Reading through all the P8 gripes here is pretty depressing !
My PC is a fairly new chinese import but never gave too many problems with P7 and P8 seems to work without most of the other users non visible libraries and crashing problems. 
Only drama I'm experiencing has been related to accessing the P7 runtime pose libraries. Everything shows up okay but some poses and mat pose/textures will not physically apply to a figure in P8 ? 
Basically, I'm forced to work in P7 and render the pz3 in P8.
I gave up on loading older files into P8 due to the lack of support for viewing rsr thumbnails and only loading P8 with Daz characters (M3, V3, SP3, V4 etc) At this stage it can't replace my P7.
My hope now is that somebody can advise on where I'm going wrong.

For my 2 pence of input............ P8 libraries really need a "CLOSE ALL FOLDERS" button, this oversight is as annoying as the P7 libraries springing back to the top folder every time you closed one at the bottom of the library. And also why can't the libraries use the old rsr thumbs ? There are millions of older poser files out there in personal collections and even Rendo free stuff  that do not have png's.
Tommy.    

You know, if you'll just view the directories with the RSR file in Poser 7, it should create PNG files that Poser 8 will see. If not, there's always the free RSR2PNG converter here in freestuff.

With all respect LostinSpaceman, he shouldn't have to should he?

Once again, i'm pretty dumbfounded at just how shoddy poser releases can really be. No, I cant give you long, drawn out, technical answers about why this or that in Poser isn't working, I do know though that I've been a loyal poser  user since it's inception (around 95/96?) and I don't EVER remember  NOT having problems with the software....not even after successive service releases such as P5 had.

OK, granted that on a new, revolutionary piece of software were going to have teething problems but come on...were now on version 8 for chr***sake.... this program needs stripping down and rebuilding from the base up if punters like me arn't going to start jumping ship wholesale and going to Daz Studio, a program incidently that, including DS3 extreme has worked pretty seamlessly on all my machines since the Beata version before  DS1.

When P6 came out I first started getting those irritating "out of memory"  messages everytime I built a scene   theyve been a problem on all my PC's ever since. I now have a pretty large, quad core , dual graphic card, 8 gig of ram 64bit system....out of memory?  No, in this version it's defininately a "cant find texture" problem and i'll bet you it  NEVER gets solved on my system!

I got to the point were, since P6, I don't bother usually even trying to add clothing to figures (and I have 60 gigs worth of 3rd party add on's hoping that one day this would be sorted) I just paint it on in Photoshop or Painter ...huh...2 other pieces of software that have allways delivered the goods!

I am now right on the point where I WILL just completely revert to solely useing DS...and i've kept on hoping that I wouldn't have to do that as I do genuinly like the whole Poser thing  but if SP1 doesnt appear verry soon AND FIX the problem it really is bye bye Poser.

Quote - With all respect LostinSpaceman, he shouldn't have to should he?

Well yes actually he should. RSR files are ancient leftovers from Poser 4 for Pete's sake! Poser's 5 thru 7 including Poser Pro would read RSR's and create thumbnail PNG's for all old content because their libraries were written with that ability. Having gone from 4, 4 Pro, 5, 6, 7 and Poser Pro, very few of my libraries had only RSR's for thumbnails left in them because all the successive upgrades I did wrote new PNG files. Since he says he still has 7, it's just a matter of finding the few items he has left that haven't had PNG's made and browsing to them in Poser 7 to create new PNG's which will then show up from then on in Poser 8.

You say the whole program should be rewritten from scratch and then complain that the library, which IS completely new with no old code, won't do what the old one did. A bit hipocritical if you ask me.

