Quote - I won't chide your argument for Vista.  There are both pluses and minuses.  The problem is that many people are encountering the latter - which is why it is being dissed so much.  For all of its advantages and modern support, it does not play well with all older hardware and software (unfortunately, we can't all be at the cutting edge all of the time).  And older here can be as little as a couple of years.

Basically, for every success story (like yours), I've heard at least two horror stories (like the OP).  That does not bode well for Vista.  I won't touch it.  As a developer, I absolutely require 'status quo'.  If I can't build projects because some inherent feature or flaw of the OS kicks in to prevent it, my livelyhood is in peril.  Mr. Gates needs to provide the evidence of this before I jump in the boat - which appears to be slowly sinking.  No business that I know of will touch it either.  Rumors of Microsoft's own departments going back to XP abound (though unverified).

And there's the rub, aye.  Any user worth their salt has more experience actually USING computers than Bill Gates has neurons.  Vista is a 'user' OS - not a power, experienced user OS.  It infuriates so many real computer users that I fear a revolt.  Actually, the revolt is evident - noone with any real computer needs uses Vista - we all use Windows XP Pro SP2 or Windows XP Pro x64.  Who are you going to trust?  Microsoft pandering or users with 10/20 years experience?  (I have 20 years experience).

Unfortunately, an SP for Vista may not help.  Many experienced users are just going to keep chugging along until the next OS is released.  I hope it hurts M$ down to the core - they will see that short-changing people for control is a criminal offense.

Well, in all honesty, windows is a user's OS, plain and simple.  Always has been,  probably always will be.  The fact that Vista doesn't run will on older hardware is to be expected, after all it is based primarly off there 2003 server code, which was pretty heavy on system requirements to run properly too.

Granted I like the power and flexibility of Linux, but when it comes for the average Joe linux distros are still too complicated and cryptic to be able to manage sufficiently.  That and Windows monster market share makes it difficult to consider running strictly Linux - wine is great, don't get me wrong, but until the day comes when you can install a Windows app under Linux as easily as you can under Windows then Linux will remain primarly for power users and those who really need a little extra oomph from the OS.  While I must give all kudo's to some of the newer distro's out there who have made major strides in making Linux desktop's easier to install and configure, they still don't come close to Windows in this regard.

As to who I "trust", I trust myself and my own experiences, which date all the way back to my very first PC.  A 2001 series Pet, with 16k of internal memory and a tape drive.  No harddrive, all programs were in the basic programming language and had to be loaded from tape into memory to be run.  It was state of the art, top of the line hardware when my father purchased it, one of the very first PC's to be commercially available to the public.

I've seen OS's come and go, and I'll probably see quite a few more before my time is up.  I've worked with everything from VAX/VMS to CPM to Tandem at one time or another.  I've been a computer user, computer programmer, website designer and mainframe operator in the many years I've been working as an IT professional.

And in all those years I've found it all boils down to one thing, you have to find what works for you and your application.  Windows XP is great, for certain applications, but it can't hold a candle to even the most out of date Linux distro when ti comes to something like serving web pages or being an internet gateway.  Sure you can get apps that will allow you to use XP fo thoese purposes, but they don't come close to what your average Linux can do out of the box as far as featurs and security.

So does that make Linux a superior OS to XP?  Well, for those who want to run a webserver Linux probably is the better choice - but not everyone is setting up a webserver.  I have 3 daughters, all of whom use the main computer for a variety of reasons.  My youngest just got an mp3 player for her birthday.  She setup the softwware herself, by putting in the CD and plugging the mp3 player into the USB port.  My middle daughter got a camecorder, again she was able to install everything herself and integrate it into the computer easily and quickly because both of these items (and many, many more) are designed to work with a Windows OS rather than a LInux distro.

So for there application Windows is obviously the superior choice.  They want somthing that is "plug it in and it works", not something that is "find the proper text file in the cryptic subdirectory and edit it with cryptic phrases to get this to work".  They could care less if it's more stable or more secure or uses less memory, they want to be able to plug in their camera and see the pictures they took or download music to there mp3 player without having to jump through a lot of hoops.

