Vince, that was the funniest thing I have read in a loooong time.

Where exactly did Karen even refer to your sexuality, much less call you "gay?" That's a hoot, pal!

All she did was tell you to lay off the Shift+1 keys. That's it. I don't think it was a lot to ask. Your writing is quite dizzying.

And stop lying. That's more annoying than the whining in the first place. You meant what you wrote in the first post. You didn't go to the effort of starting the 3,437th thread on the subject simply as "a joke."

If you don't feel welcome here, I am sure it has a lot more to do with your own behavior than anyone else's. Everyone answered your post, which is pretty much the purpose of a public message board. If you don't like the answers, that's fine, but don't get all hissy simply because people don't agree with your POV.

Leaving comments "to get comments" isn't really the point that was made. It's pretty much accepted that people go to each other's galleries when those people come to theirs. It's a give and take. It's not shallow, it's [i]courtesy[/i]. People have limited time to look at the galleries. I know, at best, I will look at a couple of pages of new images at a time, tops. That's when I even make it there. Usually the only images I see are people who I have added to my favorites list. Some of those people have commented on mine in the past. Some are those that helped me out in the forums. Some are those I heard about through the grapevine. That's just the way it works. If you don't like it, I don't know how to make you feel better about that.

Have a nice day!

Very cool. I love the skin work. A lot of jaggies on the resize, but I guess that's just the downside of shrinking. Very nice looking model though. Did you use shaders for the skin, or is that the result of a great texture map?

Glad this info has helped you out. Feel free to let me know if there is anything else I can assist with.

Lou

I like to get hits, but I don't care one way or the other. I make my art for my own sake. (When my computer is actually functioning, that is.)

Why do people get so concerned? If you don't get hits, then people may just not be interested in your work. Big deal. I don't care if someone likes what I do. I like what I like. You say tomato, I say, well, I guess it all types the same anyway, so bad example.

Seriously though, here is a good tip to get hits. Hit [i]other people's[/i] images. Make comments on other's hard work. You would be surprised how many people who you comment for appreciate it enough to go view your work.

Breast images may get you hits from people casually visitiing the gallery, but are those the people you actually want to attract? My opinion is that I want people who care about art to check out mine. Like ernyoka stated, I would rather 10 hits with 8 constructive comments, than 1200 hits, with no commentary.

BTW: You use the Post Filter I see. Do you see any appreciable difference from it? I have tried renders with and without it (I have tried all three types, and with each of the number options.) I really don't see too much of a difference. Nothing I couldn't achieve in Photoshop with a little bit of work. I'm curious to know if you see anything that makes this feature worthwhile. Of course, it's one more thing that can be turned off if it isn't doing anything you couldn't do yuorself with a little bit of postwork.

Quote - destro! BTW!!! Here is the other part of the render settings...can you help me out with this too????
:) Ariana

Those preview settings are actual for the Preview Render engine. I just discovered this engine not too long ago. I originally thought this was for the preview window's settings, but it actually isn't. If you hit the Render Now button on this panel, Poser will actually run a render in the preview window. This render looks very much like the scene in the Preview Window, but you can actually save this image. I know a lot of people had been looking for something like this. Amazingly enough, it was in Poser already.

Quote - I included a screen shot of my settings destro.
Yes, I see some of the problems I was having are in the following....
 
A) I WAS using Texture Filtering! But I was told by E-Frontier that this would help to show
more detail in my renders?! Hmmmmm.....

B) My Bucket size is/has been 48...What is Large? Up to 64+ or down to 32???
C) I know that removing backfacing polys help...but sometimes the background will suffer edge loss...is this common?

D) YES! I am doing these for Print work. I use 350-400 DPI. I have several that wil never see Ren Galleries or any other on-line gallery. Because they are for Poster/T-Shirt and Decal works. I minimum print at 11 X 17, and find that this render setting (*3600 X 2700) gives the best Up/Down quality. When positive that something is exceptional, I save out at the largest setting.

E) I do not surf or run other programs during renders...learned that from doing fractals! LOL!

