Poser is very disk intensive. When navigating through the library, the folders you enter are scanned on the fly to display their contents. A fast hard drive with big disk cache will really help out with this. A lot of "wait cursor" time in Poser is hard drive related, since you're inevitably loading big textures and models into RAM.

Message edited on: 09/12/2005 14:49

Thank you, I will give these recommendations a shot! maxxxmodelz, I am using raytraced shadows, just not AO. I haven't tried every possible combination of raytracing with and without shadows, but only because Poser 6 on a 800MHz machine is slow bloody slow. Thanks!

I appreciate the suggestion, but the scene has neither an IBL light, nor any light with AO turned on. The light set is the Daz simulated global illumination setup from P5 days. I get this junk on every render, even "default scene James" if I enable raytracing. These files also render fine in P5. It seems to be a P6 Firefly issue, or perhaps my download of the Poser app got subtly corrupted? I do get an awful lot of unexpected quitting too, especially after saving files.

You know, I just had that same realization! It gives me an idea for a possible gallery feature: gallery artist/keyword filters. I can think of reasons why not to implement such a system, but let's be honest--just about everyone has seen an image that is so bloody awful they wish they could filter out the artist from the search results. I think anyone who claims otherwise is not being entirely honest with themselves. Frankly, I'd settle for a checkbox to filter out everything that uses "The Girl"; I'm personally offended by that figure's dimensions/features and what it represents (but I digress, that's a whole other issue ;-)

Message edited on: 10/10/2004 01:34

FlyByNight, this is not what I'm objecting to. Your thumbnail above is a good example of selective cropping done right--there is enough there to see what you're going to get. I made the mistake of saying "entire image shrunk to 200x200" when I meant "big enough section shrunk to 200x200". I myself rarely squish down entire renders, but nor do I cut 200x200 chunks from 1600x1200 images or repeated crop out just one eye. Happiness is someplace in between.

I did not mean to say that the only acceptable thumbnail is the entire image scrunched to 200x200, but I think that thumbnails should show a reasonable section--enough to tell if the image is worth viewing, and acceptable to view in the workplace (nudity tag is not enough). I'm not against cropping out a reasonable-sized sample area for a thumbnail "teaser", but one should consider doing this carefully, with intent.

What I'm objecting to is the cropping of just one eyeball from a huge image. Half the portrait gallery is literally a gallery of eyeball images. These are not cleverly composed teasers like yours, queri, they are just boring to browse and not helpful for making a selection.

Message edited on: 10/10/2004 00:40

Debbie, I appreciate the offer, but I see requesting stuff from the admins as a temporary fix to something that is still an issue that could use some looking into. Having to request sales reports from admins isn't a convenient way of accessing past records, and in the end this hurts customers as well as merchants (since merchants can't easily contact their past buyers). The merchant admin section had automated "contact all buyers" options that were 1-click methods. This is a lot easier than having to get someone to email me the list of all buyers and products and me spending hours trying to figure out who bought what when, and what upgrades they might not have.

In addition, I can think of no reason whatsoever that merchants without current offerings should be shut out of the merchant forums. The discussions there about policies, polls, marketplace changes, etc.. are all still of interest to merchants who are just on hiatus. It does not seem right to me that I should have to upload a new product just to regain access to things as basic as the merchant forum, mailings and my existing customer base and sales history.

I would definitely appreciate it if the marketplace staff could take a moment to reconsider whether or not there is any benefit to the current policy of restricting site access to [apparently] inactive merchants, as I can only see drawbacks.

Message edited on: 10/01/2004 01:13

Well this does not work, and it brings up another problem that I've already mentioned to Debbie M: I have been a merchant since 2002, but because my items all expired while I was off doing non-3d things, I evidentally lost my merchant status. If I try to load the accounting page, I get a message saying I'm not a valid merchant until I upload a product. This is a serious problem because I can't see any of my past accounting info, contact buyers of my previous products, access the merchant forums/maillist, etc... to me this seems very, very wrong! The policy should be: once a merchant, always a merchant, regardless of whether or not you have products currently in your store.