Sorry guys, I didn't mean to open a war of fighting words.............
I had uninstalled P7 and deleted all folders 3 days ago, done because the libraries were a mess with a lot of items in wrong places etc. Poser 8 was supposed to be my fresh new start.
I re-installed Poser 7 today to make use of its folders for lesser used items but seems some random things such as poses and cameras from P7 just wont work, you can apply them in P8 but "no go ". That problem is still my main question.
My original content hoarded over the last few years is stored mostly on CD's, DVD's and recently a 1TB external drive and you guessed it, many older zips and files do not have PNG's.
I have P3do pro and yes it does convert the rsr's. It can also view the contents of zips and install them into Poser's runtime. I'm testing that facility at the moment, so far so good.
Tommy.       

Glad to hear you have something for the RSR issue. I too have loads of old stuff backed up on CD's and DVD's but thankfully I've never had a crash and had to reinstall from any of them. If that ever happens I'll be needing to convert RSR's all over again.

Wish I could help you on the pose issues. I've had mat poses from respected merchants for their items not work for me at various times. That's why I prefer MC6 material collections written by Poser itself.

I have to agree with lostinspaceman,its been a while since P4,why have these people only just thought ohh theres a new poser? and at least there are ways to convert RSR files...
the only gripe i have with Poser is with every new version very little is added or fixed,infact Poser8 seams to have had the least done to it, am i also wrong in thinking that as soon as a new company buys out the Poser franchise they a minor update and release a new version? (quick money)...
So who will own Poser next? otherwise will there be no more Poser?

Quote - Poser8 seams to have had the least done to it... as soon as a new company buys out the Poser franchise they a minor update and release a new version

I can't agree with these two points.

Let's start with the fact that Poser is cheap. It's not going to be 'as good as' Vue, Maya, Lightwave, C4D or any of those apps that costs several times more. It's a $199 package which is very good value for money.

Poser 8 has a new GUI which is a huge advance over previous versions. It has a greatly improved - I suspect heavily re-written - Firefly renderer. In an ideal world both of these features would have been working perfectly straight out of the box. Personally, I'm a little disappointed that the renderer wasn't worked on a bit more before release, but I can live with it. There are many more new features which are poorly documented and/or confusingly implemented.

You can moan at SmithMicro for these shortcomings, but their reaction to the feedback here and on other sites has been positive and informative - this is very encouraging, and suggests a more helpful mindset than that of CuriousLabs and e-frontier.

When it was announced that SM had bought Poser, I thought, "oh no." I thought that they would be milk-it-for-a-quick-buck owners, but it's starting to look like that reaction was wrong. I can only speak for myself, but I get the impression that Poser has a better future now than it has for several years.

Quote - > Quote - Poser8 seams to have had the least done to it... as soon as a new company buys out the Poser franchise they a minor update and release a new version

I can't agree with these two points.

Let's start with the fact that Poser is cheap. It's not going to be 'as good as' Vue, Maya, Lightwave, C4D or any of those apps that costs several times more. It's a $199 package which is very good value for money.

Poser 8 has a new GUI which is a huge advance over previous versions. It has a greatly improved - I suspect heavily re-written - Firefly renderer. In an ideal world both of these features would have been working perfectly straight out of the box. Personally, I'm a little disappointed that the renderer wasn't worked on a bit more before release, but I can live with it. There are many more new features which are poorly documented and/or confusingly implemented.

You can moan at SmithMicro for these shortcomings, but their reaction to the feedback here and on other sites has been positive and informative - this is very encouraging, and suggests a more helpful mindset than that of CuriousLabs and e-frontier.

When it was announced that SM had bought Poser, I thought, "oh no." I thought that they would be milk-it-for-a-quick-buck owners, but it's starting to look like that reaction was wrong. I can only speak for myself, but I get the impression that Poser has a better future now than it has for several years.

Yep, I agree. SM did good in my book as well. SR1 will make it even better. FOR THE MONEY, Poser is a fantastic value!!

Wow, LostinSpaceman, sorry to cause offence.  The way I read thomasrjm's post say's that he's having to use an old version of poser  in which to enable him to be able to use the new version....that's OK?

