Do any of you ever used "Use external binary morphs" with DAZ figures? What exactly is the functional difference between using delta injection poses vs. using PMD? PMD was buggy in Poser 5 but was fixed in Poser 7 and later? Is PMD only for SmithMicro figures? All I really grasp about it is that DAZ style delta injection morphs require pre-existing channels and SM figure PMD injection does not for some reason. Do they use memory resources differently? What do External Binary Morph PMD involve? What are its positives and negatives? Can some one explain all this all to me? I am not very suffisticated technically and have not understood the technical articles I have found but I would like to understand this better. Thanks.

PMDs are perfectly safe to read from.  Have external binaries On is a matter of debate. Some people say they still have issues when PMDs are used to write scenes and saving to the library, others do not have these issues. I have used it for the past 2 years and I have no issues whatsoever.

What advantages do external binaries offer?
It uses less disk space. The morphsets are written to a PMD in a binary form and are re-used. It is also a LOT faster in saving and loading scenes and figures. And as you said, there are advantages to be able to create morphs in figures outside of the INJ system

Disadvantages?
As I said above - some people consider external binaries unsafe.
Another is that PMD files are not directly usable in DS

Regarding memory usage - I don't think there is a difference. It could be that morphs are loaded on the fly, but I am not sure about that.

Hope this helps

Thank you. I too have been wondering if the morphs are loaded on the fly.

There's PMD and ReadScript, the daz morphs are ReadScript.

When you create a PMD based injection you only need to have use external binary morph targets enabled during the creation of the morphs for INJ, the end user of the morphs need not have UEBMT enabled in order to use the morphs as the morphs are simply referencing the PMD file, the channels will be created by poser.

Anyway, here's a thorough description of the surprisingly simple PMD INJ creation process by Nerd3D...

http://www.nerd3d.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=13

For the ReadScript process you might want to refer to this product available in the Renderosity marketplace... it's a morph MR and contains a 60 page pdf tutorial on these kinds of morphs and ways to mix the various Daz morph packages morphs along with custom morphs and create a redistributable INJ. This product is probably the most exhaustive documentation on ReadScript that I've ever encountered and well worth the price...

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/ps-eve-collection-/94573

Edit_ I'm pretty certain that there is a utility or plug-in for Daz Studio that will enable you to utilize .Pmd morphs. Might be something to look into if you are a DS user.

Simply for completionists sake, here's a link to Daz's rules and regulations for distributing INJ/REM poses of Daz proprietary content.

https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/entries/124136-Distributing-add-on-products-that-use-INJ-REM-pose-files

what got me interested was seeing Binary Morph Converter by Dimension3D in Clearence and wondering what the purpose/value of it was and I started with the Nerd3D text but could not make any sense of it and whether the Dimension3D utility was intended for use with Daz Generation 2 figures, Generation 3 figures or only Smith Micro figures. Then I wondered if it would speed the very slow loading of Daz 4 figures on my inadequate computer.

Nope.  But then my PZ3s are not that big.

It's intended use is for anything that can utilize external binary morphs (which is anything with morph data that is saved), as such you will have to opt to have "use external binary morphs" turned on in your preferences. I believe (as I don't have the utility and am a Mac user and this is a windows only thingy) that this will also convert embedded morphs in props and figures into an external .pmd file. It is a little confusing, and clarification would only be possible if I had the ability to operate such a utility.

What is certain is that many people are wary of using the external binary morph option in Poser as it had a history of causing bugs and scene corruption. Supposedly Smith Micro finally ironed all of this out by Poser 8 but Nerd3D states that he encountered some minor issues in poser 9. I myself don't use .pmd unless creating a .pmd INJ and rather save the morphs as embedded within the scene or .cr2 or what-have-you.

Hope this helps... perhaps someone with more knowledge about editing Poser files and Poser Arcana will chime in with more substantial info.

Edit_ as far as faster loading, there probably is some savings by using .pmd, although I've never really noticed a massively significant difference. Been a while since I actually had them turned on in prefs.

"but could not make any sense of it and whether the Dimension3D utility was intended for use with Daz Generation 2 figures"

IIRC, it was the Gen 3 Daz figures that introduced the ReadScript method of loading morph data, prior to this the data was embedded within the .cr2. I might be wrong on this, but if you're utilizing the Gen 2 figures then D3D's converter might be of some use in this instance.

The bugs which were known regarding external binaries were fixed in P9 SR2 and SR3.

Regarding speed: If you do a save of an existing scene which wouild be 500MB on disk without external binaries, it will take less than 3 seconds when you have external binaries On. This means you never hesitate to do intermediate saves. Save to a new scene would be around 5 seconds.  Loading such a scene would probably take 30-40 seconds which is faster as without external binaries, but not as dramatic as saving the scene. Reason is that it still has to load all the textures and objects which belong to the scene.

