I'm using XP pro.

My runtime path is C:Program FilesPoser 8Runtime

Ok, I think I know what my issue is. I think it's just choking or timing out or whatever on my over sized, barely organized single runtime (which is in the program folder). I get a of wall of question marks from my Pose library onward after poser 'finishes' loading. But after I restart poser, all the libraries after Figures are collapsed to the top level. Clicking on them expands them, begins counting items and poser acts normally.

This underscores my need to get organized, but still, this shouldn't happen and didn't happen pre-SR1.

Yeah, I'm getting a similar problem occasionally.

When I start poser I let it grind away, counting folders until HD and CPU activity drop back to idle then go on about my business. Now, sometimes (seems to be at random, not seeing a pattern yet) some of the folder counts (sometimes most) stay at 0, no matter how many times I refresh and then eventually it will crash to desktop, with no error msg.

Then if I restart poser, it works fine...

Using WinXP Pro, no external runtimes.

Aha! That's handy. Thanks, bagginsbill!

Quote - Give me a few minutes to get de-annoyed from another thread and I'll show you.

That'd be awesome!

Setting both thumbnail size settings to 91 = Ah... Relief for tired old eyes! The library is noticeably faster all around.

The material room is now a pleasure to use again.

Ok, the new shadow samples setting for raytraced lights. What's it good for? After a couple quick renders, I don't see a difference between 10, 20 or 30 samples. Admittedly, my test renders were pretty simple.

In my case, rotating the camera ~90 degrees, clicking more than 2 menu items or switching to a different 'room' would cause poser to simply POOF to desktop. No warning, no error no nothing, unless I farted around with preview render settings, and that only worked 50% of the time, at best.

Awesome! Glad to be of service.

Ok, after reading a post by mariner here, and some fiddling, I SEEM to have fixed my problem.

I added a profile for Poser 7 in the nvidia control panel, under "Manage 3d Settings>Program Settings". The only thing I changed from the global settings was turning the "threaded optimization"  OFF. Turning it ON seemed to preserve stability as well, however, camera tracking was VERY slow and choppy, and my cpu usage never dropped below 50%... Turning it OFF, on the other hand returned poser to it's normal smooth operation.

I opened and played around with about a dozen different scenes and it hasn't crashed yet.

Hope this helps somebody.

This started happening to me after updating my nvidia drivers to 178.24. Poser was rock solid before that, it hadn't crashed in MONTHS.

The only way I can work with a scene now is to set the preview settings to Sreed>Software buffer, disable hardware shading, save settings. Then reset back to OpenGL>Software (always crashes when the buffer is set to hardware), re-enable hardware shading, save settings.

After doing that, the scene is smooth and responsive, but I have to go through these hoops EVERY TIME I load a new scene.

What kind of troubles are you having with textures?

If they appear grainy or blurry, drop the minimum shading rate in the render options down to .2 or so. Also, set the post filtering to box and turn it all the way down (slider to the left) for crisper renders.

Blur radius values vary widely depending on the effect you're looking to achieve.  I personally tend to use 0, since I like sharp, dramatic scenes. If you use it, don't use too much, between .5 to 1 is often enough.

As for min bias settings, between .2 and .3 generally give the best results. Sometimes I need to go a little higher, but never above .4, but I never go below .2, as self shadowing artifacts very quickly crop up.

If what you're asking for is how to make self extracting archives, then I suggest 7-zip. It does a good job and it's free.

Just check the box "Create SFX archive" in the compression options.

Quote - 10 samples is pretty high. You can get good results at 6 or so. If you have to leave Backface culling unchecked you will need to crank the samples to about 12. There is a bug filed on the Backface culling messing with DoF hopefully that will get fixed in the next release.

Aha! I would never have thought to check that. Backface culling never seemed to produce much, if any render time benefit and caused problems for me often enough that I just completely ignored the option shortly after it was introduced. I'll have to test that out with a few scenes. Thanks, nerd!

Quote - You don't need the python script to calculate the focal distance. When you adjust the focus on the camera a DoF gizmo will appear in the scene. It indicates the focal point with a big cross hair in the posing window.

Yeah, I know about the focus distance control, but in p6 it was rather unresponsive, so the script saved quite a bit of hair pulling, using it just became a habit. But now I see that the control in p7 works very well.

Quote - The chunky background : sorry. I get the same thing but it's better than P6 could do. You might throw a little gaussian blur in that in PS or PSP.

Heh, since I'm going to have to postwork the hair shadows anyway, I might as well bust out with some bluring and softening tools.

One thing I noticed is that the 'chunkiness' seems more pronounced on backgrounds with more straight lines and right angles, but less so in more natural scenes. Or is it just my random luck?

I'm just grateful to the poser dev team for improving it to the point that I can actually DO some of these things! If I tried to do that scene I posted above in p6, it would have choked out a laugh at me right before it died.

And here I was about to post a new thread with DoF questions. :D

Since DoF rendering is far faster in p7, I've decided to finally give it a real try. i was hoping someone could give me some tips to improve the blur quality.

As you can see in this image (warning, large file size. ~2MB), the blur is pretty good up until it reaches the back of the scene, whereupon it gets kinda chunky.

I used a DoF python script to get the focal distance to the character's head, and that comes into nice sharp focus, so it's pretty easy to do. Where I started getting confused was at the fstop setting, which the poser manual is typically vague about.  What are some guidelines as to what fstop value to use?

In the above image, I set samples to 10 and used an fstop of 10. Should i have set the samples higher (please say no, 3 hours is testing my patience :P) or lower, the fstop higher or lower?

I'm fairly new to the more advanced poser techniques, so any advice is welcome.