Howdy, I've been using the P6 Material Collections option to create pre-defined textures for a prop I created in LW.  While it "seems" to work, I've been having a few problems during the process.

1. At times it will record the "shrugging man" image (when this happens I know a "freeze-up" is soon to follow) Why it's taking this "shrugging man" image is a mystery to me as it should be taking whatever is displayed in the document window.  

2. Afterwards, when I attempt to create a PNG for this Material Collection I just created, my computer would freeze.  (sometimes even after the material collections saves properly, the freeze will happen when I try to render the new PNG for it)

While I have pretty high specs on my desktop (P4... 3.4 Ghz w/Hyperthreading ... 2 Gigs of DDRam) I decided to try it on my laptop...... SAME RESULTS! (laptop specs: P4.... 3.4 Ghzw/hyperthreading.... 1 Gig DDRam)

Is there some sort of limitation for this Material Collections option that I'm not aware of?   

Maybe this may or may not have something to do with it:

At times I select ONE material only and save it as a "Material Collection" rather than a "Single Collection"  so that the user does NOT have to select the corresponding material from the Material Drop Down Menu before applying the texture.   

If anyone has had any experience/solution for this type of problem..... PLEASE enlighten me on it as I have exhausted ALL my patience trying to figure this out!

Thanks in advance.......

-Pandorian

Also, an added problem that seems to be recurring is that at times I CANNOT see my mouse pointer while it lays on the Poser screen.  If it lands on the Menu bar I can see the buttons highlited as the mouse apparently passes over them, but the mouse pointer itself is not visualized.

I know what some may be thinking, viruses and such, but I have a firewall up 24/7, Use Nortons Antivirus and Webroot Spysweeper.... have run scans since then and they all came back clean.  This sort of thing only seems to occur in P6 when I start messing with the Material Collections option. 

-Pandorian

I do not have THE answer but have suffered all these problems. Do you have "Use binary Morph Targets" enabled? This can confuse P6 if the obj is stored off Runtime or, is switched out often. On the mouse, if you can find the "lightball" and click it, arrow should reappear. The rest is pure guessing but, reistalling P6 and SR2 over your old locale helps. Updating your MBbios and Vid driver helps, too.

I unchecked the "Use binary Morph Targets" option quite a while ago, so I don't think that's the problem.  The OBJ itself is stored in the P6 Runtime.  I have switched the OBJ a couple of times as I was still testing out my prop.

I'll remember the "lightball" thingie for the next time the mouse cursor disappears. 

If it still continues, I guess I'll have no choice but to reinstall P6 as you suggested, but somehow, I don't think that's the problem as it does it on BOTH my desktop and laptop, and ONLY seems to happen when I'm messing with the Material Collections.

Thanks for the assistance richardson, I really appreciate it.

-Pandorian

I have no idea if this will have anything to do with it...I use material collections all the time when setting up renders, but I always go in and uncheck the Preview material before saving. (it's something you don't need in there anyways as poser only uses it for itself)

It could also be one of those odd memory bugs that Poser seems to have that crop up randomly from user to user. Annoying PITA....I know when I've had some funky issues I close everything out and restart my computer and it seems to be ok for a while after that.

Sorry I don't have anything better to offer... =(

Welcome Not a total reinstall..! Just run the 2(P6, SR2) installers right over your P6. Takes 3 minutes. Nothing will change but little quirks get fixed, sometimes. Best to do it with P6 shut down, too. The mat collection has a few probs still. Saving a collection to replace a single texture(same name) proves this. You end up with 2identical pngs. Deleting one produces the shrugging guy....

"The mat collection has a few probs still. Saving a collection to replace a single texture(same name) proves this. You end up with 2identical pngs. Deleting one produces the shrugging guy...."

Yep, I've had that happen as well..... though sometimes I get the "shrugging guy" even one only ONE png is saved (the original created by the Material Collections option). 

Thanks again....

