I am very interested in what 'ordinary' people like me use when they work in Poser... Maybe it would be a good idea to let me know which version of Poser you use. Me myself use a AMD64 3500+ (OC to 2.35 GhZ), 2Gb Ram, SLI with 2xASUS 6800 GTX (256Mb Ram). Watercooling. Tomorrow ill upgrade my CPU to AMD64 X2 4800+ (2Mb L2). For me Poser6 works fine until trying posing 2 or more characters with collision detection on then my computer going in to SHOCK :-) And the rendering is also a devastating task, as most of you probably are aware of. I render mostly to animation and that T-A-K-E-S T-I-M-E, big time :-( If this was a bad idea, im sorry :-( but i thought that is good :-) If theres already such a thread somewhere, let me know and ill erase this faster then rendering a spline with no light ;-> Snaah Hmm? Should this be a sticky??

Poser 6, Pentium4 3,4GHz HT with 2 Gig RAM, 250 Gig SATA HD [seagate], XP Home, 256Meg Nvidia 7300GS PCI Express graphics card!

No problems with P6 with rendering or anything else!

"Size doesn't matter" or so we're told.  I do animations using P3 on both a 1.2 Ghz PC, and a iMac G3 (450 Mhz).  I use P3 because it fits within my personal styling aesthete, and even my clients like the lo-tech look (I tend to do anims in Toon mode).  I also use P6 on a dual chunk G4.  Animating on this takes a whole whack of time.  I loaded P6 on a new intel based dual chunk Mac as a test and animation times (full render P6, Jessi dancing)  still took a lot of time for a 30 second clip.  the more info you are asking the computer to handle, the more time it will take.  I started this Poser addiction with P3 on a Mac Performa 6400 (running a screaming 180 Mhz with 96 Mb of Ram) and still turned out work.  So, as a matter of curiosity, what kind of work are you doing?

It's really simple: doing any type of 3d work takes horsepower, and "smart working".

When you are isung a number f figures and props in a scene, don;t try to use the full preview settings.. drop down to wireframe or even cartoon shading. That's what th ebig guys like Lucasfilms do.

When they do a movie, they have whole rooms full of computers doing the processing, for a year at a crack. And every time a new poser version is released, with new and better rendring abilities, render time increases, because our computers are doing more and more calculations.

And no, I don't think it should be a sticky at all.. it's just the nature of the beast.

If you sat through the 24 hour long renders I used to do 190 years ago of JUST a glass ball at 320x200, you'd realize how far we've come in all this time.

We're all just so used to "I want in NOW!" that patience is going out the door, and when you are doing 3D work on ANY system with ANY software, patience (or renderfarming) is one of the main ingredients.

Hehe ,

I use a e-machines amd athlon 2800 with 512 meg memory and Integrated graphics on the motherboard.   :)

Surprisingly this runs Poser 5 pretty well.  

My previous system was a 450 mhz pentium which didnt run Poser 5 very well.

I have done scenes with 4 figures of V3 , M3 , David and Hiro , hair and clothing with no problems.

Rendering is slow , but then rendering is always slow.

This is Poser on a budget but the performance increase for cost didnt justify more.

With Poser 7 coming I would like a dual or quad processor and another couple gigs of memory.

What with all the new puters coming out now and P7 in the offing... what we need... is what somebody did a years or two ago.

Somebody/somewhere... put up a standardised Poser scene... that everyone could use to test their speed etc against.

I was surprised at the time... cos my meager (then) puter was getting results simiar and better to the (then) new puters that had been released.

It went to prove what a lot of people had said for years... that faster prcocessors and more memory didn't mean that Poser would run any better/faster.

However... if I remember correctly... the test I refer to was pre P6... and hopefully with P7 we should see performance increases that are dependant upon puter power.

I can't remember who started that thread off, but I am sure somebody will...

Garee:  Sorry... I don't believe you...! I don't think they had glass 190 years ago..!   :tt2:

¨Heh perhaps it just FELT like it was 190 years ago?