So no one OS is the absolute best choice for all applications.  I'm glad XP woks for you and many others, it did not work that well for me.  XP is a fine operating system, don't get me wrong, but it just didn't suit my application or my hardware as well as Vista seems too.

Your situation might be different, in fact I'm sure it probably is, but I would'nt dream of telling you that XP is "inferior" or that you should never chose XP under any circumstances.  If your hardware and your application support it and you like it then more power too you.

So the final word on Vista?  If you have the hardware to support it I really think it's worth a look, depending on your application.  It's drive management and caching features are based on there 2003 server code, which means it is far better at accessing the drive than XP is when it comes to reading and writing large chunks of data, something I do fairly regularly here.

However for those with older hardware I wouldnt' recommend Vista, it just wouldn't be a good choice for them overall.  Also if XP is working for you and doing what you want I wouldn't consider switching to Vista unless you actually have a need for some of it's features.  If your needs are already being met by your current OS, why change?

Just my 2 cents worth.

Stepdad

Ok.. I can't believe I'm doing this.. I really can't.  But I'm actually going to find myself in the bizarre position of defending a Windows operating system.. lol..

First, a bit of background.. I'm not windows fan.  I haven't been since version 3.1 - in fact I was tossed off the widespread beta team along with a dozen other folks because we kept annoying microsoft by reporting bugs.  That of course is what we thought our job as beta testers should be, apparently Microsoft had other ideas.

So believe me I'm not one who would normally come to the defense of Windows, in fact the only reason I still run Windows at all is for two main reasons, I do runs some Windows apps that Linux Wine simply cannot handle, and my wife and children are unaccustomed to Linux and have no desire to switch over.

So I run a small network here at home, with both Linux and Windows machines.   I had not intention of upgrading to Vista myself, in fact I generally wait quite some time before upgrading any version of Windows simply because Microsoft is notorious for releasing new versions that should have been considered beta code rather than finshed production code.

So I wasn't planning on switching to Vista, but two things happened within days of one another to change my mind.  First a buddy of mine who's a longtime linux geek bought a brand new system that came bundled with a Windows Vista DVD.  Naturally he had no use for it and didn't want anything to do with it, he's a Linux only kinda guy.  So he gave it to me, knowing that I work in the IT field and am always looking for stuff like this to experiment with.

The second event was my daughter downloading a file off the internet and installing it, turns out it was actually a particularly nasty virus/trojan called wintems.exe.   Well at any rate sine I already had a full backup and was curious,  I installed Vista on my machine.

I was impressed by the fact that it found all of my hardware and made use of it, something XP could not do without a lot of external drivers being downloaded and installed.  The new visual effects I must admit are a bit much for my tastes, but on the whole the OS has been very solid and very stable on my system.

Unlike most of Microsoft's previous releases, one thing you cannot call Vista is "premature', it is in fact an update they've been working on for nearly 5 years now and is based off there 2003 server code.  Now, that having been said, Vista is not for all machines or for all people.  It does not run well on anything that doesn't meet or in fact exceed there minimum system requirements and if you have some very oddball hardware this might give Vista the fits.

However in my case it seemed to work well with my hardware and actually Poser has been a lot more stable and a lot faster under it than it was under Windows XP.

Now, in reponse to the Windows XP 64, I do have a machine with a 64 bit processor, however truth be told I haven't really been to concerned about upgrading to a 64 bit OS, not yet at any rate.  The reason is that most of the apps I run, in fact pretty much all of them, are still 32 bit apps, and as such a 64 bit OS really wouldn't give me too many advantages.  

Some of the newer apps out there are being coded for 64 - and when it becomes necessary I will probably upgrade my OS to accomodate them, but for the time being paying extra for a 64 bit OS really didn't make much sense for my application, since none of the apps I have could take advantage of it anyway.

So take it for what it's worth folks, I'm no microsoft fan nor am I a Vista cheerleader by any stretch of the imagination, but thus far I must admit Vista has been more stable and more usable on my machine than XP.  In the final analysis though I suppose everyone has to decide for themselves what the best OS is for there application.

