I have Shade but haven't played with it much. And besides, I don't run into problems speed-wise until I start to animate (I use Poser to make movies, not stills) and render the animations. I don't think Shade will help me there. I'll look at Pov-Ray.

Thanks, guys. Great insights, very on-point, but it may be helpful for me to be clearer what I'm up to: I'm a video person gone 3D. I do not use Poser for its original intent; i.e., to make static still images. I use it to create short 3+ minute movies, some with a cartoon look and some with as much realism as my Mac hardware can handle. I like Poser because it is focused on figures, and has such a enormous array of ready content that I barely have to mess with before using it. I use Poser's figures from P4, 5 and 6 and Daz's people, along and their various permutations, and modify them to the look I want, often to people I know personally. I find or buy pre-made clothing, props, backgrounds and environments, and deploy my characters in animated scenes and dialogue planned and previewed in FrameForge. Then I combine and edit it all in Final Cut Pro. When I'm working with higher realism, I have to render and export every frame in an animation one by one as a TIFF, and then drop them into Final Cut. What a pain! Poser's animation tools are barbaric and drive me nuts, its renders too slow (P7 will help me a lot). So how do I keep the figure tools and content that I love in Poser and get the animation tools and video-editor-style animation work environment I crave?

Apparently PhilC has an nifty morph eliminator, and a couple of complementary morph consolidators and reducers, as part of his Poser Tool Box. A couple of months ago I bought PhilC's Poser Tool Box, but had not really messed around with it until today. When I did, I discovered that -- among other great tools that I needed -- he has a couple of tools in it for both consolidating morphs, eliminating minimally-moved morphs (you can adjust what "minimal" is), and eliminating morphs set to zero in a figure. All as easy as button-clicks on a Python menu. I KNEW I had read it somewhere, and it wasn't just Acadia's and Angelouscuitry's thread. If you haven't checked out out, I suggest you do. I'm ever more impressed with the things that PhilC has come up with for Poser users -- a couple of his ideas will even be part of Poser 7 -- and I have most recently joined his forum. SS

Thanks for everything, Angel. Don't what I'd have done without your help. SS

Angel, I don't mind lugging around a few 30-50MB figures in a scene --it's the 150-200MB+ bubbas that really bog my system. These are the ones loaded with full head morphs, body morphs and character morphs (+/- 200 of them on a V3 that I've sculpted to my liking -- usually to look like a specific person where detail matters. Plus morphs for many of the clothes. Once done with those, however, I'd really like to keep most of the expression morphs in there because I will be using them in a cartoon-type animation where the figures will be "talking" via Mimic and may be changing expression several times during a 30 second scene -- I rarely have enough foresight to plot out precisely which expression morphs I will use ahead of time. I have a pretty top-end Intel Mac Pro with multiple procesors and plenty of RAM (another reason why I'm so eager to get Poser 7), so power isn't, or at least won't be, the issue. Ghostofmacbeth's comment concerns me a bit because I'm Mac. Other Python scripts have worked fine for me, but I certainly haven't tried every type. So let me ask this: IF you had to choose only one to use (maybe an unfair question), which would it be, and why? Thanks! SS

Angelouscuitry, I was trying to get your attention on another thread regarding a Python script and wanted to make sure I did, so I'll post my question here as well: will Ockham's StripZeroCr2 eliminate all zeroed morphs, or should I use your other suggestions in that regard? SS

Thanks, Angelouscuitry. A 20MB figure will be a lot easier to work with than a 180MB character, especially in animations! But what about Ockham's StripZero script? Is that what I think it is, and will it do the same job as SVDL's Remove Morphs? And can't I use Remove morphs alone or is it better or essential to use Spawncharacter first? SS

