Poser for beginners

[OFW]

LOL  I guess the rendering will never be consistent between the two...I've seen some who loved the way poser rendered, some who loved Daz...I personally like the reality renderer and wish there was a Poser bridge for it...maybe someday

[DarkAngel]

maybe tis safer to split yours off anita and get rid of the original thread. sure don't want newbies to get drawn into troubles than help

[thelufias]

Keep asking the questions OFW cause those were some of mine also.....LOL.....

Who knows....Maybe Poser WILL live on my computer..... 

[Jherrith]

It lives ...

Nonetheless any and all questions and concerns please list them, there is no such thing as a stupid or dumb question except the one you don't ask.

[OFW]

I think my post with the questions got jumped as it was the last on one the previous page and DA and I did a cross post at the same time.

[Jherrith]

Tis all right I will be reading them all again and address them after I take care of the morning tasks

[Jherrith]

The Geek at Play videos are fairly simple and easy to follow and seem to be pretty spot on.

The tutorials at Smith Micro are a bit harder to follow if you are a newbie. I read one of them and think that they might have missed the boat slightly but see that it was written for an earlier version so adapt, conquer and overcome.

The book that is referenced is a great volume to have in your library and yes it is in mine, in fact in the bookcase behind where I sit at the computer, I know it shouldn't surprise any here since my house is furnished with mostly bookcases.

I would suggest that if you buy any number of books at all in a year to get a membership card from Barnes and Nobel and then this way you can save an additional 10% in the store or even greater savings when you order on line. So consider it.

[OFW]

my husband  and I are both avid readers, so I already have one :) while Christmas last year brought us both E-readers, there is still nothing quite as satisfying as have the actual book in your hand

[Jherrith]

OK starting at the top of the questions

If I understand correctly you have the full program of Poser installed on an external drive?

If it is working like that then cool running, typically one usually installs programs to the main hard drive where the OS is located as sometimes programs look for bits of registry or .dll files. With it being installed on a remote drive means it might take a bit longer to load or find the pieces needed to run the program.
Granted with the way computers run now this may no longer be a problem Not certain, although I will say this with it being on an external you can take it with anywhere and plug in to any other computer and work with Poser there instead of being confined to the house all the time. You can go on vacation and plug it into your laptop and carry on.

The default runtime is the one within Poser itself. So when you installed V4 it will not allow you to install it anywhere else except the default runtime. Which when you open Poser that would be the folder at the very top of the library tab. Directly underneath it there is another "runtime" folder called "downloads".

Any and all other content can be installed into "runtime folders" that you create.

Example on your hard drive create a folder and call it "Poser Runtimes"
Create  a new folder within it and call it "Aiko4"
Now go to your storage folders and find an outfit or any other product for Aiko4 and install it to that newly created folder.
I will not go into detail on the steps of installing unless asked, but the highlights are simple.
When you go to install it it asks for a destination, direct it to your newly created empty folder called Aiko 4 and let it run.
When you go back to it to look at the file structure you will see that when it installed it that it created all of the other needed folders to contain all of the files.
So nothing else to do there except continue to install content.

At some point you are going to run into dialog screens saying that there is already a read me folder or file by the same name. Do not overwrite them. You will have to manually go into your Aiko 4 folder and then rename the file or folder, (I usually give it the name of the product).
While you are in there you might notice several folders all called read me in various spelling formats. What I do at this point is create a Master Read Me folder and I move all of the stray read mes into this folder that way I have all the license and usage documentation for all products in one spot. Another trick that I do is I create one called DAZ Read mes, since they have thumbnails and a html plus a text file for all products. I will move all of them into that one folder to keep them organized.

At some point you are going to get some content that when you install it instead of unzipping to the proper directories it creates a new folder called runtime within your folder. Now what? Well now you have to go into the root structure of the folder find that new runtime folder and click on all the "+" signs until you can see all of the final folders for the product, now move them (drag and drop) to the correct location in the main folder (geometry, character, pose, prop, textures and so forth) and then once you have all the pieces moved then you can leave the read me in that folder, after deleting all of the empty folders and rename the folder it as the product and then move it to your Master read me folder.

As to P3DO you are correct, sorry it will only show a generic icon for a pz3 file. What the cool thing is that in the window to the left of it it gives you the complete run down and location of every item in that pz3 file. That has saved my bacon more then once because of not remembering just exactly what I used in a picture and now I want to use it in another but have no idea as to how to find it. So I open the file in P3DO and then look in the column until I find the name of the item and then I check the path for it and now I can find out where I have it hidden.

[Jherrith]

my husband  and I are both avid readers, so I already have one :) while Christmas last year brought us both E-readers, there is still nothing quite as satisfying as have the actual book in your hand

No e-readers in my house can't survive without the actual book in my hands

I see though that you are just "avid" readers so there is still hope for you both.

I have been diagnosed as a "rabid" reader