Hey Folks, I hoping a tech minded person out there can give me some advice. I'm unable to render the picture below in the Fire Fly renderer. I can only do it in the Poser renderer. It hangs at the "adding objects" window. I went to bed hoping it would be done by morning and it was still stuck there. I'm rendering in 1280-1024 to a seperate window with the options: cast shadows,smooth polygons & remove back facing polygons all checked. It seems that with 5 figures and 7 spotlights I have taxed the render limits of P5. By the way, I have under the hood an AMD 2G, 1.5G ram, a slave HD just for graphics, an ATI radeon graphics card all running XP pro with the max allocated processor resources with only P5 running. I think I have enough power so I'm stumped! Anyone else having a problem like this? If so, have you discovered how to fix it?

Can you try and narrow down the problem? I'd try turning off the Firefly options, maybe polygon smoothing could be it. Then, if that doesn't work, try removing the figures/props in your scene one by one until it works. Do other scenes work with your current render settings? Do you have the latest service release installed? Can you watch memory usage while rendering?

Yes, P5 is fully up to date with SR2 and I have rendered other pictures with the same settings. You can check out my small gallery here, each one of those used the Fire Fly settings I indicated. I will try your suggestions and see if it makes a dif. and thanks for the reply.

In my experience, it doesn't matter how many figures I use... it's usually the lights that crash it. Some of them I installed to the P5 directory now, and it worked... but only for some. Sigh...

I think you are right about the lights. I took "stewers" suggestion and started eliminating some of the actors from my scene and Fire Fly moved beyond the point where it was hanging up: which was the "render shadow map>adding objects" for the first light in my scene. I think by simplifying the scene, therefore the shadows, for light 1 that allowed it to move forward. I'm going to explore this a little further and see if I can narrow it down more. I'm also going to upgrade my video card now that faster ones are available.

You can reduce the shadows-- that's what I do, cut the shadows off of half the lights. You might try removing "remove back facing polys, I never use it. Is raytracing on? And. . . that's a lot of figures, maybe twice as many as Firefly can take. Is it possible to use low res versions of some of them? Emily

Thanks Emily: yes I had "remove back facing polys" checked & I unchecked raytracing. All though I haven't gone further in my experimentation; I do think it is the lights more than the figures. Unfortuneatly, shadows in this scene are important to me, I am trying to simualte what a stage setting would look like. I'll keep on plugging away when I get a little more time. Thanks again.