My point was that, personaly, I am agrieved  by the fact that I continue to buy a  piece of software that wont do, at least for me, the job it was origianally designed to do which was to be a simple, easily posable manequin for artists! I don't  need fantastic, super clever lighting. I don't need smooth flowing animation. All I need is an easily posable figure that I can apply  textures to so I can speed up my painting workflow, I would have thought that this would be the easy part for a program like Poser and yet due to the dodgy memory management I dont get smooth posing and neither can I now apply textures without having to tediously trawl through masses of readme files to find the names of third party modelmakers so's I can tediously go through all my texture files enabling me to tediously apply them all in the material room!.

I don't recall ever mentioning the Library, although it would be nice if folk like myself with older eyes could see the thumbs! Lol Personally I don't care what they do to Poser so long as it WORKS!!!!

So, hipocrite?  No!   Mug? it would appear so!

Quote - Everything shows up okay but some poses and mat pose/textures will not physically apply to a figure in P8 ? 

This may or may not be the problem you are experiencing but...
It has been reported that there is a bug in the library reading programming that makes it refuse to read files with capitalized extensions. i.e. thing.cr2 works but thing.CR2 does not.

as i understand, it is known and fixed for the upcoming hot fix or SR.

Quote - For my 2 pence of input............ P8 libraries really need a "CLOSE ALL FOLDERS" button, this oversight is as annoying as the P7 libraries springing back to the top folder every time you closed one at the bottom of the library.

that sounds like a great feature to add. you should send it to them.

Quote - And also why can't the libraries use the old rsr thumbs ?

according to the readme: Due to fundamental architectural changes in Poser 8 that have removed legacy code, and improved overall performance in many areas across the application, the old Poser 4 renderer and automatic RSR Library thumbnail conversion to PNG has been discontinued.

"Reading through all the P8 gripes here is pretty depressing !"

People rarely come to forums to rave about software with which they are thrilled. They rarely EMail a company about an application that they really enjoy using. If you are having no problems with Poser 8, and you really enjoy using it, you would probably be playing with Poser 8, not posting messages about it in a forum. There are many more people who love and/or hate Poser 8 than post here at Renderosity.

On the other hand, people who complain about problems advance the software by calling attention to the bugs and problems, or they get answers from people who know of work-arounds, solutions, and resources. I have never owned a complex application for which I did not have to figure out how to make up for what it should do but doesn’t. If you aren’t going to file a bug report with SM, at least mention the problem here.

I have found some problems with Poser 8. It doesn't load some textures for saved scenes because it corrupts the path to that texture. Saving with reloaded textures does not solve the problem. Other people have described their problems. Clearly the Poser development team is paying attention to the forums here.

For my part, I am really enjoying the program. I love the new fall off settings for pointlights and spotlights. I was shocked at the added realism these produce. I have finally gotten the library working as intended, and I like it. I can actually use the scroll wheel on my mouse with the library. There are some amazing Python scripts included with Pose 8, and most of the old scripts still work. Poser 8 renders most things faster than Poser Pro, but still has some memory limitations. I am eager to see how things work after the SR1 is released.

I would love to see what people can do with Poser 8. Maybe some one could start a gallery link thread here of new Poser 8 renders. Something like, "Hi. I just uploaded a render using Poser 8's new features here's a link to my gallery." There are render threads at DAZ, but I doubt they would really support a few Poser 8 threads.

LMK

OK, and I have said this in another thread;  I don't WISH to knock Poser, I actually WANT to like it...I KEEP buying it even though for me it's now unuseable.

ALL I'M ASKING SMITH MICRO WATCHERS;

Remember what this program was originally made for....posing figures and making quick, simple renders AND MAKE IT DO THAT, FOR EVERYONE. THEN do the clever stuff.

I put up with P5 because at least it could do what it was supposed to do, SIMPLE RENDERS.

