mm cough cough !! poser manual I've just looked out my manual(blowing the dust off it ) and looked for deleting animation frames - loads on adding none on deleting. The animation engine is very powerful the manual is err - how shall I put this- lousy? bad? no,no Us brits have a word for it - pants... yup the poser manual is pants (lousy, bad, ill organised and devoid of any street cred whatsoever) Narsil- a working animator for more years than he cares to remember(OK the first CGI I did was using a PDP 8S computer in errm 1973) before that I was an onion skin merchant (still am -in extreme cases)

1600x1200 need it for the resolution I need PaulC

Plusses Dispacement maps/ shadows Firefly rendering much better on animation. a general feeling of solidity that was not there with previous service packs. (rather a pity really I miss the feeling of will it- won't it) oh and the libraries are much better handled minuses some weirdness in the material room - not really traced it down but have had a couple of instances of complex materials hanging the system. Slower to start up (seems to take a fair time chewing over if it should load the plugins) generally a goodie (I can handle a stable poser with a longer startup time.) lots of fixes under the bonnet I confess it has made me clean up my multiplying runtimes and to get the rest of my modelling directories in some kind of order as a kind of spring cleaning. The material room anomaly is of some concern to me because some of the work I do tends to be batch run overnight. SR3 was stable enough to give me a good nights sleep after a few tweaks. However I have run two animations overnight with few problems. I tend to use one machine for this( a 2.6Ghz P4 with 1 Gb ddr 400 with western digital hdds.) so far no probs - apart from that one material room glitch - I have never had material room glitches before. PaulC

Hi there The 50% cpu thingy is probably the Hyperthreading - if you press crtl alt del and bring up the task manager- tab to processes and look for poser.exe highlight poser.exe and right click - on the menu look at set affinity - you'll probably see two cpu 's cpu 0 and 1 this is hyoerthreading working. You could switch off the HT - I found no real difference.You could set the affinity for poser to work only on CPU 1 , if you have problems with other programs slowing down.I do not and an calculating dynamic cloth in the background as I speak. set the bucket size to 64 instead of 32 - it really does make a difference, use the bucket size in octets (8,32,64 etc) it works then. thats all folks

When I use light I keep it short and simple - The way to use light in poser is the same way you use lights in real life. Two is all you will probably need (most proffessional photograhers use one subject light and on fill-in. In poser (any version) change the shadow mapping to around 0.150 and the map size to 1024 change the red channel to fit your preferences (I normally look for between 3- 5% more than the green or blue channel) this will give a soft early to mid morning light that is good for flesh tones. Having just two light mean that your rendering tends to be quicker in P4 - no difference in firefly if you check RayTrace on the lights instead of shadow maps. I've used this mapping professionally for a number of years.

Yup I'm with wdupre don't use gradient bumps Use the shader nodes and plugin in what you need - the P5 bump channel is a bit fierce so play with what you need until it looks ok

Working for me too

Same here Reading "His Dark Materials" Amazing book!

PheonixRising - Why did e-frontier they buy it then? Spare cash for a useless product ? They have all of the code, they can do what they want with it, change it, recycle it or throw it out and replace it. Look at some of the content coming from our eastern bretheren . I agree that it "deleted and rewritten" thats what I was saying - if e frontier are serious - and they have put there money on the line - they will be doing just that. I do not expect Poser 6 coming hot on the heels of DS.. Fundamental rewrites take time. But they have good products and good code already in their products(have you seen some of thise animations?) err it is common to all software houses that only the core team knows anything when a program is in alpha- unless they choose to release it to the greater community to do the bug catching - then it is only fair to release it free and buggy.That is when support teams are told about it.Until a product is officially released I doubt if any software house would say anything about it. I hope there will be a poser 6 - or even a shady poser I fnot -Hey I still have hair, materials,cloth etc to play with until DS gets it act together. And I will not participate in bug tracking - once is enough

Ratteler one could say that by creating a new file format Daz is attempting to corner a market . DS as you point out, has changed the user interface. It is however a still a basic posing tool. no plugins. No cloth. No materials. I have been around enough to know that what is in alpha releases (and tends to have the wow factor) is not what ends up in the final release .I still want to know how long would all of the content that I want (hair, materials and cloth etc)- that makes me use Poser 5- how long and how much will those modules take to come on line. File formats. Do you think that Daz would be unwise enough to essentially cut off one of their prime means of income by refusing to release anything they have on offer in the new file(how big are these new files going to be if it"will include everything in the scene"? err lets see My v3 with morphs and a decent texture is what 118,243Kb mike 3 same(ish)so how big are these files going to be? Just the figures will be larger than one of my PZ3 folders Hmmm.... now surely The Shade people are not stupid , they know what went on with Poser 5 (I think the bottom line is that CL ran out of money and HAD to release something that they knew was clunky)they will be looking at a merging of their products- if they are wise they will be looking at the release of DL and seeing what is good and bad with the product. They will have plenty of time to see the state of play and what people really want. They are after all a Software house not a content provider trying to be a software house. They have shade - a very good product. will they want to rewrite the core of poser - yes of course they will - and they have the experience to do so. Will they include OpenGL yes because they have to to give the target purchasers what they want, will they put in something to read daz files course they will - and Daz will give it to them if it means more content will be sold. Because you see by then, DL will be old news and Poser 6 will be the new kid on the block ;-) What will Daz do then? There is an old chinese curse"may you live in interesting times" - its getting more interesting day by day!

Ratteller-surely this will apply to DS as well? If Daz cannot get plug-ins out quickly enough to make a sizeable amount of professional and semi-professional artists to make the move over to DS then surely Daz will be left as a niche product.Or do they want a niche product that good little daz consumers will buy their content and then hurry to get the first render up on the forum(shudder) I have an inkling that compiler may be right when he postulates shader/poser5 development- the danger as I see it from Daz's point of view is that the poser 5 community will take the shade/poser 5 product(poser 6?) to "new levels of complexity" certainly a poser 5 that does what is supposed to do -better collision detection, GL rendering and a better production renderer (all of which shade already has)would move poser into a new level of sophistication. Could Daz - who are, after all, content producers- raise their game to meet the the challenge or will we see a parting of the ways in poser /ds in that the naked-vicki-in-the -temple set will favour Daz and endlessly fill up the gallerys with even more acres of virtual flesh and the Poser/shade elements pushing the outside of that envelope. just thoughts.

Buy the boxed version Esther. As PheonixRising says it is better to have any software on CDROM rather than relying on hard discs. Way way back in history(in a galaxy far far away etc;-)) I was working on a large Comic Setter file on an Amiga 2000 (remember Amigas?) saved everything off to hard disc went to bed, got up next morning turned on the computer and had a cheery blue sign saying please insert your boot disk - whole hard disc had scrunched. No backups. from then on I have always backed up everything and had original disks and downloaded patches on cdrom.

Compiler - re the Daz religion - me too!

Err I do support Questor on this

Poser is scream inducing (marginally less with the service packs)

Daz studio is alpha, is only a posing tool at the moment.

We will pay through the nose for dynamic clothes, hair et al when they come along.

While it is alpha - have a separate forum for the people that want to play with it to communicate directly.

The Daz people that will be monitoring the forums will only have one place to go.I have a feeling that the inconsistency between the open GL render and the final render will take some work to iron out.

I will continue to work with P5 and the rest of the stable programs that I have to do the work I want

A separate masthead to point Daz Studio to the right Forum
is right - Renderosity did the same with P5 when it came out .