How to Speed Up Your Poser/Vue Renders

A word of warning! Be very careful when doing the following. Read this tutorial completely before you do anything, since a mistake could damage your Poser files.

Ok, you bought Poser for its great figures and it's posing and animation abilities. And you also bought Vue for its great landscapes. Then you wanted to merge the two, so you went to Import in Vue, selected the Poser scene you wanted, and carefully guided Vue to your Poser exe. file. Then, after a few more questions from Vue, you waited with baited breath as Vue slowly brought the Poser figure into the scene. But then you notice something strange. Vue has slowed down to a crawl. It takes a while to do anything, including moving the figure, and then you wait for each screen to refresh. And as for renders; well, if you have any chores to do, just click render and you'll have plenty of time on your hands.

What's going on here? In a nutshell, it's the Poser textures. Poser figures often come with enormous textures, sometimes 4000x4000. They can consume a great deal of your memory. They are great for extreme close-ups, I suppose, but you really just don't need that much most of the time.

What can you do about this, aside from upgrading your computer? First you need to go take a look at your figures textures stored in the Poser textures folder. So open up whatever Image editing application you have. I use Photoshop, but most image editors will work, and there are even free ones that work quite well, including GIMP. Then open the file by going to, for example, "C:\Program Files\Smith Micro\Poser Pro\Runtime\Textures\Poser Pro\Male". Wait! Don't actually open the file yet. Instead, very carefully (since you don't want to damage you original texture), within that folder right click anywhere but the file and create a new folder caller "Master Copy". Now go to the image file, right click, and copy. Paste that copy inside the "Master Copy" folder. This protects you is case anything goes wrong, or in case you later find you actually do want to do a close-up and need the original texture. Now, go back to the other copy, select it, and click open top bring it up in your program (from now on I will be saying Photoshop).

Once in Photoshop, the thing becomes simplicity itself. Just go to Image, and then click Image Size. This brings up a dialogue that allows you to change the size of the image, as well as resolution. Size is all that matters for us though, so leave Resolution alone. Make sure that Constrain Proportions is clicked on, and then type in in the width area what you would like your new smaller texture to be. It's usually best to am for 1500 to 1000px or so. Although if you have a large crowd of Poser figures in the distance, you might get a way with a lot less. Save this back to the original folder (not to the Master Copy folder) as a jpg, and there you have it. When you open this figure now in Poser, it should be using the new texture. If not, you can go in and directly change it in the Material Room. Good luck!