Hi all, I want to do a little battle scene with Poser. I still use Poser Pro 2014 as I am used to it, but also have Poser 11 installed. I do this with creating single scenes separately and then import them into the battle scene. My problem ist that, the more figures I include, the size of the file increases and soon my PC is impossible to navigate through it. It takes forever to load and then the mouse navigates slowly if at all. So, is there any trick to reduce the file size? Thanks for any advice! Best, Tobias

Tried the Combine Figures in the Figure menue to reduce polys?

Some suggestions, they are not 100% reliable so results may vary.
In Poser 11 there is the combine figures and also reduce poly commands - these can be used to combine a base figure with its armour and reduce the overall poly count.
Reduce the number of morphs to the minimum.
Use the outline command on figures to reduce the detail...
or use hide to hide figues
Convert a figure or figures to obj - you'll need to reapply the mats. This will remove the overhead of morphs and bonnationes. If they are identical figures exporting a group may have the additional benefit of all using the same shader tree (only tried this with simple props)

Do you use the same figure/clothes/armour combination are they all different?

Thanks for your suggestions! I will try the combine figures and reduce poly commands when I can find them in the program. I', not native Engish speaker and have to figure that out! My figures are a variation of same and different types.

Another approach is to stitch together several renders how to make large scenes tutorial

Unfortunately for the OP, the combine figures, reduce polys functions are not in poser 2014, they were game dev features. A couple of obvious things to try are to use a different display style, I find smooth shaded helps, and use low poly figures where possible, such as those by epici and thunderr here at Rendo and the predation figures (Lorenzo, Loretta etc) at DAZ

ironsoul posted at 1:40PM Fri, 19 June 2020 - #4392458

Another approach is to stitch together several renders how to make large scenes tutorial

That's one I've used many times from way, way back.

Thanks again for the tips! As I have Poser 11, too, I tried to reduce polygons there but quickly this looks lousy. When I click on combine figure, Poser is creating a near identical figure of the one I marked. Is that what you mean? The tutorial may be a nice way if you want to produce a single image. I want to show a battle scene and get many picture out of it, from different angles, some totals and many close-ups... I remember a way from a long time ago, but I forgot... to sace the groupings as something else, not poser files, and import this into scene. Anyone has a gues what this can be?

Where the OP said they had poser 11, they could take the figures in there to reduce and combine, but that could be a pain. For all me large scenes, I never do either. I've had problems with poor movement of the clothing.

I agree that changing the display settings will help a little. Avoid any that show the texture or the wireframe. Changing the tracking to bounding boxes only is even faster, but it's hard to do detailed posing with that. Don't use fast tracking. It is anything but fast. And hiding figures helps big time. On most scenes I only have the figure I'm working on showing at a time.

As far as speed of loading the scene, aside from reducing polygons, I don't think there's much you can do. I don't remember if Poser 2014 has autosave but if it does, you might want to turn it off for these scenes and just set some kind of reminder to save once in a while. I had one scene that took over an hour to load. By the time it was done, the autosave wanted to start.

You can do different angles and closeups with one of the methods I used in the tutorial. Use the hide figures rather than the delete them option. Here are different camera angles for the scene I used in the tutorial. These are pretty low quality because they are just screenshots of the preview with the settings at the bare minimum.

And here is a comparison of one figure with clothes

And combined with the clothing and the polygons reduced to about 75%.

2 things to remember about this is that morphs specific to the clothing will zero out such as the tails of the jacket are flared and I had to apply that flare. Also, don't go too low with the polygon reduction. For me, even half seems too low

There's one other option I haven't heard mentioned. It's been in Poser almost since the beginning. It's Paste onto Background. You should find it under the Display menu. Used creatively, you could easily do an army battlefield.

OMG, Combine Figures! Paste Onto Background! Why haven't I been curious enough to discover these things myself? I'm such a Dumbo Columbo. Thanks for the tips!!!

Use "Grouping" for big scenes. You can put all kinds if things from the scene in these groups and then hide the groups when you work on something else in the scene. I have Advanced Figure Manager 2 with Layers. It does the same as Grouping but in a smarter way.

Zaycrow, you make it sound like hiding a group opens up more memory, so it's easier to move around the unhidden objects. Is that the case? That was the OP's problem. I always figured if the polygons are there, whether I can see them or not, they're taking up memory.

VedaDalsette, that's not what I got from the OP. I read it as he has trouble navigating the scene with many characters in it as his mouse is getting slow. But of course I could be wrong.

Thanks, Zaycrow, but I could be wrong, too! I know before I doubled my memory, if I had too many polygons in the scene, I had trouble moving them around. I guess I was reading my experience into what he was saying.