Successfully completed my pre-order for Poser 6 SE.

I do have a few questions:

1. Shade LE download link is already available. Should I download Shade now and, if so, will that make the payment go now (a partially filled order) OR will Shade be updated for Poser 6, in which case I ought to wait for the Poser 6 release?

2. Is this free version of Shade LE upgradeable to the Shade Standard version for the usual LE to Standard upgrade price?

3. I have not seen any mention of compatibility with Poser 5. Will everything in Poser 5 work directly in 6 (sorry if I missed this information anywhere). Will my runtimes and PZ3 scenes be available/usable in Poser 6?

4. I have actually upgraded my Poser 5. When I install Poser 6, will I still be able to run Poser 5 as an alternative to 6 (should the need arise)?

Thanks in advance of a reply. I guess I am set to find out all the answers in due course due to already having flashed the cash. Oh well!

Regards from Jovial.

Hi all,

It is a nice theory that those of us who have SEEN the messages warning of blocked intrusions into our PCs have actually already been compromised BUT this neglects the following facts:

• Hackers don't attack sites, Zombie (compromised) PCs and servers do.
• I am running Symantec Antivirus + Firewall, AdAware and MS Antispyware (all updated, usually every day). The problem really does not appear to be at my end!
• My IP address is dynamically assigned so the chances of getting a spoof TCP attack to me, supposedly from marketplace is pretty tiny.

Can't someone wake up a techie at R'osity?

Jovial.

My firewall has also just blocked the Xmas Scan

Symantec Personal Firewall reports:
Details: Attempted Intrusion "TCP_Xmas_Scan" against your machine was detected and blocked.
Intruder: market.renderosity.com(66.18.106.198)(http(80)).
Risk Level: Low.
Protocol: TCP.

Not good. Probably not a good time to go shopping at R'osity.

Regards,
Jovial.

Hmmmm. Wonder if anyone at CL is listening.

Poser 6 Needs:

• "Cancel" that works 100% of the time.
• "Undo" that works at all (and multiple undo too).
• Dynamic hair that behaves as I want rather than as it wants.
• Use the graphics card GPU if there is a decent one connected. 16 texture pipelines are likely to help speed-up the rendering.
• Mesh movement so that I can get any article of clothing to conform to any figure (as long as it starts outside).
• Seriously fast rendering BUT not at the expense of image quality.
• Point source lighting.
• Collision detection that works reliably and quickly.
• Continuous monitoring of user interaction even when poser is busy at some task.

Poser 6 DOES NOT need:

• Content lab, advertising or pop-ups.
• BUGS.
• Any crappy freebie figures.

Thanks for listening,
Jovial.

Thanks Kirwyn for the bit about collisions. I had not realized that collisions required ticks for all objects involved. Doh. I actually was saving the .PZ3 (and associated .DYN file) correctly BUT the dynamics file is being loaded and somehow corrupted when I load the PZ3 back in. Regards from, Jovial.

Hi,
There have been a lot of threads covering this issue in the last two days, so it is worth looking back through the last couple of pages of postings.

You need to go to Daz at:
http://www.daz3d.com/

Victoria 3 and Michael 3 base figures are free and are listed in the store (By-figure -> Victoria 3 / Michael 3), so simply add them to your shopping cart.

You should be able to download them once you have registered as a customer.

The free V3 and M3 base figure packs do not include the head and body morph packs (used to create different body shapes) or any textures (that make the skin look more real) so you need to consider if you want to buy these. Daz are now doing a combined V3/M3 Head and Body morph pack for about $43. The morph packages are fairly vital but you can get great textures here at Renderosity. Most character sets will make use of the morph packs.
Regards from,
Jovial.

Thank you very much. This was just what I was looking for to try out a new pose/render idea.
Happy New Year from,
Jovial.

