Im back! I walked into the room and could hear the computer. I have been watching it now for over an hour while using the telephone. The CPU usage on task manager stays around 50% even though I am doing no work on the computer. I did as spothmann suggested. On "Processes" on Windows Task Manager Poser,exe is the active program and under CPU it has been running quite steadily at about 52%. I had pressed "close" under file last night and am doing no work on it at all although it is open. The only other processes that are running steadily are system Idle Process and Task Manager of course. Now and then a program will change from 0 to 1 very briefly. These were explorer.exe, and csrss.exe. I got suspicious that I have 4 svchost.exe processes showing on the task manager, although they do NOT appear to be running. From what I find on the internet it seems that I should only have one. Does this ring any bells? Obviously there could be a virus here for all I know, but I am up to date on all my virus scanners. Now the sound has stopped as I was typing, after well over an hour, and I did nothing to stop it. Poser.exe has dropped down to 8-15 so something is still going on even though I am not using it at all. lsass.exe goes to one now and then. But at least the sound is off. Should I mention that I have hogsoft, and it says it is always ready to go. I don't know what that means! Would it be part of the Poser.exe file?

Thanks Garth that must have helped. It did not do much right away. I had to fiddle with a lot of other things and I can't figure out what else I did right. But I got a picture out of it that I feel I had some control over. I noticed somewhere in the tutorials about setting up "the gain" in the gradient editor. I could not find "gain" to experiment with. But I did move up "amount" to 1 and maybe that helped. Hard to say. There are so many permutations and combinations possible and I am quite new at this. It is difficult to guess what does what. I still have to learn to save. When I saved the parameters it only saved the object and its colors and not the background. I guess I should have saved the background separately. Not that it was hard to make! But for future reference, it seems that scenes do not save as a unit as is possible in poser or vue. Phil

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12416&Form.ShowMessage=2100224

Thanks again for your help. I am doing pretty well with Apophysis. I went and bought Xenodream and am also trying to work with it. But I have run into a problem with the tutorial that comes from the company in the help file, and made a new posting about that, hopefully to attract the attention of Xendream afficionados. http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12416&Form.ShowMessage=2100224 If anyone has any insights, I would appreciate it! I have started over several times with this tutorial and always run into the same problem. Phil

Thanks xenodreamsoftware. So if I understand correctly all your own excellent posts were rendered in xenodream itself. They are not 3d objects exported to other programs. Then, if I want (and I do) to export a XD obj to poser or vue, I would have to figure out how to testure it myself in poser or vue. Right? I have never used the UV mapper, but I suppose I could learn if I thought it would do what I wanted. Do you know, would that be difficult? I am not great at this stuff. I am enjoying playing with Apophysis,which I just got a couple of days ago, but I will also certainly want to buy Xenodream if I can retexture objs easily in another 3d program. I might get it anyway. You guys are right, these programs are very different! I have also played with fractal explorer, which is great fun, but seems very different from the two that we are discussing here. Thanks again also to Fran for the tips on Apophysis. which has been fun. I also saw your tips elsewhere for reducing the graininess, which so far for me has been a limitation. I don't ALWAYS want it there. I have been able to reduce it significanly in display, have not tried high quality renders. "Sample density" in the help file does not show up in the options box in my version (the latest) as it says it should and so I have not yet figured out what they are talking about. And they don't indicate what the possible range is anyway. Phil

Thanks very much, Fran. It seems to work, and your tutorial is great. You are right, I have to make sure I also get exercise and rest. This could be addictive. I didn't get out into the REALLY remote parts of WA, but enough to see a lot of natural beauty. And Perth was just charming and comfortable then. Reminded me a lot of southern california where I was raised, but without the crush of people and all the traffic. And of course we did not have your spectactular wildlife. Phil

Thanks, Fran But I still have a couple of questions. I went to the Apophysis website and downloaded 2.02. But I have not installed it because windows tells me it may not be safe because "the publisher could not be verified." Does this sound suspicious to you? I have not seen it before. Another question is that I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Apophysis can only run as an add-on to UltraFractal, which must be bought. Does that sound right? I guess I don't want to install it unless I first decide to buy ultrafractal if that is the case. I have the impression that xenodream does not make flames, as I am beginning to understand them (I hope). Way back in 1979 I spent a month in Perth and got out and about in W Australia and loved it. Do I understand correctly that you are lucky enough to live there? I live in Minnesota , USA, and it is a very nice place in many ways, but I would take Perth of 79 if I had the choice.

Okay! I guess you mean where it says "processes" on task manager. I may have to wait for it to start acting up. Thanks.

Spotmann, I am not sure what you mean. I am not a very computer savy person. I do have something called pboost http://market.renderosity.com/softgood.ez?ViewSoftgood=9540 which is a sort of index maker. Is that what you mean? How long does it run? It will seem to go on and on until I stop it. It irritates me. I suspect that you are correct that there is hard disc activity involved and I would guess that this is not good for the computer, and that is why it irritates me. But now I could leave the computer alone for hours and there might not be a problem. Then maybe when I come home tonight it could be making noise.

