I have moved Poser 8 out of the Program Files folder.  I felt I had nothing to lose and a lot to gain if it worked. I left the Poser Content where it was.

Poser 8 seems to run a lot faster and so far (touch wood) it has not choked on the libraries. There isn't even a pause when it loads up on startup.  I was able to access the Props category in the new Poser 8 content, and I had not been able to do that before. This is very exciting. I'll play around some more and see if this is a lasting solution. It certainly looks promising.

Mariner, I thank you for the sage advice.

This machine has Vista Business 32 bit.
UAC is off.

Poser 8 is in the c:Program FilesSmith MicroPoser 8 folder.

Poser content is in D:Poser 8 Content

My other runtimes are in D:Poser Runtimes, each with a subfolder there.

I am now wondering whether I should re-install outside the Program Files folder.

Bagginsbill, I appreciate your taking the trouble to post in such a busy time. All the best with the move, and may the college experience be everything she hoped for.

I had in fact been trawling the forum for your other posts, but had not found a solution.

There is nothing unusual about the folders that give trouble. They are in the Poser 8 Content structure, and were created by the Poser 8 installer. I have not changed them in any way. That is why I would have expected them to work.

I apologise for venting, but I needed to. If it's a bug that will be fixed, I'll wait.  Just as developers are exasperated when people complain about bugs, users are exasperated when when they pay for software, wait for it to be delivered or downloaded, and then spend hours (days) trying to get it to work, only to find that it won't. A frustrating time is had by all.

I believe Wardrobe Wizard by PhilC will do what you require. It comes built into Poser 8, but you may have to buy expansions for some non-Smith Micro figures.

This is very good news. Thank you so much for your efforts in making Blender more useful for Poser users.

I don't like the store interface. It is slow, uninformative and irritating. The thumbnails are too small. The pop-ups are annoying, especially on my slow South African connection. Pop-up .....wait......look at blank square......wait....oh there is something about the item now. Are the prices a big secret or what? You have to wait to see the price. That is very off-putting.

Free items are down to less than a third of what there used to be. Perhaps some need to be put back, but this does not bode well.

The new Content Paradise site is a huge disappointment in my opinion.

As far as I have been able to make out, I got no Poser 4 material with my purchase of Poser Pro. I only got Poser 6 and 7 legacy content. People who buy Poser 7 get Poser 5 legacy content throwh in, but Poser Pro users don't get that.

I have, however, now made three female and two male African face morphs for the LoRes figures, and made several shades of skins and eye colours. With the normal map applied, they don't look so bad at all, quite adequate for figures that won't be viewed in close-up.

I now need to work on some clothes for them.

What a wonderful model. You guys are doing amazing work.

I bought Poser Pro and have no access to any Poser figures older than Poser 6. This is very irritating because people who buy Poser 7 get the Poser 5 content for free, but not people who buy Poser Pro. This also means that I can't use the ethnic figure pack, because all those are based on Poser 4 figures. They don't have very good African figures anyway.

I tried using the morphing tool in Poser to change the faces but it doesn't give me enough control.

Since starting this thread I have exported the Lores Female  head into Blender, and managed to create one African morph target that is not totally useless. I think I'll just have to keep at it until I get it right.

Thank you for asking this question Acadia, I am wrestling with the lighting myself and was wondering about this very thing.

Wow I am following all of this and learning a lot. Thank you.

Oh thank you, this has been most helpful. I like the minimum makeup look, but not the no-lashes look. I may even try drawing some transparency maps. The characters from 3D-Arena have different maps and they look a lot better when rendered than the default lashes. I am using Poser Pro, so I must turn the Anti-Gamma correction off. I had no idea what it did.

Update: the render settings make a huge improvement. This information should really be in the documentation somewhere, but I could not find it.

Well done PhilC for taking the mystery out of making conforming hair. I have made two hairstyles myself, modelling and UV-mapping in Blender. Probably not the most efficient way, but they turned out usable and I learned a lot. For me the Hair Designer is great news. But even if you don't buy it, just going through the demonstrations on the product explains some basic principles very well, even if you are going to model the hair elements yourself.

Yes I also experimented with turning off the texture filtering and I get a very slight improvement. Strangely, when I render with the Poser 4 engine, the eyelashes look great, but the skin looks horrible. I looked at some of the characters I bought for Sydney. Most use the defaul lash transparency map and the lashes hardly show. One or two figures have a different transparency map that gives considerably better results. In the material room, Sydney's lashes are coloured black. I don't know why they appear light brown. Perhaps the transparency map is key.

I had not tried doing anything with the render settings yet, apart from changing the engine. I'll give that a go. Thanks for the tip.

Thank you pjz99, that is certainly a very good point. I am using purchased skin textures and they are all very high resolution. Two of the characters also have strand hair applied. As it happens I got this particular scene rendered after numerous attempts. Perhaps I should make medium and low resolution versions of the skin textures for scenes where the figures are not viewed in close-up.

I considered using face room textures, but getting the face and body colour to match is something I just can't get right.

Perhaps the answer is to resample the textures. I am going to try that.