More and more merchants are dropping .rsr thumbnails from their products. That means P4 users are going to have a lot of shrugging thumbs when they install the bought products.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing. P4 is three versions behind the current release of Poser. EFrontiers offered free and low cost versions of P5 for limited periods and it's now possible to find P5 going for the price of a new videogame instead of the hundreds it originally cost (and what new versions cost). It's fairly inevitable that this would happen, but I've only recently noticed that the majority of new products no longer provide .rsr support.

The one annoyance for me is that Poser changed the dpi of their thumbnails. Current versions send them at 72 dpi whereas older versions saved them at 96 dpi. The bother for me is that I started and did most of my visual index cataloging with the older 96 dpi thumbnail resolustion. The dpi doesn't make much of a difference in Poser (and actually provides smaller file sizes). It's an extra step for my indexing, but that's a nonstandard application of the thumbnails, so I can't expect any changes. I was surprised once to find a freebie with a .png thumbnail at 66,000 dpi.

Poser4 was released in 1999. Usually software companies abandone older versions while they support newer ones

Microsoft is still giving support to Windows 3.1 or Windows95?

Merchants who no longer support P4 (myself included) are not including .rsr files because P5 and above don't require them.

I've discontinued support for P4 because most of my characters now use the Poser shader tree extensively and P4 doesn't have one.

I still see a lot of freebies being made via P4. Im sure you are all wishing for it's death but I don't see it happening just yet. In P5 I still have to make my own thumbs if they are not there. So, Im not sure what you guys are talking about.

I still use P4 all the time. I don't care if an author includes RSRs. I just use P3DO Explorer to solve this problem.

1. Install P3DO Explorer and the Poser Pro Pack (both free, both here in Free Stuff, now at v 1.9.2.)

2. Open P3DO Explorer and browse to the section of your library where the "P4 Unfriendly" content resides (Poser 4Runtimelibrariescharacter... for example)

3. You will see all the content, with thumbnails, as P3DO explorer can read both PNGs and RSRs.

4. Select any the content that has no RSR file (or just select everything.)

5. From the Tools menu, select "Convert Rsr2Png..." The dialog comes up.

6. Under "Apply To", choose "Selected Files" (or "All Files" if you wish.)

7. Under "Convert From", choose ".Png to .Rsr".

8. If you don't want all those PNGs hanging around bulking up your P4 runtime, you can go under "Options" and check the box for "Remove source file after conversion".

9. Click OK and your shrugging dorks will vanish into the aether, to be replaced by glorious, full-color thumbnails!

EDIT: I see they've finally fixed the "double line break" issue with the new forum editor!

Jimdoria has the right idea, but we still include Poser 4 support in our products. But I see why some don't.  I am not sure who still uses only Poser4, but it would be a good pole to see.  Sharen

I still love P4!  I'll never give it up, LOL!  Same with ProPack...  I have every version, but am just so comfy with P4.

This is what happens when you get old.

Even DAZ has dropped P4 support. New files have the version number 5, mat poses are using shader nodes and nested folders are supported.

I'm one of those who has finally dropped Poser 4 support and I had been a BIG advocate for not doing so. It was time to move forward.

I still use P4! : ) Although, I did buy P7 when the upgrade price was offered. Silly me, I have the program, but not a computer to run it on, in the fatalistic hope that someday I'll be able to purchase a Mac (new or used) made in this century. So I have a copy of P7 that I've never broken the seal on yet.

On the side topic of the thumbnail dpi's... surely that makes no difference whatsoever to a screen image? Whether 72, 96, or 66,000, the number of picels is what matters when it comes to being shown on the screen.

All screens show at 72ppi (pixels per inch), whereas dpi is referring to print resolution - the number of dots your printer is instructed to print in each inch of the paper. So Poser changing it's default resolution for the thumbnails should make no odds as to how they are shown on your monitor - nor should the file sizes change that much, because the number of pixels (and therefore information) being stored is the same.

jonthecelt

I still use P4 as well as P6. I just like the program and it renders a lot faster for some of the things I use it for. I do like the P6 library system better though. Glad to know I am not the only die-hard P4 user out there. :O)

I still have P4 installed. It is good for merchants in some ways to do a few things quickly, but it is time to focus on the present, not the past.

