I'm old enough to remember those days.
Real Life we called it back then.

It wasn't bad: whoever had put it all together had done a half decent job - the lighting was good, textures were pretty awesome and most things looked pretty realistic, even without being GC'd.
Real Life had its disadvantages, though - it was pretty expensive for what it was and it was often difficult to get the People to adopt any pose you wanted, even if you rigged it carefully beforehand.

I always had that feeling that Real Life had a lot of potential but was just too difficult to use properly, at least for the sort of things I wanted to do with it.

When it was replaced with Poser everything became much easier. I found I could do all the things I wanted to do. Even though it's not as high-tech as Real Life, Poser suits me much better, I think.

I like the fact that Poser can be upgraded fairly easily too - you just need a few dollars. Upgrading Real Life required far more: a career, charisma, a personality, friends, enthusiasm, ambition etc.,. I don't know why it had to be so complicated back then. No wonder it's not so popular anymore.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3195529&ebot_calc_page#message_3195529

Strength in material based AO can be controlled using the technique described in the attached link.

I like your questions John so keep'em coming!

At least they encourage discussions which can't be simply answered by "switch gamma correction on" :-)

Count me in!

This should meet your needs:

http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/shop/itemdetails/-/?item=5685

Attached Link: Snarlygribbly's Snow Macine

I use Foobar 2000.
www.foobar2000.org/
It's primarily a media player, but does conversions too.
Free and easy to use.

You can download a Python utility to enable renaming of Material Room nodes from:
www.poseworks.com - you'll find it under the 'Python' category.

How quaint. I suppose it has some nostalgic value (glowing nostrils and all), but otherwise I can't see anything here that provides a compelling reason to waste time labouring with the Dork.

@Latexkuv: Your render of Posette does have a rather appealing face (I like it), but there are a lot of artifacts on the skin. Small lines are appearing on the upper neck (just below the chin), around the collar bone and generally on the chest. Very strange.

It's very unlikely that its a virus, despite comments above.

The vast majority of software malfunctions are caused by hardware faults (RAM etc.), misconfiguration, driver incompatibilities, incorrect access rights, shared files being overwritten and so on.

Many of these issues can be complex and hard to understand. It's much easier to just say 'it's a virus', but the chances are it's not.

Viruses actually tend not to cause any problems. It is in their interest to go unnoticed, not to attract attention to themselves by causing problems from which they don't benefit.

If you have removed all the preferences files as described above, and done a clean reinstall of Poser to no avail, then it is probably nothing to do with Poser which, as you say, was working recently. You need to look for other causes.

Something else on your computer system is causing the problem.

Check the system error logs. They may give a clue as to what application or module is causing the problem. Check the application error log as well as the System error log.

Have you updated your graphics driver or changed its settings? You could try switching off advanced features of your graphics card (hardware acceleration et al.) just to see if they are causing the problem. Even boot in Safe Mode so that your graphics driver doesn't load. This will help you to identify whether or not there is a conflict with your video driver.

Attached Link: How to light Poser props

I use this to create candles, lamps etc. which load with their light already in place.

See attached link for instructions.

@dphoadley
That's ripe coming from someone who's own work has such little merit you have to ask publicly why no-one's interested in it.

Luckily for you most people around here are much more polite than you are.

Quote: Snarlygribbly: All maps had been saved as Baseline "Standard"

Fair enough, if you're sure. I had exactly the same symptoms just two days ago. My new V4 character had black limbs! Spent several hours in frustration until I decided just to resave the texture map as baseline standard - and then everything worked. I was hoping the solution would be as simple for you, but apparently not!

Good luck!

Make sure your jpeg has been saved with either Baseline ("Standard") or Baseline Optimized as the format option (in Photoshop that is, other progs should have similiar options). If you save a jpeg as 'Progressive' Poser will get confused and render it as black.