Shogakusha I think we are not talking about the same thing. My problem is not that the processor will not go over 50%, it will do that in bursts during a task. And often it is running down around 10% or so. The problem is that I may walk into the room with my computer at 4am because I can't sleep, or some other time, and I can HEAR the computer being active. Then I check the cpu and it will be active at around 50% or so, but I am not actually using any programs!! Then if I close down each program that is open, like e-mail, poser, word, etc. it turns out to be Poser that was making the sound and running the cpu high. But this does not happen all the time, just often. For example right now I have poser open but I am not using it, and also Eurdora e-mail, and even a couple of websites. And I am typing to you, and yet the computer is quiet and the cpu is jumping between 4% and 18% only. This morning, though when I got up I heard the computer being active and checked and the cpu once again was being used at around 50% even though I had not used it for hours.

I press alt/control/delete and windows task manager comes up and then I click on the "performance tab and it shows cpu usage and a graph of usage over the last few minutes. While using, it jumps around of course. But not necessarily enormously higher. I should say that Poser is not ALWAYS running so high while idling. It just does it sometimes. I can try removing the dork. I have sometimes done that in the past, and I can't remember why I prefer to keep him in. But the problem with misloading is not just speed. It loads something like figure/chest, but there is no figure at all, and then I know from experience that nothing will work right and so I have to shut down the computer and start over once or twice. Again, this does not happen each time, but maybe 1/3 of the time.

Well, now I am having some problems. I save new (composite) figure (V3 with M2 genitals and invisible M2 body) and when I try loading it again from the library I get missing body parts. So I guess I have run into some sort of crosstalk problems. Maybe it would be better if the second M2 figure were not there. I'll have to work on this when I have time. Any suggestions?

I got curious and looked in the hierarchy editor. M2 is there except everything has been made transparent except for the gentials by using dalinise's system. Easy to apply, though, and works fine with her texture. The fact that both figures are there may be good to know if problems pop up down the road, but I don't know what they might be. I wonder if the computer works much harder to process all the extra invisible information,or if it is blind to it. And would it be enough work to make any difference? Anyway, interesting.

I e-mailed dalinese and got a quick reply with a tutorial. It is very easy. Basically just load v3 srI and click on the morphs in the new package in the pose file. That gives the male body and texture. Then load M2 on top of v3 and click on the genital item in the same pose file. That transfers the genitals to v3 and removes the rest of M2. Then move the genitals slightly and parent to v3 hip. Looks good.

Thanks for the other suggestions.

Message edited on: 11/21/2004 18:57

Dear Vendors, The true horror stories are only things I read on the web, and lots of them. My own problems seem minor compared! But let me elaborate a bit, as best as I can remember FOR THE VENDORS'sake who ONLY use Paypal, if there still are any who only use Paypal (and it looks like ONLY using Paypal may be a thing of the past, but I have not made it a project to check and update.) Some years ago I tried to sign up with Paypal because of a 3D vendor who only would accept Paypal or personal checks. Somehow or other I botched the application. I was quite new to all this stuff. My application got rejected even though I have excellent credit in real life, because it was incomplete. Then I could not get Paypal through their automated system to correct the problem and let me finish the application and I could not seem to find a way to talk with them directly on the phone. For whatever reason. I do not remember if a phone number was available then. Their automated system would not let me simply put in a new application. So I had to mail vendors who only used Paypal checks, which was a real pain. Meanwhile Paypal kept sending me statements about this and that and reports about my account status. But I did not have a working account!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So all this was and is junk mail so far as I was concerned. I gave up and tried to get Paypal to just take me out of their system entirely to try to put an end to the junk mail. But nothing I tried, e-mails, "click this link to unsubscribe"-types of options, seemed to work. As I recall part of the problem is that their computer thinks I have an account, but I don't have a password to get in and change anything because they denied me an account!! Of course, after awhile I did not want an account or anything else to do with them, except get out. Finally a few days ago after yet more "junk mail" I turned to google to see if others had had any similar problems and had found ways to escape from Paypal. Instead I ran into website after website that had been set up by groups of people who felt that they had been very seriously burned by Paypal and were trying to take action. It makes me nervous to think that they have any data on me in their system at all. Again, my personal problem so far at least has been comparatively small. But from what I have seen and experienced I feel very sorry for artists who want to do business with a vendor and get involved with Paypal. I have not noticed if there are still vendor's who ONLY use Paypal, but IF there are I urge them strongly to give their customer's more payment options like Visa and Mastercard. It seems that some like BBay have now created more options, Visa etc. So maybe being trapped with Paypal if you want to do business with a Vendor is a thing of the past for the computer arts community. I hope so. PERSONALLY, If I were a vendor I would not have anything at all to do with them. But of course that is easier said than done. I imagine that a lot of people use paypal simply because they use ebay and have not had problems with paypal, even if they also have "real" credit cards. I wonder, though, if it would really hurt business to drop Paypal. I guess for vendors it comes down to personal circumstances and feelings whether to drop them entirely. But anyway, you have my two cents.

Thanks for the interesting comments. I had already gone ahead and deleted the messages so I can't check to see if they were authentic or not. But the telephone number should help. I'll try that.