Ropetastic for Poser – Improving editing performance
Hey everyone!
Thanks for buying Ropetastic.
If you are finding that this product is slowing your Poser scene navigation down, here’s an easy fix:
Whenever you load a rope, ensure that it is selected, then click on the properties tab in Poser (it’s on the right next to the Parameters pane).
Now look down to the subdivision levels, and pull the Preview value down to zero. This should speed up your scene navigation. 
If you are rendering from a distance – say 4 feet from the subject, you may wish to turn subdivision off entirely by turning the Render slider to 0 as well. This will result in faster renders, with more basic-looking ropes that use the colour textures, but disregard the sculpting.

*Tip – improving screen performance with ANY models
Did you know, whenever your scene starts to slow because the amount of geometry is getting heavy (this happens a lot with outdoor scenes that have a lot of plants or landscape in, or with some complex hair models, or a lot of figures), you can always speed it up again with a single click? Simply go to the Display tracking option below the main window (it’s the second button), and change it to Box. Now, the objects in the scene will be represented by boxes, and you can quickly navigate, to add elements or move them around. When you want to render or check out your scene, simply go to the same place and change it back to Full.

If a single object is slowing the scene down, you can improve performance by simply changing the display settings of just that object. For instance, select one of my ropes, then open the Display menu at the top of the screen. Go to Object style and change it to a less demanding mode – Flat shaded is my preferred choice, but Silhouette and Hidden line are also great choices!

Optional technology insight
Displacement is when Poser uses a greyscale image to extrude geometry from the surface of a model. Imagine a medieval wall. It has a lot of depth and contours, but modelling the depth would make it very unwieldy to use and take up a lot of memory and processing power. Instead, you can add a displacement map, where light areas protrude more, and darker ones protrude less.
With Poser’s older Firefly engine, displacement works independently of the amount of underlying 3D geometry. That means that if you placed a complex map on a single square polygon, such as the Square in Poser’s Primitives folder, when you displace, the full detail of the displacement map is revealed. To add more detail, simply increase the resolution of the map. 
It is a quirk of the Cycles engine that means there needs to be a lot of geometry to work with because it can only displace EXISTING GEOMETRY. Essentially, if there is not a piece of underlying geometry, it cannot create displacement.
This has a number of vital implications:
1. You need high geometry surfaces for displacement using the Superfly engine. It is not practical to construct entire models at that higher resolution because they take up a lot of memory and processor power.
2. You will need to subdivide your models or model parts to create enough geometry. The more you subdivide, the slower your scenes will become, but the better your displacement, and consequently the higher the quality of the final image.
3. Before you can subdivide, you will need to change the skinning method by going to the Figure menu at the top of the screen, then selecting Skinning method/Poser Unimesh.
4. Now select the required object or figure, then click on the properties tab (it’s on the right next to the Parameters Pane).

Look down to the subdivision levels, and adjust the Preview and Render values as required.