Miss B posted at 9:50AM Wed, 09 September 2020 - #4398855

adp001 posted at 1:47PM Mon, 07 September 2020 - #4398837

If money is not an issue, you may look for a "Gaming Laptop". These laptops are equiped with powerful graphic cards.

That's what I wound up doing last November when my old laptop gave up the ghost. I went to Dell, and wound up getting an Alienware m15 gaming laptop. They DO have a Dell G Series gaming laptop for a lot less money, so you have that option too, if necessary.

Ditto here, by getting an Acer Aspire 7 (using the iRay render engine means getting a GeForce GPU, and the Aspire 7 came with a Geforce GTX 1080 w/ 6GB vRAM).

It's nearly $40 (after exchange rate) at E-frontier (around 4200 yen or so). You can find a massive listing of freebies for TY2 here: https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Terai_Yuki_2

@EClark1894 - Actually it wasn't half bad in certain render engines (P5/3DL or newer) and under certain lighting styles. The "Babyface" face morph helped out a lot in this regard if you found the default face too un-anime-like or too blocky.

I don't use it much, mostly due to a lack of stuff, but ocne in a great while I'll unlimber it for giggles. Subdivision and geometry smoothing (err, DS stuff) helps big-time, much like it does for Posette, and even the creaky old Michael 2-based character I still keep around as an avatar.

EldritchCellar posted at 5:52AM Fri, 04 September 2020 - #4398600

Seems to be a pattern. There's dead ends aplenty here also. The poser user base would literally be in the dark ages if not for all that information...

Gone.

Tempus Fugit. Memento Mori.

Didn't Rendo say they were porting-over the old fora? Can't recall offhand if they said that or not.

In either event, maybe once Mr. Bart collects all the info, maybe various luminaries (who can be contacted) can go through and de-chaff what he collected, then put it in a format that can be downloaded and used offline? I mean, it can't be any bigger than the typical texture set these days... ;)

Don't feel so bad... you should see what happens when you enter poserpros.com - it's a page full of Kanji that translates into advice and guidelines for finding the right grave for you and your family.

Prime, Platinum, Whatever... ?

Never bothered. Closest I came was way back in the day when Digiport had a membership thing... almost did that one.

II mostly make my own stuff these days, or repurpose older stuff... I make enough to buy what I want when the mood strikes otherwise.

Now if by chance I started buying stuff on the regular, and regular enough to justify the additional expense, then sure, it would make sense. As it is, I don't, so it doesn't.

Oh lord... I recall Dina. It was frickin' HORRID to work with... I think this was the last time I ever dragged it out...

FVerbaas posted at 6:57AM Thu, 02 July 2020 - #4393707

Other question why convert .png to .rsr when target app Poser5 accepts .png's? I started with Poser5 and .rsr was a thing of the past then already.

.png formatted thumbnails were usable way back when Poser Pro Pack (PPP) came out for Poser 4 in the late 1990s. This is the first time in all that time that someone asked to convert thumbnails from .png to .rsr, though.

Maconverter used to have that ability... too bad it doesn't exist anymore.

Wasn't .rsr just a cobbled variant of .gif or .tif? I can't remember exactly, but damned if I can't shake the memory that somehow renaming a file of a certain image type to .rsr would nominally do the trick.

EldritchCellar posted at 1:37PM Wed, 01 July 2020 - #4393230

So many community created extensions to Poser were written as windows only, as a former mac poser user with an interest in morphs and figure creation I always felt left out of all those nifty toys. I see no reason whatsoever, in terms of making 3d art stuff, to go back to Mac.

Fair call - I bumped back to 'doze mostly because when I bought this little beastie, I still traveled like mad, and since I didn't have the time/patience to Hackintosh something, and because Apple had some really crap options for GPUs on the latest (at the time) Macbook pros... yeah, I wound up buying an Acer Aspire instead, mostly for two things: its reputation for being not total crap (coughDellcough), and because it has an nVidia GTX 1060 (w/ 6GB of dedicated GPU RAM) on board.

I do miss the ol' Mac sometimes. My wife still uses it with zero issues at all, almost 8 years after I first bought the thing.. and I gave it to her in late 2018 after I beat the crap out of it on a near-daily basis. The newer macs (like my work laptop) don't quite have the same uber-high level of quality, but they still do okay.

Meanwhile, most PC-based laptops tend to crap out after 1-2 years (the trackpad is already dead on this Acer, but COVID says that my passport is staying idle for awhile still, so a plugin mouse works just fine for the time being...)

I'll third staying well clear of Dell. Better to build your own if it's gonna be a desktop.

As for OP? Integrated graphics do okay if you're using the CPU to render, and nothing else. HOWEVER, render engines are increasingly moving towards utilizing the massively CG-friendly firmware and instruction sets that GPU chipsets provide. Sure they can still shift to CPU if needs be (Iray does this), but pure GPU rendering on these render engines take only a fraction of the time that a CPU takes, and the results look way, way, WAY better for anything remotely 'realistic' in nature (and even does a bang-up job on cell- and toon-shaded renders.)

Long story short - get a decent GPU-based video card. It'll future-proof things a little for you.

Ladonna posted at 8:28AM Mon, 22 June 2020 - #4392685

Even when I ignore the whole rant from the user above, in one point he is right. Poser need a new lightning system. This actual one is outdated.

