Brian, That is strange as far as no mention of Carrara, plus no direct import into Carrara2 either. Makes the transparency deal a bit more difficult. There are a couple folks setting up some bones which can be used directly on the Poser characters, import the character, apply the bones file...viola. plus some tutorials on tranparency work which will make that part a bit easier. The textures import if you use obj files. I just sent a post to the Carrara list inquiring about Poser direct import. Hopefully someone can provide an explanation. Probably some licensing thing with Curious, although that feature is available as posted here with several apps.

What about Carrara 2 ???? http://www.eovia.com Eovia has added much in the way of lighting....GI , Etc...plus the renderer has been much improved. Price is pretty nice. It now does bones which can be applied to the Poser figures. I would assume if you can add bones, this means the figure can be manipulated within Carrara....thus, you can change the pose within the app.

I'm relaxed...............

You guys have gotten me confused now... I have a 40gig hd, with a 768meg swap file, 512 meg ram, and have no problems using Poser...Win XP Home What's with all these extra drives and separate swap files and stuff? I set my virtual memory in control panel, and let er rip. Been running this system every day since February...also have Seti@home running 24/7. Last night I rendered a 4000x4000x200dpi, separate window, image while surfing the web, doing email, running Seti...all at the same time. The pz3 file for this render is 38meg...the resulting image was 61meg...took less than 10 minutes to render. My Poser directory is a bit bloated as well....2.01gig in size...7,227 files/477 folders....

Wow...your system sure shouldn't be the problem. I've never rendered anything that large, but just for the heck of it, as I'm typing this, I have a 4000x4000x200dpi render going of a fairly simple scene...the PWFW bedroom with Vic2 and Mike 2---dressed and textured. It seems to be going fine... Did you try to clear out all your temp files, etc ??? defrag your hard drive? Sorry to go here, but I just went through some major problems with temp files---had to go into the registry to clean them up...my system was at a crawl....could barely read my email....finally got those temp files deleted...all is working to par again. Well..its done..and it worked..61meg tiff file...huge :)

thats why I asked the above. I could not render using Win98SE...switched to Win XP and all works fine.

What happens exactly? What OS are you running. How much ram, etc

Dizzie...that's EXACTLY what I'm talking about and asking. They don't look photo-realistic. Yes, Catherina's are close...I also use her textures. So...what is the secret? If you look at most of the images here on Renderosity, they either have a somewhat cartoon look to them, even the ones done to be realistic, the Poser plastic look of the P4 fem and dork characters, or the unreal look of the DAZ characters. It has to be the lighting...and possibly somewhat the environment. If we're using photorealistic textures...what is missing???? If you look at any photo of a person, in any environment, they don't look anything like the Poser stuff....but it isn't just lighting...the entire photo has a much crisper, cleaner appearance...deeper The second reply way up at the top of the thread from Jaqui is the answer, but not the total answer. I've done some work in Bryce5, and the end result isn't much better...in fact the textures look better in Poser IMO. Maybe Carrara2 will help. I can't afford much more than that.

Great story Ron :) You must be used to the weather by now.... I was in the Navy stationed at Brunswick NAS. My wife and I loved Maine, in fact, if it wasn't for work, would move back there in an instant. It's a very peaceful lifestyle out there...the scenery is fabulous, especially going up the coast, but just as remarkable inland...just a great place. I'm from the UP of Michigan, so Maine felt just like home to me...not many people, except when the snowbirds and tourists come back in the summer... I like it quiet :) Hey, my youngest graduates from high school in 2003...so who knows, maybe we'll move back out there. I'll look you up and we can start the Maine Poser/CG group. My brother lives in New Hampshire, my wife's sister is just outside Brunswick. I'm about your age, but will be lucky to retire until I hit 80 or so...the job is the only thing keeping us here in Wisconsin. We also lived in Rhode Island, and I was stationed outside Boston back in the late 60s, so New England is like a second home....really like it out there a lot.

I used to live in Maine....until 1987. Did you have an Atari computer by chance? I used to attend some meetings outside of Portland.

You guys are so damn harsh.... Can't you imagine all the time and effort that went into that cube guy ? And especially that $100 BB.....I think ts because of the autographs

actually, I'll send back 6 of my free stuff downloads for the boots.

can I send back my earing and get the boots? What the hell is that thing anyway ???

Yep...and the more memory the better. I currently have 512meg of ram, PC2100, and it isn't enough to run Poser adequately.... The hard drive is screaming most of the time with the high res graphics. I moved from Win98SE to XP because I could NEVER get Poser to render a high res character. Since I upgraded to Win XP Home, I have never had a problem with rendering..I've had 8 Vic2 and Mike 2 characters, fully decked out and was still able to get it rendered---the hard drive is doing a lot of the work...therefore i would get a minimum of 1024meg ram.... Poser is CPU and memory hog---faster the better. All the bs of how AMD cpu have problems and compatibility issues are hogwash. I've run both and now run an AMD XP1800+ with absolutely NO PROBLEMS. There were some issues with the early AMD chips, but that was several years ago. Its an ongoing myth to fuel the Intel/AMD debate. Be very careful when selecting components. The post that talked about all the different versions of hardware...video cards, hard drives, memory, sound, etc is right on....plus the performance can vary by manufacturer as well....do plenty of homework. I've contacted numerous repair/home brew stores around here, and a lot of these guys try to sell uninformed buyers whatever they happen to have on their shelves just to get rid of it...much of this stuff is out of date, and they sell it and talk about it like its the greatest and fastest...be careful. Check out the following: http://www.anandtech.com/ http://www.tomshardware.com/ and of course the previously mentioned Maximum PC. Check the prices of components here: http://www.newegg.com These will probably be lower than your store, but it will give you an idea of what you should be paying.... Also...www.pricewatch.com Checking these prices will save you from getting ripped off. Oh...AMD processors are considerably cheaper than Intel...usually by $100 or more dollars, depending on speed, etc.... the K6 is old news...you should be able to get the XP for pretty much same price...faster then Intel P4