I'm doing some animation with Poser figures on a 400 mHz Mac G4 with 288 mB of memory and I would like the frame to frame speed to improve. Anyone know if a different-from-standard video card might help? And which one? I have only 16 mB of video memory and suspect that may be the culprit.

Poser's speed in building an animation depends far more heavily on CPU speed (MHz) than on graphics. (The vast majority of applications really don't need CPU speed, but Poser is a definite exception to the rule.) When I switched from an old 133 MHz processor to an 800, my animation speed improved dramatically. On a PC, adding more RAM can also help; I don't know if that holds for a Mac.

You may like to approach this from another angle. How many polygons are in your scene? By way of example you may like to review http://www.philc.net/lowpolly1c.htm (nudity) which depicts an walking animation created with one of my low polygon Poser figures. She has only 2254 faces and her OBJ file size is 240 Kb.

Attached Link: http://members.tripod.com/~knittingman/index.htm

I agree with all the other comments made. The graphics card is of minor importance with Poser. Simple - low file size figures / props are of great importance. Also consider size of frame.. smaller = faster .. and lights ... less = faster. I am a big supporter of using Poser4 Lo figures. I'm 50 years old now and don't have enough time left to wait for Michael or Vicky to render at 25 frames per second!! Good luck with your animating. Have fun, Gerald - Fast and Furious.

There two answers to this depending on where you are viewing the animation. 1.) To speed up playback of animations inside of poser before rendering. You need lower polygon content. Or a faster cpu. 2.) To speed up video playback after rendering. You need to use a better compression file format so your machine won't skip any frames due to the demand. Mpeg is a great format for PC's. It plays back smooth and does not drop frames even at full screen. But I don't know if MAC's can use Mpeg. ScottA

Thanks for all the helpful comments. Some of what you (all) responded with was what I already suspected. Guess I'm just too impatient. I do try to hold down the polygon count, but occasionally, I get carried away with creating elaborate scenes, with the obvious result. Guess the old adage applies: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Happy New Year.

288Mb is quite small to run Poser on a Mac. Memory is cheap nowadays...

Attached Link: http://66.70.166.29/mpegs/whitejedi.mpg

Macs Most certainly can use and create MPEGS

But 3D animation is a patient mans game

this one took about five hours
to render in cinema4DXL with an imported
poser animation