Hi everyone,

I'm trying to graduate from Poser-Inept to Poser-Beginner.   Thank you in advance for taking a look at my three questions:

-- Dynamic Hair/Cloth - What types of Poser activities require me to set up the basics in Frame 1 and then set my poses and morphs for Frame 30?  For instance, I've gotten the hang of dynamic cloth, but do I have to do the same frame advancing for dynamic hair?  Do I need to set up all of my hair preferences, then set to Frame 30 and then calculate so that my hair will grow and drape per my settings?

-- Let's say I calculate a dynamic cloth dress to drape nicely over the pose and initial morphs that I want to set for Jessi.   Let's say I have it calculate out to Frame 30.   What if I want to pose again.  Do I have to zero everything and reset?  Or, can I now do a new pose and calculate it out to Frame 60?  What about after that?  

-- Complex Scenes - When I use multiple characters, props and background, my computer says it won't render due to insufficient memory.  I've got a pretty beefy computer 3.4 GHz, 2G RAM.  Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

Thanks for taking a look!

You don't actually need to go out to frame 30.  You can set the start and end frame to 1 and use 15-30 draping frames.  If you change anything in a pose, just go to the cloth room and recalculate.

• Roni

On the last question, Poser will not use more than 1.5GB (or thereabouts) of memory, no matter how much your system has installed.  Some tips to reduce memory consumption when working with complex scenes and rendering them (Windows mainly):

• Don't load all of those wasteful, useless systray background processes and startup processes.
• Close all other applications.
• Stop unnecessary services (there are several websites that explain what services are automatically run and may possibly be disabled or set to manual).
• If you must, disable your internet/wireless connection and AV while working in Poser.

Doing these things may help you recoup a 100MB or 1/2GB of memory depending on how much is running and how much memory it all consumes.

Even those won't solve the Poser memory barrier, so some tips in Poser:

• Turn off (make invisible) all body parts that are not seen - such as underneath clothing or outside the rendered region.
• Reduce texture image map pixel sizes.  8000x8000 textures are really only good for extreme closeups, but consume vast amounts of memory (e.g.: 8000x8000x4 = 256MB of memory !!)
• If possible, use lower-polygon figures when they are too distant to be of any detail.  V3 with full injection morphs is just way too much overkill in this scenario.
• Watch the size of shadowmaps, Firefly bucketsizes, and other memory consumers.

Robert

I kind of have a related question.  When dealing with dynamic hair/clothing, are there guidelines that dictate simulations with respect to the model's movement?

Having completely confused you, what I mean is, cloth will behave pretty differently if the model spins on her heel vs. turning slowly to face someone.  What settings control this?  I'd read that 30 frames covers about 1 sec.  What if her action takes 5 sec (such as walking across a room in a long skirt, then stopping short).  I can't imagine needing to create 150 frames.  For that matter, since I have the figure's x,y,z coordinates, could I calcuate her velocity (assuming I knew how much time had elapsed over N frames), and apply that to the dynamic settings?

Matt

Don't forget about wind force. What really makes cloth move like that (well some of what makes cloth move like that) is wind resistance. I've had limited success in using wind force to mimic movment in cloth. I probably could have done better with more practice, but havn't had the time. My biggest problem with dynamic hair is the do going all flat in the draping stages, what am I doing wrong there?

Quote - Don't forget about wind force.

Oh, I havent even started with that, nor have I tackled dynamic hair.  At the moment, I'm just trying to get my hands around the physics of motion in Poser wrt dynamic cloth.

Matt