Should I use RDS 5 or upgrade to Lightwave We have been having some problems. This will be used to produce 30 minute commercial animation, not hobby project. Created /modified model in Poser, failed to import into RDS 5.0. Got RDS 5.02 patch, import worked but file failed to reopen. Problem stopped happening once drives defragged, but since problem is an intermittent this is no guaranteed solution. Options are: 1) keep defragging and performing "save as incremental backups 2) upgrade to RDS 5.5 and do same 3) Purchase Light wave and move on 4) Issue confounded by tight schedule, so learning curve time for light wave, as well as no experience with know bugs is problematic. I would really appreciate opinions on each of these options if you have experience with them.

Try Carrara it's an excellent program and easy to pick up. I have used lightwave and it is an awesome program but as a fairly steep learning curve. Truespace 4.3 is another great program thats really easy to learn.

I'd think that if you're having system problems with RayDream, you'd probably be in for a bunch more with the more complex LightWave. 5.5 might solve your problems, but it might not.... Carrara seems (from what I've seen) to follow a similar (if not identical) logic to RayDream; gday's comment about it being easy to pick up is probably from a RayDream familiar vantage. Since Carrara is a MetaCreations product, it does seem (from what I've read here) to work pretty well with Poser. Good luck!

I wrote a lengthy response to this thread and it never showed up. That will teach to be brief! Anyway the gist of it was that a member here named Konan has a beta program that will tranlate a poser animation sequence exported as a series of obj or 3ds meshes and then trim it down to a one useable 3ds file. Including all morphs and textures. This was design to be used with 3ds Max. But can be used with lightwave very easily if you get the program called Nugraf. Nugraf can translate the 3ds animation file according to its website seamlessly into a lightwave animation scene file. The cool thing about this is that Nugraf besides having its own raytracerscanline capabilities (including animation) it can export to a ton of other formats including POVray and BMRT. that is all.

I am not sure what your problem might be, but I have had RDS files which would not open after importing Poser 4 figures. I would think importing files from Poser 3 should work OK. I have imported many Poser 3 files without too many problems. I know you can import Poser 3 or 4 figures into RDS as OBJs, but you lose the features you have using the Poser importer. Make sure you have the last Poser Importer, too. I think it was version 2.7. If all else fails, the bones program for RDS from AFX.com might help animate an OBJ. Just some things to try. Beth

You could also try Strata Studio Pro. . . To me it's what Raydream could've turn into if Metacreations would've taken good cared of it. . . the building of objects is very similar to RD but with more control over them. . . Plus, . . . It has the options of rendering to the following formats which you might like since you want to do a comercial. . . NTSC 1,2 (US TV)PAL (EU.Jap. ect. TV) HDTV 1,2 Film, and much more. The program can also render in Raytracing, Raydiosity Open GL, and scanline. And the learning curve is not too steep since most of it is like modeling in RD. . The only thing is that Studio Pro said it needed to be installed in NT, But I installed in win98 and even after it told me this it went through OK, //so far so good, fingers crossed . . To me this is the Real merge of Infini-D and Raydream that could've been.

I'm working on a very similar project---commercial and of significant length. I've had success with Poser 3/Raydream animations but not Poser 4. I also have Animation Master, a terrific program---as good as Lightwave for around 20 times less money---but it lacks in the human modeling category and can't import poser models without a lot of time-consuming decimation. Given my own time constraints and the breakup of Meta, I may just render in poser 4, use Bryce 4 for bgs and do a lot of blue/green screening and compositing in Adobe.