If you've seen the movie, you know that Daniel Craig makes a really fine James Bond, but he's certainly different than all the others -- he's the first Bond that swaggers when he walks (hips and shoulders move with each step). He's really more like a British Steve McQueen. Is he the best? I think each Bond (with the exception of Lazenby and Dalton) had or developed their own appealing style. Even Roger Moore had a style that fit his time period pretty well -- c'mon, all you/us boomers looked pretty cheesy in elephant bells and crop tops, too. And Pierce Brosnan, the "prettiest" and most polished of them all, would have been even better had he been able to accept the role ten years earlier but for a contract commitment to CBS. On the other hand, e-Frontier's depiction of its new spy figure that comes as part of Poser 7 content looks like more like Don Knotts than any other spy I've seen. Yeeeesh. And I thought P5 Don was a wuss. I like Daniel Craig a lot, and the movie suited him well, but a little less gratuitous violence (Harry Potter and Casino Royale with the same PG-13 rating???!!!!) would be welcome. I and my teenagers really don't need to see our hero spend 20 minutes getting his family jewels re-cut. SS

Yes, whoopy2k, knowing the approximate release date is kind of important to me. I have to decide whether to finish a project in P6 -- and sacrifice a lot of quality and features -- because P6 renders too slowly to handle the volume of frames I'd really like to include in the video (about 5,000 -- roughly 8 minutes). SS

I'm typing this while on my knees. God and e-Frontier have answered (most of) our prayers. Praise the Lord, pass me my catechism and credit card, and for Heaven's sake finish the code de-bugging by next weekend! P7 can't get here fast enough!!!! Now about that devilishly inept animation interface... Can there be a Reason 8? SS

Whether it's Reason 7 or not, the link in Sealtm2's message is for Reason 6. But I'll bet Sealtm2 is right. Makes sense.

Okay, okay. I found the thread -- it was posted more than 45 days ago, so unthinkingly I missed it on the first few forum searches I did. Acadia posted basically the same question as mine on August 6 of this year ("Zero Morph Dials") and got a flurry of answers. Here's the thread: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2769123&ebot_calc_page#message_2769123 Among a great number of suggestions ranging basically from "rotsa ruck" to miracle cures, Angelouscuitry seemed to offer the best, which I have taken the liberty of pasting below (there were many other ideas and opinions, naturally): Attached Link: Ockhams Scripts Hello Acadia, I hav'nt read every word of this thread, but the quick answer(I hav'nt seen) is that Ockham has a Python script to delete all Morph Targets with a value of 0/ It's a great script, you can slect any any combination of parts to effect, or all. The next best idea was the SPawncharacter script, but I'm not real sure it'll do everything I will also suggest. My, real, V3.PZ3 is 250MBs, and I managed to .ZIP her, with all of her textures and geometries..into a 12MB file... I see Figure > Spawn... has been mentioned, but it's not as easy as you'd think.

I'm wondering whether us Mac users have much choice but to wait for Poser 7 for high speed renders -- I believe most of the other programs mentioned as alternative render vehicles still run in Rosetta emulation mode on MacIntel machines. Do any of the other programs offer a Mac version with universal binary code, multi-processor support, 64-bit processing and the ability to utilize more than ! gig of RAM? SS

I'm with PapaBlueMarlin. SIMS is an apt analogy for iClone. But hey, I like cheap beer as well as martinis, but Poser is the much better value, dollar-wise. Yeah, Poser CAN be fun; iClone is fun like a video game or a kid's artist program. Poser is fun the same way Final Cut Pro is fun; it's the creative aspects and the results that keep you coming back. But I stand by my criticism of Poser's animation interface, which is simply barbaric. I'm a video person who migrated to 2D animation then to 3D. I think Creative Labs tossed in animation as an afterthought at some point and is now struggling with a legacy interface. Poser needs a visual interface for it's animation, where you can see the motion paths and the image(s) in the control window. Imagine a control window where you can see your scene, and track the animation paths of control points through 3D space. If not that, then there should be at least an onion-skin feature similar to 2D programs. SS

Warangel, that's a good characterization: iClone is fun; Poser is not. Poser is more of a means to an end, like Word or Excel. SS