Hi Phil - Is TruePose still available? I thought it was pulled from the market. I was reading some old forum postings recently and I got the impression that TruePose triangulated the mesh upon importing it to tS. Is this so? Thanks ! Jimdoria .^.

Yes, definitely check out the MayaDoll character at Studio Maya. She is free, but she can wear all the clothing designed for either her or Anime Doll (which is not free.) Kozaburo hair works fine in Poser 4 and is the best hair ever, anywhere. To get the most out of Poser 4, you can use lower-poly figures and props, etc. A GREAT source for these is fast3d.co.uk Also, NEA is a remapped, remorphed Posette that poses well & won't bog down an older system. I think she takes Vicky 2 textures, opening up a lot of possibilities. You can get her from Planit3D at this address, but a free registration is required: NEA by Narcissus Also search through free stuff for HackWorthless. He has lots of great morphs for Posette available. I find Vicky 3 to be overkill, especially on a P4 system. It's hard keeping track of all the INJ/REM poses. P4 can use them, but it can't ORGANIZE them too well. Finding all thos poses and scrolling through all thos dials will give you headaches (and finger aches.) Besides, even with all the characters, morphs, faces, etc. most of the Vicky 3 renders you see still come out looking pretty much the same. You might check out Vicky 2, though. I think there's "more" to her as well, especially when paired with something like Roxanne from Capsces.

My join date shows up as December 1999, but I know I was involved before that as well. I remember when the move to Renderosity came, and some of the political stuff that happened - battles over forum software, battles over content guidelines, battles over egos, I guess. :-) The breakdown of Poser Forum also spawned that more adult-oriented Poser site... now, what was the name? Render... Rendero... Something like that. :-D They've since branched out into too many sites for me to keep track of. I remember some of the other early free stuff sites, too. One of my favorites was called "Poser Fashion." I think I might still have an item or two of theirs buried in my freebies library. I alwasy wondered whatever happened to them - one day the URL just stopped working.

Hi nruddock - Didn't know Poser used XML for config files. Interesting!

Oh boy... XML doesn't really have anything to do with Poser or 3D modeling. It is a file format that is used for marking up data and exchanging it across the internet. It is a fairly new technology that underlies a lot of websites and new applications known as "web services". XML is part of a whole other world of computer activity. Like the world of 3D modelling, it has lots of twisty little branches, niches and sub-categories. XML files are text files that include markup, much like HTML files. But while in HTML, the markup specifies what the text should look like, in XML the markup specifies what the text is about. So it's possible for machines to read the text, "understand" it and transform it according to rules. It's also easier for people to read the file, since it's somewhat self-describing. For example, in HTML you can mark text as bold and the web browser will know to render that text in boldface. But the web browser doesn't know what that boldface text represents. In XML you mark text as "filename" or "booktitle". The browser can then apply formatting based on rules (filename=Courier font, booktitle=italics) but it can also do things like compile a list of all the filenames or do a search for the author of every book. Browsers can read XML, but its more common for XML to be used by servers or dedicated programs to create human-readable data such as web pages. I'm using it to do technical documentation. When it works right, it lets you write your documentation once, then automatically make it available in a variety of formats (web pages, printed docs, application help, etc.) If Poser's text-based file formats like CR2 were re-written to use XML, they'd be easier to work with for both people and 3rd-party programs. But since that would require a fairly substantial re-write of Poser, and would break all the existing 3rd party tools that work with these files, we're not likely to see it happen.

First of all, you'd have some competition: Mediachance's Multimedia Builder sounds similar, if (a bit) more expensive and more complex: http://mmb.mediachance.com/index.html. There are a number of tools out there that will do Flash animation. Almost none of them are as expensive or hard to use as Flash itself. Swish is one such program and their Swish Photo Album is arguably in the same category price-wise and feature wise. Also keep in mind that distributing EXE files is a bit of a no-no in the Internet world. It's considred a dangerous activity. And of course, EXEs will not be X-platform, whereas Flash will. (Which is probably OK, since we all know that nobody uses Poser on the MAC anymore ;-D) There are actually a lot of utilities out there that can generate stand-alone EXEs of pictures to create a slideshow. My favorite free picture viewer, IrfanView can do this, and a whole lot more. With the right feature set and a lot of heavily targetted marketing, you might make a dent in a market as small as the Poser community. But it's hardly a given. You might want to do some more research before investing a lot of your time in this idea. At the very least, you should compare the features of your app to the features of other apps (both freeware and shareware) that can accomplish the same goal.

LOL - Helloooo NURSE! And is that the macarena?

I think 4GB might be the upper limit because the paging file is a single file stored on the disk, and the maximum size for a file on disk under FAT32 is 4GB. Microsoft's Page on Maximum File Sizes If you are using NTFS, this theoretically shouldn't come into play, but it could be some limitation built into the OS and left over from the NT/2000 days, or some issue with how the Windows code swaps memory between the RAM and the paging file. (It needs to keep track of all the blocks that are swapped in and out, and the table that tracks that info must be maintained in physical RAM, so there may be a hard-coded maximum to the number of blocks it can handle.)

Attached Link: http://www.win-utilities.com/dba/index.html

I've used Magic Folders from PC Magic (http://www.magicfolders.com/) to do folder hiding under Windows 98/ME with great results. They have a separate version for NT/2K/XP which I have not bought. But now there is an open source alternative (http://www.truecrypt.org/) so I'll probably go with that in the future.

Message edited on: 12/06/2005 22:21

Attached Link: http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

I've used it for years. Mike Lin is an incredibly cool software genius! (I think he was fifteen or something when he wrote most of the freeware on his site, but you'd never know it.)

