efstarlet opened this issue on Jul 09, 2008 · 156 posts
efstarlet posted Wed, 09 July 2008 at 8:29 PM
Here are some helpful notes about a few improvements in the SR3 updater and how they may affect you.
File I/O
The SR3 updater incorporates an important change when working with referenced content found in Poser scene files. Poser 7.0.4 saves files with relative, platform-neutral paths for content components such as geometries and textures whenever possible. In previous versions of Poser, paths were written that may have been either relative or absolute. This could potentially create problems when opening up scene files in a cross platform environment or when working across machines with different runtimes.
Poser 7.0.4 now writes consistent paths. The benefits to this change include:
- Backward compatibility with older versions of Poser on OSX
- Better portability when moving files from Mac to Windows, or vice versa, from one machine to another if the runtime locations are not identical, and when runtimes are moved on a system (such as when a new hard drive is added).
- Less clean-up will be required before sharing a newly created library item with other users.
Poser 7.0.4 now searches for referenced files such as geometries and textures next to the PZ3/PZZ that is being opened, if those referenced files cannot be located in either the current or main runtime directories. If your runtime files are messy and contain duplicate file names, the search process results may be unpredictable. Creating files with unique names with a runtime directory structure that resembles the standard Poser runtime setup will help alleviate future issues.
When adding an external runtime to Poser 7.04, the key word “Runtime” must be in the path for the search engine to properly locate your referenced content. In simple terms, your content’s directory structure should duplicate the standard Poser Runtime naming structure. At the top level, content should be in a directory named Runtime, which includes subdirectories that follow Poser’s naming conventions.
FireFly Render Engine
In the development of Poser 7.0.4, we measured several instances of increased FireFly rendering performance; however there are isolated cases where the improved quality of raytraced shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and Displacement/Bump mapping effects can result in slower renderings at similar quality settings. In those isolated cases we’ve improved, the final rendered results are far superior to renderings from previous versions of Poser 7.