I'm trying out Vue 7 and it is a very powerful application but if I try to import a Poser figure with dynamic hair then Vue crashes.
Does anyone know how to import dynamic hair?

Dynamic hair is converted to polygons in Vue, and the poly count of dyn hair can go up to millions very quickly, thus leading to out of memory errors. What you should do first is use less hair in the hair room, and use less points (vertices) for a strand of hair. The more vertices, the more polygons. The more hair, the more polygons.

So that means that Vue 7 cannot handle dynamic hair as advertised? I guess I'll not bother with Vue 7 after all.

No, not what I meant.  If you try importing this is any program, it might be the same. As long as it's in its native software, it's ok, but exporting means creating polygons, and that many polygons won't always import. It depends on your system, how much ram, 32 or 64bit, etc, etc. If you have a 64bit system with 8gigs of ram, you should be able to import the hair.

If the hair is converted to polygons then it cannot handle dynamic hair,. If you have a lot less hairs with less segments and converted to polygons then I cannot imagine that you could possibly get a good render of the hair.
The number of polygons should not be a problem as Vue is supposed to handle Billions of polygons.

Vue can handle it... the question comes in with: can your COMPUTER handle it?  If its crashing - then I'd say it can't handle the memory load.

it takes massive memory to handle the number of polygons created from dynamic hair.  is your computer fast, strong, and with lots and lots of memory?  no??... then i'd try those suggestions Bruno gave you (great ones, BTW - and good explanation there!) - or switch to non-dynamic hair. .. or find a really powerful system and import the dynamic hair on there... 

But why throw an entire program out the door just because of problems with ONE feature?

i have yet to play with dynamic hair in vue (i.e., importing it) - because i know that as powerful as my system is (ok, not THAT powerful... will be soon i hope!) it simply cannot handle that workload! 

It starts crapping out (and yes, thats a technical term LOL) if more than one V4, or more than 3 of the third generation millennium family members show up in a scene.  Dynamic hair in Vue would likely give my poor system a nervous breakdown.  I just dont bother.  Transmapped ... non-dynamic - hair works fine with me, and if you toss in KaPoser's total hair control system (adds magnets to non-dynamic hair to simulate the fluidity of dynamics - here in Marketplace), you can get  some pretty good results with less memory use than with dynamic hair.

Well, you seem to know a lot more than I do, so I'll leave it as that. Next time you have a question, ask it to yourself first, I'm sure you'll find the right answer.

My computer is fairly adequate for the purpose, twin core 64 bit with 4G RAM. I was not knocking Vue as a landscape program, there are not any better ones that I have tried, I was just disappointed that it would not import dynamic hair as advertised
Regarding the point that other programs would have the same problem, I can import four V4 figures with dynamic hair into Carrara 6 with no problems. Its landscapes,plants and atmospheres are not as good as Vue but will have to do at the moment.

did you uncompress the poser files?  most of poser's native files, such as the p4 dude - are compressed to save space. 
vue cannot read these files, as it is proprietary to poser.  you must run the poser python script within poser to uncompress these files, then use the uncompressed version in your scene files - or vue will crash.

The files are not compressed,the figure loads perfectly into Vue until you add those 6 hairs ,then Vue crashes.
Has anyone ever managed to load a figure with dynamic hair?

never tried to be honest, Dynamic hair looks awful (in both Poser and Vue from the examples I've seen) so I tend to use prop hair mostly.  Much easier

I've loaded Poser dynamic hair into Vue successfully. 

Never used it in anger just messed around with it to see if I could figure out what needed to be done to make it look good.  I think the first place to look at making the hair look better in Vue is the texture.  With the one I looked at (which was one of the Poser default sets) the highlights are bright white and swamp out everything.  Tweaking the transparancy function and separating it from the colour production also seemed to help. 

I didn't put a lot of time in because I'm happy with the results I get with static hair models and didn't see the point in getting bogged down in dynamic hair when I could be making pictures.  If someone else cracks it - or I have some time to spare - I might use it.

Can even carrara handle dynamic hair form Poser, if thta;'s all you are after?

yes Vue can handle billions of polys...instanced polys.
TRUE polys depends on your system and if the mesh is good.
Vue doesn't work good with anything but triangular polys, so it has ot convert them...so if you have millions of polys that perhaps have quads and n-gons...ick!!!

Last ship model I made had about 1,200,000 polys, but because my modeller exports as quads and n-gons...I have to export it in parts of no more than 250,000 polys or it does crash on loading. Then assemble bit by bit in Vue. Only figured that out after making the model and UVMapping it, so I know to watch for that in future.

Yes Carrara imports Poser dynamic hair and renders it pretty well, but even better results can be obtained by using Carraras own dynamic hair which is possibly better than Posers.

use carrara then?

There have always been issues with using dynamic hair in Vue, for as long as it has been supported.
It uses a LOT of resources. A good head of hair will at the very least slow a system drastically, it not crash it. My first attempts were on an Athlon XP with 786Mb memory (don't laugh - back then, the system was, well, relatively powerful). It was unusable for dynamic hair. The next PC was an X2 4400 with 4Gb memory, kind of worked, but very slow. The hair did not render well - not because of shaders, the hair strands themselves were very thick. A suggested workaround at the time was to give the hair a bit of transparency, which improved the situation but slowed the renders down even more (and the responses to moving the camera). It crashed sometimes. I am now using a Core7 with 6Gb memory, it still doesn't (imo) work as advertised. This is a great pity, because dynamic hair offers a great alternative to transmapped hair (assuming one is prepared to spend a bit of time on the styling, draping and shaders) - can be much more realistic, not only in stills, but also animations.

@dadt: The problem has been reported to e-on, and acknowledged. However, it would probably help if you report the problem as well, just so that they know there are more than 1 or 2 users that would appreciate a solution.

• I also agree with you about Carrara's dynamic hair. Maybe e-on should consider a similar hair module (and grass, etc...). Now that would be a nice feature...

Rob

The problem with Carrara is that they have been promising dynamic cloth in version 6 and never delivered. They just not promise it any more for version 7. Having great dynamic hair (which in my opinion is better than Poser) is pretty useless if no dynamic cloth is available.

To render an outdoor scene Vue is far better. For an indoor shot I would prefer Carrara if they offered dynamic cloth, right now I use Vue for long shots since this provides a consistent quality and Poser for close-up shots where hair and cloth is really important.

Dynamic cloth is no problem in Vue or Carrara as both will import the full simulation from Poser.

I would prefer to use Vue for outdoor scenes as it is better than any other program I have tried due to advanced features like the Ecosystem.