Thank you for the info. I do wonder why PMD isn't more popular... the requirement to make pre-existing channels is a pain sometimes. I really don't like INJ/REM which is an other reason I still use Daz 2 and Daz 3 Reduced Resolution whenever possible. I just wish I had more modern and fancier textures for them. I fixed face_off's skin scripts to work with the older and other figures though which is a big help.

To clear up a possible misunderstanding. To use PMD to read morphs, you do NOT need to have external binaries ON. Poser will read the PMD files regardless. So creating moprhs with a PMD should not be a problem for anyone using Poser (5+ up). There are quite a few merchants which do use PMD's in their products - often when it is a Poser only product.

EZSkin works with gen2 and gen3 texture sets as well. And it is also pretty easy to setup new definition files in the editor if you run up agains a figure which is not supported. Use an existing definition as template and match the names .

Personal opinion:

I think the advantage of the PMD is for distribution of morphs for items that you can not distribute the cr2 and can not (easily) be injected.  With an item, such as the poserworld leather couch, you could distribute a PMD file for sitting morphs without violating the creators rights.

Bill

I have been away from the forums for a while. I just heard of EZskin for the first time yesterday in the JoePublic light set thread! All this weight mapping is new to me too. I have not actually used the PMD yet... do you need to REM them to save resources once you build your character as you do with Daz INJ channels? I wish spawning a single character FBM from dialed characters and deleting the source and unused channels was a basic feature of Poser!

Note: my computer is such crap I have often converted morphed and posed figures into props to conserve memory in PZ3s before rendering! Again... Wish that was a built-in feature of Poser. I have upgraded Poser and I now miss the texture resolution on-the-fly down-sampling of Max Texture Resolution that was in the poser 5 Render Settings. It was great not having to make my own lower-resolution texture maps for everything my self... Could test render with low max texture resolution and then final render with the full texture with no extra work in Poser 5. Please remember in all this that I am not at all a sophisticated user. I come at this from traditional media and have a c.1995 understanding of computers. I liked my old WinDOS OS.

"I wish spawning a single character FBM from dialed characters and deleting the source and unused channels was a basic feature of Poser!"

Scripts-->WardrobeWizzardMenu-->Utilities-->Morphs-->Dials to Single Morph-->Select name-->OK  

Your morphs are now a single FBM

Then:

Zero All Morphs

Then:

Download and install Ockhams "Clean unused Morphs" python.

Run it.

All morphs are gone except the FBM you just created.

Quote - Note: my computer is such crap I have often converted morphed and posed figures into props to conserve memory in PZ3s before rendering! Again... Wish that was a built-in feature of Poser. I have upgraded Poser and I now miss the texture resolution on-the-fly down-sampling of Max Texture Resolution that was in the poser 5 Render Settings. It was great not having to make my own lower-resolution texture maps for everything my self... Could test render with low max texture resolution and then final render with the full texture with no extra work in Poser 5. Please remember in all this that I am not at all a sophisticated user. I come at this from traditional media and have a c.1995 understanding of computers. I liked my old WinDOS OS.

There are 2 different situations where you can run out of memory: In poser itself while posing or applying materials and during rendering. If you run 64bit poser, none of these two are an issue (if you run out of RAM it will just be slower).
In 32bit poser there is a limit which depends on your OS (2-4GB *). If you render in-process (so with external process disabled), you need more memory since both the render process and poser itself has to fit in the same limited space (2-4GB).

Now you have a little bit control over how much memory a scene uses. For the poser process you can set the texture preview size to a lower value (Render Settings!Preview)

In P8 and up the render engine uses a texture buffer the size of which is depending on your actual memory. It will be smaller if you have little memory. Theoretically it should now not matter what size the textures are. Having said that - it all has to fit in 2-4GB memory and if your scene gets larger, there is little spare room left to keep things going, but that would happen with smaller texture sizes as well.

2GB - standard 32bit Windows
3GB - 32bit Windows with Large Memory Switch enabled
4GB - 64bit Windows

Thank you JoePublic. I had no idea WardrobeWizard could be used that way. Just recently I moved to a crappy $250 laptop after several years running Poser on a tiny Dell Mini netbook! I got in the habit of re-sampling my textures way down right in the texture folder. I use all my renders as a base for digital painting or to sketch from so I have never been a power-user in terms of renders. Thank you for all the info... Even though I am a dope about this stuff I have a strong desire to have some grasp of what is going on under the hood. Seriously... I wish there was a PoserPro 2012 version of that old consumer product Poser Artist. I have never been as productive with Poser as I was back with Poser 3 and 4. I could stand things like a limit to only three lights and anti-aliased 'render ' of the Preview only (with shadows and transparency) if it meant I could have a stripped down no-brainier version of Poser. But given Poser is somewhere between consumer toy and expert software I do want to at least try to understand it as much as I can. My kids used to have an game where you could assemble imaginary animals from parts and pose them and run them through dance animation loops... A human version of that would be cool. A game like City of Heroes or whatever where you customize characters from mix and match and scaling but then you could pose them in various scenes for painting from. Second Life or whatever but with decent anatomy. I guess that is what Poser 3 with Canoma sets was like when I started with this.