I have been having a bit of a problem with Poser 7 and was hoping that one of you guys might be able to help out... here is the issue..

I have a poser project that uses a combination of original and DAZ characters... and the first time round, the file opens just fine...(top figure... file size 90 MB)

However, when I change a few of the poses, safe the file and re-open, I get a wiered image (bottom figure....fiel size:90 MB)... all the settings (lights, textures, poses) seem to have been disappeared!! 

Have you guys seen something like this? Is there something that I am doing wrong?

as usual, thank you for your help...

Cheers

vxg139

Edit>General Preferences>Misc... Are "Use binary Morphs" enabled? This was a problem in P6 but I assumed it was fixed. You may have accidently erased or misplaced a .pmd file. If you lose just one of them,,, your entire pz3 gets thrashed and previous saves of the same file as well.

Easy to do when you clean runtimes or reinstall...

This is creepy. This is like Silent Hill "The Room" and that guy standing there is Walter Sullivan.

richardson,

the "external binary morph target" is not enabled to keep everything under one file.....THis is the case for both the original and the subsequent resaved file....

Would you recommend for me to turn this option on?

Thanks for your help

Cheers

vxg139

No. Don't enable. They are clever and allow for quick saves but I personally think .pmds or the loss thereof cause similar data losses to yours. This is a corrupt file.

Anything unusual happen? Crash? Lightning strike..?

nop... non of the above..... I am thinking that it might be a comaptibility issue between poser 7 and a number of original P4 and third party character... but this just my speculaiton....

Cheers

vxg139

That's a new one!

Looks like you have a composite of all the displacement maps
in the scene, flattened out in raw form.

Have you  made a dynamic cloth simulation?

Bopper.

This looks a lot like something I've had happen maybe a couple of times, ever: all the characters and props come in loaded at the zero position and with all morphs at zero; no textures load; no lights load; the camera's at a zero/default position. And it happens with a big, complex scene.

If that sounds familiar, forget this file, there's nothing you can do to get it back. I think this happens when you're right on the edge of running out of memory, something else maybe kicks in to perform some mundane task on your PC, and chunks of vital data don't get written to the file even though everything seems to have gone OK.

Thanks for the heads up guys..... I have 4 GB RAM, so I am not sure if it is a RAM issue... though it might be (seeing how RAM hungry poser becomes when loading morphs)!

What I have also found is that the file size tends to shrink when the file is saved with "external binay morph target enabled" ... in this particular case, the stand alone file w/ 90 MB gets split into .pz file of 40 MB and .pmd files of 20 MB!!! so where does the 30 MB go????? maybe some file compression going on within pmd?

anyways.. .thank you all for your prompt response....

Cheers

vxg139

There's no file compression used in PMD files, but the information isn't bloated as in the human readable pz3 files, but just binary data, so they're smaller.

Is the saved pz3 (the one displaying wrong) smaller than the original? That would mean it probably gets corrupted when saving... Otherwise it may not be loaded correctly... In any case I'd contact Smith Micro's support...

Dizzi,

The file sizes (both the original and the resaved one (that gets messed up) are almost identical (90 MB).... Thnaks for the heads up on the Smith Micro...

Thnaks agian to you all for being so helpful..... :c)

Cheers

vxg139

Hi, you said you have 4 gig ram, what os? if 32 bit windows and you've tried a hack to implement more than 2, it's at your own risk, Microsoft never officially supported that option as it was only an inclusion for developers who were told the risks and knew how to implement it properly. As such all your system memory could easily be unstable  and unreliable. Poser 7 is large address aware and can use more than 2 if available but only safely if the os truly supports it. If your on a Mac or Win 64, disregard this :)

Hi,

I am using Window Vista ultimate edition and have never tried to mess around with the system I/O.... Now if efrontier comes up with a patch that allows accessing more than 2 GB then I would certainly jump to the idea.... but not until then....

BTW, if I was to allocate more virtual memory, would this help with program stability?

Cheers

vxg139

vxg139: I was going to suggest the /3Gb switch but that's just for Win XP.

"On Windows Vista and later versions of Windows, use the IncreaseUserVA element in BCDEdit.".

"To take advantage of the 3 GB available to user-mode programs, the program must be linked with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE option."

Note: Poser 7 installs with the /largeaddressaware option enabled.

Use this next suggestion at your own risk:

Hit the Start and R keys and type this:

BCDEDIT /Set IncreaseUserVa 3072

This is the Vista32 equivalent of XP's /3Gb switch. Don't run it on a Vista64 system.