I've encountered my first Carrara problem, and it's a doozy. When I try to smooth an object in the Vertex modeller, I get a hang or a crash. I've reproduced the problem a number of times. The first time it happened, I had a modified sphere in the modeler. Lots of additional vertices, but it rendered like a geodesic dome. So I set Smooth on, left it at 1, clicked convert, and C5P shut down. Just gone and no wave goodbye. Second time, the same thing happened. Then I tried it with unmodified spheres, which are basically geodesic domes rather than spheres. VERY low-poly. Instead of shutting down, it locked up when I clicked Smooth, BEFORE I clicked Convert, and I eventually (after as much as fifteen minutes) would close it in Task Manager. According to TM, just selecting Smooth kicked my CPU to 100% permanently. Carrara was only using 80Megs of RAM at the time. This happened a few times, then I tried the same procedure with a cylinder. The sphere doesn't even get subdivided before the hang. With the cylinder, the mesh was altered when I hit Convert, and then the app hung. Five minutes, then I killed it. I looked in C4P, and first off, the sphere comes in smoothed, with 3-4 times as many polys as the C5 sphere. Even so, the Smooth function works just fine. My computer is a 2800 Sempron with 2 Gigs of RAM and hundreds of Gigs of free HD, running W2K. So what gives? Any ideas? I have had huge scenes in C5 (the biggest I've looked at was a PZ3 with Miki and V3, totalling 825Megs) with no hiccups. I'm pretty worried, because frankly, the Vertex modeller was the whole point, and this is a heck of a note an hour into learning it. M

What graphics card do you have? And what are your interactive renderer settings? It sounds like that might be the problem.

nVidia GEForce MX 440 with new drivers (last week). IRS: Eovia. Are you thinking OpenGL will fix it? M

FYI: Switching to OpenGL moved the crash. Now it smoothes, I regain control, and it crashes when I try to switch to the Render Room.

Can't reproduce on duo-G4 Mac. Smoothing and changing a 32-point polyhedron happens pretty much instantaneously.

Tried the same sequence at work, and everything worked just fine. However, my installation at work doesn't seem to have "interactive renderer settings." Instead, it has an OpenBL settings option. Weird. I'll try some more changes. I have some one dozen tabs of settings for the card in the COntrol Panel. Oh, please don't let it be card incompatibility.... M

The MX 440 is an fairly old card. I am pretty sure there are some functions it does not support that newer cards do (5200 and newer). Whether or not this may be causing the problem is debateable. I have had all sorts of issues with C5 and it hanging at the oddest times. How is your windows paging file (swap file) set up? How large is it? Did you check your DirectX version as well as cideo drivers? Is everything up to date? If not, start there and eliminate the most obvious. Update all drivers and DirectX. I usually dont run W2K on anything having to do with 3D work, but if it's working for ya, great. See if you could find a friend with a more up to date video card you could borrow to test with. The 440 like I said, is very old and lacks a lot of things that more modern cards have. The 5000 series is dirt cheap now and I know from experience that they work very well with C5. Keep us posted on the outcome.

I'm running Win2K on both machines, so that's not the problem. And I'm not having "all sorts of issues with C5 and hanging all the time," so maybe you should reconsider W2K? :) I punched the swap file up, a trick I learned in NT. As for the 440 being "old", I just bought the bloody thing six months ago. This must be some new definition of "old" I am familiar with ("That's so-o-o-o last week!!") but don't generally accept. It could be DirectX or video drivers, I suppose, so I'll look into that. It's definitely a hang, by the way, not just a huge task. One gets used to "huge tasks" in Poser. "What, you want me to turn my head left a few degrees? Ok. Come back in a few minutes and I'll be done." I left the last "hang" all day while at work and it was still dead when I got home. Thanks for the suggestions. Mick

By old I meant the design of the card. The card was designed a few generations back from current cards. Even my newer 6600 TD is technically obsolete since the 7000 series came out :) They still sell the card online and at several stores, but the technology is fairly old and lacks a lot of the built in functions newer cards have. If you go to the NVidia site, you can compare the differences. I mentioned the odd hangs and issues I have had with Carrara as an example of some of the weird things which can affect the program that you would never think would. I generally stick with XP mainly because it has almost the same core kernel as 2K but also has more optomization for other non business apps like games etc. I also prefer the interface since after working maintaining w2k servers until I was disabled a few years ago; I really never want to see 2Ks interface again... argh.... I'm just waiting for Vista to come out so I can finally take full advantage of the 64Bit dual core Athlon I just got. I am currently having a particular issue with C5 as well. Mostly I think I may have overdetailed a scene I am doing, including three poser characters I imported. I get the Unknown error as well as memory allocation errors. I actually had to reinstall C5 just to get it to load the file. As far as getting to Render it, I am going to have to turn off all my indirect lighting. :( Well good luck with the issue, keep us posted.

A new wrinkle. I made a few changes to the card settings, nothing that I had much hope for as a fix, and reloaded C5. If I take a primitive sphere into the vertex editor, I can smooth that, even though it already has 5x the polys of a vertex primitive sphere. But that corny little geodesic dome you get when you ask for a vertex sphere still blows C5's brains out when I hit smooth. And now I have a big P6 import on screen that is working just fine. However, I brought Steph Petite into the vertex editor, tried smoothing (not that she needed it) and bang dead. M

I also just smoothed a Carrara spline (lamp) in the vertex editor. It definitely has something to do with the vertex primitives (Steph is 250K polys BEFORE smoothing, so I don't consider that crash a problem). It if only happens with the vertex primitives, that suggests to me that it is not the card. Neh? M