This machine, all kinds of stuff. The Poser box, almost nothing.

Cool. I'd bet most of us hobbyists only use one box though ;)

"what's "Personal Orchestra"?" It's a wonderful orchestral sound library from garritan.com generally used with notation software. Makes orchestral composition affordable and accessible to the hobbyist. You can use it to write your piece for a full (or whatever size) orchestra and then burn it to disk.

..I've cropped the dual monitor screenshot so you can read the icons.
(wallpaper is by Raphael Lacoste) *edit,uv mapper & MPE don't get used anymore,might delete those two

Message edited on: 03/06/2006 21:06

...hmm. Now you guys got me googling some of those apps. Hope I can make it through the night without a charge card ;)

Quick tips to improve your Poser performance... Switch off EVERYTHING you don't need. That means backdrops, screen savers, music players, sounds in general, themes and whatever else you use. If you need music, use the stereo, if you want to look at something nice, get a photo album. If you have Windows XP, get rid of the jellybean interface and use Windows Classic. All the lovely things Windows can do will eat away at your memory and system performance. End of lecture, back to our regular programs...

This is quite interesting. My 'Poser desktop' looks bare in comparison!!

...we all know that, Sam. The original post says, "related to Poser and "The Hobby". It doesn't mean we're dumb enough to run em all at once ;)

Wow....your desktops look so....organized! looks at desktop. And the random zip files and .psd's. Let's just say that my desktop is really messy. lol I usually just access my programs from the start menu g And, once a month, I clean up my desktop and feel all neat and tidy. :D

My actual desktop only has 9 items when it's clean. I euphemistically called the folder with Poser/animation shortcuts in it a 'Poser desktop'. The sparse 'real' desktop gives me plenty of room to put all the temporary junk I generate with this awful hobby. That stuff gets cleaned up frequently ;)

Message edited on: 03/06/2006 23:14

@ stonemason very cool wallpaper. My desktop has about 4 icons : Firefox, DSL, and two folders. smiles I like mine with very few icons. And a final fantasy x-2 wallpaper. :O)

Attached Link: http://www.alerma.com/cooltabs.html

Message edited on: 03/07/2006 10:59

And here is mine :o)

what's TTailor Tunesy?

The Tailor. A utility available at DAZ for putting morphs into clothing.

...I guess I win the 'Bad Choice of Words for the Day' award ;) My bad for using the phrase 'Poser desktop'. I should have said something more straightforward like 'other apps you use with or in support of Poser'. Was curious what other apps people use in the hobby, not curious about actual desktop. hehehe ) Ah, well. I'll ask again later when people have forgotten about this thread ;)

What is ContextFree, diolma?

((Was curious what other apps people use in the hobby, not curious about actual desktop.)) Poser 6 Wardrobe Wizard Vue D'Esprit 4 Paint Shop pro 8 That's it. Now, ask again after I win the lottery and I'll have a really big list to show off. LOL! ;)

ContextFree is a helpful (in the right circumstances) and amusing little (free) app that creates errm... well, it's up to what you can make of it. It workks by applying ruls (which you can define) recursively. It can create patterns, textures, height/displacement maps, and it has a very simple interface. But it's rather limited (unless you have endless time to play with it). Can't remember where I got it - try google.. Cheers, Diolma (who must remember to get back to ContextFree ...)

...cool. Found it. Reminds me of an old DOS fractal app from almost 20 years ago that I wasted hours playing with ;) Thanks for the tip, diolma.

Attached Link: http://www.ozonehouse.com/ContextFree/

OOps - Xpost

'tis a good app! Can use it for all sorts of things, but probably not too useful in Poser.. (still fun to play with, tho..) Cheers, Diolma

ARRRRRGGGH! Have just been totally discombobulated by ernyoka1's pic! How on Earth does ernyoka1 navigate through that lot? Wish I had that mental capacity Cheers, (and 'bye) Diolma

LOL In short: I don't... Except for a few of these programs, I access most through the Start menu. I just lop all the shortcuts that all programs love to install, into my "shortcuts" folder. That way I still have them, if I fail to find the program in the Start menu (that one folds out into something 4 rows wide (not including the actual Start menu) so... There's a certain program (DiskCatalog) which I can simply NEVER remember the name of. But I know the icon and I know approximately where to find it in my shortcuts folder... So I can find it that way :o)

Ooh, that's actually kind of spooky. Hundreds of little Rickman heads... OK if we're talking Poser and its related or most-used apps, here's my list. I don't have these on a separate folder or anything, most of them are in my start menu. Used every day: Poser 6 Photoshop 7 Bryce 5.5 CRPro Wordpad (essential for taking files apart to see how they work, or why they don't!) Laetia's MerchUtils tool Used about once a week: RTEncoder P3DO Explorer Used ocassionally: Mat Poser Edit 3 Morph Manager UV Mapper

PSP 9 (Postwork and Image Edit, mostly Image Edit for the Web. I do little Postwork.) DAZ Studio (Going to Bryce, or to do a quick blocking of a scene. It does render so much faster.) Shade (Getting into Rendering in Shade and started some modeling there as well.) Truespace (Modeling, though I still am learning that one.) Animation Shop Mimic Then of course I have a few Plug Ins to Poser.

Poser 4 Poser 6 PSP 7 Vue 4 Shade 7 Bryce 5 No shortcuts on the desktop, these are in the start menu. My desktop background is black with one of my favorite renders of the moment centered. Don't like any shortcuts on my desktop.

Poser 6 PSP X Vue 5 UV Mapper MatPoseEdit Wings3D

"...we all know that, Sam. The original post says, "related to Poser and "The Hobby". It doesn't mean we're dumb enough to run em all at once ;)" Well, I wasn't accusing anyone of being dumb, so please don't lay that one at my door. I have found that a lot of XP users leave their default settings, which does degrade performance quite significantly. Also, there are quite a lot of otherwise rational users who wonder why their computer is incredibly sluggish, when they have around 70 bazillion background tasks running. So, all I'm trying to do is give some friendly and useful advice.

Thanks for the advice SamTherapy, appreciate it! :)

"...70 bazillion background tasks running." Heh, and those are the ones you know about. Everybody and his brother wants to be in the message loop. My AntiVir used to update on a schedule now the sucker is waiting in the shadows and jumps on the internet every time I connect. And don't even think about installing RealPlayer!

Another good tidbit for those who don't have an image for the background (like me). The best color for the background is around 50% gray. This is important for graphics people because your eyes adjust to color. When you are editing an image in PhotoShop (for example) you want your eyes to be as neutral as possible. A white background makes images "feel" darker. A black background makes images feel brighter. This is why the background in PhotoShop is gray. I never want my eyes to be forced to adjust if I can help it. Cheers, Joe