Always good to have a well-designed "weapon of mass reduction". Kudos to the "secret" government subcontractors. :) BYS

Well, I find that to be strange since FAT32 only supports files up to 4GB and NTFS supports files much, much, much larger than that (the size is ridiculous). FAT32 is the one with the file size limitations. (???) Curious Labs Support FAQ: Poser can't render high resolution images. Error appears "Insufficient disk space to render". After some intense investigation we believe we have a work around. It turns out that Windows NT 4, 2000 and Windows XP must be using some space for the pagefile.sys file on the same partition that Poser is installed, to render large images. The pagefile.sys is the virtual memory or temp space for Windows. An approximate minimum would 10 MB. This amount might have to be increased for more complex scenes and animations. The maximum should be 10 MB or greater. To modify the Virtual Memory: Windows NT 4 = Right Click my computer. Click the performance tab. Click change. Click the drive Poser is installed on. Enter 10 in the Initial size field. Enter 500 or more, in the maximum size field. Click set. Click OK. Click OK. Click OK. Restart the System. Windows 2000 = Right click My computer. Select the Advanced tab. Click Performance option. Click Change. Select the drive Poser is installed on. Enter 10 in the Initial size field. Enter 500 or more, in the maximum size field. Click set. Click OK. Click OK. Click OK. Restart the System. Windows XP = Click Start. Right Click My Computer in the menu. Select Properties. Select the Advanced tab. Click Settings, next to Performance. Select the advanced tab. Click Change. Select the drive Poser is installed on. Click the Custom size button. Enter 10 in the Initial size field. Enter 500 or more, in the maximum size field. Click set. Click OK. Click OK. Click OK. Restart the System. Poser will now be able to render up to its maximum size of 4090 pixels x 4090 pixels @ any resolution BYS

If you mean a book that tells you how Poser takes the information from its files and creates figures, you're outta luck. There isn't any such information. Much of it seems to be dependent upon whatever algorithms they have used to implement each Poser feature - morphs, bones, cameras, lights, materials, etc. All I can say is that Poser does alot of the work "in the background" where you can't see how it is interpreted and constructed. There are a scant number of websites with good information from those who have had the wherewithall to examine the processes in Poser and correlate them to what appears in the files. The Alias|Wavefront .obj format is a general 3D object exchange format which is well-documented. Poser only uses this as a base for the geometry. The real magic is in the pz3, cr2, pp2, etc. files. As a for instance, there are a number of cameras set up in Poser. Some of them are keyed to certain body parts (by name). They work rather expectedly if you just rotate the camera around the target object. But try "point at" something else or, worse, "point at" and translate the camera and you get some complex rotations which are hard to deduce unless you examine many variations or happen to have the Poser source code at hand. Same goes for scaling body parts. Scaling the forearm, doesn't scale the entire geometry associated with the part, but instead does not scale the geometry at the interfaces to other parts and scales the rest nonlinearly. Again, the algorithm used is not easily known. I'd love to have such information myself... BYS

I've had no problems with cancelling renders in P5 since updating to SR 2.1. Maybe I'm lucky too? :) BYS

Aye, Lassie, there be a monster in the loch. :) BYS

Sometimes play music or have TV (CNN or whatnot) in the background. Amazing how much you miss when your concentration is on Poser. During long renders, I may play guitar. Who here has looked at the clock, it's 01:00, and said, "Just a few more tweaks"? Then you look at the clock and it's 03:00 and say, "It's time for bed, really gotta save and stop." Then... ;) BYS

It's either -5 or -6, the latter depending on whether we're in daylight savings time (which I believe we are). BYS

ernyoka1, nah. If it ain't broke, you ain't tryin' hard enough. Damn, where did I put that duct tape? ;0P BYS

Fishnose, I'll believe that. :) But, I've not had any success writing, let's say, 4.3GB (real GB) without the software complaining. Do you have the Sony DRU-500(A/AX/?)? They are nice aren't they? I'll tell you this, though. I can write K-hypermedia DVD-Rs on the Sony, but can't read them on the Sony. Read okay on other drives, but not the one that wrote it. So, I use better quality ones instead of that coaster-fodder. :) And, yes, I check my DVD archive after write against the data on hard disk for file count, directory count, and total bytes to ensure that everything was written properly. BYS

ockham has the best (and most widely used) solution. Parenting is a great method to "isolate" coordinates systems from the world coordinates so that rotation and translation can be calculated with respect to the parent system and not the world system. Otherwise, it get's really, really complex - just try moving and rotating along a vector that doesn't have it's start on the world axis (e.g.: a camera that you want to dolly along it's Z-axis, no matter what orientation it has to the world system), but using world coordinates. BYS

PabloS, actually it's only 4.2GB. The rest is for directory/file structure and the DVD format info (Joliet/ISO 9660/etc) - yes, that much!. You could probably overburn to get some more, but success will depend on how much information is needed for the structure - if you have loads of directories and files, it may end up truncating the DVD write. Back to the topic. Yes, I have my ".zips" organized by type, model, and specifics: Victoria 2.0 Character Hair Morphs Clothing Textures ... Props Furniture Weapons Clothing ... Hair ... Eyes ... Animals ... Then I just do an incremental backup of these (ones added since last DVD write) and write out a directory listing for reference. BYS

Yeah, that's a problem with the parameter lines: there are all too often multiple spaces between the parameter and setting (e.g.: locked 1). A better, but most annoying approach, would be to open the file and search for all instances of "locked" and then change the 1's to 0's manually where needed. The best approach would be to write a script or little proggie that does the work for you. It is actually simple to write one (I already have code to parse an entire .pz3 file) ;) BYS

Another rhetorical question: if one guy working alone can import the objects, textures, cameras, lights, bones, and morphs, why can't they do the same? Rhetorical answer: they don't want users to consider Poser as just a plugin for other 3D apps, I guess. I've already imported the objects, textures, cameras, and lights from a Poser scene into C4D without too much difficulty, but the latter two aren't included with the "official" plugin from CL. It's definitely not a translation issue from Poser to other 3D applications. They just want you to use Poser for Poser files and use other 3D apps for nice renders is my best summation. (Not for long!) :) BYS

Hey, I know Dave pretty well (well, from emails back and forth about his LW plugin and my C4D plugin and such). He's doing an amazing job of importing Poser everything into LW. Here's my speculation: the new plugins will probably export, along with what they export for 4PP, the dynamics (in animations only, which makes sense), new material nodes, and maybe some rudimentary "hair substitute" for Poser hair. Not certain if we'll get the real hair exported, but it'd be nice. As an aside, but still on topic, I find it disappointing that the 3DSMax and Maya (interesting) will be released first while LW, C4D have to wait (for who knows how long). Of course, this could be a blessing in disguise - re: Poser 5 initial release! ;0) BYS