Hi all,

Longtime visitor here, infrequent poster. Long post ahead...

I've been attempting to create my own 3D art for over 2 years now. My main motivation was to create a very specific character and go from there. I knew precisely what she needed to look like (because she's based on a real person). I started as a complete n00b over 2 years ago with the goal of creating the best likeness I possibly could.

After about a year and a half of sticking with it, messed up a lot, but learning even more I finally got to a point where I had a convincing likeness for my model. However, the figure I had created was the accumulation of all of my ignorance. I had injected morph packs for virtually every body part/facial feature to avoid having to manually create my own morphs. By now, I wish I knew then what I know now because I would have just rolled up my sleeves and built her from scratch from the base V4 model.

Now I have a great likeness, but because I work in Poser, I have a figure bloated with morphs. Even after weeding out all the morphs I no longer use, I have a figure that seems to really bog down Poser, especially if I ever use conforming clothes. Any action takes several seconds to even register, making posing an extremely slow, frustrating process -- especially since I know it should be moving much faster, smoother.

My question is this: does anyone have a recommendation for how I should proceed?

I'm on a newer Mac, so I don't have the benefit of an NVIDIA GPU, which makes DS kind of a nonstarter, rendering is just way too slow. Firefly works fine for me. Is there a way to optimize my character so Poser becomes usable again? Would a character INJ morph do the trick? I use several ironMan13 facial feature morphs, and then finally a whole slew of custom, detail morphs I made myself in ZBrush because the pre-fab morphs just weren't getting me all the way there. I don't see how I can get around this. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

And I haven't ruled out just starting over entirely, although that's still my nuclear option. There are a lot of advantages to that, especially now that I'm more experienced, but if I can salvage the work I've done to date, that would be my preference.

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any assistance.

Not being a Mac user I couldn't say what your options are, computer wise. But...

I have a fairly modest PC, 8 GB RAM, quad core processor, 1TB HDD. By any honest reckoning it's a mid range machine yet I don't notice much of a slowdown using a fully loaded V4, or any other figure, for that matter. Which version of Poser do you use? I use the 64 bit version of PP 2012 and compared to P6 on my old XP box it's like greased lightining. Me point is, with a modern machine and a recent version of Poser you should be golden.

Maybe your render settings need adjustment? I'm just guessing here.

As for the starting over option, that's not always a bad thing. I've found that when I've had to do that, it's taken me far less time than anticipated and the end result is usually better.

Thanks for your prompt reply, SamTherapy. I'm using the 64-bit version of PP2014 on a Mac that has maxed out specs. Plenty o power. Poser works as expected until I use any conforming clothing, mainly. Smith-Micro has not been able to help me resolve the issue. My figure is based on V4 but is scaled down to be about 5ft 7in and has a lot of custom morphs, so when I add any clothing and conform it I check the options to include scale and morphs when conforming.

Aside from that issue, I'm wondering if I can have an optimized version of my custom figure that 'bakes in' all my custom morphs so I don't have to keep all the morph dials left over from the 3rd part morph packs that I never ended up using. Similar to 3rd party character morphs, I'd prefer to just have a base model with a simple injection that preserves all my custom morphs but does away with all the additional dials, etc. that seem to really bog down Poser. Am I making sense?

I may start over, but it's a tough sell because I've come so far and just lack the expert knowledge to know what the next best step should be.

Have you tried creating a full body morph?

Figure>Spawn Full Body Morph

Then delete all the other morphs and save the figure back to the library with a new name (so you don't overwrite your existing V4). Go to your preferences first, and make sure that you have "Use External Binary Morphs" checked under the Misc. tab. (I think it's checked by default). This will store your morph targets as .pmd which is more efficient than .pz2 morphs and doesn't bloat the figure's .cr2

You will have to transfer the custom morph to all the clothing you intend to use. You can do this via the fitting room or by hand in zbrush for a more accurate fit.

Thank you AmbientShade! I'll try that and let you know how it goes. :)

Another way to do this is create a full body morph ... export as a Wavefront obj ... and then you can re-import as a full body morph anytime you need her. Sort of a back up if the character doesn't work. Just a backup precaution.

And in Poser Pro you can "copy morphs from" (which would be your FBM) V4 to conforming clothes as you use them.

The previous comments are good and I use DS on a Mac with little issue. Just depends on what you are doing. (I did get a separate Mac for iray with an NVIDIA card but the other Mac works fine for most stuff).