Quote: "Am I right on this or is it just a pipe dream?" OT... I just saw the movie "Pipe Dream" few days ago. Was rather enjoyable.

Well... I use a Wacom tablet to paint hair in post-work in Paint Shop Pro. Firstly I make the render to my liking, then open it up in PSP. I then use some filters on the hair (either completely re-making the hair or making just some touch-ups) - like EyeCandy Fur filter. Then I start using the tablet and paints the hair the way I feel it should be, but was not easily possible in Poser. I accomplish this using mainly basic PSP tools (smudge, lightness up, darkness down, soften, burn, hue to target, color to target...). Post-work could easily take longer than the actual time spent within Poser.

One further thing to note: Poser was originally a port from Mac. Hence I sincerely doubt the coders put much attention into speed-related issues of the code - they just needed to port it to Win. It's not the fault of the computer industry in general if the software designers can't/won't take into account the possibilities offered. Poser in particular is not well known for it's capable code - on the contrary. No matter if you got Radeon9600 and 2 gigs of RAM... if the code can't take advantage of it, there's nothing you can do about it. Contrary to many others in this thread, I believe (and have seen it many times too) that, say, tripling capacity can increase execution speed to 10 times that of original. It all depends on the quality of the software used, hardware used and the weakest link of the said hardware. Many here are Windows-only users ... in many cases Windows itself is the cause of slowness and trouble. I've heard "upgrade to WinXP" comments, but I'd never upgrade from Win2k to WinXP in hoping to get better Poser-performance - it jsut won't happen - probably the other way around. I'm currently working with a 3-processor HP-UX Mainframe ... and I can tell you that using "grep" to find out text from a 500Meg text-file executes about 7-10-times faster after the system memory was doubled a while back. If I'd be using Poser in this environment, it probably would be slower ... :D

Dunno but the problem has been bugging me for at least a week or so. It's really annoying for a lurker like to me finally post something and then notice that it wasn't actually posted at all. My timestamp: Welcome 12rounds , Thursday, April 1, 2004 3:07 CST (GMT-6), 1285 surfers currently online

1280x960. 17" LCD screen.

What exactly are you thinking of doing? Digital cartoons? Animations? Character illustrations? Scenery images or portrays? ... My personal interests are such that PPP is enough for me. You see, "better" for me may be "worse" for some1 else because they have different goals than me. I do not do animations - heavily postworked illustrations are my field - you may regard that us nonsense and want to your own Poser-video. So maybe you could enlighten us of what you are planning on using Poser for.

As a software engineer at a fairly large printing house, I'd have to say that QUALITY prints will need a better dpi than 72. 300 being about the minimum. Most digital printers (I assume your not making 10000 copies of your calendar) eat wasily 1200 dpi images - the quality is directly influenced by your choices in making the rendering. Most home-users will have limited amount of memory though, so maybe the suggested 300 dpi is enough, but in that case you should run a production-quality test -run before you submit your work to a printer - in case you are using a commercial printer.

Actually women were not in the "Nazi army" at all - not even late war. Referring to "Nazi army" would be referring to political armed forces (that is more commonly known as the SS troops of different military services). However, German females did take part in military actions as part of the Deutcher Volksturm (ie. "people's militia"). Those were simply people defending their cities and homes against occupying forces. A distinction between militia forces, regular army and the SS (the armed forces of the Nazi party) is in order. The Nazi party official line was that women were the key part in making more Aryans - hence high-ranked SS officers and party officials were not only encouraged but pressured into having many women with whom they should make offspring. Not entirely off-topic, but I guess I won't be hanged for saying this :)

I'm not sure if anybody has thanked you yet, Kozaburo, but THANK YOU :) whistles

No Flash at work. No Flash at home (dial-up connection). If my money is wanted somewhere, it sure needs to have a non-flash alternative. I don't buy the 10% don't use Flash ... ?? Where was that figure taken from? A short asking around in my workplace (a roomfull of database programmers) results in 50% using Mozilla as their web-browser, 50% using IE of whom only 1/3 have BOTH Flash installed/ActiveX controls allowed to their computer!! Me too I'm thinking heavy use of Flash is not so great way to go in the web-design. Btw: Java IS NOT the same JavaScript. Ppl please don't confuse these two even if they had similar syntax. JavaScript originates from totally different language than actual Java. I make servlets with Java for web-applications thus rendering me atleast some knowledge of these things. Well. No offense to anybody.

The BUM -files are essentially same as BMP -files (ie. RLE encoded bitmap files). JPG -files are a different standard alltogether and jpg-files use a lossy scheme of packing up the pixels. BMP-files (and BUM files) can never actually compete with lossy image packing methods cause they, by default, don't lose any information. In jpg, the least significant bits (how many depends on the packing ratio wanted) of each pixel is zeroed or made identical or average of the pixels next to it. I think Poser developers saw that using a BUM file for bumpmaps was exceedingly wasty (filesize-wise) and coded in the use of jpg files. Changing all BUM-references with a batch -file is relatively straightforward (using standard unix-tools ported to Windows; grep and rpl comes to mind). No need to open up text-editor to do this. To accomplish this: From: 1) http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html. Download package rpl (its in a zip file) and install it to a folder of your liking. 2) in a command prompt, make sure your path -environment variable points to the installation directory of rpl. Do this by typing: SET PATH=%PATH%;D:POSERRPLBIN Change the directory (D:POSERRPLBIN) to wherever you installed rpl. 3) navigate to character folder of your poser installation's library files using cd -command. 4) type in: rpl -x -R '.cr2' '.bum' '.jpg' * WARNING: this changes ALL bum references ... it's not reversible easily, so please take a minute to consider what you are doing. You may want to test using this tool in a copied folder to become familiar with it. Now all .cr2 -files that reference bum files reference jpg-files instead. You may ofcourse not have all those bum files as jpg versions, but using this command eases up these kinds of batch changings in general. You can change bum-references in one particular directory as well, of course. Poser locks up many files in library-directories when it runs, so this command is to be used only when poser is not running.

Yeh. Poser being a mac-port to windows originally and having memory leaking problems anyways ... using linux is probably not a remedy for those inherent problems. Also ... thinking the Python scenario again... one would need to use Poser-Python and run it in wine. Python in linux will not do, IMO, since the scripts need to talk to poser and vice versa.

Hmm... all seats taken. sits on the floor

Actually ... Dr.Geep's recent actions seemed to UNIFY the community here in general. Not ever in this place have I seen such a thread ... I've been here for years, mostly lurking in the background like a spider. So, I would like to THANK YOU, Dr.Geep !! You may have succeeded in something you didn't even try !!

Hehe... good good. Best friday for a while.