Hi all, Just wondering how much geometry people can handle. Been checking some old downloads and files over the past few years and have noticed polygon resolution doubling every year. Any RAM or rendering horror stories or Poser crashes? What are your CPU and RAM specs and what can your scene handle? Anyone ever run across an item that wouldn't load. I have a gig of Ram and am curious. Any info is appreciated. Anton Off topic: I create shortcuts to manage projects in my Poser folders. When done I try to remove them all. I found that if I have any dead shortcuts within my runtime folder it locks Poser. Hope that helps someone.

No problems here: Windows 2000, Athlon 800, 640 MB Ram. I can handle several Vickys and Mikes with StefyZZ textures :) Windows has a problem with more than 256 subdirectories (Poses folder). Mazak

Win 98, 700 Athlon, 512 megs = problems with Vicky and her hi-res textures - 50-50 lock-up. Mike handles better, Catharina's textures are fine with him, Eve - no problems at all and Pro Packs w3d exporter can't do more than the Manniquin on this OS. I need a new 'puter.....

Win 98 can't handle more than 256 MB Ram. Go with XP or Win2000. OT: The size of my poser4 folder. :o)

I have an 80000 poly squid that loads fine..and Ive not heard of any problems with it. and then there's dina..whats she have...~110 thousand? I havent heard of any problems with her either. :) BT

Mazak..... I know, that was 40 quid down the drain but upgrading scares the hell out of me! What if I lose everything, or it blows up, or the sky falls on my head, or WW III breaks out, or..........

Win 2000, Athlon 1,2 1024 MBRam, had to size up the Poser cache file (Auslagerungsdatei, don't know the right english term for it) since it couldn't handle high dpi renders.

More polygons does not always equate to better models. Just because a computer can "handle it" does not give me an excuse to build inefficient meshes. I appreciate that with the increase in power of the average computer there is more leeway but even so no one wants to wait longer than necessary for a scene to render or an animation to compile.

Mazak, that is false. Win98 (1 and SE) and ME have a max of 1GB RAM (according to MS documentation). More than 1GB can cause a continuous reboot. fun stuff! LOL Now even though 98 and ME support 1GB, there is still a problem with using >512MB - Vcache causes memory address conflicts. Adding MaxFileCache=16384 to the Vcache section of the system.ini (limits it to 16MB which is plenty) fixes that. BTW, limiting VCache (disk cache) improves system performance greatly by freeing up RAM for programs so everyone should do it even if you dont have >512MB.

This tweaking of the windows98 system you must make by hand! Mazak

Im on a 1,2 Gig Athlon with 512 mb. I modell tres and plants in xfrog and many of them have polycounts about 60000 . No problem using 3 or 4, and a clothed viccy ,a building and so on in poser.

I am on a, imac G3, 500/768meg, OS9.22 running P4w/ProPack. I can put Mike &Vicky w/med. textures together, dress them in Adventurers clothes, add Posable hair, wonderwedge and some props, lights & shadows. Hi rez textures bog me down with stephanie, but if I reduce lights and shadows I'm okay. Still slow, but ok. Ok I have given most of my memory to poser, but I can still run photoshop in the background and switch between them by hiding the one I'm not using at the moment.

Thanks Freon I'll try that - if I softly and silently vanish away, could someone send out a search party!? Phil, I wonder sometimes why people go for these huge meshes too. From an animator's point of view, I really like to be able to switch off fast tracking and be able to see my results in real time, which is why Eve was such a God send, I can't do that with Vicky. Using the lo-res versions works out because Eve (and Mike to some extent) follows so well but Vicky's completely different. So, a plea to all modellers, please consider making a lo-res version of your characters.....

Brilliant! OK, Anton, Vicky with hi-res textures, radiosity lighting and the updo hair, no problems.....

I recently constructed a scene consisting of the following: 1.) Elegant medeivel (SP?!) dining hall 2.) "Mike the sorcerer" complete with Anton's Fantasy Beard, a sorcerer's robe 3.) Anton's Storybook Dragon 4.) Mike dressed as an adventurer's outfit 5.) Vicky as an adventurer 6.) A character of my own creation dressed in an Adventurer's suit I converted with Tailor. I was able to work with this scene with very little difficulty. I have the following humble system (home built) 1.) Intel Celeron 533mhz CPU with Intel Motherboard 2.) Onboard AGP video (maybe 1MB) 3.) 512MB SDRAM (this is my max available memory) 4.) 30GB hard drive dedicated totally to the Poser installation and my art 5.) 20GB hard drive for Windows XP and all other software. I can't show the picture for a day or so, till the contest ends, grin. Ron

running win2k on an 850MHz PIII, 512M Ram. Recently started playing with "Dina," no problems. Seems Hi-res textures like Yuma slow me down more than Hi-mesh (But certainly worth the wait!)

Well, I have a dinosaur: AMD K6II-366 with 156 mb RAM (would be 160mb, but 4 mb are shared with onboard video card), a 4 gig HD, and a 2 gig HD dedicated to Poser... I have absolutely NO problems with, among other things, my Dracos Titanicus (50k polys), and a couple milfigs in a scene... am I thus a mutant?