F) I don't really know Python as well as i would like...maybe you could either IM me or post here how to manually merge the Shadows and the Main Render?

Lastly, Thank You very much fo all your assistance...I am Very serious about Poser6 and all the programs i own and are learning. But I do lack time in these mediums, so someone like yourself that has been working with them for a while is always valued as a mentor and advisor.
(((huggerz!)))
Ariana

Okay, let's try to work with this.

The first thing that popped out at me was the Min Displacement Bounds. If you aren't using displacement, then set this ridiculously high. A number like 10.00 should do. Low displacement bounds kill renders.

Texture filtering is only worthwhile if there are artifacts that the filtering can get rid of. (As far as I know. Maybe e-F is right, but I have yet to see any cases where it made a positive difference in the render, and it just causes so much lag it's not worth it to me. Maybe with your resolutions you need it, but give a test render a shot, and see if you can get around it.)

That thread I posted had a great writeup on Bucket Size. It even has a posting from an e-F rep, so the info is good there. My general rule with Bucket Size is to use your system RAM as a base for hte calculations. I raise and lower it in multiples of 32. On my last system I had 1GB of RAM. I used a bucket of 128 most of the time. If the render locked up, I would use 64, but most of the time 128 did the job. Given your system RAM, I would give 256 a shot. If you are still dealing with problems, drop it to 128, then 64, then 32. The higher setting should allow Poser to do less total calculations, since more data will be done in one spot, rather than doing the same # of calcs over a longer period of time.

I don't know about the background problem with removing backfacing polys. Obviously, since it's an option, there will be issues turning it off, but I don't know what they are, and have never ran into any myself. This is a judgement call for you I guess.

Ahh, print work. Yes, you have to make high res images then. That bites, but not much you can do there.

I usually leave my high end renders to run overnight, so I can do other things while I'm awake.

As for merging the renders, there is no need to worry about Python. All you need to do is save the two images (which the script does automatically, but will not save to PSD, so you may just want to handle it manually.) Once you have an all shadow render, and a no shadow render, take both images into an image editor that supports layers, such as Photoshop, and put them on separate layers. Then you can manually adjust the shadow layer to look as perfect as you want. I have found this to be a much better solution than having the shadows in the original render. You get so much more control over the fine tuning of the shadows, plus, you have the option of putting the shadows on multiple layers, giving you even more control over fine tuning.

Glad I can be of assistance. I was away from the Rosity forums for a while, since I was having severe computer problems. (I actually lost everything on two separate occasions this year. The last time, I just broke down and got a new computer. That was just a few weeks ago, so I have been in the process of getting everything in place to really dive back in and get busy again.)

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2350666&page=1

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2352997&ebot_calc_page#message_2352997

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=2349350&ebot_calc_page#message_2349350 (There is a file attached to one of my posts in this forum that might help you out.)

The links above should give you some answers Ariana. The first thread is the best one of the bunch IMO. There is even a response from an e-Frontier person!

As for suggestions, here are some things:

Use as large a bucket size as you can afford without problems, especially if you use the Mat Room a lot.

Keep removing the backfacing polys.

Run as few other apps as possible when running Poser.

Turn off Texture Filtering unless you have a very good reason not to.

A very important tip is to reduce your Max Texture Size to the highest part of your render dimensions. Ex. for your above dimensions, for the 4800x3600, make the Max Texture Size 4800. Any higher, and Poser has to figure out how to resize it before using it. It's going to drop it to 4800 anyway, so if you at least tell it in advance, it saves some work on your system. (That's a really big render though. Is it necessary? Are you doing this for print work? If you are only doing it to post online, you are probably overdoing it. Also, check your dpi settings. If your image is meant for the web, don't do more than 72dpi. More is just a waste of power.)

My last tip would be to render in passes. When you are using shadows, you are putting more strain on the system. The easiest way to allieviate some of that strain is to run a render as Shadow Only, then another with the scene minus the shadows. Then use an image editor to combine the layers. That last thread above should have the Python script I wrote to render to these layers automatically, but it's easy enough to just do it manually as well.

