Hi Guys, I have a question about loading textures into poser. Do they takeup less room in memory if they read from a tiff file as a opposed to a bmp file. Does Poser cache textures to disk or are they stored in memory all the time. Thanks, Thorgrim

memory wise, it doesn't matter too much what format you use, as long as they're the same resolution and color depth, since they must be decompressed when loaded into memory. So 24 bit TIF, BMP JPG will take up the same ram. I'm pretty sure Poser doesn't cache images on disk (other than using the OS virtual memory system)

Any idea on what kind of memory limitation poser has for texture storage. I've only got 256 meg and I've been stalling poser on a regular basis when I attempt to render.

I'm not sure Poser actually keeps the full image in RAM. Last nite I had a Poser file open, went into Photopaint to alter the jpg for the skin texture, and went back into Poser & immediately re-rendered, just to see what would happen. The changes showed in the render though they hadn't in the pre-render "textured" view. It would seem to me that if Poser already had the image in memory, the changes to the file on the hard drive would not have shown in the render. Can any Poser "experts" throw a little light on this? I'm curious about just how Poser actually handles those texture items too.

It may be Poser keeps a 'file lock' on any texture it loads, so it knows when some other application changes the file. I think it must keep the current texture in ram, otherwise it would be pretty slow when using the textured preview (having to go out to disk everytime you change the pose or view. Unless it keeps a low rez version loaded for preview and loads the full texture in for rendering. Might also depend on your Video card's memory as well. Heck if I know.

I always thought that when a program had a "file lock" no other program could open the file, but would get a windoze error message about the file being in use. Maybe it does just keep a low-rez quickie in memory for the preview (????). It does seem like it takes a bit of time to render, maybe that's because it's loading the full file (???). Sure hope somebody who knows stumbles across this thread and can fill us in.

Well, "lock" is probably the wrong term. What I mean is, a program loads a file, and then "watches" the file. If another application changes the file, the program can then reload it to keep it in sync. Textpad (text editor) and Dreamweaver/HomeSite (WebDev/html) do that as well. HOW they do it I don't know exactly, on the Amiga there were system notification flags that would tell programs that this or that status had changed, I assume this is a common feature in a multi-tasking environment. But that doesn't mean texture files aren't cached either. In fact that might explain why some renders crash, as Poser attempts to load in all the textures for the render. This is probably something that Curious Labs would have to answer. Regards- Lemurtek

I think it's actually simpler than that. I think whenever Poser is commanded to render, or certain other commands, it just re-loads the textures from the source.

That seems true from my experience, that it reloads the texture each render. That won't answer your question about what's happenng with your program freezing. I have twice the RAM but get the same problem sometimes, there is a freeze while rendering that doesn't register as 'not responding' if you c/a/d. Other people have told me it happens to them too. Maybe a bug?