I THINK it was Ajax who did that sample scene btw. I remember it, I'm just not totally sure who did it. And yes it could be cool to have an updated version of it for Poser 6 tests (and soon Poser 7)

I'm running P6 on a machine with an AMD Athlon 64X2 dual-core 3800+, 2GB PC5300 667MHz RAM, EVGA Nvidia GeForce 7300GT 256MB, 250GB SATA HD on an ASUS M2N-E motherboard and everything runs brill!

I'll be better prepared to answer this question after P7 is released.  It would be nice to have the current limitations lifted off of the number of figures which you can use in a scene without render / memory problems cropping up -- regardless of your PC's horsepower.

Well, much of the limitations can be circumvented using Vue's ecosystem or ability to mass duplicate items that are imported.

True.  Vue has often been my renderer of choice.  It might become more so with Vue 6I, and the Poser shaders working in Vue.

But it'd be nice to have Poser with native capabilities of its own.  It's irritating when more than three Mil figures with hair, clothes, and a detailed background regularly cause Poser to choke on a render.  I'm hoping that P7 will fix that.

Quote - Garee:  Sorry... I don't believe you...! I don't think they had glass 190 years ago..!   :tt2:

the phonecians (sp) used glass to decorate potter about 5000 yrs ago and glass was used in architecture as long ago as 4500 yrs ago. glass really came into its on in the middle ages thtrough the art of stained glass windows. and medina glass has been made for centuries.

billy

There are bits of colored glass used as jewels in Tutankhamen's tomb collection.  At the time that those ancient headpieces, etc. were made -- the colored glass was as precious as real gemstones.

Today's cheap costume jewellery would have been worth a king's ransom in the ancient world.

billy423uk:  actually... I did know that glass had been around for considerably longer than 190 years.

My (supposed to be) humerous comment was in response to Gareee's comment:

Quote -  "If you sat through the 24 hour long renders I used to do 190 years ago of JUST a glass ball at 320x200, you'd realize how far we've come in all this time."

Okay... lets try again... I don't believe the equipment to render anything was around 190 years ago. I do have an old Sinclair ZX81, but I thinks that is under 100 years old...

Let's see, AMD 4400X2 CPU, 4GBs Ram, Nvidia 7900 GT, Dual Raptor Drives...Poser runs fine, but renders too slow for me to ever use.

190 years ago they did trick painting like putting a cylindrical mirror in the middle of the canvas, then painting a picture using the mirror. The thing looked like a Photoshop filter until you put the mirror back..;) 'bout as close as they got. Unless you count camera obscura's..;) but there the render was at the speed of light..;)

I'm a broke mofo, and I have an Athelon 2k, Asis system board, 512 meg memory, a 40 and an 80gig drive, and Poser 5. 4 didn't break a sweat doing renders, but 5 is touchy. I've learned never to use an injection after I've loaded Vickie's face expressions (about 2 minutes of timing out per dial..;), and don't hit the 'do you want to save' button until it's ready. 5 blows up more than 4 or Bryce does, but it makes up for better renders..;)

With the right number of magnets Poser will get slow on any machine (not talking about rendering here) ;-)

AMD K6 2-350 256MB. Do I get a prize? WinXP runs sweet on it though so nobody dis Bill Gates.

slightly OT but a number of years ago, I did some animation on an Amiga 2000 using the first generation of Lightwave and Alladin 4D.  a simple bit of moving a primative was a weekend slog.  so, don't complain if your machine isn't a super computer.  if it works, use it.

Yep, my roots go back the the Amiga (actually I used it when at Disney), and back before that to the Atari 800.

Rendering back then? A pipedream of what MIGHT be possible in the future.

I still remember the first wireframe game on the Atari.. we were dumbfounded watching wireframe planes that had maybe 30 or 40 polys in them, moving realtime.

Dual Xeon 2.66GHz w/4GB memory, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra - Poser 4-6
AMD64x2 4800 w/4GB memory, GeForce FX 5200 - Poser 6 (smokin'!)
iMac Intel dual-core 2.16GHz w/2GB memory - Poser 5&6 (4/PP don't work with Intel Macs!)

