Hello, everybody. I'm a longtime 2D animator who is looking to expand his horizons a little bit. I was gifted a copy of Poser 8 (if I can learn it enough to be useful, I intend to get a full current version, this is just a way to try it without spending too much money) on a late 2009 Macbook running 10.6 (before Apple blocked Flash, so all features are enabled, as far as I can tell).

I've been playing around with it, and I'm running into some confusion. I'm a tinkerer, I like playing around with things while learning. To that end, I found a few free Poser compatible models to try and incorporate. But I'm confused by the whole concept of the runtime environment. I can put the downloads in a separate file folder (which I would prefer to do, so I can sort my stuff by rights management responsibilities) and import them into the Content Library just fine. One tutorial told me to just drag and drop the new runtime folder into the proper Poser runtime folder and it will merge everything (I created a clone of the drive and tried it. Nope, it overwrote the folder and crashed Poser 8).

So, what happens if I just keep using separate folders for new Poser content instead of putting it in the "proper" runtime directory? If I try to manually merge the stuff in the new runtime with the proper directory under Poser, how do I make sure the correct model/name/etc. is seen? Am I overthinking this, or will it cause conflicts and crashes if I don't do it the "proper" way?