I had similar problems (exe does not run) last time. I never tried explorer (too risky to use for anything other than win updates :) They sent me links the next day, which worked fine (I think I bought them on a monday) First time I have ever had a problem of that sort. jb, I think the new store requires a login. eric

Frankly, with 512, I think the CPU is a more likely source for improvement. Thats 60% increased throughput. While the RAM is a 100% increase, you have to assume that you are needing 1G to run poser for that to benefit you 100% of the time. Unless you are always doing some huge scenes, 512 should be fine. I have 1G (2 512 sticks) and I think that with my machine (750mhz) the second stick is a waste. Pulling it out changed nothing about posers performance (I even got silly with the content) Eric

Be careful you are not trying to "Tailor" to a charactor whose shape is due to Magnets. Spawn morph targets prior to running tailor. Scaling might cause a problem (it used to, but it might have been fixed). Make sure you aren't trying to tailor to a shape that relies scales other than 100% (you can scale the garment yourself) eric

Well, I like poser for the the bendable folks (figures) and some of the really great stuff you can get for really nice prices. I prefer rendering in vue (because I like out of doors scenes), but I want a good platform to manuever a figure(s) into an attractive pose that works with the scene I'm generating elsewhere. Although I am far from it, I do intend on working on some animations now that mover 4 has been released, and that certainly applies to poser. I don't have P5, and am not sure when I'll start planning an upgrade. There are some really great things that I have yet to learn about P4, so perhaps I will wait a while before jumping into the fire. Eric

Heh, I should have at least noticed that I had spelled viola (the oversized fiddle) I played music with a guy who played one of those:) Thanks for the spelling lesson. It didn't look right, but I couldn't tell why not and my spell checker (open office) wasn't able to offer me anything better. eric

I agree with all those who recommend 2000 (or XP). I use 2k at home and work, and have only a few hangups a week (mostly with microsoft products....believe it or not) You might check your drivers and consider doing a quick re-install of windows if you must stay with 98 (just pop the CD in and start the install). Exceptions generally mean that something did something really bad. If poser was doing this directly, those who are using non NT machines would be reporting core dumps and other types of errors. Most likely, a dll is out of date, or corrupted. Frankly, for the $150, you really can't find a better upgrade (unless you have hardware that doesn't work) I think TigerDirect had OEM win2k for sale for about that much. Not sure how easy it is to find it anymore (but you don't have to worry about MS spying on you, nor the registration limit, etc that comes with XP) eric

The best solution, assuming that the right extensions are on, is htaccess file (if it is available). You can use it to determine who has rights to get into a certain directory, and prompt for a password (one of your making) also, security through obscurity can help, in this case. You could use very criptic names for subdirectories where you store these sort of things (assuming they truly can't browse your directories) Depending on the type of server, this approach might be a little different. If you are paying for the hosting, you should have access to a faq which should address this very issue. Also, keep in mind that most of the "free" web sites have restrictions on unlinked material. If they find it, they have various rights (depending on their agreements. Some can delete it, some can close the whole site, while other's might not care) eric

Glad I could contribute something (even as small as this :) I've found that whenever poser responds so quickly to a file and doesn't seem to do anything, there is an error in the file (I have munged more than my share over the last few months experimenting). The glories of the plain text data file! eric

Actually, poser 4 won't convert jpgs to bums when you select them via a MAT pose (at least mine won't). If you select a jpg, it loads just that, a jpg, but will look strange. I don't remember who suggested it, but it has been a good tip for me. When you get a new thing with unconverted bump maps, first, load a sphere (or something with very little geometry) and set it's bump map the old fashioned way (menu->render->materials) If you do that, it will prompt you regarding conversion, which you should accept. Do that for all apparent materials you recently acquired. Good luck! eric

I was able to use 2 mil-dragons each with a different textures (from the store) and different accessories without a problem (win2k and 1G ram). I was surprised at how quickly it rendered (the dragon, that is) There isn't much transparency there, so it is like rendering any other solid structure with a big texture map. If you are using win9x, you might have to buckle down with smaller textures. I had trouble with some of DAZ's hires textures until I reduced them to a smaller size. eric

hey make trees, but apparently due to the programming that is unique to both, exporting would be something difficult My belief has been that they prefer not to have a bunch of non-vue users having great vue-generated gnarly trees in their poser/whatever program renders. Since their vegetation is better than most, it serves as an enticement to use their software (rather than aquire the output of their solid growth engine for use elsewhere) I doubt it has anything to do with complex programming. Just one cynical guy's opinion :) eric

What I would like to see, is a poser file integrety checker. Looks like you have the basis for it already in place, but clicking individual files would be a pain for this sort of task. Produce a listing of all files (cr2, pp2, etc) which reference items that are a. in the wrong place, or b. just plain missing and the references in question. This done, of course, in batch mode, with a text file output. I recently did a reinstall of P4 onto a larger partition, and still find textures that haven't been moved (trying to avoid moving things that I don't use). Not a big deal, but it takes forever for p4 to alert you of missing textures/bums/etc. Not to mention that I do a lot of rearranging of everything (including obj files) which can make some files unusable until I fix their references (missing/incorrectly located obj files have a habit of causing parts of the scene to be removed....not good) Oh well, That is my suggestion eric

Can you get it to work without full body morphs? I am trying to strip those from my characters, and produce poses to do the same thing, but it is a time consuming task? How configurable is it (I really considered it, but just wasn't qutie convinced) eric