Over 1TB of storage:

• 420GB - dual Xeon
• 160GB - 64bit system
• 250GB - Mac
• 450GB - external

Amiga 2000 with Imagine and a hellovalotta suffering, yes! :)

Imagine? What?? No Videoscape 3d??

I think I even still have the demo tape of that around here somewhere.. LOL!

I'm a very patient person.  For the few past years, while my 3 new Monster ATX have been parted together I've done a ton of work with a few 700Mhz celerons I have.   They have 300 - 500Mbs of RAM and clunk away fine!

Allthough I'm very anxious to see what my Hyperthreaded 2.8Ghz, with 4GBs of RAM, will do with Poser 7, and maybe Windows Vista!

Ok..

AMD Athlon(tm)XP 3200+ (2.21Ghz), 2GB DDram (PC3200s (1x1GB, 2x512GB)), Dual Channel 400mhz, Ati Radeon x700 Pro(256mb), Creative labs Sound blaster Audigy 2 sound card, Shuttle AN35 Nforce2 chipset motherboard, 160GB HD 7200rpm(Pri), 80 GB HD 7200rpm(Sec), CDrom RW, and DVD RW, Samsung 712n 17inch TFT monitor, Logitech Cordless mouse, keyboard, Saitek Cyborg EVo joystick.

After installing the latest nForce2 drivers today, poser functions great.

Quote - Yep, my roots go back the the Amiga (actually I used it when at Disney), and back before that to the Atari 800.

Rendering back then? A pipedream of what MIGHT be possible in the future.

I still remember the first wireframe game on the Atari.. we were dumbfounded watching wireframe planes that had maybe 30 or 40 polys in them, moving realtime.

 

You mean like in "Battle zone" with all its wire frame tanks, planes and missiles??? LOL!!

Yep.. there was a tank game similar to battlezone, and a jet gat with jets flying around. They first came out for the appleII, and then were ported (much better) to the atari computers.

We actually got solid plane colored objects first on the amiga computer.. imagine poser's preview manipulation "box" mode, and everything in the game looking like that. No bitmaps,  just solid colored planes, cylinders, balls, and pyramids.

AMD XP 3200+, 2.5 gig ram, 490 gig of hard drives - 1 x 120 internal, 1 x 250gig internal, 1 x 120 gig external - partitioned into 5 drives, ATI Radeon 9550 250 meg Graphics, Dual monitors - 17"  LCD & 21 " CRT, Windows XP Pro with 3 gig switch activated.

Was still having minor issues with Carrara until I set the 3 gig switch - now all seems well......

I prefer to setup in Poser and render in Carrara.

Quote - Yep.. there was a tank game similar to battlezone, and a jet gat with jets flying around. They first came out for the appleII, and then were ported (much better) to the atari computers.

We actually got solid plane colored objects first on the amiga computer.. imagine poser's preview manipulation "box" mode, and everything in the game looking like that. No bitmaps,  just solid colored planes, cylinders, balls, and pyramids.

 

Another former Amiga user here, I miss my Amiga 1000!

Did you ever play "Arctic Fox"? Simple 3d graphics, but man that was fun! I spent days playing that and Bard's Tale on my Amiga. Ahh memories.

To stay on topic I have a P4 3Ghz w 1.5 GB ram. Using Poser6 I routinely get 5 mill figures with hair and full background (like stonemason's stuff) with no problem.

Yep.. loved artic fox.. did you ever find the easter egg in it?

My first-ever computer was a $35,000,000 IBM 370 -- or rather -- the IBM main frame belonged to the university.  They'd kindly let me borrow the machine on occasion.

It was great -- a $35M machine so that I could sit around and play Star Trek.  Some of you might remember the old Trek with dots for sector grid points and an "E" to represent the Enterprise.  Asterisks (*) for stars.  I think that I've seen an updated, colorized version with gasp graphics added in -- but that was a few years ago.

The first PC that I ever used was an Apple IIe, with a very brief foray on an Apple III.  That machine didn't last long in the market.  IIRC, there was some sort of a problem with the Apple III.  The 1st PC that I ever owned was an Amiga 500.  For its time, it was an amazing machine.  I was disappointed to see the Amiga go.