Ran a 1GHz AMD Athlon on 384MB RAM. 32MB Graphic-Card. OS is Win98, for which i hate me while i was to tired when bought the comp to install NT. Window is activated to handle the Virtual-RAM itself. Don't know if this is good or bad. Never have had problems with high-polymeshs itself, it's all the time the textures which crashes poser. BTW: How much RAM can Win98 truly handle ? SHARKEY

With Win 2K and 768 Mb and a fast CPU I can do, oh, I sort of lost count, but there are about 20-25 or so Vickies, SMVs,and whatnots in there, plus some hair and other stuff. This is probably a slightly more powerful system than many have here now, but will probably be only an average system next year. On the other hand, high poly count for the sake of high poly count is silly, I think Dina is actually hrader to morph because of her too-close poly pitch. But after saying that I think 45-60 K polys for a figure, 20-30 K polys for har and the same for all the clothing is O.K. right now, at least for the better systems. On the other hand, my Mac G3 with 256Mb seldom can open Vickie II.

"Phil, I wonder sometimes why people go for these huge meshes too." Simple. To make a low polygon model. You need to be able to model one vertice at a time. And not rely on fancy tools and nurbs technology. Nowadays. Most people rely on the software to create all the geometry. And that produces huge file sizes. Go to the Rhino forum and check out how people are working with it. They use lots of tools like splicing, lofting, grafting, and joining. After the model is converted from nurbs to geometry. It's bloated. I've always admired the job Zygote did with the standard Poser figures. The models are super efficient and clean. Yet still look pretty darn good. ScottA

hey jim! LOVE the chick with the blue hair :P BT

My company' just bought me a P4 1.8a Notebook computer, I guess they want me to be mobile. 512 MB Mem, 20 gig hd, win2K, 16mb video. I'll loaded poser (so I can have something to do in hotel rooms). I'll let you know how it performs. At home I have a AMD XP1800+ with 1 gb mem and Win2K. It runs like a dream. JVR

On a Dell Pentium III 1GHz with 512meg of RAM running XP, I've loaded, moved and rendered the entire Magellan project. With textures, that's a 100 megabyte articulated model. I DID have to go to box tracking, though. The creator of the project uses a 1.7 GHz Pentium 4 with a gig of RAM running Win 2k, and has no trouble at all. Still, I sure wish Poser supported Open GL, or one of the other 3D graphic accelerators. -SMT

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=161778&Start=1&Artist=arcady&ByArtist=Yes

The gallery image in this link from my gallery was about my limit. Oddly enough it didn't slow down until I added in the 3d-sky library prop. Win Me 512 Ram, K7m Asus Athlon on 500 Mhz AMD. Just added an 80 GB hard drive last night and moved Poser to it... that means my E: drive finally has more than 60mbs of free space and my C more than a roaming 100-800mbs free. (Poser was using 8 GBs) :) So maybe that'll speed things up...

P4/1.8, 512MB, 10GB Free, W2K. I've had 3 or 4 of Mobius' Solondra loaded at once. No hey problema. Even when I had my old P2/400 it loaded fine.

In the subject of poly count, Yes, high counts do little good on flat surfaces. When modeling you need to add polygons where they do the most good. In the case of a figure that will be used in poser that's at the bending points. I've also recently learned that the shape of the mesh can have as much to do with bendability as poly count. In a thread over at Poser Pros the subjec to hex shaped meshes came up. I recently stumbled on to the benefits of their superior bendability. You can morph and bend the heck out of them without them becoming jagged, like Posette's knees. I believe a Posette with hex based mesh in the bending areas would out perform victoria in benadbility. When I get time I'm gunna try it just to see how well it really works.

Nerd, Do you mean 6-sided polygons at the joints rather than 3 or 4 sided? (I want to be clear on this before plunging into a project.) The areas in bend zones would look like honeycombs in wireframe? There should be some mathematical reason why deformation of a hexagon would be less prone to warpage than smaller triangles. Carolly

"There should be some mathematical reason why deformation of a hexagon would be less prone to warpage than smaller triangles." On the other hand, they complicate the math tremendously :) The best thing about triangles is that they are ALWAYS a flat plane. That makes things very easy :)

OK, yes and no. Poser doesn't know what a 6 sided polygon is, so they are actually triangles arranged like a pie, 6 of them that make up an over all honeycomb pattern. Stop by PoserPros.com and read serge's topic in Character Creation. Also look at the preview image of my "Nerd Curls" It is built with a Hex Based Mesh. [](http://www.nerd3d.com)

"This tweaking of the windows98 system you must make by hand!" Only for over 512MB (not 256) and ONLY if you are having the memory address conflicts. There are numerous applications available to do the job for you if you dont want to do it by hand. Cacheman from http://www.outertech.com/ is a popular one. Either way, Windows98 supports well over 256MB. 1GB to be exact.