Quote - Thought I'd share this, I finally finished one using the Soft Studio lights. Did some postwork in PS , added the DOF and some level adjustments - I think it came out pretty good.

Thanks again for the help BB..

Is that one of Danae's textures? It looks really good.

Quote - But why would it be loading thumbnails (and anything else) for anything but the branch of the library that is currently opened on screen...?

Because that's how Smith Micro designed it. A common complaint is that with Poser 8 you frequently have to wait a while before the Library is "usable" .

Quote - Surely it doesn't load all the library in anyway? It physically can't - mine's several GB's in size. The internal library browser only works as a file explorer and indexes files as appropriate depending on which directory/folder you are in?

Consolidating runtimes would only end up with a single runtime the sum size of the individual runtimes anyway (assuming no duplicates).
 

It's not actually loading the files in the library into memory, but it is loading thumbnails and other info. Having all of the files in one location, especially if they are contiguous on the drive and not in multiple physical locations, should reduce the amount the drive has to seek back and forth as it loads the thumbnails and file info. If the drive head doesn't have to seek back and forth this will improve performance and reduce or eliminate the "grinding noise" that Cage is hearing.

It's also likely checking each Runtime folder for any changes, which could take a while if they are in multiple locations.

I was under the impression that IDL falloff was based on the number of bounces and not distance.

I doubt it's a memory leak. Many programs are doing things in the background that require memory, even if you aren't doing anything with the application. Like loading the Library.

The private working set is the amount of memory in use by Poser that is not shared with other applications, so that's a more accurate measure than whatever RAM monitor you're using.

Not that I know of. I just moved my Runtime folder from one version of Poser to the next. If a file isn't where it's supposed to be I just point Poser to where is actually is.

It may be worth merging your Runtime folders into one location and then configuring each version of Poser to use the new location. It would not surprise me if Poser is trying to load the library from multiple locations on the drive at the same time.

If you can, try merging them on a different drive and then move the new Runtime folder back to the original drive wherever you want it, so that all of the files are contiguous on the drive.

I've heard that scaling up everything in the scene (by 10x or so) will reduce the side of the IDL artifacts, but they cannot be fully eliminated.

I was actually referring to an EnvSphere as a light source for a scene, but looking at the mat room settings you posted I think I have a pretty good idea of how to do it.

How large is your Runtime? It's beginning to sound like Poser 8 is just taking forever to load the library for some reason. If you have thousands and thousands of figures, props, poses, etc, it may take a LONG time, which would also explain the constantly increasing RAM usage.

Quote - > Quote - I got a wild idea and decided to try it. Took a few hours of tweaking and rendering before I was happy with it. What I did was bring in Bb's EnvSphere and applied the ambient shader from his light box. I deleted all but one spotlight that was pointing at my figure's head and played with the balance of the light and the ambient on the EnvSphere until I got this.

Also very good! I love how the speculars played out on the skin here.

You jumped ahead of the class! I was going to do a scene with the "glow sphere" technique, too! Do you want to give me yours? I'll post it on my website if you like with the other(s) - yes there will be more. I've started working on the "bright sun outdoor" set.

Here's a preview. This is a work in progress - not finished yet. I mixed up the materials on the car by accident, leaving the wrong one on the bumper. I'll fix that and post the materials for the car, too. Also, the ground with puddles will be included.

Will you tell us about the glow sphere technique?

That's exactly the type of lighting I was trying to replicate. I guess I'll have to fake it with Poser or export the scene and render it with an application that's capable of actual GI. The way light behaves in Poser is from from realistic.

Yep. Just verified this myself. The area where the light initially strikes the ground is brighter, but the surrounding area is not appreciably brighter.

Unless you actually use Windows Search to find files, I recommend running services.msc and setting Windows Search to Manual or Disabled to ensure that Windows hasn't decided that it wants to index your file system anyway.

Though the easier way to diagnose this would be to watch the services running with Windows Task Manager and see what it's doing when the drive starts thrashing.

If you want to check the size of your virtual memory cache, go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings (on the sidebar) -> Performance -> Settings -> Advanced tab. Under the Virtual Memory subsection the "Total paging file size for all drives" is how much virtual memory is currently allocated for use. By default Windows controls this and will adjust it accordingly. You may want to hit Change and tweak a few things. First of all, if you have multiple physical hard drives in your system, change the page file location to a drive that does not have Windows or Poser installed on it. And given free reign, Windows used to allocate more virtual memory than it actually needed, so you may want to put a set value or range of how much you want it to use. Since you've got 3GB already, another 3-4GB of virtual memory should be more than enough.

Okay. So the fstop camera variable does not affect exposure?

Is there any way of quantifying light output in Poser in a meaningful way? It would be useful to know how many lumen or candela a point light or a spot light at 100% outputs.