Buy aye. P7 > P6 > P5 > ProPack > P4..

It is no big deal about thumbnails. P3do can make rsr's if people really need them.

I go with the fact that Poser 4 is getting very long in the tooth (8 years, people!).  I still have it installed on both Windows and MacOS for testing, but that is about it.

Speaking of which, sooner or later Apple is going to drop OS 9 level support in their OS - and then what will you do?  Poser 4/PP will only run in Classic mode - without it, the migration to Poser 5+ only will be mandatory (or you stick with an older MacOS).  Eventually (probably five or ten years) even Windows will no longer support old 32-bit applications.  Can we then bury the bones? ;)

Though I own Poser 7, I still do a lot of work with Poser Pro Pack.

Jay

Well, fortunately, there is a perfectly useable substitute for P4 for those unable or unwilling to do P5 and above.

/P

Aye Kuroyume. Same here. For testing as well.

I really liked Painter3d which shipped with Pser4 but never worked past Windows 95 sadly. A great software title abandoned. Not sure if the problem was the company couldn't keep up, or it wasn't financially viable, or what the reasonaing was. Painter3d rocked. Never made sense why it was abandoned.

More concerning is the various Poser utilities and the void left if they someday are no longer compatible with OS or Poser itself.

One of the things I think that made P4 so popular was that it was very stable and trouble free. It felt well thought out and complete. Despite needing a few patches most people found it stable for all their needs for many years. But the lack of advanced features people have become accustomed to in Poser 5, 6, and 7 makes it dissapointing to go back except for testing.

I wondered how long it would take for someone to push DS.

Still, DS is a glorified P4 and Daz has geared thier new figures to that.

I still have P4 installed for testing but I think it is time to retire P4/5 and just keep P6/7 on my drive.

I still use Poser 4 and will continue to use, the other Poser I only use when I need some special effect that cannot be done in Poser4 and the cloth room for making/fitting clothes to be used in Poser4.

Obsolette?, something is worst, my Poser 4 is runing under Windows 95!!, well... Poser 5 also does....

I've grabbed P5 when it was free and use it for procedurals and displacement, but my main tool is still ProPack. It's so fast, so easy to use and doesn't freeze itself at all.... And uses .png's, so if only the creator included them, there's no problem with shrugging guy ;)

I also abandoned P4 on my new PC. Stick to P6/P7 now (P6 offers better Carrara support) and I'm happy with it. I may start testing new meshes on my notebook, which has still a P4 installed.

Quote - I wondered how long it would take for someone to push DS.

The obvious is often the last thing thought of, no? ;)

Quote - Still, DS is a glorified P4 and Daz has geared thier new figures to that.

I prefer to think of it as something that has roughly the same compatibility and functions, but is pushing out in a lot of new directions entirely. Ferinstance, those of us who have used Poser Magnets know how fscking frustrating that is, esp. to beginners and folks who don't use it too often... D-Form makes it orders of magnitude easier. AOL/IBL? Not any serious prob in D|S... a cheap plugin later and you have it.  But, enough pimping for now; point is, it does everything P4 does and more, with very little expense overall.

As for those have-to-have features in >P5? Umm, like what? Dynamic hair isn't exactly a hot seller, and the time and trouble that dynamic clothing takes makes that more trouble than its worth to most folks... which explains why there are so few of those items up for sale.

I'm actually not knocking the features - just that they do eat more workflow, time, effort, and patience... and often they don't work quite right for everyone.

This leaves materials. Okay, fair cop there - to a point. A converter (inline to D|S or as a separate manual plugin, or an external tool, or...) isn't too hard to whip up for a free or nominal cost.

Quote - I still have P4 installed for testing but I think it is time to retire P4/5 and just keep P6/7 on my drive.

shrug - no makey; I use OSX w/o Classic for a long time... no P4 there either.

/P

Quote - On the side topic of the thumbnail dpi's... surely that makes no difference whatsoever to a screen image? Whether 72, 96, or 66,000, the number of picels is what matters when it comes to being shown on the screen.