Stepdad

A few other quick recommendations, generally when I install things that I purchase or downloadI go through my runtime immediatly thereafter and rename the folders.  Many artists have a really annoying habit of putting things in "vanity" folders, a folder with there name one them.   Hey, I'm all for giving an artist a bit of credit for there work, don't get me wrong, but folders named

!!! Insert Artist Name Here

Really don't tell you much about what the content of that folder might be.  It's not so bad right after you first install something, but it gets pretty bad 6-8 months down the road if you haven't used it in a while, your going back through your runtimes trying to remember where it is and you can't find it to save your life.  Your stuck trolling through all the vanity folders trying to figure out what is what.  So my advice is to always check what you just installed and rename the folders to something intuitive, something you'll recognize a year or two from now.

Also when it comes to clothing and hair in particular a lot of times the artist will name the folder in figures or hair one thing, and the folder for mat files something completely different, making things a real bear to find later on, so I always give the folders in the figures/hair/props directories the exact same names as the one in the poses directory, so I can find my mat files for those items fast and easy even if it's something I haven't used in ages.

Next tip, when your renaming directories get rid of all those ! type symbols that so many artists just seem to love sticking at the front of there directory names so that they'll appear at the top of the directory listing.  It's a whole ton easier to find things if there in alphabetical order, especially again if it's something you don't use often or haven't used in a while.  Also get rid of all the silliness in front of the name like "MAT XXXX" - of course it's a mat file, it's in the pose directory after all.  If by chance the item has both mats and poses in different directories, I generally either combine them into a single directory (if it's going to still be small enough to navigate easily) or make two new subdirectories under the directory with the items name - one for Mats, the other for poses.  Again it's a big time saver because everything in the main directory will have a descriptive name and be in alphabetical order.

Final tip, I made a special runtime called "install" that allows me to install things into the runtime folders and peruse them in poser (or you could use another aftermarket program like p3do explorer I suppose) so I can see where everything goes when it's first loaded.  I rename the directories in the install directory to my liking, then I move them to the actual runtime into which the item will be installed.

This makes thing much easier to install overall, because after I move the subfolders under the install directory it's blank again, and ready to be used for the next item.  That way I'm not struggling to find the new install and all it's directories in a larger runtime since odds are good it will be poorly described and or out of alphabetical order when it's first installed.

This also allows me to easily spot things like readme files or pz3 scenes and the like that are often installed with the program, the ones I feel I might need again at some point I can copy into a special directory I have under my main poser programs directory for "valuable" read mes.  The rest just get deleted, not much point in letting them take up drive space if they don't contain valuable tips or usage information I might need again.  The pz3 scenes get similar treatment, they are moved to a folder under the main poser program directory and sorted into subdirectories by type of scene, making them all very easy to find later when I need them.

Hope that helps, as ahudson mentioned when it comes to runtimes everybody has there own individual methodology, but aside from those tips I have only one other suggestion, keep your main poser runtime as uncluttered as possible, in fact don't install anything into it that you dont' absolutely have too.   The more that is installed in posers default runtime, the more memory the program uses and the longer it takes to load.   Not entirely sure why, I think it might be building some sort of index for "fast file" searching with it's default runtime and storing it in memory, but for whatever reason the bigger that default runtime gets the more memory poser takes up and the less you have for important things like rendering.

So pretty much everything I have is in an external runtime, when I get around to getting V4.1 I'll install that in the main runtime since it's required for V4.1 to get some of her special features to work properly, but the only thing in my default poser runtime is the stuff poser installs there by default when it's installed.  Other than that it's clean as a whistle.

Hope that helps!

Stepdad

Quote - Wow, I didn't even realize till it was kindly pointed out to me that I didn't include 1,2 and 3 of my LCS-Backgrounds nor the chocolate Alphabet Set (grumbles at self) I must be getting old :/

So, for all those that downloaded and didn't find them but want them please download here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?br25jon9yc1

I'm real sorry for this, but appreciate the help that spotted this BIG chunk of missing items :)

Craftmans

Nope.. to late for an apology.. your fired... 

Lol.. kidding, of course. 

Quote - I reed somewhere on the forum that a defrag might help.

Sorry, cant remember the exact thread, but that person had crashes to and solved it with a defrag of the hard drive.

Its worth a try.

Lol. that would have been me, and yes it worked like a charm for me. If that doesn't do the trick let me know, we might be able to find another solution, but in your case I'd recommend you check the harddrive for errors first and then run defrag. 

