One of the things that we want to do with Posermocap.com is to go beyond simply providing motion capture files for use in Poser. We want to be able to turn this site into a resource for Poser animators, thus unleashing this powerful piece of software and enabling people to create their own animated short films and projects.
If you read through the articles in the News page you’ll see that we’ve already taken steps to do this. From the Animation Democracy series of posts to product reviews and book reviews we’re hoping to provide our readers with the inspiration and resources they need to help them learn to animate within Poser. Starting with this article, we’re adding a new section to this page for tips, tricks, and techniques. This section will be an ongoing collection of articles that will provide shortcuts, tutorials, and interesting tricks to use when animating with Poser.
Following on from our review of 3D Content Installer, we’re going to be starting this off with a tutorial on how to create multiple external Runtimes in order to show one way to help people organize Runtimes and migrate their contents into multiple external Runtimes quickly and easily.
Just about every Poser user has experienced the problem of Runtime bloat. Because there is such a wealth of low-cost and even free content available to Poser users online, it becomes very easy for Runtimes to approach several Gigabytes in size. Of course as the Runtimes grow (and because of the file dependencies between Poser figures, props, poses, and textures) they tend to become confused messes that are both difficult to navigate and reduce productivity to a crawl. The solution then, is to look at the employing a multiple, organized Runtimes in order to create a logical and easy-to-navigate file structure.
Migrating Poser assets into multiple Runtimes can be a daunting and mind-numbing task of re-installing each and every asset by hand. Given Poser’s system of file dependencies among its assets, re-installation is the only way that migration works. Simply trying to move assets within the Runtime or even move the assets to an external Runtime stands an excellent chance of breaking the file dependencies and making the asset unusable. Trust us on this.
By using multiple external Runtimes, we can organize the content in a way that makes sense to us as users. Fortunately, this is a relatively easy process. And with the right tools, a bit of planning, and a bit of know-how, anybody can end up adding Runtimes reaching up into the hundreds of gigabytes with very little difficulty.
Now, if you have read our review of 3-D Content Installer, you probably know that that’s a tool that we recommend very highly. You can create multiple external Runtimes without the tool, but it becomes a lot easier with it. We will, however, walk you through the process both with and without 3-D content installer.
Let’s get started.
