3d App Annoyance

[marydell]

I'm doing some stuff in Poser 6 (Poser 7 is no faster, so I stick with 6), using some new DAZ figures, and YE GODS the memory hogging has become INSANE. I have a human figure with an outfit, boots, and hair; all of the stuff has textures loaded. There are no props, and I only have 3 lights. And I can't move the camera interactively because of the atrocious lag.

I haven't done much with Poser in the past couple of years, and when I have I've used older figures.  These new gen4 figures must have a trillion polys each; they are SO SLOW.  I have 2 gb of memory and if I want to have any fun with the app--like, rig some of my own models--I will need to double my memory first, I think.

Comments

[seawasp]

I'm sorry. :( I didn't mean to bring your system to its knees.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

LOL, it's not your fault! Although A's long flowing hair is partly to blame :)

Back when I started using Poser, 10 years ago or so, the figures were relatively low-res, with commonsense limits on the points that make up the 3d meshes. When I started selling stuff through DAZ they wouldn't accept models above a certain poly count. Now, though, there are so many cool things you can do with a high-poly model that they can't resist the temptation of having everything be an enormous file with zillions of potential variations. Which is fun if your machine can handle it, but annoying if not.

All in all, though, I'm having fun despite their bad polygon management! And the ship model is in Cinema 4D so it's easy to work with. I should have a couple of pics to show you tomorrow.

[seawasp]

Kewl. I look forward to it.

I need to get me a version of Photoshop that works on my new Macs. Right now I haven't got any working image-processing software, I can't even make icons or animated .gifs... the problem is that Adobe wants MY IMMORTAL SOUL for them.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, they are all about the immortal soul. Before I managed to put the pennies together for Photoshop I used Paint Shop Pro, which isn't free but isn't $600, and does pretty much all the same stuff. And it has a decent interface, unlike GIMP, which is free.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I have an old edition of Poser, but alas, there is some activation issue with it, and I can't fully install it because my copy comes from back in the MetaCreation days. (I've got the box, the serial number everything, but it's a no go. It really drives me crazy when companies fail to support older versions of a product after acquiring the software. I don't really want to pay the 99 or whatever it is for the newest. My old version worked fine. I just want to be able to install it.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

If you talk to Smith Micro (this year's owner of the product) you might get somewhere - they're US-based and they have a group of lower-cost products like Groboto. Last year's owner was based in another country and had a flagship high-end product (I forget what) so might not have been as inclined to support normal users.

Do you have version 3? If you have v4 I'm surprised it wants to activate--my v4 will still install, I think. Another way to go is DAZ Studio, which is free and comes with some figures. Since you use it for drawing reference I think the free figure set would be all you'd need. DAZ developed it when Curious Labs was on the rocks and it was unclear if Poser was going to continue, and it's a good alternative.