hi,

just trying. Go Start > Configuration . Sound, this will give you a window with tabs for playing, recording and setting the windows event sound. Go playing, and check your list with sound devices.

In my case, the High Definition Audio either has to do with the SPDIF port, or with using the explicit 3.5mm stereo jacks. I've got both (not used/connected). 

I also have symbols for sound over the headphone jack (use that sometimes, for simple speakers), and over USB speakers (using that for my headphone). I don't have a build in PC speaker, otherwise that one should show as well.

The thing that happens to me every now and then is that while fiddling with the USB and headphone jack speakers, my machine doesn't know which one is active and connected. Ths Sound panel gives the clues, telling you which one can accept sound ("connected"), and which one is really active (green checkmark, you can have one active at the time only, I guess). You can right-click each entry for options, like testing and (de)activating.

It seems to me that your speakers are not activated, as your HD-audio apparently is, I'm not sure whether they are connected. 

Hope this helps

aRtBee (running just Vista 32)

Thank you very much!

next to reducing intensity, deploy the falloff start/end parameters so you can light figures but no background and v.v., or light specific figure/prop groups.

The real issue with many lights is that rendertime increases as each lamp has a shadow map to be calculated. Hence, check the Reuse Shadow Maps when balancing lights and textures only.

Real-life camera "one stop difference" means half / double the intensity in Poser.

BTW: for portraiting, I use 9 spots for simulation one softbox (sum of intensities = 100%). Having two softboxes plus some rim / back / backdrop lights make about 25 lights total, so: that's not uncommon.

Runtime DNA has some great lighting and rendering tools. Colm Jackson rocks.

Pinacle VideoSpin - Movie Maker alike but more in/output formats
Wax - unlimited number of video and audio tracks
 

I would like the Dynamic Cloth simulations and the gravity script to use the same gravity constant, so solid objects and heavy carpets with zero air-damping fall equally fast,  as is told in day one physics class.

jee, all modern stuff out there.

I started on a DEC PDP 11, with my own separate harddisk (5Mb, 24" diameter I guess). Some colleque just arrived from the States with some obscure operating system, designed for handling telephone switches, from AT&T. Unix, they called it, and if I could do something productive with it.

Imaging was about ASCII art, and animation was about making ASCII-Art-Snoopy walk over the operators consoles. 1978. 

Oh, and we had a Cray supercomputer. 64-bit memory banks, up to 4Gb. My simulation programs ran at night only, and lasted a month.

Today, I run a 64-bit system, 4Gb ram, my animations render at night only, and last a month.

There is no real progress in IT.

hi,

in order to lengthen the animation, just increase the max frame number (frame 1 to 30, change 30 into 300). This changes the upper limit for your frames.

Retime means that you want to rescale the animation, so your frame 10 becomes 100, 20 becomes 200 and 30 becomes 300. This slows down the animation as you stick with 30 fps or so. It;s a quite uncommon operation.
Usually, I build my animations at one key per 8 frames, so I can easily add intermediate at 4, then 2, then 1 frame distance. Then I find out that 8 frames take 1.8 second, so my original 8 frames go to 45 at 25 fps (PAL). I've got to do that with the main figuares in the scene far befor I've got that many props, or I really will have some job to do.

So, it's a per object operation indeed, and do not forget cameras and lights.

hi RP Studio,

it will tell you how to stop crashing a 32-bit Vue on a 32-bit Windows, despite the amount of RAM you throw at it.

For 12Gb I do hope you  run 64-bit Windows, otherwise 8 of it rests in vein. And if you also run 64-bit Vue or 32-bit Vue 8 (which is Large Address Enabled), I can tell you your crashing is not memory related. If you run 32-bit Vue 7 in a 64-bit Windows, the tutorial tells you how to deal with its limits too.

Hope this helps.
 

 hi folks,

things may clear up when you put two objects at different distances to the camera. In P8, say Andy and a ball, at 1 m up, 2 forward, 1 mtr aside.

Zoom will bring both closer or further away, focal distances stays the same and the image flattens while zooming. Just like an ordenairy lens.