Try inserting a .png thumb made in P5 versus P6/P7 into MS Word (or same a thumb in two different resolutions) and you'll see the difference. A 91x91 pixel thumb shouldn't be any different in size on a computer screen if there are different resolutions, but the difference is seen in Word. Larger resolutions result in smaller thumbs in Word. The difference is immaterial in the Poser Library. Since I started my index when P5 was the latest version, I've sized tables in Word for those thumbnails. 

Up till recently DAZ always included .rsr's in their original products and it was only with purchases from the recent sales that I've noticed that they mostly don't now. 

There are now more procedural materials and P5/P6 MAT settings being used in commercial items, but that's been a gradual thing that has been happening. DAZ held off providing dynamic clothing for the longest time, but there were a few offerings in the recent sales that included dynamic cloth. Some stuff, like including .bum files instead of .jpg with content had largely been abandoned even before P5 because of the lack of compression in .bum files that made them 10X as large as .jpg equivalents. Slower dial-up speeds, and bandwidth costs, forced that change and the .jpg files had to be converted back to .bum files by users.

Penguinisto, I was joking with you. I think that DS has a very important place in the development of Poser. But I don't think a bunch of low cost plugins are cheep. As far as I have calculated the numbers, it costing more and still not what Poser can do. IMO. But that is where the competition comes into play to benifit both apps.

What I really like about P5 and up is the smoothing. I can use lower rez figures and have them look as good as the high rez figures. P4 and DS yet, can't do that.

One of the reasons why the plugins' costs pile up quickly is that to get into plugin development for D|S, one must pay a licensing fee to use the commercial Qt interface.  DAZ has a deal with Trolltech to keep prices lower - but it is still a bundle.  And that investment is passed on to the consumers.  Qt is a well-known and widely-used cross-platform GUI (among other functionality support) but I haven't purchased any D|S plugins for a very long time.  Why?  $100 for a barely working FBX export?  Do I really need to spend another couple hundred dollars for this basic support when I have Cinema 4D Studio, Hexagon, Shade, Carrara Pro, Vue Infinite? ;)

Quote - I'm one of those who has finally dropped Poser 4 support and I had been a BIG advocate for not doing so. It was time to move forward.

Yeah, me too!

But eventually, it is just time to move on.  One of the BIG advantages of P5+ and DS that is seldom mentioned anymore is you can have stacked libraries.  No more scrolling through the Pose folder for 5 minutes to find something!

Oh, and as to the DPI, as has been already mentioned, DPI is meaningless on the computer, it only refers to printing on paper.  The reason it shows up in Word is beacuse the program is emulating paper.  PPP (pixels per inch) on the computer can vary greatly too, my 21" monitor will run 640 x 480 all the way to 2048 x 1536 resolution, a range from 41 to 132 PPI. 

Quote - Speaking of which, sooner or later Apple is going to drop OS 9 level support in their OS

They already did. You can't run any Mac OS older than 10.4 on an Intel Mac, there is no Classic environment.

I thought that this was the case - but didn't want to make proclamations without evidence. :)

Thanks!

DPI is the most stupid thing ever invented for an image, it is meaningless and have no use. If it exist is only an arbitrary number in the header of the image format and is used for nothing.
Most of the time is set equal to zero the same as with other useless or reserved fields in the header. Also it can be a random number if the software that creates the images doesn't fill with zero or some defined number the unused fields in the header.

The only problem with P4 is that you can't do multiple external runtimes. That's the only reason why I stopped using it & switched to P5. I don't feel the need at the moment to upgrade from P5. If it was up to me, I'd still be using P4. But, my runtime got too big. I have 4 external runtimes to cope with. :)

You can't do any external runtimes, you can't do nested library folders, there is a limit to the number of items in a library folder (256 I think), thumbnails are only RSR.  There have been a few improvements in each version since... ;P

Poser 5 was an improvement over Poser 4, but the problem is that Poser 5 is much slower than Poser 4, so Poser4 was improved and degraded at the same time giving as result Poser 5 not be a replacement for Poser 4 and only a complement for Poser 4.
The only solution to have the advantages of Poser4 and 5 is to have them both installed and use one or other depending on what you are doing.

