Hi guys,

A while ago, i needed to find a way to put more characters and clothings in a single scene, but we allways end up out of RAM, because of the high resolution of the texture MATs for each char. and clothing item. This high resolution is useless when you have 3 chars in a scene, far away, that you can't even see the pixels of the brows anyway. So i created a software that makes a LOW-resolution copy of all .pz2 and MAT textures (leaving the originals intact) so you can load much more stuff in a single scene.

It's here:
http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=61698

Resized textures take only 25% of the original RAM, is a bilinear scaledown (like photoshop does) and saved in a 90% quality JPEG 50% smoothing. Every responsible Poser/DAZ/Carrara user need this software. (For PC only at the moment, i'm working on the MAC version).

I'll give that a go Telecino and let you know how I get on, it sounds like something which will come in very useful

John

I've found that there are various ways to "cheat" and create scenes that have more characters that RAM would allow.  One option that works for me is "stiching" together renders.  Basically you set up your scene without characters, and then mentally divide it into "zones" (such as "left side" and "right side"). It may help to use a simple prop to divide the zones.  You then only load the figures that would appear on one of the zones, and render the zone.  For example, if you have ten people lined up on a beach, set up your empty beach, then load the people who would be on the left side of your image.  Then, do the same thing for the rest of your zones.  If something would be in one zone but can affect other zones (for example, a light in zone a that shines onto zone b, or an item in zone a that's reflected in a mirror in zone b) load it in all of your zones.  The same thing applies if an item would overlap zones.  Then, once you have your rendered images, cut/paste them together in photoshop.

Stiching is a good idea when you can deal with Zones, but it takes away the realism. If you wish to have people interact, or overlay a bit, you might consider using DownRezer to downsize the textures and lower the RAM requirements of the scene.