---Pandorian

One slightly off-the-wall thought: what's the status of your video driver? I have an Nvidia GeForce card, and the built-in latest-drive functions in Windows, pointing to Microsoft, load a very old driver. When I bought Hexagon on that DAZ special offer, I had to go to Nvidia's website to get a properly up-to-date driver. and doing that made Poser run better as well. As far as saving a specially-made PNG goes, you are rendering to the the right target size? I use 91x91, though I'm not sure where I got those figures from. And, with the Poser colour choices, it's sometimes all to easy to misread a filename so that the rendered version is distinct from the auto-generated version.

Quote - I use 91x91, though I'm not sure where I got those figures from.

91x91 is the default size for thumbnails automatically generated by Poser.  You can create larger thumbnails manually, however.  I inadvertantly saved a thumbnail to the library at 640x480 recently, and Poser didn't have any problems with it, although it looked a bit odd while the library panel was docked.

I have an Nvidia GeForce 6800 on my desktop and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700  on my laptop.  Both have the latest drivers installed. 

As far as the PNG goes, I used 91 x 91.

Thanks for the suggestions Antonia Tiger.

Well, here is something that may help you.

I have had the same sort of issues over the past few months. It is exclusively tied to the Mat Room, as far as I can tell. At one point a few weeks ago, I had a total system crash, which led me to run setup for Windows again, and overwrite all of the updates etc.

Fortunately, I didn't lose any of my data, except the Windows updates. Unfortunately, it didn't fix the problem.

So then I took another approach. I thought about it logically, and approached the issue where I thought it best served. It seems to be all about memory with large render problems. Obviously, many figures/props cause large render issues. However, wouldn't it also make sense for Mat collections to be an issue?

Looking at the raw text of a scene file, it shows that each node in the material room takes up a full 10 lines. Multiply that by however many nodes you have on each material in the scene, and you can imagine how much data you are dealing with. (This is just theory, but whitespace may also matter, and each node sits pretty far in on it's lines. 5 tabs in the scene I am looking at right now as I write this. The total size of this file is 17.7MB uncompressed, 2.3MB as a .pzz. It has 990468 lines of "code." No small file for sure.)

So what does this mean? Well, here is my working theory. Since this is all about data size, and obviously, all data must reside somewhere in memory, where is this data actively running from? Well, I have 1GB of physical RAM in my system, so that should tell me that the scene is fully sitting in my RAM, right? I don't think so.

Sure, in a perfect world, this scene file would fully reside in RAM, and should have no problems processing. However, Win2k takes something like 250MB of active memory just to boot. Then, I'm sure Windows has other things it runs in the background with available space as well. On top of that, once the OS starts, drivers load. Then, up come the TSRs, or Terminate Stay Resident programs. (Your little apps that run in your system tray, such as your anti-virus, spyware killer, IM clients, etc. You would be surprised how much room those "little" things take up.) There goes tons of memory down the tubes.

So get to the point right? Okay fine. Most people know that once all physical RAM is used up, Windows uses hard disk space for a "swap file," which simply simulates RAM to the OS. When writing to the swap file, or any disk space for that matter (including your Internet cache, that is a lot of space used up,) Windows uses the next available space on the hard drive, regardless of where that space resides.

Thinking about this, I decided, just for the heck of it, to run a defragmentation on my hard drive. My disk was an absolute mess! If you have ever run a defrag before, suffice to say there was a LOT of red in the analyzation.

So what happened? Well, in a word, nothing.

Huh? What kind of answer is that, you say? It's a GOOD nothing! So far, since that first defrag, about 2 weeks ago, I have run defrag about 5 or 6 times, each time, there was a decent amount of fragmentation. (Don't pay attention to the message that the drive does not defragging, it's like an anti-virus scan, no matter how many times you do it, it can only help, not harm, your system.)

Since that day, I have yet to have ONE lockup. No problems in the Mat Room. No problems rendering. Like I said, NOTHING!

So is this the right answer? I don't know. Am I safe from problems forever now? All I can do is shrug. Does it appear to me to have helped? The answer is a definitive YES!

