Okay, so I built this character from V4, adding a Godin skin, a few wardrobe items (nothing much), and Fancy Long Hair from Pretty3D.

Saved her to my library.

But now, when I try to load her into a new empty scene, she takes forever to load -- actually, NEVER finishes loading.

I have to close the program.

What is causing this?

I'm running Poser Pro2012 on Win 7 Pro x64.

The program just freezes when I try to load her. Screens go white, come back, I try to click on the character, screens go white again, come back again, etc, cycle repeats on & on.

Sounds like a memory issue.... How big is your V4 character? How much RAM do you have??
How long is "forever" for you? (it's about .005 seconds for me!!) But every time you click on her, you tell poser to load her again, so please, don't do that!!!

8G of ram, which I'm expanding later this week to 16. My workstation has an 2008 Intel Skull Trail Motherboard, so I can only take it that far. But it's running two quad core Xeon processors.

Is RAM the issue, do you think?

The V4 character is hardly that loaded (see attached JPEG).

I've waited well over five minutes and it fails to load. No problem with other similar characters.

Not clicking more than once.

NewLauriHair&Shoes.jpg

Sound like something got corrupted in the file. Are you saving with external binary morph targets activated in your preferences? If you are generating pmd files with your saves to library, one of those files may have become corrupted.

Thank you, hborre. That sounds right. I probably am.

I don't know exactly, but I'll check my settings and the manual and get back to you. I have made minor morph changes to the hair and chest. I've changed the textures & color on the bikini top, and I've modified Godin's skin color to give her a tan. I'll look into this after I get back from work tomorrow.

A corruption somewhere was what I was thinking, but I'm not advanced enough to know how to identify it in the scene file code.

Hmmm. I'm still working this out. I doubled my RAM this week from 8 to 16 GB and it's made little visible difference in this matter. I made a duplicate installation of V4 on the C drive with the program too, since I read that V4 wants to be there too, apparently.

I believe that hborre is right about something in the PMD files getting corrupted, but I don't know how to find it exactly. Yes, I had "use external binary morphs" checked in general preferences. Isn't that the default setting? If I uncheck it, is the morph data then saved within the actual CR2 file as opposed to a sister PDM file? I find little in writing anywhere that clarifies that for me.

Yes, external binary morphs setting is on by default, a feature which needs to be turned off manually. But, of course, by eliminating the creation of PMD files to contain morph information, this data is saved to the CR2 instead, subsequently increasing the size of the figure file. With the current Poser iterations, there is less likely a chance to corrupt PMD files but the likelihood of failure is still there. Check your character folder where you saved your custom figure CR2 and note whether there exists a PMD file. Usually this is where PMD files are saved together with the CR2. If, for some reason, you physically moved the CR2 to another location but not the PMD, you will most likely experience Poser crashing when loading the figure.

I’m finding that the necklace prop I modified had some kind of corruption in it, so I’ve replaced it. But I am rebuilding the character anyway and testing each step along the way.

So far, I’ve not moved any files around, though.

Excuse my naiveté here, but if having a sister PMD file can potentially create these errors, what is the advantage of using them--especially if the morph info can remain in the CR2 file anyway? Is somehow using the CR2 with a sister PMD file together more efficient and faster?

hborre, you say that this matter is handled better in newer editions of Poser. I am considering an upgrade to Pro 2014, but I'm not too keen on upgrading to PP 11 at the moment--at least not until the first or second service packs have come out. I’m very reluctant to make an upgrade on a software package when I’m in the middle of a project.

And with good reason not to change in midstream. CR2 files can become very bloated when including extensive morph targets, used or unused. And distribution can become a download nightmare if files are too large to port over the network. It is quite faster to load morphs with PMD than using .cr2 figures; again size matters. As I mentioned before, PMD have been corrected with current Poser version and there is less likelihood of corruption.

Thanks so much for your lightning-fast response, hborre.

How well did PP2014 handle the PMD file issue? Or is it only the new PP11 that has gotten it tamed?

Yes, I won't upgrade until this phase of the project is completed. Then, I'll have the space in-which to consider it. The main tool I like in the newest version is the "measuring stick", but I have a couple third party ones I'm using now that are awkward but sufficing.

Corrections were made in PP2014, I don't remember if service releases for PP2012 also patched the PMD coding. I usually turn off the feature in General Preferences. From what I hear from other users, stability has been improved significantly.