Intrinsic Poser Storage Flaw! As a beginner to Poser, it took me several days to even begin to comprehend what to do with all the wonderful downloads of characters, texture maps etc. for Poser 4. Then, after having not looked at Poser for about 4 months, I was again, almost totally at a loss for how to "load a new character". I purchased several characters from the Online Store and ran into some serious problems . What every beginner finds confusing is that every file must be put into a different folder. It is very, very confusing. Plus you either run out of hard disk space or you have to seriously limit your "loads". First of all, I can never get theses characters to ever look even 1/2 as good as in the pictures shown in the store. This is probably just lack of knowledge on my part. But why not provide more information about the rendering parameters? How do these people get such fantastic renderings? Does everyone know this except me? Second, the readme.txt that is supplied with the free, and the purchased downloads is extremely limited and generally too little. The assumption is that every purchaser is an expert. I would be surprised if this was true. Experts, probably do less purchasing than those of us who know very little, otherwise we could do it all ourselves. Third, my contention is that the entire Poser storage management system is very poorly thought out. Here is why: I'm talking about Windows based systems, although these ideas apply also to Mac' etc. 1 All the add-ons (downloads of characters, textures, etc.) take up enormous amounts of hard disk space and it is all under the Metacreations folder under c:programs. Consequently, the size of the C: drive must be very, very large. This is very bad because backing up drive C: becomes much more difficult, and time consuming. Most intelligent people eventually realize that the Operating system and application programs should reside on a separate partition from DATA (I consider all of the add-ons for Poser DATA). The benefit of this separation is great. For example, if your OS (Windows!) is badly screwed up and you cannot boot into GUI at all, you are reduced to booting from floppy into DOS, but when you copy your data the long filenames will be truncated. Worse yet, you may lose all of your data on drive C: completely, whereas if your data is on a separate partition D: (or perhaps even a different hard drive) it is likely to survive whatever disasters befall drive C: (except if the entire hard drive crashes, since logical partitions are still on a single phyical hard drive. Often the only way to fix a badly damaged Windows OS is to format the C: partition and reload from scratch. If your DATA resides on a separate partition you have nothing to worry about. If you are changing your operating system, it is again well advised to start with a clean system--so it is a good idea to format your c: partition. You'll have less extra leftover useless scraps of your old OS hanging around taking up space. And so on. But getting back to Poser. This maybe a very naive question, but why not simply create a folder for each new character which contains EVERY DAMN thing needed for that character (cr2, texture maps, morph targets etc.) This would have the advantage of PORTABILITY. Life for the USER would be much, much easier. Obviously, this storage method may actually create increased storage waste due to redundant storage of shared "goodies". Also this may not be "elegant" from a programmers point of view. But keep in mind that EASE OF USE and PORTABILITY should have a higher priority than programming convenience. Failing to pay attention to EASE OF USE, and GOOD INTERFACES, is the entire industries biggest and most serious problem. I welcome your comments. Sincerely, Dan S. Tong