Your image doesn't seem to be that complicated, but your problems are probably related to texture size, rather than polycount. Hopefully some of these suggestions will help you out.

Poly count affecting renders is based on individual system specs. The more polys in the scene, the more powerful your system will need to be in order to keep Poser running. The poly warnings in the descriptions were simply put there to assure you know what you are dealing with before buying the product (or at least, that's what I assume, since I didn't make the package.)

As a comparison, I believe V3 base is about 8MB. Use that as a starting point to determine if you can fit enough of those objects in your scene without your computer choking.

Hope that helps!

Glad others are so happy to hear about this! One thing about this film that was already stated, it will be about Dragons of Autumn Twilight, but if successful, will determine the viability of making further movies!

There is a thought that it doesn't mean just the rest of the Chronicles, but ALL of the Weis and Hickman series! Legends of the Twins, Dragons of Summer Flame, and the absolutely fantastic War of Souls trilogy! (If you haven't read the War of Souls trilogy, I HIGHLY suggest them. After that, a series Margaret Weis is currently penning, of which two of three are already released, is the Dark Disciple trilogy. I won't ruin any storylines by telling anything here, but if you have yet to check them out, and are a DL fan, pick up these books. You can definitely see the maturity in the writing with these.)

Yes, I know, the lack of full CGI hurts a bit. However, they are saying it will be a hybrid of 2D/3D, so I assume there must be some CGI involved, which is quite interesting.

Have you had the chance to check out the comic? It was made by Devil's Due Publishing (http://www.devilsdue.net/) From what has been said, the same company that created the art for these comics is doing the art for the movie. I collected each issue of the comic, which was a 6 issue miniseries following Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Let me just say, the art was fantastic. It wasn't the sort of comic style you would associate with The Smurfs. The rating they are targetting is PG-13, so there should definitely be an edge. If you have a chance, check out the Devil's Due site and look at the Dragonlance comic art. It's really great stuff.

(I hope I am not angering anyone by posting this up here. I know it it so way off topic, but I am just really excited about it, and I figured there would be people around here who were old-school DL fans who have been away for so long, but would be honestly interested in hearing about this.)

Yeah I love the Legends series as well. I love anything with Raistlin in it really. I actually became a bigger fan of Mina in recent years though (War of Souls, and Dark Disciple series.)

As far as voices, there are only 3 defined so far. Goldmoon has been voiced by Lucy Lawless (of Xena fame) Micheal Rosenbaum (Young Lex Luthor on the Smallville t.v. series) will do Tanis, and Tass is being done by Jason Marsden (who I admittedly know nothing about.)

The official movie site is supposed to be updated as information is released, but since there are 5 seasons between now and the movie release, I'm sure there is quite a bit still to be ironed out. It seems like this has been in development all of this calendar year though, so there may be quite a few details already mapped out.

See, I knew there were other DL fans out there!

Boy, just to prove me wrong...

My hard drive is now reporting that a failure is imminent. Windows advised me to backup my data immediately. I guess that blows my theory on DISKCHK out of the water. (You were tight AntoniaTiger, sorry for doubting you ;-)

I'm a bit ticked off, since the drive is only a couple months old. Ah well. Maybe it's my excuse to finally buy a new system. I've had the current one for like 4 years now.

Richardson, yeah, if you have a friend who knows his/her way around a computer, let that person run all sorts of diagnostics. (Never hurts to have a PC wiz in your circle of friends.)

As for my typing, yeah, I type pretty fast. I 9 to 5 as a programmer, so I am used to typing a lot in short periods of time.

AntoniaTiger, what you say is somewhat true, but not always. My current drive has needed a few CHKDSK repairs over the past few months, and it's only a few months old. From my experience, it has a lot to do with I/O anomalies. With all of the I/O going on during a render operation, it could be the drives are just generating a lot of heat causing corruptions. (Besides, CHKDSK also finds file and folder corruptions, and fixes those too, and doesn't report what the errors it found and fixed were, so it could be just that.)

