effects into morphs will greatly reduce the load on Poser and speed things up.

Are you saying that rendering is slow, or that morphing/posing the figures becomes unbearably slow?

If the former, then the responses above pretty much cover it. If it's the latter, then welcome to the Poser folly! Each version, including SR's, adds yet more code and/or more cached data to Poser's memory model (I'm probably doing it more justice than it deserves calling it a "model" :-) Nothing is ever made as an optional load, so Poser's base memory requirements just grow and grow. With a finite upper limit of 2GB (imposed by Windows), more Poser base code/data means less memory for figures and more page swapping for normal (sub multi-GB) systems.

Some of us complained bitterly when P5 made this huge memory occupancy jump. ProPack's was trivial by comparison. Most users seemed happy though, because either they only use 1 or at most 2 complex figures in their scenes, and/or they were using very fast systems with extremely large amounts of memory. The most common symptom seems to be a slower and slower response to dial changes - not helped by having to go through Windows OS intertask switching since P5's introduction of a separate thread for the Parameter Dial window!

Realistically I don't expect Poser to be able to have limitless capacity, but I see no reason why each version should be capable of smaller and smaller maximum scene size.

Only solutions appear to be: Temporarily hide as many figures as possible while you pose the others (tough if they interact), as this reduces CPU load. Pose as much as possible before adding clothes (which just adds more figures to the scene). Save out your fully morphed and/or characters as new figures before you start the scene, and use the saved figures exclusively, to reduce the memory footprint per character, in your final scene. Wait for CL/EF to come to its senses and make the less used options (Setup, Face room, Dynamic, etc., etc) load on demand (or put the Parameter Dials back in the main Poser task - at least on Windows which has such slow intertask communication). Or wait until Daz|Studio advances enough to create your scene in - which may be a while, but likely will be quicker than CL/EF addressing Poser's memory hogging...

Attached Link: http://svdlinden.xs4all.nl/poserstuff/downloads/spawncharacter.zip

About free disk space: NTFS file system tends to get slow with less than about 25%-30% free disk space. Defragmenting the disk also helps. Not only for Poser, everything will benefit. 4.48 GB of RAM? That's quite a lot, and a rather unusual amount too. The CPU is fast enough, my secondary machine is an AthlonXP 2700+ with 1 GB of RAM and a Geforce Ti4200 graphics card, and it's a decent Poser machine. Though it slows down when using more than 3 Millenium 3 figures. A faster graphics card might help if you're using the OpenGL preview of Poser 6. Don't expect miracles though. Spawning morphs is a good idea. The magnets cause a good deal of on-the-fly calculations, and the sets of deltas from the custom morphs (plus DAZ morphs) do not speed up the system either. I'd suggest spawning those morphs, deleting all magnets and custom morphs, and set the new morph to 1.000 on all body parts. Saves a lot of memory. I've made a little Python script to do just that, see the attached link.

I have this problem to. From what I've read in forums it looks like getting rid of unused empty morph chanels in the CR2 can/might reduce drag on resources. If I understand it correctly even empty chanels bloat the character.

Next question for the both of us. How does a person get rid of all the empty morphs chanels and keep the joint controled ones? In Morph Manager they all looks the same to me. Maybe anyone offer up some ideas in that department?

The empty morph channels do take up memory, but not very much. A dozen bytes or so per morph per body part. It should be possible to write a script that reads in a CR2, scans the channels, and writes out a CR2 without empty channels. Not unlike using a DOM XML parser.

About my disk space and how it can influence my Poser performance. I have two HDs; my main internal one, and an external one(that is of the FAT32 file system) which holds more and has alot more free disk space than my internal one. My internal one is NTFS and yes my disk space on there definitely is significantly lower than 25-35%. Do you think that P6 would run better if I re-install it on my external HD?

I definitely recommend freeing up space on your internal HD. You can do that by reinstalling Poser on the external HD, or by moving other stuff to the external HD, doesn't matter what stuff. More free space on your internal primary HD means that Windows and everything will run faster. The speedup can be significant.

Ok Svdl I installed P6 on my external HD. Now the scene with my three V3s seems to handle somewhat more efficiently though still slow to an extent. Could that be due to the fact that the scene uses my Runtime from my P5 folder ported over to P6(via the Add Runtime feature)?

