Why don't you all just spend a few hundred
years learning to spell, instead? It eventually
comes naturally.

Well, there's... no, wait. Okay, I, uh... no, not that, either. There's always.. no, no, I guess not.

Sorry, that's such a great straight line, and I've got about half a dozen great follow up lines, except they're not really clean enough for general public consumption. ;)

Jack

Internet Explorer? Blech. Who uses that thing anymore?

According to Browser News, August 21, 2004 about 85% of all people who browse the world wide web do so with some version of IE. To be sure, that's down from an all time high of 94%, and it's likely to continue dropping, but that's still many millions of users.

Jack

Once, as a child, I was looking over my father's shoulder as he was writing a letter. My father is an atrocious speller and I was a spelling bee winner and obnoxious to boot (I'm ever so much nicer and more charming now, of course). When I corrected my father's spelling, without being asked, he looked at me sharply and said in a pointed tone, "Son, I believe in creative spelling." I've always tried to be careful after that... :)

On the other hand, caulbox, I do appreciate the link. I like using spell checkers quite a bit, and I didn't know there was one that embeds in IE. Thank you.

Jack

It's probably an unsolvable paradox...

I think this blends two different issues together. I think most any point can be made in either a civil manner or in a rude manner. I may disagree with someone, but I will listen to him with respect if he or she is respectful to me in presentation. On the other hand, if a person feels the need to beat me about the head with their words, I may feel inspired to respond in kind, or, more likely, walk away and ignore them. And, most importantly, if I was the one providing the speaking platform at no charge and at expense to myself, I might very well tell that person to go spew elsewhere.

In short, I think the objectional parts of a political discussion are (usually) about the format, not about the content.

Jack

What do you suggest decreasing the maximum texture resolution to?

Another thing you can try, if you don't mind some extra work, is to make the texture files themselves smaller. I have the high-res texture set from DAZ for Michael 3, which is nice but a waste of resources if he's very far from the camera. I took all of the high-res textures, made copies of them, made the copies 25% the size of the originals, saved them with the letters "Hi" in the file name changed to "Lo", and made a copy of the Mat pose file with the new names in it, so that I use less memory with a lot of Mikes or with Mike standing far away.

Generally speaking, I think you'll get pretty good results if your texture files are no larger than about 125% of your rendered image size, even on a close up. So, if you're rendered image is going to be 1024 by 768, you don't really need a 4000x4000 texture map, as 1200x1200 one will probably work just as well.

Is there no patch for this problem?

Poser 5 is probably about as patched up as it's gonna get. My guess is some of these issues will probably be addressed in Poser 6, if and when such a critter gets released. The owners of Poser have had their ups and downs with the product, to be sure.

I had this very problem a while back, and several people suggested doing multiple renders then merging the results, which worked for me. My image had Michael 3, The Freak, two copies of the Dragon, and the Cyclorama from DAZ in it, along with a lot of props, poseable and otherwise. I rendered it three times, once with only the Mike figure and his props visible, once with the Freak visible only, and once with the dragons visible. I left the Cyclorama on in all three renders. I took the resulting image and imported them into Paint Shop Pro as separate layers, then erased the parts of the background obscuring the characters, and it worked great.

The total render time was about 45 minutes, and it took about half an hour to get the image assembled the way I wanted it.

Another possibility would be to export the scene to something else and render it there, if you have other software. I've taken very complex scenes (in excess of 50 million polygons) and rendered them successfully in POV-Ray. It's a gold-plated, cast iron, B-word to export Poser content to POV, though. If you've got Bryce and the DAZ import plug-in, that's pretty easy, or you might just try rendering your scene with DAZ|Studio (since there's currently no cost other than the learning curve and disk space for it) and see how that works.

Hope that's helpful,
Jack

When I signed up at Renderosity originally, I was using jevans (my first initial and last name) at most web sites; when I tried to sign up here with that name, it wouldn't let me use it; IIRC, it was already in use. My standard practice was to add a number to the end of the name and try again. As it would happen, the movie "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" was running on the TV in the living room at the time, and just as I was getting ready to re-submit my user name, they came to the line in the movie where the characters Bill & Ted both chime in with the phrase "Sixty nine, dude!" in response to being queried about their favorite number. I took it as a good sign, and thus my user ID. :)

"Aggressive disagreement" is one thing.
Incoherent passion is another.

I don't especially like to talk to someone who's shouting, especially when it's mostly invective that's light on semantic content, but I respect other people's right to shout and shout back. The thing that bothers me is that so often the shouting seems to be at the expense of facts. Numbers that sound for all the world like valid statistics, rumors repeated as truth, quotes from celebrity figures as though they're speaking ex cathedra, and on and on.

I always know that a political discussion is going to go nowhere at warp speed if I get yelled at for asking for the source for a fact. Honestly, if you don't know the source, or you can't establish the source's bona fides, I don't see anything wrong with adding "I heard this, and I believe it" or "this agrees with my opinion, even if it may be just an opinion also", rather than saying "It's a statistic, and numbers don't lie".

Of course numbers don't lie. People do. Usually with numbers. :) Hmm... now where did that soapbox come from, and why am I standing on it...? grin

My view is that art is about expression of emotions, and the expression of ideas is a different (not better or worse, jut different) kind of communication. I think the two types of communication are often confused, because they both can use similar media, although I believe that visual images are better suited for art and words are better suited for ideas.

Renderosity is an art community, and a great deal of the members are going to be more interested in investing the time they spend here on studying and critiquing art as opposed to sharing new or rehashed ideas. In all likelihood, those interested in pursuing those interests will do so at other websites at different times.

Yesterday I found myself at lunch with a group of conservative, reactionary women who were complaining about the volume and style of the music in their church. I tried to engage them in discussion about how they might go about compromising with other people in the church, and quite a conflict ensued. I realized later that I was proceeding under the assumption that they would be interesed in sharing my expression of thought on the matter, and engaging in debate. In fact, they wanted to complain about the issue and vent a lot of anger that, IMO was mostly irrational and self-centered. My mistake was that I assumed that just because it was an open forum, I knew what they wanted to do.

Anyway, I think that anytime an artist wants to create art that is emotionally charged, there will be controversy. If the artist also tries to communicate a message, often there will be active resistance in an art community, because the bulk of the community wants to study the art and consider messages at another time or in another contest. It's like going to a concert to see your favorite country singer and finding that his opening act is a rap group. It's not that there's anything wrong with the rap necessarily, it's just a jarring change from what was expected.

I also think it's very important to be aware that Renderosity is not just a public community by and for art enthusiasts; it is a commercial enterprise, subject to laws and business rules & practices that bind in many respects what it can do and what it will do. Regardless of the amount of freedom of expression we as artists and individuals have, no one is obligated to provide us with a forum for our views. We are all welcome to buy our own servers and design our own on-line communities.

Having the right to express yourself does not obligate your neighbor to buy you the soapbox; that's your responsibility that goes along with the right.

Jack

Attached Link: http://www.turbosquid.com

Jack

Cool, thank you. :)

Attached Link: http://www.wotsit.org

Hope that's helpful,
Jack

For the economically challenged, some options are:

POV-Ray for rendering (free)
Terra Incognita for many free models (including lotsa skeletons and bony things)
3DWin4 for converting to/from Poser content (shareware, but very reasonably priced)
Wings 3D for modelling and adjusting models (free)

None of these tools are as flexible or as easy to use as Poser, but they make great add-ons for working with it. Yay! He segues back on topic at the last possible second, and the crowd goes wild... ;)

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=738077&Start=1&Artist=jevans69&ByArtist=Yes