Hi, guys

I am trying to import a  poser scene to vue 6 xstream, but it seems to be too much for vue (or my pc). It consists of a milleniumhorse with vic4 on it and some clothing and stuff...

Can anyone give me a hint, how to decrease load of the scene, how i can perhaps optimize some options in poser and vue, so it doesn't freeze everything?

Grateful for every hint

the problem might be the textures... Vue hates loads of textures.. specialy 2048x kind of size's
Make sure when you dont need to change anything to make Vue not to load multiple textures..

Other then that ..well my Vue esprit runs pretty much all stuff i load into it..
Maybe some one has the TIP of a million for you. 

On my old PC, which was minimum spec for Vue 6 Infinite, to load a Poser scene like the one you describe I learnt to do the following:

1. When setting up in Poser avoid over the top textures - if your only planning on rendering a 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel image of a figure do you need a 3000 pixel square texture for the head that will be less than 100 pixels in your render?  Sometimes this means reworking textures you've bought with lower resolution versions of the images in them.  Resolution is important here not file size.  Sometimes you can avoid using a Poser texture altogether and texture in Vue later, for example use SkinVue's procedural skin instead of a Poser skin texture or a fabric texture made in Vue.
2. Don't try to put too many figures into a scene to import at once.  Sometimes it can be worth saving each figure for the scene as you posed them in Poser as a separate poser file
3. Shut down any uneccessary software - no music players, web browsers or anything else.  Do not try to run Poser at the same time as Vue.
4. Make sure you don't have power saving modes switched on on your machine that may interupt Vue because they think it isn't doing anything
5. Start a fresh copy of Vue
6. Reduce the number of stored undo's to 1
7. Set all the view ports to display Wire Frame Box
8. Turn off Show Fog in Vue on the Main Camera View
9. Turn off Density from Atmosphere on the Main Camera View
10. Turn off Auto Update on the mini preview
11. Load the figure into Vue
12. When the poser import box comes up 1. Do not refresh mesh while moving timeline slider - Checked
13. Allow re-posing inside Vue - Unchecked
14. Render materials using Poser shader tree - Unchecked
15. Import only a single frame from poser if you are doing a still
16. Be patient and let Vue have time to do the import - have a break
17. Once the import has finished Purge memory
18. If you use SkinVue use it now.  Do any other texture work in Vue that you want to.  One way to save some memory is to check for materials that can be easily improved by using a Vue material - glass and metal are common ones I look for - these often have reflection maps that can be discarded as a Vue material will reflect the enviroment you put the models in
19. Save the resulting figure as a Vob
20. Repeat this for each figure if you have several for the scene.  Close Vue and start it again for each figure.
21. Close Vue and start it again for each figure.
22. Load the Vob files in one at a time.  Purge Memory again for each figure as you bring in the Vob.

Also sometimes you need to be patient with Vue and just let it work.  Just because your computer says it's not responding don't panic and start loading other things or running diagnostics or starting task managers.  Once you do this Vue probably won't respond in my experience.  Take a break for 5 minutes and if it still isn't working when you come back then shout at it :-)

Save frequently while working. 

Do basic computer maintainance including checking your machine isn't overheating (which was a problem I had for a while and it made Vue look like it was broken), make sure you have plenty of free hard drive space.  Defrag your hard drive etc at least once in a while.

Hope something there helps.

Great post that impish. I pretty much do the same as you as I only have 1GB RAM.

I had 0.5GB in my old PC and a video card that Vue didn't really like.  My new machine has a lot more RAM and now I don't have to do half of that (except remember to purge memory between imports).

thank you very much, impish

I already do all that , except

1. Turn off Show Fog in Vue on the Main Camera View
2. Turn off Density from Atmosphere on the Main Camera View

Where do i find those?

On the Main Camera View there should be a symbol you click to Set  the view port to display Wire Frame Box and these are on that menu.

If your doing everything else I'm not sure if doing these will help you import from Poser much.

good post!  I

s it more efficient to work with VOB vs OBJs?   I recently imported a flying saucer with MANY parts from an OBJ.  I then saved as a VUE object once I got everything like I wanted it.  I then re-imported the vob into the scene but really can't tell that it helped that much......I didn't realized that purging memory was so inportant all the time but I guess that option is there for a reason.......

When you choose the uncheck of render materials using poser shader tree - does that mean you lose all the material links or does that mean that the render will only be done inside VUE and not in Poser?  I find that having a poser pz3 scene in the VUE scene really slows things down....or it seems to...

Would it just be better to export from Poser the OBJ format of the posed figure and then just import that into VUE ?

If you uncheck the "Render with poser tree" any special materials that the pz3 uses won't appear exactly as you might expect.  I almost never use the poser shader tree - for people, I use SkinVue and for things, I tend to use Vue materials.

It will slow Vue down if you import a pz3 file but it depends a bit on which options you use when you do the import.  I just check "group objects as single meshes" and "import single frame of animation" (I forget the exact names of the options but they are close enough :) ) then import frame 0 if I've not used any dynamic cloth or whatever the frame number I want to use from a sim

I don't know as you'd gain much by importing the .obj file - you'd lose the ability to make a change in poser and have it recognised when you reload the file in Vue

I'm thinking that I would only want to import the Poser scene if I bring in the entire animation so that I can incorporate it into the VUE scene with lights, shadows, etc.  Otherwise in most situations I could composite the Poser figure into a VUE scene depending on where they'll go....I understand there is considerable overhead if when brining Poser into VUE although this is very handy.

impish, that was an excellent post. You touched on all critical points. I would like to add just my two cents, regarding Poser textures. In fact, they can be shrinked from the gigantic usual 3000x4000 to something way smaller but there's also another thing: many times, these textures have a resolution of 150 dpi, whereas 72 is perfectly enough if you aren't aiming at prints. That also shrinks memory usage.

And another thing that saves resources is to use hidden layers. For each heavy object that you don't need to manipulate in Vue, you can put it on its own layer, hide the layer (click on the little eye twice) and purge memory. On very heavy scenes, I sometimes only have visible the layer with the objects that I'm working on.

So you need to purge memory every time you hide a layer?  Does this affect the render if you don't?