I just got Poser 6 late last evening, and have been working with it. However, I have a few questions: 1. I have my preferences set to compress the files. Only once they are compressed, I can't open them. The icon is the Windows icon that shows when there is no program assigned to it. I highlighted it and tried to assign a program to it, but Poser 6 doesn't show up in the list. I browsed to the Curious Labs folder and picked "Poser.exe", but that doesn't work. Instead of it trying to open with Poser, it tries to open with Acrobat reader (?!?). Can someone tell me how to get my saved .pzz files to open in Poser 6? I never had that problem with Poser 5. 2. I thought I read sometime back when everyone was new to Poser 6, that it could preview what your render will look like before you actually render it. How do you do that? 3. I like my renders to show up in a separate window. Is this possible in Poser 6, and if so, how do I do it? I didn't see an option for "render in a separate window" when I was looking at the render options. 4. How do you save your rendered image? Everytime I tried I could only save the .pzz file. I ended up going to "File" and "Export/Image". That's all for now. I'm sure I'll have more as I go along, hehe

1. Easiest way, open in Poser File open or import but this will create a new scene with the content. Why pzz don't open in Poser from the filemanager, no idea with my PC's it works.

2. ???? may be you talk about the draft render before you use the final render stettings?

3. If you look at the document window, there is a Tab named Render, in this Tab the render shows up and here you can see also past renders, depending on the settings in General preferences.

4. In the render window (tab) you will find on the top in the right corner a cam for rendering, a cam with a frame for partial renders and then an icon looking like a frame with an arrow. If you click here a window with your render opens and when you clos this window you are asked for saving or not.

Happy rendering

Message edited on: 12/30/2005 04:24

ok, the easy one first, number 4 Onve the pic is rendered, look above the viewing window. You will see from left to right, the size of the render, whether its a full size render, the renderer used. There is the then a space and 3 icons together. The one furthest to the right shows a litle picture with an arrow curving up to the right. If you hover the cursor over it, it says 'tear off'. Click on that to get a full size version of the render. If you then click on the 'x' on the top right hand corner to close it, you'll gett he option to save the image before closing. I've never tried to render to a separate window in Poser 6 due to the tear off facility. I've never compressed Poser files so I can't help you there. Question 2 leaves me a little puzzled as to what you mean - if I want a preview render, I go to render/render settings and click on the preview tab. Set the settingsa s I want them then click Render Now(Preview). IS this what you meant or have I missed something? If you haven't already, install the Service Packs and enjoy Poser 6 Good luck Nic

When you got the update tonight, the SR1 and 2 should be included, check your version number under Help/About Poser, it should be like 6.0.2.xxx when this is the case they are included or if you look at top of your application window, if there is written: e-frontier Poser, SR2 is included and there is no need of downloading the SR's.

Message edited on: 12/30/2005 04:44

I had to install the updates. Nothing like forcing the issue. I installed the 3 updates I found at the eFrontier site and now my .pzz files have an icon associated with them.

Being able to "preview" the render might refer to the open gl support? You can see the transmapped hair in preview mode.

Transmap? That's when it looks mesh-like? If so, then yes, I see "mesh-like" hair in the Pose room.

The mesh-like hair you can change with shift+ctrl+9 or Display/element style/Textureshaded.

Click on the ground and switch of cast shadows, but then you have no shadow on the ground. An other way is to click on the lights that you dont want to produce shadows and switch the shadows off.

The ground prop is being rendered as a "shadow catcher", one of the new P6 shader options (especially useful for compositing). You can get rid of the ground prop by unchecking the "Visible" property. The preview question: Textured preview now can make use of OpenGL, which means transparencies. If your graphics card supports OpenGL, you might want to set the preview mode to OpenGL - right click on the background in the Preview tab and choose OpenGL. OpenGL doesn't always work smoothly, however. A lot depends on the graphics card. I have had lots of OpenGL trouble with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, but all my nVidia cards (Ti4200, 6800LE, 7800GTX) work perfectly with OpenGL. I tweaked the 6800LE into a Quadro using RivaTuner - even better OpenGL stability, plus a nice performance increase. Doesn't work on the 7800 series of graphics cards, alas. If you want to open your older .pzz files, you can always uncompress them using WinZip or another Zip utility.

Thanks for all of the answers so far :) In Poser 5 when I applied preset lights, I saw in the pose window the general look of what the end result would be and could go light set to light set until I found one that I thought was the best. However, in Poser 6, when I apply the same preset lights, or any lights for that matter, the figure becomes darker, light a shadow instead of looking "lit up". Now I find that I have no idea what the lights look like until after I do a render; and that's a really pain. Is there a way to have Poser 6 show the light applications in the Pose window like Poser 5 does?