Quote - I have an early version of Poser (2 maybe?) and I'm sure it was Fractal Design's Poser.Metacreations, back to Fractal Designs?, e-frontier, Smith Micro.
I've another, early, software package from Fractal Design's on an old Windows 95 machine and for life of me can't remember the name of it.  Good software but wanky to install - and on FLOPPY DISKs.

Was FD the original Poser software company?
-R

Wikipedia thinks so, at least.  They have a nice Poser entry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser

I'm a sucker for tables.  :lol:

Cage - there's a note for you in your PM box. Let's dig in a little deeper to get your issue resolved.

BTW, I like your signature block.

Cooper

Quote - Cage - there's a note for you in your PM box. Let's dig in a little deeper to get your issue resolved.

BTW, I like your signature block.

Cooper

Oh, thank you.  I saw the PM.  Give me a bit.  Poser made me angry recently and my therapy is to vent about it, then try to laugh for awhile.  I'm working up to facing the problem again.

What, the sigline?  Phantom3d is a great guy!  :woot:  And I'm not trying to be a turkeyhead, no.  Whether or not I am one, regardless of motive, I couldn't really say.  :unsure:

You can laugh, but Fortran IV has all what is needed for the Poser core and has more features than Python, C, Basic. With Fortran IV you can work with complex numbers, vector math, matrices, differential equations, integrals, Monte Carlo, etc. All you need for 3d transforms, not biased raytracing, radiosity, moon landing, atomic bombs. Only is weak with the user interface, but if you have a keyboard, all is ok.

The idea of the Poser core including atomic bombs kind of scares me, personally.  :scared:

I think my grandfather used to program in Fortran, on one of those big UNIVAC-type computers, with the vaccuum tubes.  With all the punch cards.  He tells me my generation has it too easy.  :lol:

And I'm not contributing much to the computer language discussion.  Sorry.    The above is all I have on the topic, sadly.

As for Poser everyday (well not really every day) people discover something new. Were discovered material poses, JCM, injection morphs, a lot of stuff controlling channels, and so on. All this stuff has existed in Poser4 and in Poser 3 too, but nobody knew its existence. Of course the creator knew it, is was him that created it and put into code. Poser4 had dynamic hair, only it was a hidden and experimental. Poser only exist for Mac because it was created for Mac and later someone ported it for Windows.

One of the great things about Poser is the way it tolerates all of the strange hacks the users have come up with, over the years.  It's hard to imagine Poser now without ERC or the various MAT and insertion poses.

The P4 hair easter egg was pretty cool.  :laugh: And the trick to switch over to the older P2 interface.

FrankT: Thank you for that.  LOLCode made me laugh.  :laugh:

Quote - One of the great things about Poser is the way it tolerates all of the strange hacks the users have come up with, over the years.  It's hard to imagine Poser now without ERC or the various MAT and insertion poses.

The P4 hair easter egg was pretty cool.  :laugh: And the trick to switch over to the older P2 interface.

 

FrankT: Thank you for that.  LOLCode made me laugh.  :laugh:

Easter eggs. I miss those days.

The motivation behind using a text based structure for all the data in Poser was to purposefully enable all kinds of creative hackery and encourage experimentation. Rather than design a closed system that would lock users out, we wanted an open environment. There was no way to predict the ways in which it would grow, but it sure did takeoff.

I think a big mistake DS made wasnot having text files the way poser has so users can edit them easily and make hacks.  that is what caused poser's evolution.

Quote - I'd love to see someone write a version of Poser in COBOL.  :)

Better yet, Visual Basic.

Quote - And the trick to switch over to the older P2 interface.

??? I didn't knew this, how I do it?

Quote - ??? I didn't knew this, how I do it?

I think it might just have involved typing "P2".  Or it might have been more complex.  I can't remember how to get back to the P4 interface afterwards, though.

Attached Link: Now3D

"Better yet, Visual Basic."

Well, NOw3D is a complete GI raytracing render application written in VB6. Personally, I vote for Logo, using turtle graphics for rendering and we really do need an ASCII art shader.

