Excuse the ranty mood, but I've been up all night with you-know-who. I've had Poser for about 3 months now, but I swear this thing is almost enough to put me off CG completely! I am trying to import a DXF file... I have reduced the polycount. Of course, when you import, it's click and pray, because there is no way to cancel an import operation. (Grrrr.) Naturally, it bombs out with an out of memory error at 95%. So, sensible me, I look at the various settings for some way to tell this lovely program "use more memory, stupid". Nada. So I check the oh-so-helpful help files. Zilch. I KNOW it's not the computer- I have a GeForce 3 64, and a gig of ram. I monitored the system resources all through the process, and they never went below 75%. I can't believe that there isn't a way to directly control the program parameters (memory usage, so on) but if there is, I can't find it. (Aaaarrggh!) Can anyone help me, before I am forced to feed my Poser discs to the paper shredder? (Giggling maniacally, of course.) Thanks!

how many poly has the file you try to import??importing in poser had never been a prob for me.im on a pc with 386 mb on a pc you cant advice memory to a program.

The best thing I cna suggest is to make sure nothing else is open first off. You can't control the memory requirements on PCs to my knowledge (which is almost non-existant). See what size the file is but you really shouldn't have a problem witht hat. Also check and see if you cna import it into anything else. It might simply be that the file is bad.

Importing DXF into Poser is normally a snap unless, as above, the file is screwy. You might try to get 3DExplorer and fiddle with different file formats.

Attached Link: http://home.europa.com/~keithr/

I bet the file is corrupted. I am the queen of computer illiteracy and I can get dfx to import no problem, LOL!!!

I think your GeForce 3 is the problem. My PC never shows problem importing DXF in Poser.

I can't imagine the GeForce has anything to do with it! That's just the graphic card. It has nothing to do with the computation and memory handling of the comptuer. On the other hand, I agree - there must be something whacky with your DXF file. It may work OK in another program, but that program may have more tolerance for something unusual.

Thank you, everyone! I feel better now. People here are so nice. It had better not be the GeForce! They're supposed to be the best on the consumer market. (It cost like it!) Maybe the file is screwy- I'll try it again- making it that is. Maybe it's the DXF format? Or it might be a teence big- I checked the file size, and it eas just over 15,000 megs. Is that big?

Uhhh, your joking about the file being 15 Gigabytes, right? I'm hoping that's a typo cause if it isn't 15,000 megs may very well be a little large for your gig of memory.

That's what it said- I looked in the file manager, under properties- file size 15,720,944 bytes. I usually whack off the last three, so I guess that would be roughly 15,000 megs. (Is that right?)

...But the memory manager said during processing, it never used more than 20% of the system resources at a time. It took about half an hour, using the same 20% over and over, then it would get to 90% complete, and say "not enough memory". I don't understand- naybe it was trying to ship the file into Poser, THEN it said "that's too big!" Uhrrgh. I don't know!

"not enough memory" is Poser's way of crying for help as it's really confused... usually the result of a corrupt file or a bad plugin load.... easy way out.. restart Poser and try again.. if it still fails... then tis weither the dxf plugin or the file itself... try the convertion options outlined above

Crossroads! Cool- I'm downloading it right now. I still would love to find something that explains in real-people terms what, for instance, a DXF file is, what a 3DS is, what makes them different, and so-on. Thanks everyone! I was doing a project for freestuff, so if this works, I'll let ya' know! I'm making trees! (Nice, real-looking trees, not phonepoles with leaves.)

dxf is a file created with an autocad style programme 3ds is one created by a 3d studio style programme... 3dmf is a file created by an ermmmm... an architecture programme.. the extensions are usually what the programme designers decided to call it.. thout there's a number of different sub-formats with those 8 ) smiles inscrutably Cheers

Yeah, I know who makes them, just not what they're made of! I seem to remember someone saying that with >obj and >dxf files, one has UV data and one doesn't- things like that. I got out my calcalater'- 15,720,944 bytes divided by 1,024 (bytes per meg = 15,352.484 megs. Urk!

a sequence of numerical patterns within a file.. how they're sequenced is the main differance... some will have the addition of material co-ordinates.. i.e. UV values.. and some dont... dxf is mainly structure and no textures nor materials... so they'd have to be mapped for texture use 8 )

So no UV in DXF. Right. (Thanks!) Crossroads is neat. The file is bad- my other DXF's opened fine. I'll have to redo it. (And there's a picture of a cute widdle baby when you open the program... aaawwwww!)

Macs let you assign memory. :) Carolly

Hi Folks! I've only tried what I'm about to suggest on a Power Macintosh, but I'd be interested in seeing whether my PC colleagues get the same results. Use the Painter 3D application (that ships with Poser4) to open the .DXF file. After you have repositioned and/or smoothed it to your desired specs, export it again as an .OBJ or 3DMF file. You can then use UV Mapper to generate texture mapping for the new prop. As noted earlier in the thread, you can't apply a texture to a .DXF prop anyway, so it might be better to reprocess it into a format that does accept mapping. Again, I'd like to know if anyone on a PC has tried this, and what were your results. If it's consistent across both platforms, then I can pass it on as advice to my 3D students. Peter (Dr Zik)

I bought poser 4, and I don't see a Painter 3D anywhere! I've looked and looked on both discs.

Painter3d came with the poser4 upgrade from poser3 package it was a rather poor, half-assed final effort from Metacreations as they fled into the wilderness of "web avatar" OBLIVION !! you did NOT miss much if you didnt get a copy.