Quote -
funny. I render N-gons almost constantly while testing architectural models I'm refining... and never once seen the crash your describing. infact in several models I've left Ngon's in non important area's - backing areas etc and no crashes reported. ever.

and thats with poser 5,6,7 and Pro....

Count yourself lucky then. I've not only seen the crash repeatedly and tracked the culprit to Ngons, but seen render errors with Ngons. I have used Poser 4, Pro Pack, 6, 7, and Pro.  Since it is documented, it's really not something that should be taken lightly or argued.

Quote - I don't believe this is the case either way.  

Poser really doesn't like long thin polys of any shape.  It can handle ngons, too.  IIRC, Victoria 2 has several.

Actually it is the case, and poser does not like Ngons at all. Ngons may appear to work with some meshes, but can result in render problems, errors, or that dreaded pop-up window during rendering that says there was an error - and crashes the program(the internal Poser generated window, not a Windows error window).  This is documented in much of the material and documentation included with Poser 7, Poser Pro, Poser 2010, and on Smith Micro's help pages.  You are right, Poser also does not like long, thin Poly's

As already mentioned with Poser 2010 it has 64 bit program and render support, background render, supports a slightly better range of import/export stability with files, better alpha-masking, better texture filtering.  In addition the Pro versions of Poser generally feature a slightly up-modded render engine, with richer and better lighting and faster ray tracing.  Another great feature is the Queue Manager, only available with Poser Pro - and it's not just for networks, despite what you may have heard; With the Queue Manager you can batch render multiple jobs in sequence, or render off animations while continuing to work in Poser (background render is limited to a single frame from a single job).  Also, to my knowledge, Poser 2010 Pro also features more content.

I haven't really had a chance to fully test it, I hate the Poser 8 style interface and library also used by 2010(it's hit or miss from my understanding, you either love it or hate it), so I am still doing a lot of work in Poser Pro 7.

You should put Luxrender references in your topic, as it is hard to know that is what you meant otherwise.

Poser also handles triangular meshes much better than quadrangular - even though it supports both.

Quote - and there is the negative shadow trick. 
setting shadow to negative1 will make the shadow light instead of dark.

The shadow setting is a property of the lights though, and would affect everything the light affects, not just a single object or set of objects meant to be luminescent.

Quote - > Quote - Poser 8/2010 Pro- Set the ghosts ambiance to anything between 1 and 1000, and set the color you want. In you light and rendering options turn on IBL.

You mean IDL.

Yes, yes I did. Typos happen sometimes, especially when my brain and my hands are not comunicating properly. I would go fix it, but for some reason it wont let me edit that post.  So it should read:

Poser 8/2010 Pro- Set the ghosts ambiance to anything between 1 and 1000, and set the color you want. In you light and rendering options turn on IDL.

I very much dislike the new store and item layouts as well. I agree, the tabs are more of a pain the the so-called infinite scrolling they were trying to fix (I never had a problem with that - in fact I like more info and I like it all on one page where I can just read down through it).

Quote -  This can be done using a Blender Node with 2 different 2D Image Map textures plugged into it. You also have to click on the little key's in the material room that turns material animation on and off. Then it's simply a matter of changing the strength of one image map to 1 while lowering the strength of the 2nd image map to 0 over the course of the animation.

I agree the blender node is the way to go, but you can save a step by simply animating the blend level of the blender node itself.  When the blend is at 0, Input 1 should be the only source you see, then when it is at 1, Input 2 will become the texture.  This way you only need to animate 1 value.  This will help later on when you start chaining multiple blender nodes to animate multiple textures in sequence

Quote - So, I've been trying to create an animation of a ghost coming out of the ground.  I am using the ol' Edge_Blend connected to a Subtract node and hiding from raytracing trick to create a faded halo around the edges of the figure while having the inside invisible/translucent.

Ok, this really caught my attention, as I have been looking for a way to do Auras, Halos, and such, but I don't catch the exact reference. Is this "trick" from a tutorial somewhere that I could brush up on? I think I got the idea on the subtract node on edge blend, not sure though, and some frame of reference on settings and the exact ray tracing trick would be very useful.  I appreciate any help. As for the Glow you are trying to achieve, there are a couple ways without using an actual light source.
For Poser 7- Set the Ambiance value of any surfaces that will be illuminated to a value of at least 1, set the color to white, and attach a Gather Node to those surfaces.  Set the ghosts Ambiance to anything from 1 to 1000 (depending on how bright you want the glow).  You might need to play with the ambiant settings of surfaces that catch the glow as well.

Poser 8/2010 Pro- Set the ghosts ambiance to anything between 1 and 1000, and set the color you want. In you light and rendering options turn on IBL.

Hope this helps.

Some other good, free, anti-malware/anti-spyware programs include:
Malwarebytes (I really recommend even just the free version - they update constantly)
Spybot - Search & Destroy
Superantispyware
Clamwin
AVG Free
Hijackthis
Combofix

Quote - one of the best things you can do for yourselves folks is to stop using IE and start using  firefox.  much better, faster browser and with the NoScript add-on you wouldn't have this current problem ruining your day.

That's fine if you like firefox, but I don't.  And it may prevent the scripts running, doesn;t mean that information exchanged between your browser and a hacked website is safe, there are deeper issues than just the redirect scripts when something like this happens.

Incidently if you are running a blocking or blacklisting program with up to date blocklists for known trojan/virus/malware sites it will stop the redirects as well (such as Pergaurdian2).

You could always compress the frames to quicktime through any good video software (After Effects, Premiere, Virtuadub even) for the TV station, then you have the best of all worlds.  Even on my slow single-core, final compression of the frames takes almost no time even for 9000+ frame sequences (about 5 minutes to compress from Virtuadub).

Daz3D and myself have reached an agreeable settlement to thisd issue. I consider the matter closed.

Even though that Daz forum post, which is for a similar yet unrelated bug, used regshot just as I did, I saw several registry keys in excess of 255 characters, using illegal symbols as well.  Right now those are my suspects - gonna try to figure out how to get rid of them and see if that does the trick, but somehow my hopes are not high.  Flagging external files is another possibility, I see several registry links in that log that show modifications to other files, not even certain I can undo that if that is the case.

I agree Analog-x64, this is exactly the type of behaviour a rootkit or virus exibits, and is unacceptable in my book as a "security" feature.  If they are that determined, they should maybe use a dongle, or make an uninstaller/cleaner as you said.  I could see this actuall making the software less secure.  For example, a computer user who is capable but not security minded goes to sell or trade his machine and believes simply uninstalling and deleting programs and files is safe and secure (I use this as I saw it all the time at the repair shop I worked at).  He leaves the OS on it and sells it, gives it away, what have you - but oops, embedded in the registry is his name and serial he paid for.  Someone using the computer decides to try Carrara, and installs it, and wham - they have a serial for a full version of Carrara pro with the ability to updates.  This may even cause conflicts with the actual owner, as if they embed this kind of data in the registry I would not doubt their online updater tracks machine and hardware IDs (kinda like microsoft does).

Problem here, is while I am definately more of a Power User, I am no programmer, so many of the registry keys are just gibberish to me.  Some I know from experience, others I can make educated guesses.  I really don't want to use a "registry Vacuum" to remove everything it identifies as an invalid key, as in the past false possitives had caused problems with other software, CoDecs, and liscenses, so I really need to use something with a little more precision.

Formatting and re-installing is out of the question.  With all of the software, files, and custom settings, it would result in far too much downtime.

Come to think of it, the last legitimate program I had this much trouble uninstalling was Roxio, lol - and for a time there was a cleaner for it to address that.