AntoniaTiger, thanks for that link. I have been thinking for a while about writing an app to free up RAM, and I never thought to look for a freebie app to do it for me!

Richardson, I have been meaning to contact you about your crashing problems. (I have been watching your issues on your gallery postings.) I have an idea for you to try before you do something as drastic as a Windows reinstall. (Keep in mind, I mentioned that it didn't actually help me.)

What you can do, and something I have done a couple of times to fix up my system, is to run a CHKDSK on your hard drive. I don't recall if you ever mentioned what OS version you are on, but CHKDSK is the replacement for the old ScanDisk Windows utility in versions up to, I believe, WinME.

What this utility does is checks the sectors of the hard disk, and tries to repair any problems it finds. You would be surprised to see how sectors get corrupted in day to day use of Windows. Using Poser seems to increase this "damage." (Note: damage is a terrible word to use here, because I don't want to make anyone think Poser is causing hardware problems for them. What I mean is that for whatever reason, that only MS can possibly know, significant I/O just freaks out drives. My belief is that this is directly tied to the defragmentation issues Windows has. Someday, MS will figure it all out, I hold that hope closely. Again though, Poser is not hurting your system. Windows file access is. And no, I am not a Windows hater, I'm actually a big fan, but these are the problems we deal with, and I don't sugar coat. )

So, to run CHKDSK, go to My Computer (not mine, yours :biggrin: ) and right click on the drive. Choose Properties from the resulting menu. On the popup, choose the Tools tab. The first option should be Error-checking. Click the Check Now button. The next popup will present you with options for the checking. Check off both options (Automatically fix file system errors, and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.) Chances are, you are running this utility on your primary drive. If that is the case, you will receive a message that Windows cannot run the utility at the current time. It will however set itself up to run on the next system restart. It will start automatically on the next reboot, unless when you reboot, you explicitly stop the process from running before it starts (which I don't suggest.)

My suggestion is not to run this unless you don't need the computer for a day. I have an 80GB hard drive, and it takes in the neighborhood of 16 hours for it to complete. (Keep in mind, this is doing some very low-level work on your hardware.) Expect to lose significant time on this process, but it is good to run it when you are having crashing problems. It could just be some data sitting on some corrupted sectors. When you run this, it will move that data to a clean sector, and fix the original one, thereby fixing up the disk.

If for whatever reason you can't run it this way (though I don't know why that would happen, unless you had a blue screen you couldn't recover from, which I have,) you can also run it from the Recovery Console.

The Recovery Console is a bit daunting if you have no experience with MS-DOS. To run it, boot to your Windows installation disk. When you get to the first screen with options, choose the option to Repair a Windows installation. Follow the prompts to enter the Recovery Console (I can't recall the exact key sequence to reach it, but it should be easy enough to figure out.) Once the console starts, you will be on a black screen with white lettering, very much like MS-DOS. If you type the word help, it will list all available utilities (though this isn't necessary, but you may be interested in the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR utilities, I was.) You can type CHKDSK /? (which will show you the parameters available to the utility. I believe the command you want to use is CHKDSK /F but I don't recall off the top of my head, so check to make sure by using the /? parameter first. Again, this process will take many hours, so be prepared to walk away from the system for a long time.

I know this is another long post, but hopefully it will help you, or anyone else, for that matter.

Pandorian, I really hope this helps you out. I'm glad it at least gives you some hope.

Again all, if any of these suggestions help, please bump this thread with your results, so others can benefit as well!

Well, here is something that may help you.

I have had the same sort of issues over the past few months. It is exclusively tied to the Mat Room, as far as I can tell. At one point a few weeks ago, I had a total system crash, which led me to run setup for Windows again, and overwrite all of the updates etc.

Fortunately, I didn't lose any of my data, except the Windows updates. Unfortunately, it didn't fix the problem.

So then I took another approach. I thought about it logically, and approached the issue where I thought it best served. It seems to be all about memory with large render problems. Obviously, many figures/props cause large render issues. However, wouldn't it also make sense for Mat collections to be an issue?