This is all bound to the render engine... and Poser, just like DS and most other hobbyist-level CG apps, have the render engine baked right into the application, which in turn means everyone just uses what's there. This has always been a bit of a bugaboo with me. I know DS can do it, and Poser used to do it (and likely still does), so here's your solution, folks:

If you don't like the lighting system, go get a better render engine that has a bridge/rig/plugin that plays nice with Poser.

I must warn you though - stepping into this world means you're taking on greater responsibilities, because the 'Make Art' button will disappear awful fast when you do this. However, doing it this way has the neat advantage of getting new and awesome features and performance updates as your fave render engine updates with new features and bennies. You also get the advantage of a faster pipeline, since the external render engine is doing all the work, which frees the UI for setting up your next scene. I did this for years with DS' 3Delight engine (by using the external free 3DL engine), and it's better than sliced bread...

Hrm.

Nearby Portland, OR is still locked-down (well, when they're not rioting... and the masks in that case are worn just to keep from being identified, so...) However, out here in rural Columbia County (~50m outside of Portland), few folks bother with the mask thing, and we're pretty much back to normal with only a few precautionary bits left. So yeah, no, I don't see masks as being a 'thing'.

They do wear them in Japan/China/Vietnam, but usually only someone who is sick will wear one (as a measure of politeness towards everyone else), and not the other way 'round.

My colleagues in India don't bother - masks are uber-rare out that way (you can get 'em, but not in a quantity that would allow for everyday use), and folks just use basic precautions like hand-washing and not touching face/eyes/etc. They did have some cities in lock-down out there (red-zone/green-zone measurement), but nothing that could be enforced too much, especially in the really big cities like Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, etc. My colleagues in Shanghai? Yeah, the less said the better - they avoided the crap that Wuhan had to endure, but at the same time everyone is nervous as hell that some indicator will require a Wuhan-style lockdown. Residents in every Tier-1 city fears it from the sounds of things, and Xi the Pooh is still edgy about the whole thing being (rightly) blamed on him and the CCP. Colleagues near London do the mask thing and are rather disgruntled about it, but won't say it too loudly... apparently they have a massive Karen issue (e.g. deviate even in the slightest from the official opinion or proscriptions, and someone will report you), and I found out via some very deeply-couched phrases and descriptions, in spite of the fact that they're all working from home. I'll know more tomorrow in my weekly w/ them, though.

So overall, I think the whole mask thing (no matter how cool and cyberpunkish you can make it) will likely die off as soon as possible.

I use an Acer Aspire 7 (Intel i7, 32GB Ram, GeForce GTX 1060, 2.5TB of combined SSD-based storage, 17" screen.) I spent $1800 for the privilege... two years ago. You might get something similar these days for maybe $1200-$1300 or so?

I bought a laptop because my company (until COVID showed up) made me travel a lot.

Expensive? Yup. Worth it? Yup. You get what you pay for.

My gaming laptop performs better than most common desktops. I abuse the unholy sh!t out of the thing, it went on the plane with me every time I boarded one, and yet it has, so far, held up like a champ. My previous laptop, a 2012-era MacBook Pro, held up through SIX YEARS of constant travel + rendering + whatever... and yet, my wife still uses it today. I paid $2000 for it (plus a couple hundred bucks or so for more RAM and a bigger disk) - which amortizes down to roughly $500/year. I think I bought new fans for it once too, but they were like $25 or so.

If I had stuck with $1000 laptops, I would have been forced to replace it every 12-18 months (because laptops generally aren't made for the kind of CPU/GPU abuse that CG art entails), which would have meant an additional $3,300 - $5000 above and beyond that $2k.

Trust me - save the pennies and buy quality - it will last long enough to pay itself back over and over.

Damn that was a lot of ugly.

(Don't ask. I need my hair done first - damned quarantine got the shiz long enough for me to credibly portray a Medieval Jesus at this point.)

The original generation of SSDs were pretty limited in lifespan, but TRIM was invented (also known as "wear-leveling") to make an SSD's lifespan competitive with that of a typical HDD spinning disk (and in some aspects longer-lived).

From a mobile-computing perspective, an SSD means longer battery life as well since you're not spinning up and spooling-down a typical HDD motor each time you want to read or write data from/to a disk.

And yeah, replacing an HDD with an SSD is a serious upgrade, even for older computers, since nowadays the CPU and RAM speeds of a 4-year-old computer aren't too much different than latest/greatest, but the I/O speed-up by going to an SSD will actually make an older machine somewhat competitive with a newer machine that uses a spinning HDD.

All that said, if I were buying a new machine (and later this year I may), my big focus will be on the GPU, full-stop. In CG, even the somewhat older CPU/RAM/SDD rigging will be more than adequate, but the big diff is in having a badassed GPU. This will speed up your UI if you're crazy enough to enable a GPU-hungry preview mode in the workspace, but the big diff is in cutting down render-times. If I get a laptop that replaces my current nVidia 1060 GTX @ 6GB RAM with a 2070 GTX @ say 12GB RAM, my render times would likely be cut in half, if not cut it down to an even smaller fraction.

(Example? Even now, I can dork around with the NearMe meshes in a simple scene w/ iRay preview in DS, and the render times are laughably tiny now, and the preview results are to the point where I could almost just take a screenshot w/o running a render and it would have the same level of quality considering their toonish skins.)

Anyrate, yeah, sink your ducats into the GPU... biggest, meanest one you can spring for. If you can get two and connect them viz. SLI or Crossfire, do that.