Hi Robo2010,

To answer your question: You bother because you enjoy creating something which is unique to your vision, using tools that are great fun and challenging to use. I also hope you continue to do so.
Your work is, IMO, really good or excellent in many instances (obviously this comment is prejudiced by my likes and dislikes about the subject matter of your renders) and technically very good in most of the renders.
You seem to be getting (I guess on average) about 6 comments and rankings and upwards of 300 views per render. Given how many posts there are per day, I would think this would be quite usual and nothing to be disheartened about.
There also seems to be a hardcore of gallery viewers who regularly comment on pictures in the first 48 hours or so and then the picture is generally lost in the archives.
I must admit that I am very bad at commenting on the work of others because I still think I am a beginner at Poser and hence somehow unworthy to comment on the work of others. Also I would say that it takes quite a while to check through all the new Gallery posts and much more time to actually comment on the better work.
I would guess that many of the really highly viewed and commented images are for some of the more established/excellent artists who other members have added to their favourite artists list.
To give you one little bit of wisdom that works for me: Judge comments made about your work based on the skill and experience of the person making the comment. Sometimes having one good comment from a great artist is just the BEST experience. Numbers are irrelevent.

Regards,
Jovial.

Hi,

Correction about the memory limit of 32-bit Windows.

The 2 GB limit that people know of in 32-bit versions of windows is "per-application". I am not sure if the OS (e.g. Windows XP) can see 3 or 4 GB although the theoretical maximum address range is 4 GB. The extra memory (beyond 2 GB) will be useful since some of the OS tasks can use this memory and leave a full 2 GB for poser (if poser does not have some internal limitations on memory addressing range).
The RAM doesn't make poser faster, it just makes it able to render more complex scenes, with more polygons and larger textures. However if you don't have enough RAM and poser starts paging working memory to disk then the rendering will slow to a crawl or possibly halt.

A fast processor is essential for big complex renders using lots of figures because poser seems to do all of the hard work in the CPU (processor) and makes no use of advanced GPUs (Graphics Processors) that have multiple pipelines and special floating point processing support for texturing and ray-tracing.

Poser has been reported as being not very clever about dynamically sized paging files so many Poser users recommend having large fixed size page files of approximately 3 GB.

If you want to future proof your system then you might want to investigate the AMD 64 bit processors which should be supported late next year by a 64 bit version of windows. We can only hope that Curious Labs build a 64-bit version of Poser 6 too and then the memory-rich can start doing amazing scenes with 30 or so fully-clothed Victoria 3s infront of a temple.

Also to answer your other points: Poser likes its runtime folder in one place (I believe) but you could save your downloads and pz3 scenes on another drive. I don't think that there are any major differences between XP home and XP pro that would affect Poser performance.

Regards from Jovial.

Hi,

Check out Pretty3Ds excellent free products which include a lantern (i.e. flashlight) at Renderosity:

http://www.renderosity.com/freestuff.ez?Form.Contrib=pretty3d&Topsectionid=0

I think the flashlight comes with some poser lights but I can't remember.

I think Dr. Geep's tutorial about lighting seemed to cover the illumination issues.

Regards from Jovial.

Hmmm. Can't vote for my own so:

Dorkati - 3 Points
weezie - 2 Points
MorriganShadow - 1 Point

For anyone that is interested - my thoughts on the images I voted for.

Dorkati : Excellent scene. Really well thought out and posed. The lighting is excellent too. Lots of feeling in this image and nice attention to detail.

weezie : This is just way too cute! Great scene with loads of attention to detail with background, plants, bubbles and seabed. My personal preference is for a little more life (live creatures) in the scene - maybe some-one or thing looking in on sleepy sea-horse.

MorriganShadow : I am not really a great fan of cartoon-style characters like the girl or laroo, etc, BUT I like what has been done with this scene and the light gels work really well.

I'd also like to give an honourable mention to Dayna2 who used great lighting and created a really nice scene. I was just a little concerned about the slightly too-dark shadow of the foreground pillar. Otherwise great and a very-near contender for my votes.

Doh! Sorry! Thank you for the advice. I had actually downloaded the mentioned items but I did not know what they did (because the text on the download page is a little uninformative) and I have not tried them out yet. Time to squeeze some more into my runtime. Thanks again from, Jovial.

Hi,
I did the rounds with amazon.com and amazon.co.uk too and it was never clear why the US price was so much lower than in the UK.
You can, however, buy a full Poser 5 boxed product (for $199) from
http://www.pcconnection.com
Home and office site (search for poser)
They are US based but happily ship to europe for approx $30 and you will have to pay a small import tax too.