I uploaded a very small product (1 pair of shoes) on Sept 18 and have not heard anything back, except that Debbie says it is in the pending area. It's going on 12 days and I'm posting here just to make sure it was not overlooked or rejected without informing me. Also, when I uploaded, I was brought to a page that showed the pending status of my uploads. But I can't find that page again through navigating the site, could someone tell me how to get back to that?

The problem with V1 and V2 is that the files are not mathematically symmetrical. Daz wised up with V3 and made her symmetrical. I see no good reason why the earlier victorias are asymmetrical either, they clearly weren't going for a deliberate asymmetry (it's too close for that), it's just sloppy like some of the textures are. I never got around to doing the code to make my program work with V1 and V2. It's too much work for the amount of free time I have. The logic to pair V3's vertices is a straightforward quicksort on 3 indices, but with V1 or V2 I would need either an external pairs file or some kind of slow pairing algorithm that uses increases the slop tolerance until all pairs are matched. The later solution would not only be slow, it might also produce errors with vertices that nearly overlap.

I still use my own tool internally, but I stopped going to the trouble of releasing it due to lack of interest. I gave out 12 beta copies to people who requested to test it, and I got not a single bit of feedback, good or bad. Most folks did not even acknowledge that they ever downloaded it, tried it, and non ever emailed me about it. It's technically a carbon app, but I have no OS 9 machine here to test it on, so I can't say if it would work or not. It should, but it might not. -Adam

Without familiarity of the model in question, here are my best guesses:

Kerkruiten - Church style window (glass portion)
Vuurtorenramen - Lighthouse windows
KerkraamKozijnen - Church window frames
Planken - Shingles / Clapboard planks
Spijkers - Nails
Fresnel Lens - The lighthouse lens, named for Augustin Jean Fresnel
MetaalFresnel - Presumably the lens's frame
LuikScharnieren - Skylight/Porthole hinges
Nagels - Not sure what it means in context, the word means fingernails usually
Schakelaar - switch (e.g. electrical type)
Kabel - Cable
Lamp - Lamp bulb
Draden - Gears
Deurkruk - Door handle/knob
Torenglas - Tower glass
DiamantPlaat - "Diamond Plate/Tread" like on shiny pickup truck toolboxes and fire trucks
Muurankers - Iron rings/hooks for attaching things to
Wenteltredes - Spiral stairs? I'm not familiar with this compound word
Vloer - Floor
Middenkolom - Center Column
Afdekplaten - Deck platform (floorboards?)
VuurtorenMuur - Lighthouse Wall

-Adam

The filename ending in .ez is the script that's fetching the link to the real item from r'osity's database. Various browsers get confused and put the script name onto the downloaded file. Some browsers realize the mistake partway through the download and correct the filename, others do not. If you know it's a .zip file, just change the extension as noted above. If you're not sure what it is, Aladdin's Expander can usually take it as-is and correctly uncompress it whatever it is (unless it's an .exe) -Adam

I was not as much disappointed as put off from posing. Curious Labs really didn't do themselves any favor by shortstaffing their mac programming efforts. They'd have had my personal money a year ago when I was all Poser-gung-ho, but now I've pretty much lost interest in Poser. My office bought my dept C4DXL 8.0 and Maya, and I'm on the fence now as to whether I will get Poser at all. I will probably wait for when/if we get a project in-house that would benefit from it and let my company lump it into dev costs. I got left behind for technical reasons. My G4/800 can boot into OS 9.2 and run poser 4, but I'm sooo an OS X user now and it just isn't practical to reboot my machine every time I want to switch apps or check my mail. Poser 4 also doesn't work right in classic mode, as most of you have notices (fails to launch more than once, painfully slow to render). P5 shipped for the PC the same month I traded by 8500 for a G4. I was wishfully thinking P5 for mac would be out by the time my computer was setup and running OS X nicely, and I was all saved up. But, it didn't come. By Christmas 2002 I had completely lost interest in doing any Poser work, and I went back to coding games and restoring antique sirens and fog horns (what I do when I'm away from work). -Adam