Hi,
I wonder if someone else has the same problem with Poser 8's preview ?

I'm using an ACER Aspire 6530 G laptop with an ATI Radeon 3470 Hybrid X2 crossfire mobility card running Vista Home Premium.
It's about 4 months old and has 4GB of RAM installed so it should be plenty to run Poser 8.
No problems with ZBrush, MAX, DS-3 or Photoshop.

Now, whenever I load a textured figure (Unimesh based), it looks fine in preview, but as soon as I render it once, the preview turns either all white or shows one of the transmaps as soon as I hover with my cursor over the figure.

I do my own posing and custom morphs, so naturally I can't work that way.
ScreeD "fixes" it, but then the preview becomes way too slow and jerky to work with.

If I set the screen to floating and resize/wiggle it slightly, the preview gets stable again....for a few seconds.
Then Poser "drops" the transmaps attached to the cornea or the hair, and those parts go white as if there was no textue attached.
Once the preview is crashed that way, there is no other way to than to start Poser again to bring it back to working properly.

I already gone through my textures with a fine comb, looking for stray nodes or some other problems, but nothing.
Ebven attached the transmaps to the displacement nodes like the new Poser 8 figures have.
SOMETIMES a figure stays "stable" for a awhile but only as long as I don't render to screen.
If I use the area render or render to a new window, it stays stable.

But it's really hit and miss and I can't wok that way.

I played with the ini and looked for other problems,changed transpary settings, but no luck.

And NO, I CAN NOT update my video drivers because mobility card drivers are issued by the laptop manufacturer, not the card manufacturer, and ACER says the one's I have are the latest.
And as I said, other OpenGL previews in other programs work perfectly fine on my machine.

I'm actually not that sure that it is just an OpenGL/driver issue, as Poser 8 also seems to have a problem finding textures in general.
I have several hundred separate small runtimes to keep track of my stuff and usually only install those I actually need, but it seems the new library can't properly search through runtimes that are located on another drive.

Anyway, anyone else have a similar problem with the preview ?
Anyone knows a fix for this ?

I really would get Poser to work as it's improved render engine is pretty fast, but without a proper preview it's useless for me.

Many thanks !

You can try Render -> Reload textures, and many times this will fix this kind of problem, but tbh I mostly got over needing to see accurate shading and whatnot in previews a long time ago, I usually work with the textures turned off in preview.  Even on fairly high end display adapters (NVidia 8800GTX) without a lot of display errors, it's often just a lot more comfortable.

Quote -
I'm actually not that sure that it is just an OpenGL/driver issue, as Poser 8 also seems to have a problem finding textures in general.
I have several hundred separate small runtimes to keep track of my stuff and usually only install those I actually need, but it seems the new library can't properly search through runtimes that are located on another drive.

You're kidding, right?
So, the new and improved library offers the "feature" of creating a problem for those of us who already were able to control our "bloated runtimes" on our own without new and improved "features" for that?

Poser 8 sounds better and better with each new thread. :rolleyes:

You're downloading your copy right now then Mike?

 Re.: the missing textures: Did you set the search to DEEP or shallow? (although I think the default is deep, I know mine was set to deep when I went to change it the first day)

Poser 8 is apparently also more picky than previous versions about textures with the same name. I'm not sure if it's going through the texture folder and taking them in alphabetical order or what. Then again, so far I have had NO problems with textures not loading or wrong textures being used. I can only judge from other threads.

I LOVE the new library. No more changing runtime all the time to get to the thing I need (typically, stuff for one scene is scattered over several runtimes) - it's ALL there, in the same listing. AND it's super fast, too.

A few people are having problems with Norton... er... Poser 8's library, but that doesn't mean it's a general problem. Just that a few people are having problems, MOST LIKELY (since it's not a general issue) due to somthing else on their computer.

Hi, many thanks for replying.

Oh well, I feel so stupid now !
I was so desperate yesterday that I tried to install some ATI drivers which were listed as "mobility" but they promptly shot my system.
And when I used system restore, my german Catalyst Control Center was gone and with it the crossfire mode for my video card.

So, as a final attempt I browsed to the german ACER support website and guess what ?
Despite everyone sayin' that my drivers were the latest and that there were NO drivers to be had from ACER, there WAS a download for my machine.

And it installed a brand new CCC that now let's me fiddle with every little setting my video card has.
Seven settings alone for 3d !

I feel so...professional now. He He.

AND of course shiny new drivers and new OpenGL and Poser-8 now FLIES !

Sure, there might be still some bugs here and there, but I now can WORK while waiting for the first SR.

Thanks to everyone at SM for doing such a great job !