Go ahead and give it a shot. It can't hurt, so no loss there. Here is a tip, locate, and download the trial version of Diskeeper. It is a very good defragmenter. Install and run it. Do this a couple of times in a row. Yes, it's a pain, but it will really clean up your disk, which is your ultimate goal here. While I didn't bother, you can also run it's boot-time defragger, which I have used in the past, and it's pretty good. Now I don't condone stealing software in any form, so if you don't want to pay for it after the 30 day trial is done, just uninstall it. From that point on, just use the one built into Windows. If you do this very regularly, the Windows one is very capable of the job. I have found the built-in version to be somewhat lacking when the drive is significantly fragmented already.

Yes, this has been very long winded, but I hope it has made some sense, and further, I hope it helps! I'd love for this thread to get some updates from those who try out my suggestion. Please share your findings, so we can all benefit. Whether your results are good, or bad, it helps to try to get to the bottom of the issue.

(Something interesting to note. I just found out this morning that Poser's Mat Room is a derivative of Pixel3D's Tempest shader. Who knows how the conversion from Mac, which Pixel3D is for, worked out. This is common problem in game programming. PCs are so varied from desktop to desktop to laptop, that it is wholly impossible to test for every possible configuration. That's why PC games so often need patches to "fix" where the same exact game runs on a XBox or Playstation without a hitch. Macs are basically like consoles. There is a specific design when you buy a Mac. It's going to have basically the same parts from one to the next. Think about how many different video cards alone we each have. I have 4 desktops, and a laptop here, and each has totally different parts running it.)

Okay, enough rambling. If you have read this far, thanks for listening. If not, you aren't seeing this anyway so :m_tongue2:

Later!

Destro75..... first off..... THANK YOU for taking the time out to explain and suggest all of this to me.  I DON'T see it as longwinded at all.... but rather as a wealth of information that I can benefit from.  The memory issue did come to mind at one part, particularly when I saw it happened to both my desk top and my laptop..... and I kinda figured it was "directly" tied in to the P6 Material Room, which is the ONLY time it occurs. 

I never occurred to me that I might need to defrag my computers, so I will definitely be doing that as well.  After I try these things, I'll definitely do as you requested and keep this thread alive with my findings.

Thank you again Destro75 for sharing all this valuable info with me.  I REALLY appreciate it. 

---Pandorian

Realmling, thank you for your suggestion.... I'll give that a try as well.

---Pandorian

Just to add to that, there are similar utilities which defrag the physical RAM, and I happen to have one running on my machine. It may be helping. I got it off the cover disk on one of the British computer magazines, back in March... [Pauses to check] FreeRAM XP Pro, and apparently freeware. I've had renders hang for a while, but the taskbar indicator was ticking away, and suddenly there was a fair chunk of extra RAM available to the render. I reckon it's worth a try. At worst, you get an idea of how much RAM is being used.

Scarf, snarfle Thanks Antonia Following Destro's post, I may look into a reinstall of Windows. Can never be too sure. I just traced my recent crash-a-thon to a faulty fan in the pc power unit. Fan would occassionally drop below minimum threshold but, during a render, would shut down. Find me a pc that can just power through all this.

AntoniaTiger, thanks for that link. I have been thinking for a while about writing an app to free up RAM, and I never thought to look for a freebie app to do it for me!

Richardson, I have been meaning to contact you about your crashing problems. (I have been watching your issues on your gallery postings.) I have an idea for you to try before you do something as drastic as a Windows reinstall. (Keep in mind, I mentioned that it didn't actually help me.)

What you can do, and something I have done a couple of times to fix up my system, is to run a CHKDSK on your hard drive. I don't recall if you ever mentioned what OS version you are on, but CHKDSK is the replacement for the old ScanDisk Windows utility in versions up to, I believe, WinME.