Message edited on: 12/06/2005 22:05

Attached Link: http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,81988,pg,2,00.asp

First of all, I'd avoid My Recent Documents as a place to put shortcuts. Stuff in there can get deleted, or simply disappear. This folder seems to fill up with junk, but only some of it appears on the menu.

Other likely places for shortcuts are the Start Menu, the Start Menu / Programs folder, or one of the desktop toolbars. I like these toolbars and use them for lots of stuff. First go to My Documents and create a folder to hold the shortcuts for the toolbar (I call mine Sidebar because it runs along the right side of the desktop). Then right-click on an empty area of the windows Taskbar, choose Toolbars, and then New Toolbar... Browse to the folder you created, and click OK.
The new toolbar should appear on the Taskbar. Grab the little handle on the left side of the toolbar and put it wherever you want it. (You may need to unlock the taskbar in order to move it: right-click taskbar and uncheck Lock The Taskbar.) The toolbar will dock against any side of the desktop, or float.

You set the options for the toolbar by right-clicking in a blank area. I have my sidebar set up with the following options:

View -> small icons
Show text -> unchecked
Show title -> unchecked
Toolbar manually resized to just the width of the small icons by clicking & dragging the edge.
Auto-hide -> checked

The toolbar takes up almost no room this way, and slides out of the way when not needed. Just put the mouse against the edge of the screen where it is docked, and it pops back up.

As for the shortcuts, rather than just creating a shortcut to a folder, you can do a lot more by using a shortcut to EXPLORER.EXE and specifying some switches in the shortcut. Command line switches for Explorer can be used to open it with or without folders visible, with a particular folder selected, and with a particular folder pinned as the top-level folder. I have a shortcut to my Poser runtime, which opens runtime up as a top-level folder (no My Computer, Network Neighborhood, or other clutter) and with all the sub-folders displayed in the tree on the left. The command in the shortcut's Target box looks like this:

C:WINDOWSEXPLORER.EXE /e,/root,"C:Program FilesPoser 6Runtime"

Use the link at the top of the posting to see what other command line switches are available for Windows Explorer.

Message edited on: 12/06/2005 17:02

WHY on earth is the Animation Outlet so badly BURIED on Renderosity? It's no wonder Ulysses (and lord knows how many other people) have missed it, becuase it's like the TWILIGHT ZONE exit on the highway. "Dear, did you see that sign we just passed?! It said--" "It's nothing, honey. Nothing. Go back to sleep. Sleeeeeeep." Do-dee-do-do, do-dee-do-do... Is this cool and cutting-edge resource highlighted on the top of the home page, along with all the other main sections of the site (galleries, forums, tutorials, etc.)? No, it's not. It's buried at the bottom of the Features List section in the busy, busy right-side pane. "But dear, I'm sure I saw--" "SLEEEEEEEP!" Fair enough, it's not worthy of it's own section, it's really just a type of Gallery, but one for animations instead of still images. So you go to the Galleries link. Hmmm - not there. No mention of it there. No link to an "Animation" genre in the drop-down list. It's like it doesn't exist! "There really was no exit, honey. At least... none that YOU'LL ever find!" Oh, wait. When I go to Free Stuff, there's a link! Don't read too fast, you'll miss it. It's innocuous, of course - EASY to miss among all that text at the top of the screen, especially since when you go to this page, you're not looking for artwork, you're looking for products and therefore don't EXPECT to see the gateway to an ARTWORK section of the site! "Just stay asleep, honey. Stay asleep... (bzzt) asleep... (bzzt) asleep..." (cue music again.) Um, yeah, what Maxxxmodelz said.

Also note that in real peple, height is often more a matter of proportions of the different parts of the body, than of everything being larger or smaller. (Some people can be short, but long-waisted, for example.) Experiment with just scaling the Y-axis of the thighs and shins. (You might need to adjust the arms accordingly as well to avoid "gorilla" proportions.) Neck length and abdomen length are also good candidates for fiddling. By making small adjustments to several parts, you can get a good effect without distortion, and create a more unique look for your figure to boot.

All the most well-known hackers will tell you the weakest link in any security structure is the human one - humans choosing weak passwords, humans sending critical info into the dumpster (from whence it can be retrieved fairly easily) or even just giving out secret info to friendly or official -sounding people over the phone, even if they've never heard of them before. But the real dirty li'l secret(?) of the hacker world is this: ISPs DO NOT CARE. ISP's have historically had the ability to stop most of the common hacks cold if they wanted to. But they refuse to take action. Some examples: Many hacks involve "spoofing" the IP address of the attacking computer. ISPs (and only ISPs) could end these attacks by simply filtering OUTBOUND traffic at their routers, and blocking any packets that contain an IP address foreign to their network. But they wont. These days, many hacks are carried out by zombie PCs - home computers of cable modem or DSL users that have been compromised and are now controlled by hackers (ususally unbeknownst to the owner/operator of the computer.) ISPs (and only ISPs) can match the IP address of an attacking computer with a customer in their database who has a name, phone number and e-mail address. They could then notify this person that their computer has been taken over by hackers. But they won't. Yes, if they catch some kid hacking they'll cancel his account, but this is little more than paying lip service to dealing with the problem, and catches only the sloppiest and most ineffectual hackers anyway. Of course, these days it's getting harder to tell the white hats form the black hats. A widespread and egregious hack that was carried out recently compromised thousands of systems, installing stealth software that proved nearly impossible to uninstall. The hacker went by the handle S-O-N-Y. ;-)

Thank you, Gerald - I check your site often. It's a great resource! Best Wishes!