Quote - Well...If we never get any constructive critique, then how are we to improve? When we don't even know whats wrong?  Little bit of critisism might help us.( "Hey. You need to actually conform the hair figure to your V4 character so she wont look bald...etc") Or else Im just gonna keep on rendering my retarted faes that are posed like, oh hell I dunno...like car crash victims and people are just gonna go :"This is so cool!", because  they are too afraid to tell me what they really think. And what they really think is: "Oh God. Another car crash fae by Peelo. And now I have to think of something good to say about this God awfull render...."
    Now how does that help anyone? Is that the proper mindset? Render anything you wish and people are gonna like it just the same. Is it just me, or does that sound pretty damn stupid?

P.S. this isn't directed at anyone particular. Just needed to get it off my chest.

Nothing wrong with criticism.. if it's constructive and if it's asked for from the outset.  No point in being critical of someone elses work if it's not going to help them improve,  and it certainly won't help them improve if they are not the sort who can deal with that sort of criticism.

So yes, for me that is the proper mindset.  Helping an artist improve there work is a laudible goal, but when you run the risk inflicting a significant amount of pain and dissapoinment on someone for no good reason then it's only proper to err on the side of caution. 
So if an artist asks for critical feedback I give it when I can, in the most positive and constructive manner possible.  If an artist doesn't make such a request, then I simply move on to the next image, because  I have no idea how the artist in question might receive a criticism of their work.

I have never seen a work of art so terrible that it would be worth inflicting emotional pain on someone, not to me anyway.  If I don't like something and the artist hasn't asked for critique I just move on to the next image.  I don't post something nice just to be posting, nor do I feel it's necessary.

Nope, I just keep looking till I find something I like, or someone that asks for a critique and has an image that I think my critique might be helpful in improving certain areas of there work.

To me that doesn't sound stupid, it sounds more like common courtesy.  I guess I'm just old school that way though.

Quote - Under normal circumstances a rating system works - more or less. If money is involved, people becomes "creative" to get better ratings.
A jury may be a way to go. Maybe with monthly changing members. Or a combination of both, a jury and a public voting system.

Anyway. It's a pity but I think ShareCG is going to be dead. I'll create my own site, because traffic isn't an issue anymore.

Sadly I'd have to agree, it's probably only a matter of time really before sharecg dies.  They can't survive without revenue sharing, not at this point, and they can't manage revenue sharing properly because there admins simply aren't willing to put forth the effort it takes to do so, and as a result I think sharecg isn't going to last long one way or the other.

Even now new uploads have slowed to a crawl with everyone waiting to find out what is going to be done next, and there hasn't been a peep out of the admins on the subject since they announced they were stopping the revenue sharing, other than a couple of quick posts here and there asking for ideas and then saying they weren't going to get involved in the discussion, which quite frankly is ludicrous at best.

Nope, I don't imagine sharecg will last too much longer, it simply doesn't appear to be their companies highest priority by a long shot, and it would take a lot more time and effort to make something like that work than it seems the admins are willing to invest.

Quote -
As much as I'd love to blame this all on the spam of mediocrity that ShareCG experienced, part of the blame still has to rest with the owners/admins of the site who seemed both unwilling and unable to enforce even the slightest bit of policing their own site.  Yeah they had a staff of three or 4 folks working the site, but you wouldn't have known anyone was at the helm judging from the lack of presence they exhibited in policing their own forums.

I know several other users who were reporting copyright and spam in attempts to help but the people reported never seemed to be affected or stop, so it became apparent to me that reporting infringements wasn't worth my time. I was told on several occasions that certain infringing members would be removed but in the end they were not and they just continued or created new screen names with the same sort of content.

I'm dissappointed but I'm not surprised. The concept will not work without a lot of investment in time keeping the content policed and culled.

Sadly I just don't see sharecg's admins investing much of any time into the site at all, in fact the entire thing looks to be a "when we have a minute" sort of project for there company, which is actually quite a shame.

They can't or won't even keep there message bases moderated, much less there file area.  I also find it very curious that they just canceled revenue sharing at the drop of a hat with no warning and no notice whatsoever.  They have said nothing about what  if any provisions will be made if they decide to bring revenue sharing back for those items uploaded or viewed in the interim, indeed the whole board seems to be in limbo ATM.