What this utility does is checks the sectors of the hard disk, and tries to repair any problems it finds. You would be surprised to see how sectors get corrupted in day to day use of Windows. Using Poser seems to increase this "damage." (Note: damage is a terrible word to use here, because I don't want to make anyone think Poser is causing hardware problems for them. What I mean is that for whatever reason, that only MS can possibly know, significant I/O just freaks out drives. My belief is that this is directly tied to the defragmentation issues Windows has. Someday, MS will figure it all out, I hold that hope closely. Again though, Poser is not hurting your system. Windows file access is. And no, I am not a Windows hater, I'm actually a big fan, but these are the problems we deal with, and I don't sugar coat. )

So, to run CHKDSK, go to My Computer (not mine, yours :biggrin: ) and right click on the drive. Choose Properties from the resulting menu. On the popup, choose the Tools tab. The first option should be Error-checking. Click the Check Now button. The next popup will present you with options for the checking. Check off both options (Automatically fix file system errors, and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.) Chances are, you are running this utility on your primary drive. If that is the case, you will receive a message that Windows cannot run the utility at the current time. It will however set itself up to run on the next system restart. It will start automatically on the next reboot, unless when you reboot, you explicitly stop the process from running before it starts (which I don't suggest.)

My suggestion is not to run this unless you don't need the computer for a day. I have an 80GB hard drive, and it takes in the neighborhood of 16 hours for it to complete. (Keep in mind, this is doing some very low-level work on your hardware.) Expect to lose significant time on this process, but it is good to run it when you are having crashing problems. It could just be some data sitting on some corrupted sectors. When you run this, it will move that data to a clean sector, and fix the original one, thereby fixing up the disk.

If for whatever reason you can't run it this way (though I don't know why that would happen, unless you had a blue screen you couldn't recover from, which I have,) you can also run it from the Recovery Console.

The Recovery Console is a bit daunting if you have no experience with MS-DOS. To run it, boot to your Windows installation disk. When you get to the first screen with options, choose the option to Repair a Windows installation. Follow the prompts to enter the Recovery Console (I can't recall the exact key sequence to reach it, but it should be easy enough to figure out.) Once the console starts, you will be on a black screen with white lettering, very much like MS-DOS. If you type the word help, it will list all available utilities (though this isn't necessary, but you may be interested in the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR utilities, I was.) You can type CHKDSK /? (which will show you the parameters available to the utility. I believe the command you want to use is CHKDSK /F but I don't recall off the top of my head, so check to make sure by using the /? parameter first. Again, this process will take many hours, so be prepared to walk away from the system for a long time.

I know this is another long post, but hopefully it will help you, or anyone else, for that matter.

Pandorian, I really hope this helps you out. I'm glad it at least gives you some hope.

Again all, if any of these suggestions help, please bump this thread with your results, so others can benefit as well!

Thanks Destro I'll have a pc wiz friend of mine run this along with a few other things I dare not. He can decide if there is risk,, etc. I hang onto this pc because it was a fortune and a superhot handbuilt with 3gigs 3 years ago(linux). It's still fast when it feels like it,, sigh. It's stripped down to 1.5 gigs now. As to the length of your replies, you either type fast as spit or, have some voice feed..;) Defragged again, too. It was pretty clear.

Seriously, if you run the full error-checking, and it picks up bad sectors, it's a strong sign that your hard drive is at the end of its useful life. After only three years, it shouldn't be, but data backups are always important.

Richardson, yeah, if you have a friend who knows his/her way around a computer, let that person run all sorts of diagnostics. (Never hurts to have a PC wiz in your circle of friends.)

As for my typing, yeah, I type pretty fast. I 9 to 5 as a programmer, so I am used to typing a lot in short periods of time.

AntoniaTiger, what you say is somewhat true, but not always. My current drive has needed a few CHKDSK repairs over the past few months, and it's only a few months old. From my experience, it has a lot to do with I/O anomalies. With all of the I/O going on during a render operation, it could be the drives are just generating a lot of heat causing corruptions. (Besides, CHKDSK also finds file and folder corruptions, and fixes those too, and doesn't report what the errors it found and fixed were, so it could be just that.)

Boy, just to prove me wrong...

My hard drive is now reporting that a failure is imminent. Windows advised me to backup my data immediately. I guess that blows my theory on DISKCHK out of the water. (You were tight AntoniaTiger, sorry for doubting you ;-)

I'm a bit ticked off, since the drive is only a couple months old. Ah well. Maybe it's my excuse to finally buy a new system. I've had the current one for like 4 years now.