A gratuitous car

NikKelly posted at 9:32AM Tue, 23 February 2021 - #4413647

Yay !! I used to reckon Norton's took one entire CPU thread but, either is now more efficiently coded, or has learned to hide from 'Task Manager' ...

I stopped using Norton because it was a ridiculous resource hog.

ChromeStar posted at 8:20PM Sun, 21 February 2021 - #4413532

Well, that's random. Thanks for sharing the answer though!

Yeah, my thoughts exactly, but in case someone else experiences it, it might help! :D

randym77 posted at 10:16PM Thu, 18 February 2021 - #4413238

Some kind of rights issue, maybe?

Please elaborate.

randym77 posted at 10:12PM Thu, 18 February 2021 - #4413238

It's curious that both versions of Poser are affected.

Recently, I had Poser 11 crash mid-render, and there were all kinds of problems when I tried to start it again, including extreme slowness. I had to re-install it. But Poser 12 worked fine.

Yes. I thought it might be a graphics card issue. It WAS running hot (91c), and I cleaned it and have brought that down to 85 which is apparently normal. I uninstalled Poser from the drive it was on and reinstalled onto an SSD, and still both versions crawling. Completely inexplicable. I've seen total system crawling during virus infection, but I can still play online games at top performance, and use DAZ studio with no problems.

Not sure what would cause both versions of Poser to be so slow. Some kind of rights issue, maybe?

Y-Phil posted at 6:52PM Thu, 18 February 2021 - #4413210

A few days ago, I was playing with one of the worst windows features: its desesperatly bad integrated search engine. And I deleted the wrong folder in its parameters: the one containing all of poser's runtimes. The result: a complete slow down, up to the moment when the cache management had enough frequently used files...

I agree, the Windows 10 explorer is applalling. I'm constantly deleting stuff by mistake. I really resent having been strongarmed onto W10.

RedPhantom posted at 6:51PM Thu, 18 February 2021 - #4413194

I know this is a long shot. And I know there will be people posting that it's unnecessary and shouldn't help, but have you tried defragging your drives? don't do this if it's an ssd but hdds can get fragmented and even though there are claims that it shouldn't affect performance, I found out the hard way it can and does if it gets bad enough.

Yes, one of the first things I checked. But thanks for the thought.

randym77 posted at 10:31AM Thu, 18 February 2021 - #4413145

Have you tried deleting your prefs? I've found that's often a fix for a bunch of weird Poser problems. I recently had to delete my LibraryPrefs.xml file because Poser was soooo slow. (Poser will regenerate it.)

This post has directions:

https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2935248#msg4360115

(The information used to be on the Smith Micro web site, but like everything else Poser related, it's gone now.)

Oh, I was so hopeful that this might be the problem, especially as the program keeps forgetting its layout settings, but alas no. But thank you for the suggestion Randy.

ghostship2 posted at 7:23AM Thu, 18 February 2021 - #4413117

first thing to check would be your render cache. If it saves too many renders that will slow down Poser. I leave mine on 10 renders.

Thanks for the suggestion Ghost but I only have a few cached renders. Poser is so slow that if I select a body part on the mannequin, it's fully 5 seconds before the parameters panel changes to show the new selection.

ghostship2 posted at 9:32AM Wed, 17 February 2021 - #4412994

jeebus! Did I spell "enhanced" wrong? embarrassing.

Lol. Thank sfor the tips!

ghostship2 posted at 7:35PM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412981

here is another example of using an HDRI. First example the sun is to her left and bouncing on her shoulder. Middle, I took the same image and bumped up the exposure with Poser's post FX to about 2.7. The last one I rotated the HDRI so the sunlight is shining directly on her face. I like the middle one.

Thank you. This was using snarlygribbly's skydome correct?

hborre posted at 5:41PM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412972

That is exactly what ghostship2 is suggesting. A high-quality 360-degree panorama HDR provides a natural realistic lighting condition. That is what Snarly's EZDome provides, using a two-dome setup, one dome providing illumination and the other dome providing a background image. ATM, the image nodes in P12 are broken, they cannot project a background nor scene illumination. Until that is repaired, EXR files will have to do except not everyone have the software to convert HDRI to EXR.

Thank you. What do you mean by "the image nodes are broken?" In what way?

ghostship2 posted at 10:51AM Tue, 16 February 2021 - #4412779

the alternative is to use a dome and 1 infinite light for the sun.

Thank you for your helpful comments Ghost. Yes, I was using snarlygribbly's skydome, but of course the script doesn't work in Poser 12. :-(

You say that I should use the background as a light source. I'm not sure I'm understanding. HDRIs don't cast shadows do they? Are you talking about a 360 degree background?

ghostship2 posted at 10:12PM Sun, 14 February 2021 - #4407736

really digging the Post FX options.

How are they an improvement over simply changing exposure and saturation in Photoshop? Surely, it's better to render relatively flat rather than limiting your post editing range?

RedPhantom posted at 12:36PM Sun, 14 February 2021 - #4412739

larger area lights don't produce more light, they produce softer shadows so it looks brighter, but the non-shadowed colors are the same. The same with spotlights and point lights. If you were to get more light, the colors would start to wash out. That part isn't visible in the samples above because the figure is all white already.

That's interesting. So I wonder how large I need to make them to have the same shadow effect as an infinite light?