hi all,

just poppin' by to tell you I've opened a new website for my tutorials on Poser, Vue and Postwork.
aRtbee's Missing Manuals (http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl).
Lengthy in depth tut's in multiple posts, series downloadable in PDF, not for the fainthearted.

Currently available:

• Running out of Memory / breaking the 2Gb barrier, for all those struggling with 32-bit Poser in a 32-bit Windows OS
• Poser - the Program, for all those concerned with managing performance, Ram and Cpu.
• Understanding Corrections, on the pro's and con's of Exposure and Gamma Correction in Poser and Vue. And especially: the flaws and issues. In full detail.

Working on:

• Rendering in passes, and glueing the passes in post
• Dynamic Cloth
• Dynamic Hair

Be welcome. And please contribute by making comments and remarks, here or on my site. See ya!

That looks interesting.

Thank you.  Looks great.  I need all the help I can get. 

Thanks, very useful!

Wow indeed. Bookmarked and thank you.

Looks very useful!.. Thanks for sharing

hi all,

I'm happy to inform you that I've just launched the Poser Render Passes tutorial as well.

At least the first part, as most Render Pass tools and procedures seem to have issues with more elaborated Material settings (reflection maps, shader trees in Alt_Diffuse) and IDL lighting. That's something for the second part, under investigation now, will be June.

Thanks for passing by.

Great stuff, I hope you include the dynamics stuff you did in a thread here at Rendo.

Sorry I see you are planning to, forgot after I came back from your tutorials.

Awesome - thanks aRtBee ;-)

I stumbled upon these tutorials last week and wanted to comment on them at that time, but this is probably the better thread anyway.

As much as I complain about the poor quality of documentation and tutorials for Poser (and for almost any other app for that matter), I feel I should point out when someone gets it right, and that’s the case here. These tutorials are excellent in and of themselves, but beyond that they should be studied by those in charge of documentation at Smith Micro or anyone wanting to write a tutorial.

So what does aRtBee get right? Well, he starts by addressing what I consider the first rule of technical writing: know who your audience is and speak to them. That’s the first thing that aRtBee does:

** “Who are You?**

“You are an ‘experienced beginner’ or intermediate user of Poser, Vue, Photoshop or alike and you have some basic understanding of image handling software like Photoshop, GIMP or alike. It’s installed, runs without serious errors, you’ve got some results out in print or your website or a web gallery, and you may have read some parts of the user manual, done some tutorials and visited some forums.

“Now you want to improve yourself, enhance the quality of your results and the efficiency and effectiveness of your way of working. But where to start?”

Excellent. Right away he’s defined the intended audience for the tutorials, so people won’t waste their time on something that’s either too advanced or too basic.

The next thing he does is address my second rule of technical writing: don’t just tell me what something does; tell me what its purpose is. Tell me what problem it solves, why I would want to use it, and when I would want to use it. aRtBee speaks to that also in the introduction and talks about the difference between manuals and tutorials and what their limitations are.

“Manuals tend to follow the menu structure and screen layout. But they hardly tell me when to use a specific function, and in which case what parameter settings are preferred. The menu structure never is the structure of my workflow. Manuals might help with the work but hardly contribute to the flow.

“Tutorials tend to direct me to a specific result, and tell me which buttons to push and which parameters to set. But only in rare cases they tell me why. Tutorials might help with the flow, but hardly contribute to my next piece of work.”

This is carried forward into the lessons themselves. For example in the “Poser Render Passes” lesson he spends the first two paragraphs laying out a problem inherent In Poser: time consuming renders. He then gives an overview of the overall approach he uses to deal with that problem and follows that with a summary of the basic steps needed to solve the problem. All that before he’s given a single do-this-do-that instruction.

So that, in my opinion, is how it should be done. Identify your audience, identify the problem, and focus on the why, not the how.

ElZagna: thanks.

Don't forget the third rule: know what you're talking about.

Hmmm. Working on that one :). So I can do with all comments and findings, I'm sure my Corrections and Additions post is far too short.

I've found them very informative, and like the way your approaching them.

Awesome!!!

I wonder if anyone could confirm/ deny whether the LAA tweak (XP sp3 - 32bit ) has any effect on Poser 7 (as aRtBee admits he doesn't know). I'd like to give it a try, but I'm a bit wary after trying similar tweaks found on game sites/ forums that caused me more grief than gain.

Edit; OK... that was kinda selfish of me. After a proofread, I figger if I'm gonna ask for confirmation I might as well ask the same for Daz Studio 2, Photoshop CS4 / Elements 8 and before and the latest PaintShopPro X3 in case anyone else has similar reservations to my own.

TYVM  :)

to be precise; I do know it works but I don't know whether Poser 7 is LAA already, or needs the tweak. Just run LaaTiDo, it will tell you (and please; tell us then). Whether you then apply the tweak is up to you, I've never found any negative consequences. Of course: always keep the original file as a backup.

And for XP -32bit: don't forget to set the system as well (and not how to switch back, just in case). There you will find drawbacks and conditions:

1. don't do it when you don't have the ram, 4Gb is recommended

2. more user ram means leass system ram, so you might notice a slowdown in massive file transfers over your internal LAN and things alike. Just don't go to the extremes then.

It's all in the text, of course. The main saver is; I extended the life of my 32-bit system for 1 to 2 years. Then I grew out of it anyway (not for Poser, but for killer Vue scenes).

All the best.

One thing I didn't see that may or may not help... recommended Virtual Memory. I've been using the general rule of thumb "2x system RAM" for years & it seems to be working well enough, but I'm no expert.

Any advice? 

Windows standard is 150% but I do recommend 200% indeed for heavy users.

Virtual memory however is a way to deal with the shortage of physical RAM-chips that results from having a shipload of simultaneous processes around. At this moment on my machine: 81. Each process itself however has a max of 4Gb due to the 32-bit restrictions, while the default split is 50% user and 50% non-user. This split is adjustable, at the systems level. For protection reasons, only a very few Windows routines may access the non-user area.

The LAA-thing adjusts the split, which gives you more ram for Poser scene and especially: peaks in the rendering. Whether this user-ram is physical or virtual does not matter (although when it becomes virtual you will notice a seriuos slow-down of your system due to the disk-swapping involved).

As the slogan for this tutorials says:

Enough physical RAM for all your simultaneous programs, and enough user memory for one single program, really are separate things. Solving one will not solve the other.

You can read physical as: ram + disk.

hi all,

just passing by to tell that the preliminary version of the Poser Render Passes tutorial now is updated to its final version. Some adjustments and additions, and some advanced topics like making render passes for reflections and handling multi-source lighting and IDL.

Also the PDF version is updated, just (re)download it from http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl/?p=388 .

The next main one will be on Cloth Room.

Quote - hi all,

just passing by to tell that the preliminary version of the Poser Render Passes tutorial now is updated to its final version. Some adjustments and additions, and some advanced topics like making render passes for reflections and handling multi-source lighting and IDL.

Also the PDF version is updated, just (re)download it from http://www.book.artbeeweb.nl/?p=388 .

The next main one will be on Cloth Room.

Cool - thanks aRtBee ;-)