I'm on Vista Home Premium too and those drop down menu crashes are random for me, it's worked fine ever since I had the problem with the Lola package, even the Lola textures are selecting via the drop down menu today. I also have the latest Nvidia drivers, I had them installed before I got Poser 8 though so it's not them. If a scene runs ok in Poser 7 then it should run in Poser 8.

I just tried out the cloth room tonight, whoo hoo it's a step up from what I'm used to in Poser 7 :) Very fast and smooth running, I'll be using that more often!

With regards to the menu selection I can update a little on the problem I found with my insallation:-

Once in the material room I can select any texture in the scene using the picker tool from the preview window without causing any problems, however if I use the drop down menu to select a material it will 'sometimes' crash. I had the crashing problem with the Lola texture set from Daz, I was able to select any other texture in the scene from the drop down menu except the Lola ones. But I could with the picker tool ?????

SM says as they were 3rd party textures they are probably to blame :) Maybe so but they run fine in Poser 7 and every other application I have so something needs tidying up in Poser 8 whether they like it or not.

Also I find that when in the Render window there's a lot of junk behind the render window where the screen hasn't refreshed. It's not a showstopper but it looks pretty awful :)

Finally I want to make it clear that I think Poser 8 is pretty terrific with some great improvements, I've been doing the 3D thing long enough to know that any application never meets perfection till after a service release or two :)
 

Hi, I've just submitted a support report at Smith Micro regarding material room crashes, seems there's a lot of people with this issue in one respect or another. The more people who let them know the problems they're having the more likely to get it sorted in the first service release. Fingers crossed :)

I don't have any problems getting into or out of the material room, but when a scene starts to get fairly big it will crash when selecting individual materials. Also I've noticed it feels a bit unstable around the materials room, I don't know, it just feels a bit jumpy when clicking anything, a bit of a lag then a sudden catch-up. I'm on Vista Home Premium 32.

Hello Esther,

Looking through the manual it says you can File > Open or File > Import, doesn't seem to make a difference, both are ok to get to the Transposer dialogue box.

The file name for Transposer for C7 on the PC is Ca_ac007_Trnspsr2C7.exe, there hasn't been an update for it yet so it's the only C7 Transposer file version available - for PC.

Estherau,

Create your pz3 in Poser and save it, then close Poser.

Open C7 and select 'Open' from the file menu once the splash screen disappears.

Use the navigation dialogue box that appears to find your pz3 and select it.

The Poser scene import box appears, select Transposer from the radio buttons along the top.

Deselect Import lights, and deselect Import animation if your not importing an animation.

Then click OK.

I guess you're running C7 on Vista as an Administrator? That makes a difference.

Hello estherau,

Yes I import into both C6pro and C7pro  - using Transposer - both from Poser 7 and Poser 7 Pro, but I wouldn't be able to do either if I didn't also have Poser 6 installed on my PC.

Importing Poser lights can snafu the import though as they're too different for C6 or C7 to handle them properly. Also having a background image can stall the import, but it's a piece of cake to load it into the Backdrop in C6 or C7 so I always take the background image out of Poser before I save for an import if I'm using one.

As for Macs I can't tell you, but it's supposed to work the same:)

Yes only for Poser 6, you can set up your scene in any Poser but you must have Poser 6 installed for Transposer to work.

Also try unchecking import Poser lights : - I read there was a problem with this, you would want to set up new lights anyway as Carrara lights are far better.

Glad you got it sorted :)

I don't have Vista 64 so I'm only pitching in with a couple of things that I actually know about. There is a seperate Transposer for C7 which needs to be downloaded and installed, also one thing I discovered last week was that Transposer won't work if your Poser scene has a Background Image attached to the background node in the materials room. Had a game importing a couple of scenes till I discovered it was the background image that was stalling the Transposer import. Hope you get it sorted.

Me too, I would have preferred Sandra:)

As an adage to my earlier post, I'd just like to make it clear that I'm not trying to defend the slowness of Poser renders.

I also use Vue Esprit 5, Shade and Bryce 6 to render, depending on what I need and I wouldn't call any one of them more than 'pig slow' when you start upping the ante on render settings.

There's a lot of hype around at the moment about "increased render speeds" from E-Frontier and e-on software, now they both have new versions being released, but as far as render speeds are concerned I'll wait for solid evidence of that before I believe a word of it.

I've never rendered with the big expensive programmes so I've no comparison to make, especially with the likes of 3DMax.

I'm surprised your HDRI renders are so quick with it. Maybe it IS the money. But I also know for a fact that Vue Pro, or whatever it's called takes around 6hrs to render a fairly minimal  HDRI scene and that programmes not cheap. So how do you figure it?

Seems each programme has it's "good things" which we all want, but they also have their "bad things", like a ridiculous price tag. Pity we can't get all the "good things" in one affordable programme instead of having to have a suite of mid range programmes on our hard drives, each one compensating for the lack of features in the others:)

EDIT: - I've looked into the "Ray" free programmes but I was turned off by them ((looking) not being user friendly), by that I mean it seems everything has to be programmed into them, struck me as being a bit DOSy. But, because of that, I never gave them a try so maybe it's my fault. I don't feel geeky enough for all that. Maybe someone who gets on with it could enlighten me, I'll be happy to be convinced otherwise.

Cheers again.

Hello tez12,

My P7 hasn't arrived yet so I can only speak as a P6 user for now.

Maxing the firefly render settings is something of a mistake, it adds days to the render without any visible bonus to the finished render. Using HDRI as well as full settings is probably a bit like committing suicide:)

In my experience, customize your render settings. Start somewhere low, where you can still use HDRI and work up the settings from there.

Once I found a render settings level that suited me for both speed and results I saved the setting and just load it when I'm ready to render. Don't rely on E-Frontier to have the render settings all worked out for your convenience.

Cheers,

On the Downloads page.

http://lab108.x0.com/lab108/