First, apologies...I'm sure this topic has been around before, but I'd like to get some advice on my specific problems.

I've used Poser and Carrara in the past and they were my favorite combination.  They worked well together and I had no problem importing multiple figures and scenes into Carrara without any problems.

So, now we have Poser 7 and Carrara 5 (which we know have issues because the two companies won't play nice and don't care about their customers).  Add to the mix Victoria 4 (which I think is a much larger file size than V3) and I'm having big problems importing 3 or 4 figures into Carrara.  My computer slows down to a crawl, whereas before it was able to handle the load.

I have a AMD Athlon dual 64 with 2 gigs of RAM (I'm getting another gig) and a NVidia GeForce 7600 GS 512MB  And I'm running Windows XP SP2 (I tried Vista but switched back due to lack of OpenGL support)

SO....I'm open to suggestions about rendering software, hardware upgrades, or just about anything that can allow me to import multiple Poser figures without my system getting bogged down.  I don't want to use Poser as my renderer because I like the quality of renders much better with other software.

I'm also interested to hear what other people can do....how many figures can you comforably import into another rendering program and what kind of setups do you have?

Thanks for any advice!!!!

I hope daz may be willing to listen to reason in regard to P7 working with c5pro. I dunno how many V4s ya can load in carrara. maybe 4 of 'em, all as distinct objects, with several distinct 4096X4096 texmaps, uses up all 1.5 GB, or whatever is accessible to one app in that OS.

Vue 6 Infinite 64 bit on XP Pro 64 bit - I've imported and rendered 30 figures, most of them V3/A3/S3/M3, a few V2/Judy/Don. Hires textures on all figures. 15 lights, volumetric effects, ambient occlusion, dburdick's SkinVue2 shaders, the whole kaboodle. Rendered without any trouble on an Athlon64x2 4400 with 4 GB RAM.

are you not able to save 'em as a carrera native format?

In Vue 5 infinate you can load in a character, as a pz3, then save it as a .vob file. then load it into your scene as a .vob, you can even light the figure,add a bit of scene, maybe their immidiate surroundings, chair,table, whatever......., then group all that together, and save that as a .vob object. usefull if you are happy with the character setup, but are unhappy with the surroundings, as you can just start over with the charcter all set up, it is also less memory intensive than the pz3 file.

If you have your 3GB of RAM, then Vue 6 will work wonders with Poser figures, imports really well with the Poser shader tree. I have 1GB & while generally I can work my scenes without much problems, added more memory is the way to go. Vue's lighting is superb, good rengine engine & great for landscapes. Again though, more memory, easier workflow.

30 figures and 15 lights?!?!  Wow that's impressive.  I think if I tried that my computer would explode!

In Vue, I tried saving the scene (an interior house) as a vob file and then I tried to import two V4  figures (with clothing). I got an "out of memory" error.   The vob file opened pretty quickly but when I tried to import the figures it just got bogged down again.

So hopefully the additional GB of RAM will help.

Anyone care to guess which program is less of a memory hog....Carrara or Vue?