Perspective will mainly effect the further object, the closer one will stays in place, more or less. This lets you change depth in the image. It does so by scaling the camera, relative to 0,0,0. This makes it move (dolly) as well as grow / shrink. As a result, the focal distance changes, so watch out when deploying DoF as well. 

In the end, there is one camera with one perspective and one focal length. That why they're the same. You can scale the camera separately too, with similar effects. 

In other words: if you halve the focal length, double the dolly and halve the scale, you will get the same result as just halving the perspective. It's a three-in-one action, for your convenience. Or confusion. It gives you zoom-with-depth, as in standing closeby, instead of zoom-with-flattening as in using a long lens.

Regards

hi Bim,

Oh My God, No !! Don't !! This is why:

about every renderer on Earth needs it own setup for lighting, camera and materials. Models can be transferred as far as object-geometry is concerned, and animations go well too these days, at least to some extend. But even applications close to Poser, like DAZ Studio or Vue, have to bring in their own lighting and cam setups, and material properties are transferred only partially. 

Poser does support the COLLADA format which helps you out to Photoshop Extended and most other programs, but I have no experience in there. I guess again that lighting, cams and materials form the bottleneck.

Poser is already amazing in its own end by supporting more than one render engine without any settings changes. Note for instance 3DS Max, where you can select V-Ray instead of Mental Ray and other renderers, but you have to make your choice beforehand, and you cannot use V-ray dedicated lights and materials in a MR render, and so on. Plug in the great Octane Renderer (look it up, http://www.refractivesoftware.com), read the features, and find out that it can load any scene. You only have to redo... lights, cams and materials. 

So, instead of rendering 5 days, you end up setting up your scenes anew in 4 days, and render in 2. Hence, before you throw any hardware to this concept, just test it first in small one-machine situations. IMHO, it's the concept which won't work, despite any technology.

Next to all this, please do test transferring Poser scenes to other machines or even directories. You might find missing objects, cloth simulations and textures, as not everything is in the pz3 itself. Test! Try for the PoseRay converter and PovRay renderer (www.povray.org). Free for 15 years now, and still kicking.

This still leaves the question whether you really need a second machine for the second process. I guess not. And why connect them via USB while you have gigabit LAN ports available? But that aside, I doubt rendering Poser scenes in anything else but Poser, and considering it an easy way of living.

BTW: thanks for commenting on my site.
Regards,

hi all,

After say 10 years of fiddling around (and gathering about 30Gb of content), I just restarted my serious Poser interest, so I can share my route. I will turn my experiences into a tutorial series or alike, but I'm not there yet.

At first, please note that Poser is just a tool (it cannot make good final results on its own), and it's a Virtual Portraying Studio. So I first dived into a bunch of professional guides on portrait and product  photography, studio lighting, posing and makeup (for fashion models), and so on. Just study photo's and images that stand out, from 20th century Playboy to recent 3D contests and gallery high-scores. What makes images end up high while others don't? And I started to organize my content using P3dO, recommended especially when you like to use the same library structures for Poser, DAZ Studio, Carrara and so on. 

Then I started with just creating my studio, finding out about Camera (DoF, focal settings) and Rendering, including render passes (RDNA Advanced Render Settings are very recommended) and all the tricks of Postwork.. 

Then I dived into lighting, the photographers way. So now I know how to do softboxes, ringflashes and Rembrandt lighting in Poser, and when and how to apply IBL, IDL and especially: when not to. Recently I sorted out Materials and Nodes, including making proper metals, velvets and skins, and using Photoshop for skin complexions and refined clothing details. Next thing is to figure out how those materials behave when transferring stuff to DAZ Studio, Carrara, Bryce and Vue.

In the meantime I did Poses and Animation, worried about conforming and dynamic cloth, and took care of Hands and Expressions.  

To my experience, What to do is more complicated than How to do it in Poser. And IMHO it does not make real sense to understand lighting from a Poser point of view without having an idea about the photographers vision on this. Getting a good workflow up is another thing. I still see people trying to make a 5 min animation in one long shot, from one Poser file. Very clever but not good, if you know what I mean.