Gagnonrich:

Quote - Try inserting a .png thumb made in P5 versus P6/P7 into MS Word (or same a thumb in two different resolutions) and you'll see the difference. A 91x91 pixel thumb shouldn't be any different in size on a computer screen if there are different resolutions, but the difference is seen in Word. Larger resolutions result in smaller thumbs in Word. The difference is immaterial in the Poser Library. Since I started my index when P5 was the latest version, I've sized tables in Word for those thumbnails. 

That makes sense, since Word is trying to show you what you will see on the page when printed. If an image has a particular dpi involvd, then Word will adpat the image to show that - since it's designed to be a WYSIWYG program, you need to know how big the picture will come out when printed.

**Kawecki:
**> Quote - DPI is the most stupid thing ever invented for an image, it is meaningless and have no use. If it exist is only an arbitrary number in the header of the image format and is used for nothing.

Most of the time is set equal to zero the same as with other useless or reserved fields in the header. Also it can be a random number if the software that creates the images doesn't fill with zero or some defined number the unused fields in the header.

This is patently untrue. Whilst DPI is irrelevant when only dealing with screen-based imagery (if all you do is make your images and show them in an online gallery), it becomes of paramount importance if you are transferring a digital image to print. The DPI information lets the printer know how densely it needs to create its ink patterns, thus providing greater or lesser detail as necessary. IF you don't believe me, try printing a standard photo sized image (7" x 5", or 8" by 6") at 72 dpi, and 300 dpi, and tell me ther'es no difference in the quality.

jonthecelt

Quote - Poser 5 was an improvement over Poser 4, but the problem is that Poser 5 is much slower than Poser 4, so Poser4 was improved and degraded at the same time giving as result Poser 5 not be a replacement for Poser 4 and only a complement for Poser 4.
The only solution to have the advantages of Poser4 and 5 is to have them both installed and use one or other depending on what you are doing.

I agree completely.  Curious Labs was too ambitious with the number of changes from P4 to P5 - cloth, hair, shaders, renderer, so forth and so on.  But the improvements to the library where not only good but definitely necessary.

Yup. P4/PPP library was constrictive but solved with the introduction of PBoost. With that and P3D Explorer plus Poser Remote Pocedural Call script I don't really use Poser's libaries that much. Then again, I'm totally disorganized. Guess I'm still in the dinosaur age.

for the library P6 added the ability to undock the library and make it wider, double click on figures to insert them (instead of replacing the current figure). It also added the ability to use the backspace key to go up one level in the library.

P7 added a pull down to navigate to any of your runtimes without having to use the up arrow button. it also added the collections tab which i havent found particulary useful yet, mainly because i use such a large variety of items.

If you have used PBooost then you should really try it's latest incarnation PBooost Virtuoso - it's library interface is a big improvement over P6's and yet it should still work with P4.

Using tromnek's PRPC you can "1-click" load into Poser, and the library structure is so flexible you can create folders containing, say, everything for 1 figure - figure, pose, face, clothes, etc., and load it altogether!  That's right, anything from any Poser library co-existing in same folder.

And best of all it's still free to PBII owners as Howard's been focussed on other things recently - see his website www.hogsoft.com.

Speed - and dial responsiveness - of P4PP and a good library manager.  Use a stand alone renderer, and there isn't much you'd need P6 for (P5 is a joke, and P7 looks to be trying to fill its shoes so there are realluy only those 2 choices).

Thanks, layingback. I'll have to look into it. I do have PBII but have reverted back to 1.13. It works the way I do.

I never had a problem with P5 and there was no going back to P4 once I started using it. P6 worked fine for me too. Infact, I could not go back to P5 because P6 was an improvement and the cloth room worked faster. yes, it took 3 SR's but very stable version. I know, some of you P4 diehards will say, You don't use the clothroom, but I use it for morphs and to get a better looking flow to things that conforming cant give you.

I use P7 now and sure there are a few bugs, but what software doesn't these days. Have you seen what we have been going through with Vue6I? P7 sr1.1 has fixed things and I think once eF gets the new sdk polished it should be fine. Buying extra apps to get what a new version does for you on the most part does not make much sence to me. But that's MO.

Render speeds I don't get the complaints. If the firefly render engine is to slow for you, why not use the P4 render engine instead. Let's not forget the multi thread rendering in P7. OK, not the best way to go about that but it is still better than what it was. 

