Hmmm... useful, but isn't that a bit off topic?

Another time hog (and i mean a brutal one) seems to be the atmosphere rendering (for P5 sr1 and following i guess). Setting even a single light source with atmosphere turned on and activating the 'volume' in the atmosphere material makes a great difference in rendering times (I was trying to play with the depth cue at the same time, but i gave up because everything was slowed to a creepy crawl).

OK! Thank you all, good suggestions and tips from experienced marketeers are useful and clarifying. For now I'll keep on working on her... maybe adding some particular 'twist' to differenciate her from the mass and, who knows, it could just turn to something interesting (as i saw, a common female figure can cause some big Yawning... hehe). But at least I had a positive feedback and can consider it a good starting point for further development.

Agree with you, Will, so my idea was mainly to finish the mesh in the best possible way, map it as well as i can, then 'release' it as an UV mapped obj model for any joint-wizard to play with it and make it into a full poser toy. I don't know much about setting up proper joints, skeleton and so, and the tests i made so far gave me mediocre results, not to talk about coding some decent 'remote morphs by joints' that would add greatly to any model. Yet, some of the most popular models are way far from perfection (any stretching close to real phisical limits makes models look wierd, and in most cases the same goes for bending elbows, knees and hips, even yielding overlapping limbs...) I'll keep on playing with it and see how good I can make it, mainly for fun for this first try. (hehe even Vicky is but the pale shadow of V3...)

I wouldn't like to sound too pessimistic, but i fear the problem is a machine problem... too low on RAM and too low on CPU power. Even the HD size could be larger to help a bit. Besides... do you manage to have XP running smoothly on it? I don't know it so well, but it needs quite a lot of memory just for itself.

WOAH! Dr.Geep is 'da king'! as always ;)

He he, ok... here's the solution (if i've understood your problem correctly) Select your model, go to the material room (even with the mat tab or the materials under render options) In the mat window click on the plug referred to 'diffuse_color', select 'new node'>'2d textures'>'image_map' this creates the new node for the image map, letting the former unchanged. Now click on the 'none' referred to 'Image-source', browse your dirs and click on ok a couple of times. That should do it.

Well, let's see if this can help... but first, a commercial texture pack without an auto-installer or at least a 'path'-structured zipped pack seems a bit odd... Did you extract the files with the 'use folder names' option starting in your Poser5 main directory? That should do it for the positioning. Also, look if there are some readme files or text files in the zip... some non-standard packs put there their instructions to use the files (and specify which models they are made for). Then, if they are mat-pose files, you should find em in your 'Poses' library tabs. If those are only plain textures, once loaded your model in the studio, switch to the 'material' room. From there you can select the subsets (groups) of your model and change every setting you want. This is only a 'refresh' - if you need more detailed instructions i suggest you browse your manuals first, and then look at one of the many tutorials around here. Hope that helped. Happy rendering

Well, I'd like to know if someone has already started distributing some mat pack where the probelight node is used (and understand u are one of these pioneers), or maybe if there is some way of setting the 9 parameters of the 'light armonics' in an intuitive way... I guess I'll go to study the pdf paper on the matter to which Stewer refers. Another thing: I haven't been able to use the program that Stewer mentions for the parameters definitions other than with the few .float.gz hdri samples... so if someone knows other resources of that kind... every suggestion is welcome. Now i'll go back to experiment :)

I'm glad you folks think like that! See you soon in some 'poser only - no postwork' contest... or just a poser only - no postwork gallery would be just fine :)

Thanks Xantor (forgot to say I already knew that really good resource)... ;)

To Dale B (sorry folks for going off topic...) Hey :) thanks for your good tips, anyway i tweaked my w98 settings so much that even U.Bill wouldn't recognize it anymore (Grin)... but maybe i could find something else where you said, so i'll give it a look! byes

Just my 2 cents on memory resources, since i am one of the few who still uses W98 (struggling with memory management issues...) with "only" 512 Mb RAM (i remember when a 16Kb ram extension was a luxury, yes Kb, not Mb). Aside of not having any other stuff running in background (anything* other than systray and explorer should be off), and of course having screen saver disabled, I could finally have my complex rendering done after enabling (here comes the * of above) a third party memory manager. There is an issue about memory management between Poser 5 and Win 98, causing Poser to freeze at the 2nd or later render attempts of a 'heavily textured' scene. But this way, with a memory manager that takes care of the ram swapping in a better way, it seems now to have been just a bad dream! :) Finally, to reply to the original question, definitely you want poser 5. Within service release 3 and later, you also get the still little used volumetric light (atmosphere material) and the even less known ProbeLight node, that can lead to amazing results for a very low price.