Poser

What works

Nothing

What does not

Install DVD crashes about halfway through. This DVD was sent as a "first day" pre-order shipment, but has loaded fine under VMware and Windows XP native.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Everything

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

The installer starts and copies about half of the files to the "Poser 7" directory then randomly either stalls or crashes. It appears to consistently install the file "msvcr80.dll", but crashes very soon after. I am attempting to copy the Poser 7 directory from the VMware install into the wine C drive for further testing.

I have setup and am running Poser 7 in Wine in settings provided by "12rounds" on the Renderosity Poser forums. He suggests the following settings:

--Run the most current Wine version (1.0).

--In the preferences force Wine to be using virtual desktop emulation at your native screen resolution and have nothing else selected.

--Install Poser in Wine using Poser installer, but the Sr2 updater doesn't run in Wine so copy modified files from a Windows installation

--When Poser launches, resize the main application to about 300x300 pixels size and organise all tools to be shown in that window -- rest of the windows will flow and stay where you want them to (document window, libraries, parameter dials etc). This maneuver is to prevent an issue that happens when running Poser under Wine that "loses" other tool palettes behind the main window.

Overall this seems to work pretty well getting things started, although it is a bit of a pain having to resize your main window each and every you bring up Poser. What I end up with is the main document window up to one side (with tools and dialogs in it) and the main view window off by itself. The view window still displays stuff a bit strangely on my machine - depending on how far your camera is distanced from the main figure, and clothing (mesh over the character) lets the figure show through the clothing mesh to some degree in an odd moire sort of pattern. The closer one got, the less of the pattern and the more of the clothing was visible.

Render times in my estimation were no quicker.... not really. The biggest thing one has to get used to is the fact that some dialogues still do disappear behind others, which makes the process awkward, to say the least, since focus is now on an inaccessible modal dialogue. Also, Saving As does not allow you to edit the name of the file (increment) - the dialogue is read-only.

 Not sure if the issue is Wine or Poser 7, but the behaviour is such that I find myself compensating too much for interface anomalies for me to consider it ready for prime-time.