Quote - - Your point about the transparency detail being available on the materials for the bodysuit is well taken.  I suppose such transparency could be put in as a map using an offset of the original map for the material.  So, basically, a transparency map that is just a reverse of the bump map.

Somehow I have lost you. Equal if procedural material or a texture map it stretches directly on the mesh. So having transparency means the mesh becomes transparent. In this case using a second skin on V4 you will make V4 itself transparent. This might be good for a render of the ghostly hour but only there.
In other case using a separat bodysuit the bs-mesh will become transparent looking like fluffy wool in our example. But the original V4 mesh underlying the bodysuit will stay opaque and it's own color is more or less visible by the transparency of the bodysuit. So in this case we have let's say 2 layers like with a real clothing on a girl or boy.

In case of a second skin it's like bodypainting on a girl and making her skin transparent is like x-ray. But with the difference that a real girl show's her inward but V4 has nothing under the skin.

In the same way a bump is only a vision of shadow and light on same level of the mesh. On otherhand the displacement map changes the levels depending to it's texture. With high displacement you might distort the mesh.
So there are no different layers for bump, displacement or transparency. They all work directly to the mesh. They have no offset between each other.

Quote - - I've also been thinking about adding a bump-map overlay for any V4 texture that produces "cuffs" around the wrists.  That would be very simple to do since all that would be needed is to put an overlay on the hand material which produces a "cuff" right at the seam between the hand and the forearm.  A simple line along the seam there would work just fine, I think.

Technical ok, but a bit the same as above. With the bumpmapped material a bump will do it. If using the displacement that seam should be displaced. And than it could produce well visible distortions where it raises above the normal hand mesh level.
A other point is that the forearm group is relatively long. So better that cuff could be placed at the end of the forearm than at the hand. But even there I would suggest to have the cuffs a bit higher towards elbows. Having them directly at the border between hand and forearm means they are lying directly in bend/twist zones between that 2 limbs. This will mess up in certain poses and/or morphing's of the character parts.

Quote - - Concerning the photo/sub project -   I thought you were looking for something that was suitable for a "ships boat" (small boat belonging to the sub) and passengers waving to someone at the docks/wharf.  I agree, the picture I offered isn't suitable for a full view of a submarine model.

Oh, sorry, that was a misunderstanding. U-boats has been much much smaller vessels as for example today's nuclear submarines. They only used rubber dinghi's if ever neccessary.
Boarding normally is done alongside the mole or dock. But rendering a rubber boat is not very impressive. So in my opinion not worth the rendering effort. Especially cause that rubber is normally black or dark grey, the u-boat hull behind is grey, the water around (harbour !!) is muddy ... darkbrown and the people are wearing grey cloth ... so a very unique grey symphony ... ok, might be with a outstanding white point ... the captain's cap but only starting the journey, not at the end ... :lol:
No, that's to dark for me. Doing this with some buildings as environment give the possiblity to use some more colors.

Quote - - In Poser, the biggest problem I come across in loading multiple figures has to do with textures.  Simply put, good textures take up a LOT of processing power and with multiple figures all of those loaded texture sets start to cause "slowdowns" and cache problems.  Admittedly, Poser is trying to do a great many things at the same time.  However, I haven't seen a whole lot of programs that are worse at handling their own memory caches than Poser is.  But, I don't deal a lot with such things so Poser may be one of the better applications in its class for handling cached information.

I'm with you in point of the caching or better the garbadge collection of that memory. Not the menu entry "reload texture" is needed mainly but there should be a entry called "free up all texture memory".
In my experience poser holds all textures as long as possible. So if I try out some different clothings with different textures while building a scene, it's best to save the result and restart poser completely to get rid of all unneccessary things first before rendering.