There is the better shader tree that for the most, can be used in Vue, once again, when the bugs get squashed out of both apps. Also the posing inside Vue with the use of P7. 

There are to many pluses in using a new version over the old.

Buying apps to do what P7 does? Hummm, must have missed something. Now if I was getting paid to do all of this work and had to export to better rendering engines I probably would break down and study P7 so I could get the maximum potential out of it. Then I could proudly say " You Can Teach Old Dinosaurs New Tricks" :)

Quote - This is patently untrue. Whilst DPI is irrelevant when only dealing with screen-based imagery (if all you do is make your images and show them in an online gallery), it becomes of paramount importance if you are transferring a digital image to print. The DPI information lets the printer know how densely it needs to create its ink patterns, thus providing greater or lesser detail as necessary. IF you don't believe me, try printing a standard photo sized image (7" x 5", or 8" by 6") at 72 dpi, and 300 dpi, and tell me ther'es no difference in the quality.

You set the DPI for the printer depending on the resolution or detail that you want to print something. An image cannot set this data, how an image can guess what kind of printer you have and with which resolution you want to print?
An image use the DPI field for nothing and usualy is set to zero, a image deals with pixels and not with dots or inches. As there are much more dots than pixels available the dots are interpolated and how many are interpolated depend on the size of the image, the size of the printed image and the resolution that you use for printing and is you that decide the two last factors.

just as a point of fact. Daz Studio does not do everything Poser4 does and is only partially similar in compatibility and function with Poser 4

-You can create cr2's in Poser4. You cannot in Studio.
-You can rig and tweak joints in Poser 4. You cannot in Studio.
-Studio have the P4 Wave deformer? Not sure.
-Can you load wave files? What about AVi backgrounds? Not sure about those either. Sketch Designer which is used despite what some may think. Regardless if yu don't personally use these, they are P4.
-Studio ignores many internal aspects to the cr2 and poser file formats (Taper, certain internal dial settings, lights, etc). And certain dial paragraph segments are simply ignored.

I think Studio is a fun addition to the Poser family of resources. But in the end, fact is, it is an emulator still in development. It has wonderful potential, but it is just taking too many years. We are on year 4 already and it is still a not done, a bit buggy, and quirky in some of it's undertsnading of 7 year old Poser code. I am sure vast amounts of time and money hav been spent. But really if it isn't completely a new design, should it really take 4 years to get just this far? Hopefully someday, when creation tools are added, it will be less content renderer and more figure software.

Dynamics is more widely used than is given credit. It is a bit silly and "out of touch" to still be harping back to P5. How many years ago was that now? Many people who might have stopped using Poser for Studio are a bit out of touch with what current Poser users are doing and enjoying. Poser's user base has changed and thier needs and methods aren't the same as a few years ago.

Speaking of eating time, workflow and patience... :) if you remove all of V4's morphs, her magnets take up 55% of the V4 cr2. Each magnet uses the same memory usages as three Poser body parts. All the locational, rotational, transitional data must be stored, remembered and calculated across multiple parts and morphs. If you strip out all the magnets, the magnet version is as slow as 3 loaded versions without magnets in the same scene. And magnets do not deform the same across child part seams. This isn't going  to bode well for hopes of efficient long term software design IMHO. 

Studio renders are beautiful though. I love the renders people make. very pretty. It would be nice to be able to have a fully functional shader UI like Poser users have, though not neccesarily using nodes and plugs.

"Speaking of eating time, workflow and patience... :) if you remove all of V4's morphs, her magnets take up 55% of the V4 cr2. Each magnet uses the same memory usages as three Poser body parts. All the locational, rotational, transitional data must be stored, remembered and calculated across multiple parts and morphs. If you strip out all the magnets, the magnet version is as slow as 3 loaded versions without magnets in the same scene. And magnets do not deform the same across child part seams. This isn't going  to bode well for hopes of efficient long term software design IMHO. "

FINALLY someone who isn't afraid to say that the empress has no clothes. 

P6+ Cinema4D 9 studio with interposer pro

ACCEPT NO UPGRADES!!!!!

There's a lot of stuff, quite new, that might as well be P4-compatible for all the use it makes of P5 features. I have a suspicion that this is a side effect of Daz Studio.