I've been fighting a lot of weird Poser bugs recently, and that's running the risk of making me hate Poser again, so I'm going to talk about something I really, really like in the newer versions of Poser.  The scene libraries are wonderful!  :woot:  I don't know why we didn't have this feature all along.  The scene libraries have allowed me to organize my work, and they reignited my love of Poser after almost a year of not being able to bear working with the software.  I've managed to go back and archive old scenes dating back to year 2000.  I've found all sorts of things that I thought were lost long ago.  I've been able to reorganize my figure and props and materials libraries, to better represent all of the useful things I had developed over the years, now that those things were no longer hidden away in scene files with baffling names like "tempscene_quickrender8f.pzz".

I'm not sure when they added the scene library to Poser, but, man.  I wish I had started using it back then.  Poser has been fun again, just because of the scene library.  What a cool thing.  :laugh:

So, who else uses this feature?  Anyone?  If you do, has it helped you as much as it helped me? 

I have been using the scene library since it came out. I went thru and loaded old scenes to figure out where to resave/move them to so they were sorted in a more logical way. It is far easier to tell what is in a scene file named 11.pz3 if it has a thumbnail....

I have scenes saved as far back as Poser 4, so there are a ton of them.

118 gigabyte of them actually.......

I don't seem to have begun saving scenes before mid-2000, back in the P4 days.  :unsure:  Anyway, I can't find anything for the first six or eight months of Poser use.  The figures, props, and textures are there, but no scenes.  I also had an irritating (to now-me, not then-me) tendency to keep overwriting the same files as I worked with a scene, so I have later versions of scenes from which there were nice renders in earlier versions, but now the render setup is lost.  Ah, well.

The main problem I find with importing the old scenes is .bum files.  I deleted all my .bum files back in the P7 days, to clear up disk space, so I end up having to browse for texture map equivalents, over and over and over.  I need some kind of pz3 batch editor to correct the texture listings en masse.  Every now and then a geometry or texture is missing altogether, so I've spent a lot of time digging through disorganized archives and backup disks.  Interesting to revisit some of those things.  It really impresses me how far Poser has come, when I look back into the old P4 and P5 files.

I don't use it 'cuz I've never been able to get the thumbnails... just the outline of the shrugging guy.

I still have P4 and up Runtimes, so I rarely get any missing files when reloading them. When I do, it is usually something that I had on a desktop runtime and decided not to add to a main one for one reason or the other. There are a few that are missing things I beta tested for people as well. I must have forgotten to add those to my runtime list at some point.

You could set the search preferences to shallow when looking thru the old scenes to cut down on the missing file nagging. Not sure how well that works thou, it depends on the number of Runtimes you have if I remember right.

I was in the habit of sequential saves long before working with Poser. When I started in computers you could not over write anything anyway. You can't over write a 402 program jumper board or punch cards, lol... Well, if you had way to much time on your hands I guess you technically could have on punch cards... lmao.... When hard drives first became available, one of my first questions was "What happens if it forgets or writes it down wrong, then what?" Little did I know at the time, was that "lost clusters" would happen far to often on them.

I gave up on backing Runtimes up to cds and DVDs soon after it turned into a feed the monkey thing and went with mirroring the Runtimes to multiple machines. Disk space has never really been an issue for me since I usually have cases of hard drives here. I am kind of glad that I did, many of the cd's and DVDs I burned years ago can't be read anymore. They have a shelf life too, unfortunetly.

Poser has come a long way. It is sometimes comical to load up something that I did in P4. It is also interesting to see the differences you can make with the same scene in the newest version. Posette can actually be made into a really nice character with things like SubD, IDL, SSS, etc. Can't say as much for some of the old clothes that went thru the character thou. Normals handling on them can produce some strange results when rendering.

Piersyf you need to save it using the library rather than using the file menu. Then a thumbnail is created.

Thanks for that, RedPhantom. Having over 800 saved scenes I was hoping for a way to batch them rather than loading each scene and saving it. What I have been doing is keeping a folder of .jpegs with the same name as the scene in a separate scene folder, so I can pretty quickly scroll through the scenes using Windows picture viewer. Better than a 91x91.

Quote - I don't use it 'cuz I've never been able to get the thumbnails... just the outline of the shrugging guy.

Just to add to this, if you moved a pz3 to the scene folder without a thumbnail, writing over it will not create a new thumbnail. You have to save it to a new name, then delete the old one after you verify the save.

Of course, all of this is rock and roll. .

I've got EVERYTHING in folders and subfolders in my Figures library. No more searching for what goes with what. This includes the scenes... if a PZ3 came with the package, it goes into the figures library with all the other parts! This leaves my Pose folder for... uh... would you believe.... POSES? 

This leaves the scene library with the very useful job that Cage has found for it! 

Quote - Just to add to this, if you moved a pz3 to the scene folder without a thumbnail, writing over it will not create a new thumbnail. You have to save it to a new name, then delete the old one after you verify the save.

Are you saying that if you have a scene without a thumbnail, just over-writing the scene won't make a thumbnail? Cause I've done just that. You do need refresh the library though.

Yeah, I get a new thumbnail every time I re-save a scene, in the library.  :unsure:

Quote - Are you saying that if you have a scene without a thumbnail, just over-writing the scene won't make a thumbnail? Cause I've done just that. You do need refresh the library though.

Sometimes on a Mac (rare but it has happened) you have to leave the folder and load another folder then come back to see a changed or new thumb show up.

Yeah, that happens on a pc too.

You know, there's only one flaw with the Scene library.  It's the loading protocol.  The logic of loading a scene (generally) is the reverse of the logic of loading a prop, figure, light, or almost anything else.  Generally you want to replace the scene, when you load a new one, but merge the item into the existing scene, with other things.  But the click-handling and single- or double-check button behavior on the Scene library is identical to the others.  Which readily leads to confusion.  I keep merging scenes when I want to load a fresh one.  Worse, I now find myself trying to replace figures when I actually want to merge a new one into the scene.  Because the Scene library buttons and clicks are backwards!  Ack!  :scared:

This is the Poser figure left-right inversion problem, all over again.  Poser has taught me to reverse left and right, and now I reflexively get them backwards in real-world situations.  Easily confused, is Cage.  :lol:  Needs the consistency.

Other than that, though... Scene library is awesome.  :woot:

Well, I gave the scene library a go, and while I am sure I'm missing something, I won't be using it again.

I have a few large scenes that I re-use and update from time to time, so keeping track of the most recent one is a bit of a challenge (although now I include the date in the scene name). Still, I thought having the current ones in the scene library might be cool, so I tried it.

Opened the scene in Poser, then saved it to the scene library. Thumbnail generated. I work on the scene and save the scene in wireframe view to save time when I open it becaue it takes forever for Poser to load the textures and calculate lighting. As expected, the thumbnail was of the wireframe image that was on the preview window when I saved.

Just opened it. Poser opened the file with full textures and lighting (NOT the way it was saved). Went and had a shower and came back when it was finished. Also, ALL cameras were back in the default position. After shifting one of the cameras I rendered a small thumbnail to give a nicer picture, then clicked to return to the preview window so I could change it back to wireframe before saving.

After an hour of cycling, I forced Poser to close.

Just restarted Poser, opened the SAME scene from my own, separate scene folder... opened in wireframe as it had been saved, with cameras in position, in less than 10 SECONDS!

Don't think I'll be using the scene tab in the library...

Did SM finally fix the library that shows all your figures, face, expression, materials, etc?

Can it handle loading 100 folders in less than two seconds like Windows 95 or is that too much for SM to handle (LOL).