Regards

It's Benefit Gala for V4 by Ryverthorn from RDNA.
It's still there for $3 (http://www.runtimedna.com/Benefit-Gala-for-V4.html)

I like the original blue/purple texture the best, but I have to figure out why converting it to Prop via Wardrobe Wizard did make the texture mapping go bust. In the meantime, she's got the Poser colorramp default texture following the V-coordinate upwards.

Regards

thanks to Grappo2000 and Markschum, who stimulated me to reset all parameters and recheck everything again before making examples. And hey, it solved the issue!

But I don't succees in getting an image in the post, what do I have to do for uploading? So I just attached a file (jpg). Sorry.

With all cloth parameters still at default, the simulation settings I used were

good for producing the broken dress (middle, left).

But I managed to turn this into the okay dress (middle/middle), and even wild jumps (middle/right) got supported, while the whole animation runs quite well actually. The 450 frame sim took about 7 hours to compute and still isn't perfect, but at least I've got a working sim to take me further.

The magic bullet? Just switch ON the middle option, poly versus poly. 

You apparently need it when the object (Vicky) has a quite higher density poly / vertex mesh than the cloth (Dress), making vertices to go well but polys to peek through anyway. That can be caused by the conversion routines like export/import or Wardrobe Wizard (... As Prop), I guess these try to optimize their result and reduce mesh density. Very good, except for cloth sims. 

I'll put this in a tutorial (like I will with the lighting. Do you like my softbox setup?)

 hi Bim,

I know where you're coming from, my animations are music based and last about 4 mins each, that's 7000 frames or so. In the early days of 1 CPU per machine (5 years back or so), I managed a stack of 4 controlled by Windows RemoteDesktop. It required a serious network design and systems management, all data had to be on the same drive letter for all machines, and so on.
You can still experience the results on the net, check my site (www.artbeeweb.nl), go 'My Olde Site" from the collection at the bottom, and search the gallery for the Mirror in Mirror short. Full of reflections and refractions, the longest rendering was 20 hours on a single frame and the whole thing took a month continuous rendering (on 4 machines in parallel).

Nowadays, I don't do that anymore. All 4 cores are in one machine (Q6600 based, next one will have six based on i980). I always render out image sequences so I can pick up easily after a crash or power fail or what (auto restarts at night thanks to MS Update, great). But most important, I design my animations in separate shots of 2 to 6 sec. Like TV commercials, which last 30 sec only and contain 5 to 10 shots each, modern takes never ever are long haules anymore. I even advocate that slide shows  should have 2 sec max per shot, instead of the default settings like 5 or more.

Then, I put up a Poser file for each take, or small group of takes. After finishing one in design (a one-thread process mostly, except for test renders) I take it into rendering at the background at Low Prio, while designing the next in front. Ideally, I can design 8 to 12 hours a day while the machine rattles 24 hours a day at full 100% 4 CPU load. 
Practically, I render out stills for the keyframes first, and make a slideshow on the music from them. This helps me to direct the animation as a whole, as some storyboarding. If OK I render out to image sequences, and generate a (lower quality) avi or so from them. This helps me in post processing too.

I consider a second machine some times, but it's not worth the money. You not only buy extra CPU but memory, disk, casing etc too, and you run into various systems management issues constantly. In the meantime, the 'design machine" runs about empty. Seen it, been there, done it. But I do hope that Poser is going to support CUDA-based rendering by the nVidia cards. This enables us to expand on graphix processors only (see www.cubixgpu.com for instance).

I hope this helps a bit.

Why should you want to do that?

I render and develop at the same time, by just sending out renders to the external renderer, and labeling it Low Priority in the Windows Taskmanager. Both processes can have their own 2Gb working mem, or 3Gb with the 3Gb-switch enabled, or more in a 64-bit environment. And on a 4 or even 6 (i980) CPU machine, Poser needs only 1 at design time unless you render out.

okay, I've Poser 8, but P-2010 can't be that different.