Since then it hasn't done that, just read the complaints here  refering back to releases 6 and 7 .... CAN'T LOAD TEXTURE problems..for whatever reason be they memory related or otherwise . After 3 releases, plus SR's since 5  I STILL have them, others must too? during those 3 releases I've had 8 different PC's (none of them small) all different configurations and makes, and it has made no difference. I've actually bought PC's JUST to use with Poser, it hasn't worked. PLEASE fix it.

I

Quote - OK, and I have said this in another thread;  I don't WISH to knock Poser, I actually WANT to like it...I KEEP buying it even though for me it's now unuseable.

ALL I'M ASKING SMITH MICRO WATCHERS;

Remember what this program was originally made for....posing figures and making quick, simple renders AND MAKE IT DO THAT, FOR EVERYONE. THEN do the clever stuff.
I

Well I for one am entirely thankful that Poser has moved Beyond what it was originally intended!! If all you need to do is pose figures and do quick renders, stick with Poser 1, by all means. But don't demand that the rest of us want the same thing!

Hmm, how argumentative can you be!

I demanded nothing.

Go back to Poser 1....that's a strange one, i just bought poser8? Should I not then reasonably expect  the most basic part of it to work?

Quote - Reading through all the P8 gripes here is pretty depressing !
My PC is a fairly new chinese import but never gave too many problems with P7 and P8 seems to work without most of the other users non visible libraries and crashing problems. 
Only drama I'm experiencing has been related to accessing the P7 runtime pose libraries. Everything shows up okay but some poses and mat pose/textures will not physically apply to a figure in P8 ? 
Basically, I'm forced to work in P7 and render the pz3 in P8.
I gave up on loading older files into P8 due to the lack of support for viewing rsr thumbnails and only loading P8 with Daz characters (M3, V3, SP3, V4 etc) At this stage it can't replace my P7.
My hope now is that somebody can advise on where I'm going wrong.

For my 2 pence of input............ P8 libraries really need a "CLOSE ALL FOLDERS" button, this oversight is as annoying as the P7 libraries springing back to the top folder every time you closed one at the bottom of the library. And also why can't the libraries use the old rsr thumbs ? There are millions of older poser files out there in personal collections and even Rendo free stuff  that do not have png's.
Tommy.    

I was having the same problems with the mat poses applying on the pose screen but I figured out that you have to apply them in the material room and they will work.

~Jadealis

Quote -
I was having the same problems with the mat poses applying on the pose screen but I figured out that you have to apply them in the material room and they will work.

~Jadealis

You can apply them in the pose room by dragging them and dropping them on the figure or prop you want to apply them too.

i think you are supposed to be able to apply them by double clicking, but that may be the bit that doesn't work right.

Quote - > Quote -

I was having the same problems with the mat poses applying on the pose screen but I figured out that you have to apply them in the material room and they will work.

~Jadealis

You can apply them in the pose room by dragging them and dropping them on the figure or prop you want to apply them too.

i think you are supposed to be able to apply them by double clicking, but that may be the bit that doesn't work right.

No that's mostly not working. Why are you answering "I think you are supposed", if you don't know it for sure? However they way you describe it is how it should work but it's not working.

Jadealis is right. Nevertheless a lot of users have then another problem if they want to go back from the materials to the pose room. Instead of the pose room they are led to the morph tools or the animation and then P8 crashes). This was already addressed in other threads and is known as a bug to SM who have received obviously many notes regarding this issue.

Quote -
No that's mostly not working. Why are you answering "I think you are supposed", if you don't know it for sure? However they way you describe it is how it should work but it's not working.