They did ask for suggestions on how to improve the process of revenue sharing, but then remained utterly silent even after the message bases were turned into a blood bath by a couple of immature posters who didn't like anyone disagreeing with there ideas and decided to make personal attacks on anyone with the temerity to suggest a different way of doing things.  Indeed the only statement they made after that debacle was that they were "staying out of it" so that they wouldn't influence the final outcome in any way.

This one really left me scratching my head.  Dunno folks, just between you me and the fencepost I think there is more going on over at sharecg than what has been publically stated, so I'm glad I'm a relatively new member and I have what little I did upload to them backed up elsewhere, just in case.  Wouldn't surprise me if they changed the revenue sharing system around, realized it was actually the scammers who were making a good portion that revenue available in the first place and then either cancel revenue sharing completely for good or just pull the plug on the whole thing without a word in advance.

So personally I'm looking for another solution - and I think a lot of other people are too.  Although I initially thought I'd support sharecg, over the last week or so my impression of them has changed dramatically.  It's a good concept, but one that is being very poorly managed indeed. 

Just my 2 cents worth.

Well, it's been a while since I did anything with a "halo effect", but I can tell you how I did it in poser the last time I did it.  I used a simple box primitive and placed it immediately behind the character in the scene.  Then I did a render and went into photoshop with that render, filling in with black everything that wassn't my box primitive (fairly easy to do, the primitive was white so I just selected by color to get the primitive selected, then selected inverse to get everything other than the primitive selected, and filled with black.

Then I switched to a grey color (started with about 80% black to white ratio) and painted sort of a halo around the black edges of my render.  It doesn't have to be very accurate or even all that pretty, I did it with a fairly soft brush and just went around the outside edges of the black portion where my character would be once the scene was rendered.  Once your finished with your halo select all the white that is left over and change it to black as well, so the only thing you have in your image file that isn't black is just the halo you painted.

Save this file as a jpg and go back to poser, load up your scene again.  Select your box primitive and go into the material settings, load up your jpg file in the material editor and connect it to the transparency portion of the primitive, then set the transparency strength to 1.  

This will cause the box to become more or less invisible, except for the halo you painted, which will allow light to still pass through it from behind but it will change the color of the light based on the specular color you've chosen in the material settings for your box primitive.  You can add whatever specular color you wish for your "lighting" to be, I believe at the time I used sort of a gold color - it was to place a "halo of light" around a space vessel that was crossing in front of a sunrise on a planet as I recall.

If you need to make the halo less subtle and more obvious, open your transparency jpg and increase the brightness settings and contrast settings, then resave.  You want your background for the transparency to remain black so only the halo will be visible in your render, the rest of the box primitive will stay invisible as long as the rest of your transparency jpg is black.  Conversely if you need the halo to be more subtle adjust your image so that it is darker, the darker grey your halo painting is the more light it allows to pass through and as such the less noticable it becomes.

You can also get some really spectacular effects for your halo by playing with the reflective and refractive properties it it possesses in the material room. 

While using the transparency on a primitive like this might seem a bit more time consuming than just playing with some lights, it was the only way I could find to get what I felt was a sufficently decent halo image myself using poser.  

Hope that helped,
Stepdad

Quote - I have been getting crashes occasionally in the hair room and cloth room, so when I read this thread I thought "I wonder if". Ive now cleaned and defragged my systems disk and my Poser disk and things seem to be more stable now and things load faster but there is one very unexpected result,
  I went back to the scene I had been working on previously and when I render, the page file size has gone down from 1.5Gb to 1,0Gb,

Interesting... so less is being sent out to disk once the volume is defragged.  I wonder if perhaps this is entirely a poser issue or if it might have something to do with how windows itself handles it's virtual memory.  I'll have to do some reading and see what I can uncover.  Glad to hear this apparenlty fixed your problem though.  At least now I'll have at least one suggestion for other folks to try the next time they say "I'm having problems with Poser.."

Stepdad

Well, I think everybody has a different methodology concerning this, but I'd be happy to share mine with you.  I started out by making seperate runtimes - the only thing in my default poser runtime is what is installed by poser itself, nothing more.