Looking at the raw text of a scene file, it shows that each node in the material room takes up a full 10 lines. Multiply that by however many nodes you have on each material in the scene, and you can imagine how much data you are dealing with. (This is just theory, but whitespace may also matter, and each node sits pretty far in on it's lines. 5 tabs in the scene I am looking at right now as I write this. The total size of this file is 17.7MB uncompressed, 2.3MB as a .pzz. It has 990468 lines of "code." No small file for sure.)

So what does this mean? Well, here is my working theory. Since this is all about data size, and obviously, all data must reside somewhere in memory, where is this data actively running from? Well, I have 1GB of physical RAM in my system, so that should tell me that the scene is fully sitting in my RAM, right? I don't think so.

Sure, in a perfect world, this scene file would fully reside in RAM, and should have no problems processing. However, Win2k takes something like 250MB of active memory just to boot. Then, I'm sure Windows has other things it runs in the background with available space as well. On top of that, once the OS starts, drivers load. Then, up come the TSRs, or Terminate Stay Resident programs. (Your little apps that run in your system tray, such as your anti-virus, spyware killer, IM clients, etc. You would be surprised how much room those "little" things take up.) There goes tons of memory down the tubes.

So get to the point right? Okay fine. Most people know that once all physical RAM is used up, Windows uses hard disk space for a "swap file," which simply simulates RAM to the OS. When writing to the swap file, or any disk space for that matter (including your Internet cache, that is a lot of space used up,) Windows uses the next available space on the hard drive, regardless of where that space resides.

Thinking about this, I decided, just for the heck of it, to run a defragmentation on my hard drive. My disk was an absolute mess! If you have ever run a defrag before, suffice to say there was a LOT of red in the analyzation.

So what happened? Well, in a word, nothing.

Huh? What kind of answer is that, you say? It's a GOOD nothing! So far, since that first defrag, about 2 weeks ago, I have run defrag about 5 or 6 times, each time, there was a decent amount of fragmentation. (Don't pay attention to the message that the drive does not defragging, it's like an anti-virus scan, no matter how many times you do it, it can only help, not harm, your system.)

Since that day, I have yet to have ONE lockup. No problems in the Mat Room. No problems rendering. Like I said, NOTHING!

So is this the right answer? I don't know. Am I safe from problems forever now? All I can do is shrug. Does it appear to me to have helped? The answer is a definitive YES!

Go ahead and give it a shot. It can't hurt, so no loss there. Here is a tip, locate, and download the trial version of Diskeeper. It is a very good defragmenter. Install and run it. Do this a couple of times in a row. Yes, it's a pain, but it will really clean up your disk, which is your ultimate goal here. While I didn't bother, you can also run it's boot-time defragger, which I have used in the past, and it's pretty good. Now I don't condone stealing software in any form, so if you don't want to pay for it after the 30 day trial is done, just uninstall it. From that point on, just use the one built into Windows. If you do this very regularly, the Windows one is very capable of the job. I have found the built-in version to be somewhat lacking when the drive is significantly fragmented already.

Yes, this has been very long winded, but I hope it has made some sense, and further, I hope it helps! I'd love for this thread to get some updates from those who try out my suggestion. Please share your findings, so we can all benefit. Whether your results are good, or bad, it helps to try to get to the bottom of the issue.

(Something interesting to note. I just found out this morning that Poser's Mat Room is a derivative of Pixel3D's Tempest shader. Who knows how the conversion from Mac, which Pixel3D is for, worked out. This is common problem in game programming. PCs are so varied from desktop to desktop to laptop, that it is wholly impossible to test for every possible configuration. That's why PC games so often need patches to "fix" where the same exact game runs on a XBox or Playstation without a hitch. Macs are basically like consoles. There is a specific design when you buy a Mac. It's going to have basically the same parts from one to the next. Think about how many different video cards alone we each have. I have 4 desktops, and a laptop here, and each has totally different parts running it.)

Okay, enough rambling. If you have read this far, thanks for listening. If not, you aren't seeing this anyway so :m_tongue2:

Later!