I said "I think you are supposed" because i am at work and wanted to point this out but did not want to take the time to search the help file to verify that it is supposed to be a valid option

There are some answers coming out of the woodwork and I find I'm not alone with the textures not applying when P7 library items are used. Some users are now posting band aid workarounds to the issue such as applying the textures in the material room or renaming the Cr2 files to lower case for P8 which apparently does not recognise Upper case letters in its file extensions. Until a bug fix service pack is released I feel we are in creative limbo. I really dont want to install all my desired files into Poser 7 and then have to repeat the procedure over again when P8 finally becomes useable. Basically I want everything to work seamlessly in one program, not by constanly opening and closing different versions. I work on graphics with PC's all day but I'm basically just the driver not the mechanic. If the machine is not working by the book, I have to call the testichological wizards to fix it. 
I did look into the external runtimes posts as a fix but the process was too tekkie for me and then thought I was pretty smart by installing P7 on a PC and then copying and pasting the runtime folder onto my external F drive. It worked ! ,until I tried unzipping and installing stuff to it.

Please Mr Smith get your finger out and get some major bug fixes happening.
Tommy. 

Quote - Hmm, how argumentative can you be!

I demanded nothing.

Go back to Poser 1....that's a strange one, i just bought poser8? Should I not then reasonably expect  the most basic part of it to work?

Dude, you're the one making demands in all caps as I've already quoted from your previous message but here it is again:

Quote - ALL I'M ASKING SMITH MICRO WATCHERS;

Remember what this program was originally made for....posing figures and making quick, simple renders AND MAKE IT DO THAT, FOR EVERYONE. THEN do the clever stuff.

If that's not a demand I don't know what else to call it. The reason I said stick to Poser 1, or whatever the heck it was you started with is because you basically said all you needed it for was what it was originally designed for and not all "The Clever Stuff". Why upgrade at all if you don't need all the clever stuff? Stick to what you have and be happy.

Quote - was pretty smart by installing P7 on a PC and then copying and pasting the runtime folder onto my external F drive. It worked ! ,until I tried unzipping and installing stuff to it.

What sort of problems did you have unzipping to external runtimes? It's one of the easiest things to do if the zip is properly archived with the paths intact. External runtimes also saves you from repeatedly having to redo your runtimes each and every time you upgrade to the newest version!

 Copy-pasting a whole runtime MAY be the problem, actually. Depending on what you copied and where you put it. Linking to the runtimes is always a better idea, copying it may copy files that weren't supposed to be moved.

There's this NICE script included in Poser 8 that will import all your previous runtimes for you. It's a one click solution, nothing techie at all.

Also be sure that File Search is set to DEEP in the preferences. As far as I know it's the default, but it never hurts to check. It may account for the missing textures.

All I can say is I have all my Poser versions (from 4 and upwards) on an external drive. They live happily side by side and I haven't had any of all the problems that People are complaining about. Yes I've had Poser 8 crash on me a few times, but I've had ALL my probrams do that occasionally. Those things happen, and so far, Poser isn't any worse in that respect.

Oh and I agree with Lostinspaceman.. if you don't WANT the new features of Poser 8, why upgrade at all? The rest of us WANT them, couldn't care less about rsr support or the ancient Poser 4 renderer and are (at least I am) thrilled at the new, improved library!

I tried the import script. It brings up a dialog box that tells me running the script will crash the program and asks if I want to continue. If I do, guess what happens, the program crashes.  That they even included this warning box makes me believe that they knew the script wasn't 100%

Quote - I tried the import script. It brings up a dialog box that tells me running the script will crash the program and asks if I want to continue. If I do, guess what happens, the program crashes.  That they even included this warning box makes me believe that they knew the script wasn't 100%

There's a big difference between killing the program (i.e. shutting it down properly) and crashing it.

The script has to close Poser once it's finished writing the new file, as the newly imported Runtimes won't be visible until after a restart and to be sure Poser won't have a chance to attempt write to the new file.

If you really wanted to, you could remove the sys.exit() call and shut Poser down yourself.

It's not closing down Poser after it's done though. It specificly says it will "kill" the app (quote marks thiers) When I hit okay it instantly shuts down. There's no writing of anything and nothing gets imported.

Wonderful. Just opened up P8 to check that, and IE has now decided there's a bug in some script somewheres. (Never did that before) Is this something else I have to look forward too in teh future: random script errors?