The reason for this is that Poser will take up more memory as it's default runtime grows larger.  I'm not entirely certain why this is, other than perhaps bad programming, but for whatever reason when you increase the size of posers default runtime it takes longer for the app to load and it uses up more memory.

So, I started with the notion that everything would be in a seperate runtime and each runtime should be a specific category to make things easy to find later.   Now, since most of what I do in poser is character based, that is how I seperated my runtimes.  I have a seperate runtime for each character like M3, V3, A3, etc. This runtime contains the figure itself, any poses specific for this character and my various character files and textures.  I generally don't leave anything in the default directories when installing it, instead I have a folder in the pose directory called "characters" that all my character stuff gets copied into, and one called "poses" that all the various poses get copied into, etc.  This way when I go open say the A3 runtime and I need to apply a character morph or mat to A3 I can find it easily, it's in the pose section under the characters folder.  If I need to find a pose, its under the pose section under the poses folder, etc..

I don't keep the clothing files in these directories, however.  The reason for this is twofold, on rare occasions I use an aftermarket application for converting clothing from one figure to another, one that runs a lot better and smoother if  I don't need to move the clothing from one runtime to another when it's finished and also so that the mat files for that clothing don't need to be copied to a second runtime once conversion is finished.

So clothing is grouped by category rather than by figure type for and each category of clothes has it's own runtime.. Such as casual, business, swimwear and lingerie, etc...  and then in the figure section I have folders for each specific character - M3, V3, A3.. etc.  When I install (or in my case more likely create) new clothing I put it in the appropriate folder for that figure in the runtime category in which that type of clothing is stored.  

This makes creating a scene much faster as well, since when I'm say doing something with M3 and V3 and their in an office environment, I can load both characters into the scene, then switch my runtime to "Business Clothing" and then load the appropriate attire for both by selecting first from the M3 folder under business clothing and then from the V3.  It also makes it so when on those rare occasions where I do feel it necessary to convert clothes I can do so quickly and easily without moving a lot of files around afterwards, I just have to copy the new CR2 that is created into the appropriate folder for that character.

As a bonus all of my clothing mats for the clothing are stored in the pose section of that runtime, so finding the mats for various clothing is much, much easier - my pose section is not swamped by listings of characters and poses, just mats for the type of clothing in that category.

I have a seperate runtime for all of my hair objects, as well as two different categories for scenes - Indoor and outdoor.  I make subfolders in those runtimes for such things as "office" or "home" so that I can keep my props and figures fairly well organized and easy to find.  In the outdoor category you'll find directories for "terrain" and things like "trees" or "buildings".

This does increase the number of runtimes I have, but with the way posers library system works it's the quickest method I've found of staying organized and being able to find things quickly while allowing poser to run at peak efficiency.  

It does mean I have to go in with Windows explorer and move things around a bit, but in the long run it's worth it.  I can still locate a specific prop or item I installed 6 months or a year ago quickly and easily because it's all sorted and organized by category.  It might have taken me an extra 2-3 minutes to get everything where I wanted it originally when it was installed by moving stuff to subfolders with explorer, but in the long run it was worth it because since I've started doing it this way I haven't lost track of a file since.

So when I do install something I rename the folders to my liking, I remove all the vanity directories in the stuff that will show up in posers library, get rid of all of those damn !! and other nonsense symbols that many use to put there stuff at the top of the directory and make sure everything that way is listed in alphabetical order.  You'll be stunned at how much faster you can find stuff that way, instead of trying to remember that your mat files for "Amazing Spiffy Wowser hair" are actually in a directory called !!! Artist name MAT Amazing Spiffy Wowser Hair" which shows up toward the top of your listing.

Taking a few extra minutes to rename those directories when you install them so that they will list in a logical order will be a real godsend, particularly if you make sure you always name the directory for your figure or hair the same as the directory your using for the mat files for that object - that will save you a huge amount of time in the long run, because if 3 or 4 months pass before you use that item again it can be a real PIA trying to track down all the various mat and pose files at that point because if your like me your not going to remember the artists name by then, not if it's not something you use on a regular basis.