Amiga put itself out of business.

Now, let me explain.  I lived in Philadelphia when the Amiga was around.  Commodore was headquartered in West Chester, PA (just outside Philly).  The Amiga user group in Philly (PAUG) was probably one of the most influential and closely tied to Commodore and Amiga (some of the users worked for Commodore!).  So, we had firsthand information on everything that was going on, especially towards the end.

As seen at this Wiki, the company had two headquarters - one in West Chester, PA and the other in the Bahamas (offshore - can we say financial safety net?)

"Commodore's marketing efforts for the Amiga were less competitive and seemed half-hearted."

In a board meeting in the Bahamas, Gould and the board decided that they had to take the money and run - cutting and slashing major departments of the Amiga sector in the process.  The worst hit was the Marketing Dept.  I think that one or two employees remained afterwards. It was with that one solitary Amiga commercial that aired around Christmas near the end that Commodore pinned all of its hopes for a future - lame and late.

I back this astonishing detail with this (same Wiki):

"With market share eroding, Commodore embarked on a series of decisions that were heavily questioned by shareholders and the press, who sometimes accused management of only being interested in removing as much value from the company as possible before it finally disappeared. By 1994, only its operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable."

Hard to forget this having lived in the middle of it.  I too was disappointed to see the Amiga go.  At the time - and for some years following the end of the Amiga - the competition in Microsoft PCs and Apple Macs was still not comparable (MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 - yuck).  Now the AmigaOS exists in name only - with no real hardware support or advantage that it once had.

Keep it coming, im reading it all :-) Thank you!!

There is still a very strong Amiga user base in UK and quite a few stores still sell them... second hand of course. Prices range between £45-£110

www.retropack.co.uk

I remember just before the crash... there was a pic of a robot's head... gold with red eyes going around... took ages to render to screen but would put some of todays renders to shame.

Wasn't it Workbench 3.0 that was the forerunner of Windows type displays...?

Even workbench 1.0 would be a forerunner.. ;)

I was selling amigas during thier downfall, and the problem was the PC market was just starting it's price war thing, and amiga just had too small a share of the marketplace to be able to compete like that.  Apple was in the same boat, and the 2gs died as well as the atari computers.

Price wars are great for consumers, and BIg companies.. anyone in between pays the price for them.

Regardless of web posted hindsight, I was on the "inside" and we all could see the writing on the wall for a very long time. I stuck with the Amiga because the machine was VERY revolutionary at the time, but we knew 2 years before it was discontinued that we were going down the dark path of extinction.

BTW, there are amiga emulators for PCs, and they do a pretty good job of emulation. Playing some of the old Psygnosis games is still fun, but there's not a whole lot of reason to run the utilites any more, since so many advancements have been made.

I REALLY wish colorfont tech had made it into the PC world though!

Yep - tis true.  I think that we all knew it was coming as other computers started ramping up capabilities and userbases while reducing costs.

The part about the board meeting in the Bahamas that was worst was that it was 'open' to shareholders - but it was very difficult to get shareholders there - they usually don't have that type of money - especially while invested in Amiga shares! ;)  We sent a representative from PAUG, but they were locked out of the 'open' meeting iirc.  The shareholders had no say in the final verdict passed down by Gould et al.

Yes, I have AmigaExplorer which runs several emulators, WinUAE is mine of choice.  The latest version though doesn't let you run AmigaOS 3.5 or greater and instead does some 'emulation' support using AmigaOS 3.1 to make it work with your PC's support.