I just tried working with 3 V3s + clothing/hair on my AthlonXP 2700+ system - comparable to yours. My system is still quite responsive using the OpenGL preview. It has a Ti4200 graphics card - a lot faster than the GeforceMX. It is also equipped with 1 GB RAM and 2x80 GB ATA100 drives in RAID 0, with about 40% free space. Another issue might be the RAM. You mentioned 4.48 GB, I think that might have been a typo. How much RAM do you have? If it is less than 1 GB, you can expect your system to be slow with 3 V3s. It is unlikely that the linked runtime slows your system down. When manipulating the scene there is little or no disk access. Most of the disk access is due to virtual memory use - and you can improve virtual memory performance by setting the page file to a fixed size (I'd recommend 2-2.5 times the size of your physical RAM, with a maximum of 4 GB). Another thing: NTFS performs better on large drives than FAT32. So unless you use your external drive on other machines that do not understand NTFS (Win95/98/Me, Macintosh) I'd advise converting the drive to NTFS. Easy to do, just go to the command prompt (Start->Run, and enter 'cmd') and enter the following command: convert [drive letter]: FS:NTFS and hit Enter.

Oh ok svdl, well actually my RAM is 4.48 MB, not GB. Sorry. Guess I should go buy more RAM, huh? ;-) I already have my previewing set as OpenGL. I've already set my page file size on both my hard disks as well, though maybe I don't completely understand how I should get it right so that Poser runs more efficiently. My PF size on my main HD is 672-1344 MB and on my external drive, my PF size is set to 672-4096 MB. Yeah I would change my file system on my external HD to NTFS and see what happens.

Ah, that's it. Yes, I highly recommend upgrading your RAM to at least 1 GB. 448 MB, that sounds like 512 MB minus 64 MB - do you have a laptop? Looks like your machine has an integrated graphics chip that uses shared memory, and those are notorious for low 3D performance. If you have a desktop machine, I highly recommend disabling the onboard graphics chip and installing an AGP graphics card. Even the cheap ($60) low-end cards from nVidia and ATI will deliver much better 3D performance. If your machine is a laptop, there's nothing you can do about it. As for the pagefile sizes: I'd recommend setting the minimum pagefile size equal to the maximum. 2048 MB on your main HD and 2048 MB on your external HD should work fine. The main advantage of setting the pagefiles to fixed sizes is that no expansion of the pagefile will occcur while you are working. Such an expansion slows down your system big time, and Poser 4 invariably crashed during an expansion. The fixed size pagefiles will not fragment either - dynamically expanded pagefiles tend to suffer from fragmentation. Hope this helps, Steven.

No, and good thing that I don't use a laptop.;-) Yes my PC is supposed to have 5.12 MB of RAM. I also do have an onboard graphics chip and I am going to disable that. I also am going to set the page files to those equal sizes that you specified. On the command prompt, I tried converting my file system on my external HD with the "convert H: /FS:NTFS" command, but afterwards I was told to enter the current volume label for drive H. What exactly should I enter?

Look in Windows Explorer. Drives can be named, those names are called volume labels. For example, my C: drive is listed as System (C:) in Windows Explorer, thus the label is System. If your H: drive has no name, the volume label is empty and then you should enter nothing - just hit the Enter key.

I understand. Also, how do I disable my onboard graphics chip?

When you start up your machine, there should be a screen saying "Press [...] to enter setup." Usually at the bottom of the screen. The ESC, F1, F2 and DEL keys are the most common keys. This screen appears before Windows starts to load. Some machines do not show this screen. Instead, they show a logo of the builder. In that case it's a bit of experimentation to find out what key you have to press. When you have entered the BIOS setup, there should be a way to disable the onboard graphics chip. Where exactly you are going to find that option is hard to say, each brand and model of BIOS chip is different.

My computer is a Compaq Presario. I already went into the BIOS, but I don't know where I can disable the built-in graphics chip. I don't even know the name of the graphics chip myself.

Hmm, a Compaq. That means a non-standard BIOS, probably one with severely limited options. I don't have experience with Compaq Presarios of that genereation (I once had a P166 Compaq Deskpro), so I don't know where to find the built-in graphics chip option, I even don't know if it's possible to disable it at all. Your best bet would be contacting HP/Compaq customer support.