And the last folder in my runtime list is called, curiously enough, ":Install".  It's pretty much exactly what it says, it's a runtime that I can install things into one at a time.  I use this when I download a new file for poser or create something of my own.  I can get it sorted and organized just the way I like, get my directories renamed and what not and find everything easily because that new file is the only thing in the install runtime.  I then copy that entire runtime into the appropriate runtime where I want the item to reside (Whether it's a character for a particular figure or a scene or an article of clothing).  Then I go in and delete all the files and directories under the Install / Runtime folder, so the next time I use it it's a blank slate yet again.  It also comes in real handy for working on a new distribution file, so I can test everything to make sure it's all working and then zip it with ease once it's all done to my liking.

So that is more or less my system of organization, not sure if it would work for you but it works well for me.

Well folks, I'm not sure how anyone else feels on this subject but I for one wouldn't like to see any sort of negative comments or rating on any artwork.  The only time I think it is acceptable to criticize someone elses work is if they ask for critique, and even then you should keep it positive and constructive.

I've seen more than my share of images here that I truly loved, and more than my share that did absolutely nothing for me.  But what does and does not constitute art is hardly an objective standard.  For me, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel is a masterpiece.  The works of Davinci take my breath away.

Modern art, on the other hand, makes me scratch my head and say, "I don't get it".  To me it all looks like people threw paint at a canvas.  But there are a lot of people who love modern art, and pay big money for that sort of thing.  They seem to be able to differentiate between what is "good" and "bad".  To me it all looks like a painter's drop cloth or the end result of putting a squirrel in a microwave, but who am I to say that it sucks?

Artwork by it's nature convey's an emotion or evokes some form of emotional response.  While modern art does nothing for me personally some people really get knocked over by it, so if it blows there hair back I say more power too them.  If they get that emotional connection, then the artwork doesn't suck, even if I don't get it personally.  

So my thinking is, if I see something submitted by someone here that I think is really terrible, I just click on the next image and move on.  If the artist submits it and asks for opinions or critique, if I don't have something positive or some really good tips to share on how he/she could improve certain elements for a better overall effect, I just keep my mouth shut and move on.

Whatever I might think of their work they have invested some of themselves into it, in an attempt to make an emotional connection with the outside world.  And that, in and of itself, makes there work artistic and wonderful, even if it is just a stick figure or a bunch of blobs of paint on a canvas.

Just my 2 cents worth,
Stepdad

Quote - Defrag? Who'd have thunk it. Thanks for the info! I was just wondering about buying a 3rd party utility for defraging my one Windows box about a week ago too. This also totally explains why it's not deteriorating on my other nonWindows computer. BO_ok Marking this thread for sure. XD Thank you. :biggrin:

Glad to be of assistance.  Under normal circumstances I'd defrag the home machine about once a month, but it had been quite a while since I'd done it and just a few weeks ago I moved a lot of stuff offline onto DVD's for permanent storage to free up some drive space.

When I was poking around on the web trying to come up with a solution for why poser had become so unstable, I read a blurb on a website talking about how the firefly renderer cache's to disk and how as a result you wanted to keep your disk defragged.

I thought about it for a bit, and thought well, it's a longshot but I wonder if maybe the fragmentation of the drive might have something to do with firefly being so unstable.  Never seen an app that would get hinky if your drive was a bit fragmented before - granted many of them will run slower but hadn't had one crash before.  But when you consider the disk caching and all the other stuff going on, I thought it just might be possible.

So I tried defragging the drive and sure enough, poser has been rendering even at it's highest settings with no problems ever since.  It was such a weird solution and one I never would have thought to try myself I'd thought I'd pass it along, just in case someone else might run into the same problem i had.

In the midst of another project at the moment but I'll see what I can come up with when I'm finished with the project I'm working on.

Stepdad

I don't know of a tutorial specifically geared for this, probably because your going to need a 3d modelling program of of some sort and the instructions would be very specific to that particular program.

Basically you'd need to export the pieces you want from one model as seperate object files from poser, then combine the meshes in the 3d modeling program of your chosing, reimport back to poser and use the setup room to re-rig the new figure.

Not terribly complicated overall, but a great deal of the instructions involved would be how to join the two alternate meshes in the 3d modeling program itself, so I don't know if anyone has written a tutorial for your specific modeller of  preference or not.

Stepdad