Look at the messages that I've found inside Poser 6: This version of Poser requires a Macintosh equipped with a Math Coprocessor (68881) This version of Poser is compiled for 68K processors, but you have a Power PC. This will run very slowly. We strongly recommend installing the Power PC Native version Poser cannot create images larger than 4090 pixels (or smaller than 2 pixels) in either dimension Something screwy, can't find actor box Fstream GetObject tried to read class with unrecognized or garbage RuntimelibrariescharacterPoser 2 LoNude Man P2 Lo.cr2 I believe Courier font is not used in Poser 3.0 genital_twisty

PO2 PO3 hair are working in Poser4, in Poser6 do not

Quote - PO2 PO3 hair are working in Poser4, in Poser6 do not

Correct.  I think they removed that after Poser 5, when some interface changes were made.  Or maybe it was taken out with P5.  Anyway, the easter eggs are gone now, which is kind of sad.  :sad:

I don't know if "Nude Man P2 Lo" is still inside Poser 8

Quote -  

Well, NOw3D is a complete GI raytracing render application written in VB6. Personally, I vote for Logo, using turtle graphics for rendering and we really do need an ASCII art shader.

Lord, I'd completely forgotten Turtle graphics! They were the cyber version of Etch-a-Sketch, or maybe Spirograph.

In reference to the OPs original gripe, I too just recently started having my renders stall out (still running at 100% but going nowhere).  Again, copious use of props and interiors, monsterous skins (10+mb range) and IBLs with AO and depth of field.  I'm running Win7 64-bit with 8GB and although my reported memory usage never went above 70% I still have issue with scenes requiring more than average resources.  I was able to resolve the issue with a bit of trial and error however.

What works for me is to make sure the textures are loaded into memory before I try cranking out a HQ render.  I do a number of LQ test renders so that's usually not an added consideration.  The reason I say this is because I can almost guarantee a freeze up if I restart Poser and try to start a HQ render right off the bat.  When I do load up my HQ render settings I found that it's key to lower the max bucket size from 256 to 64.  That last bit seems to have been the real clincher for getting it to complete a render without freezing up (knock on wood). 

I actually found that the difference in render speed with varying max bucket sizes all fell within a range too small to be differentiated from a conservative margin of error.  We're talking less than +/- 30 seconds on a 20 minute render.  But this bit of verbosity is a bit tangential to the discussion at hand.  :)

I've had my renders stall out frequently over the years - especially on Poser 4 Pro Pack when i would add to many textures and characters and flood memory. I would see all sorts of odd rendering artifacts as well.  I am just now starting to experience some render stalls on my current machine under Poser 7 Pro, but it is only a single core Celeron 2.66ghz with 3.5gb of ram - ideally I want to upgrade to a multicore that supports up at least 24gb of ram at some point (long way off for now).  My two render nodes cope much better when sending things out through queue, but there are numerous reasons for this: They are both quad core machines, they are both 64 bit, they both have 4gb of ram, the queue manager FFrender uses far less system resources than a full poser application.  One of the things that may increase render efficiency for some is rendering to a seperate process, another is to reduce pixel sampling for things such as Depth of Field, and lastly reducing Raytrace Bounces.  Having to many lights with too much memory allocated for shadow maps will also kill a render (and I strongly recommend that if you have shadows turned off for a light to also set it's shadow map size to 0, otherwise the resources are still allocated, but go unused).  Sometimes my copy of Poser will just up and crash for no real discernable reason.  Not just during a render, but when accessing the material room, or opening the library, or moving a camera sometimes.  SM insists this is a Windows issue, I'm not convinced (Lightwave does not do this, nor does Carrara).

I have had my differences with SM tech support too. I have had several issues go unsolved, and get marked solved because they grew tired of trying to find the issue.  That irks me to no end.  On the other hand, on some issues they have worked with me extensively to try to get it working.  I really hate it when they insist the problem is content, or just as bad their standardized answer of "Your Poser Configuration Files have become corrupt and you need to delete them". Usually neither one of those is the real problem in my experience. Still, I have had far worse experiences with Tech support from another company, one which I currently own a piece of software from I can't even use as it keeps crashing (installed and tried on 4 computers, does it on all 4) and their attitude is that it's not their problem - I'll need to troubleshoot it myself.  Now, with issues on other products in these last months, they aren;t even responding to my tech support requests.  Given how many thousands I have spent with them, I really have not filed many either - it really is annoying.  So I put SM somehwere in the mid range.

I've never used Poser 8, so I am not sure of it's particular failings. I have 2010 Pro but do not use it a lot yet, I hate the interface on it and the library (I would rather see a native library more like the ACB Advance Library).  I also feel it would be great if in their next revision Poser were to incorporate a segmented render, similar to what lightwave can do, for low memory or resource heavy scenes, and I would love for them to incorporate a larger procedural texture node database, and some simple Post Processing effects (Lens Flares anyone?).  I would trade all that though for stability.

As for the best and most stable language to program the next poser in, what's all this talk about Fortran, Kobol, PL/I, C++... there is only one supreme programing language - Basic! Like the good ol' days of the C64!  Incorporate the latest support for Ansi acceleration cards! :P