I got him!! (a friend asked how I know it is a him!? er..just a guess!) He is FANTASTIC and the possibilities are limitless from what little I have played with him.. BUT I had to do a lot of preparation and careful handling after he crashed my machine a couple of times (after I closed Poser 4 no less! - too much map, not releasing resources!) I have an AMD GIG cpu and 512 MB ram... First I carefully told poser to make all the main bump jpg's into bum files (just the one's the "all green map" seems to ask for) and saved THAT cr2 dragon... then I went out of Poser, did a restart just to be safe, and opened photoshop. I opened the head and body maps (separatly, they are huge!!!) and I reduced them by 50% in size (after backing up my mil dragon texture folder.. which I eventually found in DAZ animals-mil dragon folder). I of course left them at the 300 dpi.. just reduced the overall size. That greatly reduced the file size of the map. Then I went back into Poser, and brought my mapped dragon into the scene... and looked at him close up... very nice! :) And so much easier to manage for my system! I then tested the process by closing poser, and openening photoshop, and all went smoothly, no lock ups! whew! I took this all one step further and did some careful selecting on the head, body and wing map (and the tail spade which I like the best) and did some "hue" changes to see if I could get some different colors of dragon! Worked pretty well.. but would be SO much easier to buy the map pack set, I am thinking! I did not check, but would hope the map pack set has a MAT file for each.. I would obviously still have to reduce the size of the maps if I were to buy those...(and deal with the BUM requests). My system (hard drive, mother board and video card too) are pretty high end and to have them choke up is not fun. All in all, of all the dragons (and I think I have nearly all of them!) this fellow is the ultimate creature that I will just love using!! The dials work so well and the range of motion for each body part is fantastic! Oh, purchasing at DAZ went smoothly yesterday, but still uncomfortable with the "no padlock" thing.. even though I read DAZ's posting on this matter... no padlock, no "notice" that you are moving to a secure page... I always use an "on line card" that has a low limit just to be safer for any on line purchase. Lyne Lyne's Creations

Still waiting for Speedy the Snail to deliver my check but I take these steps one further since I am in dire need of HD space these days. I have been stripping the BUM files form all my directories and only make them when needed for a project. I find the figures load and pose much easier and I can do/work with larger scenes and just throw the BUMs on when ready to render. It make for a little extra work but my puter has been much happier and far less lock-ups while figgiting with the poses. AND I found 3+GIGs on my HD that were not there before ;p

I've not been able to render my dragon with more than him in a scene ... that's a little frustrating. (I have a 750 AMD with 256 mg of ram) I had a great rescue scene all set up ... and it really choked up on me. (Dragon, background, 2 Mike2 figures) *sigh", still love the dragon though. Boni

Boni: dont use the bumpmaps,I had a look in the folder with the dragontextures , the bummaps are about 40 mb. load your dragon, in the matsettings select every bodypart and set the bumpmaps to "None" save the scene as *.pz3 file.close poser ,open poser and load the saved pz3 file and you should have much more free memory. or open the dragon cr2 with a editor and replace every bummapcall with "NO_MAP" and save the cr2 with a different name.

uuuppss, sorry, edit the matposefile

I've been through several interesting configurations. 1. reduce maps by 50% & remove all bump files and background files (3d world files) 2. Use Dragon LE (with above settings) 3. remove other figures in image. (The last one is the only one that really worked ... but I'll try some more combinations. DAZ must have some dang powerful computers at their company. :) Boni

Wanted to get the dragon but tried the LE version and it wont render in a seperate window (Fatal error 0028:C0059C8D on a AMD 1.4 512 ram win98se) it renders in its own window........This is without textures or bumps...default setting happens with a car model also...so I guess I will have to forgo cause I dont want to port to bryce just to render a custom size scene.....Boo Hoo...ps..anyone else ever have this problem CL cant solve or dont know what it means

"DAZ must have some dang powerful computers at their company" They have several Deep Thought 4200's.

