I set up all my scenes in Poser 4, and then if I want some extra rendering pazazz, I open them in Poser 6 afterward. Of course then I have to reload many textures and their settings because Poser 6 handles that differently. If it's a really simple scene, I don't bother. Arranging all but the most minimalist scenes in Poser 6 is agonizingly slow. My computer is a wimpy 1.6 gigahertz and it's way overdue for a 3 gigahertz upgrade, but I have 1 gig RAM and a fairly decent 256 mb RAM graphics card. If I try to move things around, they turn into boxes animating in step frame- one frame every 2 seconds. Impossible to see what is happening. Poser 6 has some rendering characteristics that I like, such as specularity settings. I had to learn bump mapping all over again. I've gotten better, but still don't quite know what I'm doing. Still haven't got the hang of displacement mapping. Hasn't worked for me yet, but I'm very interested. It sounds like my kind of thing. Something about assigning just the right numeric value to the surface area. I've been using Poser since Poser 1 came out on floppies in 1995 or something.

Poser 6 is slow, thats why I still prefer propack, the renderer for poser 6 is quite slow too, I understand that it does more but why does it need to load the objects a few times and render the shadow maps individually?

I own both Poser 5 and 6 but only use 5, after SR4 it is rock steady on my machine (P4 3.0MHz witg 1 Gb ram)

Its also a lot faster then Poser 6,  maybe i'll try it again after a couple of more service releases.

Regards /

My system is a 1.2GHz, 512MB box witha  64MB video card.

I don't have this issue.

You may seriously consider adjusting your virtual memory settings within windows if that is what you are using, as memory management in poser is handled entirely by windows.

The 'box' setting can be changed if you need to see what you're doing as you move your figures. Towards the bottom of the preview window, there is a small dropdown with three possible options: 'box' (I think), 'fast', and 'full'. By changing it to full (the default is fast), you get rid of the boxes appearing anytime anything is moved in scene.

jonthecelt

Actually, setting up scenes in Poser 4 is pretty awful as well. Since Poser was designed as something where you would pose your characters before exporting them to a heavyweight rendering package, the scene setup tools have always been rudimentary. Successive versions have improved the rendering capabilities of Poser but never addressed scene setup.