Wow, 8.5 is out!  I almost thought Carrara had been neglected completely by DAZ a year ago. Carrara was much better than Poser or comparable programs when Carrara 7.0 or 8.0 came out. With Poser 9 / 2012, Poser took over, and nowadays, blender offers GPU based rendering of strand hair, and better SSS, for free.

So the upgrade price is irrelevant for me anyway (and yes, I also remember promises about a nominal upgrade free suggesting something in the range of 20..40$, when development of 8.5 was started).

I agree with posts above, that DAZ was a different company 3 years ago.

Best regards,

   Michael

Hi,

thanks a lot for the heads-up.  I also stopped my PC membership last October. So far I have not found any unjustified charge, but my next statement is only due next week. I'll keep an open eye to this. 

At that time, I followed their guideline about cancelling PC subscription and it worked (apart from shutting me down from any PC advantages the moment I confirmed that, despite my membership was paid for a couple more days...  But no issue, as I also couldn't find anything useful there anymore.)

For anyone affected: If the charge was made in error, it is your right to get the cash back, not just a voucher. If anything fails, request a chargeback at your bank. (However in the past, DAZ customer service always was very good, I would try to get the mistake corrected through CS first.) Best regards,

   Michael  

Quote - Illusions Designs still have their "going out of style" sale on V3 characters, for less than $3 each. They are well worth having.

They seem to have a year's end sale now, and offer V3 chars for 2.25 each. For 3 $ they sell all the V4 chars.

Best regards,

   Michael

Quote - "The only thing I like much more with V4 is that the morphs are organised into sections."

Then this freebie by D3D should help. I'm using it for several years now with my 3rd Gen figures.

(See link)

Thanks a lot! It works like a charm.

Best regards,

   Michael

Quote - Here an experiment with the new daylight system

Sunset reflected in the shades. I added a car to have something else to reflect as well

 

Hi,

the reflection effect is very cool!   I like that image a lot.

Best regards,

   Michael

yes, V3 is a good figure! No magnets hassle and such. The only thing I like much more with V4 is that the morphs are organised into sections.

This is V3 with Bice's free Lilo morph / texture (available in the freestuff section), still one of my favorites. Best regards,

   Michael

this is how far I got.  Always fighting with bald spots ;-)

Best regards,

   Michael

P.S.:  I suspect a connection to the famous "NO_MAP" bug, in my case it was related to an object "none".

Hello, I just can say that posting a ticket at SM is a waste of time. I have outlined two potential problems with Poser (preview window display incorrect for NVIDIA, and "New" not deleting all data from old scenes), and after walking through at least 5 different graphics driver installs (and 2 different video cards, all showing the same bug), support insisted that it is a permission problem (none of my runtimes lives on C:).

After pointing out that the bug occurs with even Poser included content, I was informed that the scene used (The Pad) is not suitable for testing.

I'm fed up, I will just continue to live with the bug. 

Best regards,

   Michael

Hi,

yes, I have that when I unpack items into the runtime while Poser is running, and then refresh the library. With the original release, this was accompanied with subsequent crashes, that no longer happens. Poser is very stable, it just shows the library entries twice.

Re my previous bug, I'm in active discussion with John from customer support. I went through 4 different graphics drivers, and different scenes. The bug occurs with the factory "Andy" scene as well, but only if other scenes were loaded before. Seems to relate to some memory issue, Poser not cleaning up all items with "New". A good indicator for the problem is that "collect scene inventory" produces some PMD files which definitely do not belong to the current scene.

Best regards,

   Michael  

Hi,

I submitted a ticket now at SmithMicro.

Yes, I use specific render dimensions (landscape or portrait, depending on the scene).  But the problem does not appear in the render, it's only in the preview screen.

Best regards,

    Michael  

 Hi,

thanks a lot. So with at least 2 others having an issue around this, it's definitely not something completely broken on my computer. I tested the suggestion with the other windows (I usually have lots of windows open, so that could be a reason), but nope, even if Poser is the only application running, I have this issue.

I played around a bit more, and found that it occurs in fullscreen as well as window mode. However, the horizontal preview window size seems to have an effect: at smaller widths, the problem does not occur. I will find out, what the critical width is, and then file a bug report.

Best regards,

   Michael

Hi,

I admit, I have lots of differences in the two test rigs. The 580 is in an older machine running Windows XP 64 bit, while the GTX 680 is in a newer machine, running Windows 7, 64 bit. The NVidia drivers are both release 306, but the build numbers are different due to the different OSes.

If bus / CPU speed contributes to the overall performance (as in memory transfers), the the 680 should get an advantage. Judging the test results, CPU speed is more or less irrelevant for Octane performance. 

My results are very close to the ones posted in the release candidate testing forums (I used the same Octane release, RC3 for both tests), for example here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=24319 

I did not test the cards crosswise in the other computer. Windows took several attempts / reboots to recognize any new card when I upgraded from the previous hardware.

Best regards,

   Michael

I have now tested both the GTX580 and the GTX680 with Octane. I can confirm that the GTX580 is faster (consistently, about 15% with Octane 1.0 RC3), despite the GTX680 having 3 times the number of CUDA cores. Within a series (5xx or 6xx), speed should be proportional to the number of CUDA cores.

I would still recommend the 6xx series now, due to the texture number. The attached image (a really small scene) uses 44 texture map slots already, and the reason I could not load Stonemason's "Streets of Asia" with my old card was also due to too many textures (and not due to RAM size, as I thought initially).

Best regards,

   Michael

I also have a problem with PoserPro2012. Whenever I delete something (figure or prop), my preview window is broken. Only a small fraction of the screen at the right side is updated. Changing camera position or zooming makes this obvious.

I first thought it's a problem of my video driver, but after 2 updates I still have the same problem. Then I thought it's my graphics hardware, but now I have changed that (from GTX 470 to GTX 680), still the same problem. I had it for PoserPro2012 initial version through all service packs. Does anyone have the same problem, or any hint what further possible reason it could have? The problem is reproducable, and it persists until I switch to the Render tab and back to Preview. Then I'm fine until I delete the next figure / prop...

Best regards,

   Michael