Usually when I import 3DS files into poser its no problem. But some files seem to crash whatever document is in poser. Ive tried scaling down the size but that doesnt seem to solve it. I was hoping that if I allocated more RAM to poser that might solve the problem. The poser manual only gives instructions for mac and Im running a PC. how can I allocate more memory?

Thats only a mac feature ya cant on a PC. It crashes the scene? freezes up? Sometimes importing .3ds files you have to move the camera around to find them. And sometimes they are just memory hogs.

they are just too big, as TJ pointed out allocating memory is only a Mac feature, Windows believes (sometimes erroneously) that it can manage the memory better than the operator. S You can however free up some ram, with a couple of things. Poser and Windows "leak" ram, meaning they don;t scrub it behind them well, so it doesn;t utilize it well. Saving your work, rebooting, and opening to your pz3 with nothing else running, and try to import then, may do it for you, because you get your full (or close to it anyway) complement of ram will be applied to it. The other thing to do, and ignore this if you know it S, is to close down the memory hogging programs that always running in your system tray, every programmer out there nowadays, seems to think their program is special and needs to be running 24/7 when they don;t. So go the Run menu and type in msconfig, pick startup from the list of menu's that come up, and uncheck the extraneous programs that are wasting your valueable resources, you can start them when you so choose from the programs menu later. The only other solution is buy more ram.

thanks for all the tech advice. my PC has 512mb of ram so I should be good with that, but I guess you cant have enough RAM...hehe as far as the type of crash, all the menu choices become disabled i.e. gray making it pretty much impossible to do anything but exit poser and restart

you know what , I had that same problem with some.3ds files..they werent huge complicated models. I just told myself ok...the file is corrupt just stop opening it. I know that wasnt an appropriate solution, but I must have been a little fed up at the time:-) If you find more information plz keep us posted. Good luck

You might also consider a ram cleanup program like Rambooster. I run that any time I'm using Poser or Vue or any of the other memory hogs I have. You'd be surprised at how helpful it is. Another thing I do is stop letting windows manage my memory. It wants to put the swap file on the c: drive which is waaaay smaller than my d: drive (I've got 26Gig of free space there right now) so I turned off that option and told it to put the swap file on the larger drive instead of the smaller c. So far, since I've done that, Poser hasn't crashed on me once and neither has Vue. Kate

You might try to open the ofending file/s in another program. Try 3d Explorer or another free to test ware if that doesn't work shoot me the file and I will try it in a few other programs to see if the file is corrupt.

Im thinkin TJ has the right idea...somethin just aint right with these files...Ive opened up some large 3DS files no problem, then opened up a smaller one only to have it crash poser...Poser seems to have a strange habit of blaming memory for every type of crash when it doesnt seem like memory is really the problem, i.e. a missing OBJ file