I just don't get it... works fine on the computers here, with multi-figures and full maps, on our AMD 1.1 ghz w/ 1.25gb ram... Maybe the extra 512mb of ram actually does make that much of a difference... ~DM

Daz company may have Workstations (i guess there is a Lightwave version for this kind of machines) ! it is a "little expensive" hardware for hobbyist poserfans (like me ;) )! As far as the awesome MIL drake is concerned, i agree with the fact that he is fantastic ! ( scale down texture is usefull for common machines like my 1 GHZ AMD 256+128 meg Ram DDR and it works fine too, but, dawn, always save !!!) i think i may try to use it with other poser people one day but there are several possibilities to partially solve the problem (obj export-import, compositing with .tif renders, bryce, vue, etc, etc... ). These solutions may seem complicated and rigorists but they can help ! happy rendering with the wyrm !

for those of you having crash problems, what OS are you running? Back when I was on Win98 if I put enough things in the scene to push the RAM usage over 640MB (I have 1280MB) it would crash poser, and sometimes leave the system unstable. The only time I had poser use that much ram was when I was rendering. I think the problem is that Win98 can't handle that much RAM for a single program.

Hmmmm I tried to answer this post earlier today, and I did get a lost connection here at rosity.. I am on the "arthur" server now, and that seems to be much faster... so will try again! :) I am running my ever steady win98SE (makes a difference if it is se, (second edition) AND that it is OEM -original version bought by the person who built my machine, and not configured for a particular kind of computer!!!) ... I have the 512MB of ram, which did very much make a difference when I came up from 256.... since then I have simply learned to do one figure (especially dressed, which then makes 2 figures) like I want it.. then save as a pz3, close poser.. open.. do the next character I am planning for my scene.. save pz3 again.. then import EACH pz3 character into Vue 4.. which can handle mulitple mapped figures, trans maps (eyes especially, not like Bryce!) just fine! Then I can make a scene in the "real" outdoors as I like.. I think that Poser 5 is supposed to address this situation.. IF you run win2k or NT (which I do NOT plan on doing since those os's are sooo finiky with hardware and software) it may help? Only time and the future P5 users will tell.. I plan to watch the forums closely to see!! (but then I am not going to buy P5 and not be able to reinstall it on a holidy, weekend.. etc.. with that code thing.. I am honest.. but I refuse to be held hostage to that sort of thing... yes, my win98 is steady.. but I do have drives die, etc.. and need to reinstall things now and then... but this is another thread... I do plan on removing all the dragon BUM maps like thgeisel said.. good suggestion!! I have always felt that bump maps do not make all that much difference in most cases, and my Vue 4 does not recognize them anyway. Now, I just need to envision a really great multiple dragon scene.. and do it! :)) Lyne

Running ok on an ancient G3 233 upgraded to G4 533, 768 Mb RAM with 600 alloted to Poser. Have not tried any other figures yet. HAd HUGE problems navigating on DAZ. IE 5.1 (latest as far as I know) does not show the nav bar on the left (just a red bar). Netscape shows the links in the red bar-but all the images and text are askew-also IE just went blank about halfway through ordering-so I was left with shuttling back and forth between the two and pasting URL's/ after all that-the dragon is lovely! Eric

Lyne, I know what you mean about the padlock missing! I saw Daz's comments about that and so I felt better about making a purchase but to be sure I tried right clicking in the main frame of the browser when I was about to input credit card info. I chose properties and sure enough it showed me it was SSL encrypted at 128 bits so I felt better about submitting it without the padlock visible. I hope they figure out a fix for that soon.

HTH,
-Teknal

Last note on BUM maps; I find that in most cases (like with the gorilla and Mil folk) you can reduce the size considerably and still get nice results. 40Meg BUM map!!!?? whooooa! Too much for my little Win98SE/P3/384meg system, especially since I like to pack my scense with too much eye-candy anyway ;p Also another note for getting nice multiple figure renders is to do two, three, or even four separte renders and then assemble the layers in PhotoShop (or whatever) See my pics in the gallery (all using BUM maps extensivly!): Beastiality (4 separate renders - 1 mil fig + 6 P4s) http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=129271 Royal Jousting Stand (3 renders - FIVE mil figures + 3 P4s!) http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=226065 Yet I got Menagerie done with only one render (5 figures and a slew of props and lights) http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=239434