And, yes, I continued using my Amiga for many years.  When I moved to Colorado, purchased an A4000, towered it, put in as much memory as possible (think jury-rig and hot-glue here), put in a rare video card and sound card, gave it internet capabilities, PFS3, and it was a rockin' machine (sold for $3500 several years later).  The problem was that I had very little software left and even less use for the machine.  Considered starting back into C++ programming (had the software and the RKMs), but it was not to be.  I could always do plugin dev for Cinema 4D R1 (if they even had plugin support at that time). ;)

There was a roiling controversy going on in the Amiga community during the period of the downhill slide -- accompained by a lot of finger-pointing and acrimony.  I remember it well.  Some editorial writer (for Amiga World magazine, I think) wrote a column about how Amiga users should look in the mirror to see who they ought to blame for the Amiga's coming upon hard times.  However: most users attacked Commodore.  But Commodore always had its defenders.  Back and forth -- It was that sort of a time.

And then it all just kind of faded away.......................

The Amiga never was as popular in the US as it was in Europe.

BTW, I still have my amiga 1300, and most of my old atari computers!

Hmmm? I heard this word in at another forum... actually it was to words, could anyone define the words? OFF TOPIC Hoever interesting the serenade of nostalgia is... Im still interested in peoples hardware. Thanks Joykiller :-)

Ah, the good ole' days --- SLAP! -- oh, hardware. :D

I was going to add something about Creative SB Extreme Fidelity Fi Platinum with Logitech Z-5500 - wow!  Optical digital with THX and DD and 500W!  Nothing to do with 3D, but it makes doing 3D much more enjoyable while pumping the tunes.

If Poser 7 is going to handle multi-threaded rendering, best to have a dual/quad core-processor system.  Multiprocessing is the way of the future.  Our grandchildren will probably be talking about their 256 core systems with 2TB of memory and holographic displays. :)

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz (overclocked to 3.2GHz) with 2GB RAM here.

I used to have an old AMD Athlon 2500+, and I must say that the difference is great. I never get the feeling that I have to "wait" for a render to finish in Poser, it becomes more integrated into the working process.
In Vue, upgrading my computer meant the renderer time on a difficult scene would be a question of 0-2 hours instead of 0-10 hours. Cinebench 9.5 showed my new processor to be about 5 times as fast as my old, and yet the clock frequency is only about 60% higher.

Getting a multi-core processor is very advisable for anyone interested in renderering.

P4, 3.2 Ghz (hyperthreaded), 2 Gb RAM.

It's only if I attempt to render extremely complex scenes that Poser actually chokes, and most renders take less than an hour unless I use IBL and AO.

Am I satisfied? Mostly, but the fault isn't always with the computer or program.

Quote - Garee:  Sorry... I don't believe you...! I don't think they had glass 190 years ago..!   :tt2:

Computers no.

Glass yes.

this useless history fact brought to you by the letter M.

Glass goes back way before that!  Probably more than 5000 years!  Of course, we're not talking 'plate glass windows', but things like jewelry and vase glazing way back then.

Sheet glass started to be used around the 11th century.  You even see window glass in the early American Colonies (1600's).

Ack!  Off Topic!  Watch out.......the OT police are watching you........through the smudged & brittle glass of their monitor screens.  On their dual-core AMD x64-2 with 2048G of RAM and a 320G hard drive.

Ah, whatever.  I'm on a dual Xeon with 4GB and 420GB HD. Let them lick glass!  (somehow full of innuendo) ;D

Yeah.....what I really want to know is where does all of that gunk on the typical monitor screen come from, anyway?

No innuendo intended, of course..........

Hmmm.... 

Quote - Ack!  Off Topic!  Watch out.......the OT police are watching you........through the smudged & brittle glass of their monitor screens.  On their dual-core AMD x64-2 with 2048G of RAM and a 320G hard drive.

Hmm? What AMD X64-2?? I thought that was like AMD 64 X2 but i still miss the CPUspeed? And whos having that 320Gb HD? confused If that was you please let me know what you think of the rig when you work in Poser... Me myself wish i had more than 40Gb on my hardrive (most of it is full);-> And hmmm? again... OT police??? I was asking a kind question nothing more nothing less...

even more OT...just started some 'training' on MS Vista (a Powerpoint presentation..how cheap..;)..they want 15 gig just for the OS, and recommend 50 gig free space..DVD, 1 Gig memory...sheesh, I remember Dos 2.1 fitting on a floppy..5.25" at that..;)