For sure textures are a problem but less to processing power than for memory. Independent of the size of a jpeg on harddrive if using real color (24 bit) you need 3 bytes each with 8 bit to have 1 pixel. So a 1500 * 1500 pixel bitmap means 51.5 Mb. If using higher resolution, e.g. 3000 * 3000 pixel, we talk about 206 Mb. Normally this makes only sense if you don't use a jpeg but a tga or bmp for example. Jpeg is not a lost less format, so you have quality loss even with 100% jpeg quality. Having that on 3000 * 3000 pixel means only to see that loss better. But poser has to stretch that giant map on the obj-mesh and to hold it in memory ... for each figure, cloth, prop, background and so on. Also the obj data including morph's data reside in memory. That fill's up nicely ... :sleep:

Also the filtering default setting "quality" is normally bad. The processor has lot's to do and the outcome is only blurry, worst than 50% jpeg compression. So only with hair that could be fine. For all other textures set filtering to "None".

On other hand using procedural shaders mean's calculating them to the object data on the fly while rendering. This is not memory consuming but makes the processor(s) warm up heavily.
Most work is neccessary using raytracing and having lot's of transparencies and/or reflecting materials and/or displacements. You could see this everytime rendering "stops" at hairs or glossy metal, e.g. swords. Ok, it doesn't stop really but poser has to recalculate lot's for that bucket.

But this is the point I normally never use shadowmaps with the light's. First I find the result's of that more badly than worst raytracing. Rather seldom that shadows are placed where they should and I found that especially shadows on the floor don't happen. Towards a wall it's better.
But second and most important point also that shadowmaps are bitmaps that fill up the memory depending of the resulting render image size and the number of used light's.
So normally a image rendering well with raytracing often breaks if using shadowmaps. In P7 normally it doesn't break completely but is ommitting shadowmaps if memory is low. You get the picture but only with partly shadows. Also not good.

So surely apps like C4D have better ressource management but comparing to the prize and the number of companies having had their hands on poser, it's really, really not too bad.

Programming graphical programms isn't the easiest. Databases, text editor and such stuff is no big matter. But for example up today microsoft is trying to do something with graphical programming and the outcome is normally somewhat between useless and rubbish including vista's desktop.

Personally I don't know why people needing this ressource wasting ... ok, ok, diagonal flying windows might be a good efffect in a showroom but if I have seen it once or twice I don't see anything new. But for work I need a square window in front of my nose and not somewhere in upper corner bended und twisted ... :cursing:

So in my opinion MS should build their operating systems as a base level with all neccessary ressources applications will need and a simple commandline interface. This would be well for all that nasty but neccessary and useful tasks like backup, data transfering or even rendering tasks. No need for the graphical overhead, all power and ressource to the task.

And then as second part a graphical environment, the desktop, for the user to work with.
Letting out all that other gimmicks and small "helper's", e.g. zipping. A experienced user will need a real programm for that task and not the buildin crutch. And there are lot's of as paid or freeware all better than MS stuff.
On other hand that stuff will not help unexperienced user's ... they think it work's but normally making more breakage than good.

So my advice to MS would be concentrate on the operating system and let the environment doing people which have more special knowledge of that. And might be try to licence that third party stuff if needing to sell a "complete" system.

So the approach of DOS/W98 was not really bad as also seen with linux/unix ...

Quote - - In very complex scenes with lots of objects and textures I have to reduce the preview and go without full texture previewing except for fine-tuning.

This might be not mainly a problem of poser but of your gahics card. As far as you use hardware support the preview in poser is done by OGL directly with the card. Also a point where Vista is useless cause MS kicked out their OGL support. It was not best of breed in XP or even W2K but it was there.

But for OGL you can really forget all that directX rubbish used for most gaming graphics cards.
What really is essential for this OGL rendering is the bandwidth of the card connected to the motherboard. Only the expensive top level cards have well bandwidth. Have a look to the NVidia website and their technical fact sheets.

So if you are not using the pc for gaming it's a super idea to buy a top card from one or even two generations back. So we talk about card's round 1 year aged. But opposite to the newest generation also these older top level card's are rather cheap AND they are doing their job in best manner.

So building my Dual Core a year back the NVidia 8xxx was brand new and heavy prized. I build in a NVidia 7900 that was one of  the top models of the 2 year back generation but cost's only like the base models of the 8xxx. But it has double bandwidth compared to that newer one's at reasonable pricings and that brings the push to the preview window. Never having any problems to stay in full textured mode.