No, I realise that, but by embedding a club badge into the files, it reduces the risk of other sites stealing my work. Also, it's the little touches that make the difference. What if Dreamworks said, "You don't need to texture Shrek, people will be listening to the jokes..."! I had hoped that the export process would retain the material settings, which would have prevented the shiny model surfaces. I don't enjoy working in Caligari in the slightest and I don't want to spend one nanosecond longer than I need to working with it.

Hiya, Bryce can only render panoramas - but thanks anyway.

Nope. Just sick of the whole attitude here, where many people seem to view Renderosity as the bargain basement store of the Internet. Take LadyBea32's recent summer textures - not nearly big enough to wrap around an entire item of clothing, not tiled, and looking at the previews, the materials are not even straight when photographed. How useless is that? It's bad enough having to do all the tiling myself, but having to first repair poor photography is unforgivable. Squaring up fabrics before photography is one of the challenging tasks. Is Renderosity going to become known as the marketplace for the rubbish that people have no hope of selling elsewhere? Jeez, how about a bit of minimal quality control here?! When even the vendor's preview pics show the glaring flaws in a product, you should not be lending validation to that product by allowing them to sell it through you. Your terms for retailers talk about products being checked before acceptance, which implies to the potential buyer that you are implicitly adding your stamp of approval to those products that do make it to the store... I get fed up having to work out from often deliberately vague product descriptions and pictures, which ones are going to be worthless and which are not. Your low levels of quality control tarnish the entire marketplace by association.

Aha, I've discovered the problem with the body texture - I had the map colours inverted so the texture was literally bulging at the seams. Still no solutio to the Armour of Ages mis-mapping though. Thanks folks. Interesting picture idea laverson. Maybe someone should tell Mike that there's skin cream to deal with that sort of thing nowadays? ;-)

I don't think it's even finished yet. To be honest, I bet that you could learn the cloth or hair rooms in five minutes once you were shown how.

Well I definitely think it IS worth it. With all of its many bugs and quirks, Poser 5 offers enough major workflow and functional enhancements to justify the cost. For me, the new Material Room, and the enhanced interface justifies the cost, let alone the other good stuff like the hair and cloth rooms, displacement mapping, etc.

That's nice. Now to figure out a way to simulate depth fading...

Curious WILL be at DAW, but sadly Kupa has had to cancel. I think the German guys have a stand.

Thanks all, seems I'm not the only to suffer, nor am I the only one who found John's technical support somewhat lacking. John, the reason I stopped mailing you for support was that you were so rude on one occasion, that I lost heart in the continuing struggle. It amazes me that the program can have undergone so many revisions and still have such basic errors. And for the record, I'm using v2.5.0 However, I will now consider the advice I've been sent about requesting a refund...

Excellent points LG. I would add that I'd like the option to mark objects as "interested" without putting them in my shopping cart. My desires are far greater than my wallet, and some things have to wait months before I get around to buying them, and I often forget stuff once it's no longer current. I'd like to maintain a list of everything that interested me, with no urgent time limit. I constantly use my shopping basket as a to-do list, but it's not ideal because, as you point out, you have to clear everything out to make a single purchase.

Well JB, Since wrote my last happy post, I've done things this weekend with Poser that I never dreamed possible under Win98. I've loaded over a dozen hi res textures complete with bump maps, simultaneous. I've got half a dozen mike/victoria models loaded, with clothes. I have buildings, props and 3D world set - all without 1 single crash. My machine has less resources than yours. I'm very happy with Poser since Win 2k. Good luck with your system. Mat

Mark, We're having this same conversation in another thread and I have good news - go read my latest comments at http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=385439 Where you'll read a solution that doesn't involve sacrificing texture quality. Good luck Mat

Okay, well in reponse to the comments from all the people here, I've finally bitten the bullet and installed Windows 2000 on my main PC, overwriting my Windows 98 installation. I've resisted the move in the past because of the trouble getting Windows 2000 compliant versions of all the programs I use regularly... Anyway, having spent the afternoon downloading Win2k drivers for my hardware, and installing the operating system, I can say unequivocally that Poser runs VERY considerably better!!! In the course of my job as a computer journalist, I had already noticed a massive impovement in 3d performance with every single graphics card tested (I recently benchmarked 10 of them under 98 and Win2k using both OpenGL and DirectX benchmarking software - see my review in Computer Arts). This alone had been tempting me to make the change, but as I have had a generally good experience with Win98, the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the aggravation of upgrading. Now, I'm delighted to have made the switch. For my test image, I loaded the ornithopter (which I've never been able to render except on freshly booted machine), textured mike, untextured mike, textured demon, textured mikey, textured victoria and P4 man. The program still took as long (if not longer) than ever to load the characters, which was only to be expected, but the really excellent news is that the scene rendered first time, even with all these models and associated textures. This only goes to confirm, as far as I'm concerned, that it was the program's interaction with the Win98 memory system that is at fault. I did try manually setting virtual memory settings under 98, but this introduced additional instability to lots of other programs, and frankly, shouldn't be necessary. Anyway, I'm delighted that the program is now running well. I don't have as much memory as some of you power-hounds, but I'm now getting the sort of performance from the program that I've always felt I deserved. In addition, my other 3D apps and games run much faster. Thanks to everyone for your useful comments.

No offense taken, and I'm sure open-minded to all and any possibilities, but I've had dozens of machine configurations and Poser 4 has been lousy with all of them. Of course, I've considered Curious' tech suggestions, but the program performs as badly with a fresh install on a brand-new machine, with the latest drivers, as it does on something less pristine. I don't like to be suspicious, but in my experience, software vendors ALWAYS blame everyone except themselves, and hardware vendors always blame the software people... I'm sure no Poser expert, but I'm reasonably competent with PCs. The fact that this is the only program that shows such poor performance definitely makes me point the finger back at Curious. Thanks for your suggestion though..

Unfortunately, Poser 4 has always been flakey about multi-model scenes, or characters with hi-res textures. It doesn't seem very well written from a technical perspective, and like the PC's memnory architecture itself, Curious has gone too far down their current route to do an about turn now. The mere fact that the program doesn't support OpenGL/DirectX despite the fact that the rest of the 3D industry depends upon them for acceptable 3D performance, tells me all I need to know about Curious' software development team (well, Metacreations team but, you get the point!). Since Poser 4 came out, I've used it with probably 8 different motherboards, 20 graphics cards, four types of memory, numerous software configurations, but always Win 98. It locks up with every single configuration, so we can definitely rule out the motherboard, graphics card, driver possibilities, unless it fails to work with EVERY card and mobo on the market... I love the program dearly, but I get sick and tired of pressing the CNTRL -R keys never knowing if this will be the render that requires a restart. The problem, if there is any doubt whatsoever, is that the program does not return RAM back to the OS after each render, or after models are deleted. After a few renders, your memory has been completely munched and the only choice is a reload. The mere fact that you can reload and continue without restarting windows, seems to me to demonstrate very clearly, that it's Poser's interaction with Windows memory, rather than Windows' memory handling, that is the fault. If you require further proof of the program's instability, (as though any were needed!), loaded a couple of other program and leave them loaded in the background, then see how much quicker Poser locks up!!! Pro Pack was great, but I'd have settled for stability, 3D card optimisation and a real-world co-ordinate system in place of all the other stuff!