Hello Folks, I emailed this to CL 2 days ago and no response yet. Perhaps one of you may help. I've been trying to render this scene (75mb)in the "FireFly" render engine for quality. The regular Poser render engine works fine but doesn't give me the quality I need for this project. I've set the render engine to the "default" settings plus "raytracing"(I've tryed it without as well, no help). When I click "render" the program will start it's calculations; but, when it gets to the "Adding Objects" portion of the render calculations it seems to hang there. I started the render at 5pm Tues.eve and checked it at 9am Weds. morning (16hrs.) and it didn't move past the "Adding Objects" window pop-up. I don't have this problem with simpler projects. The Fire Fly render works fine. Now--I had this same problem with another project (169mb) I created which had 5 actors in it and only a couple of props. I've yet to try and render it again for the same reason. Maybe this is too complex for P5, with 4 actors and a lot of props. (in fact there are 20 figures listed) The props have the option "smooth polygons" unchecked because they do not render properly under Fire Fly. In this one I am using 3 spotlights (no atmosphere effects). In the other one I mentioned, I am using 7 spotlights (no atmosphere effects). I have under the hood: XP Pro, AMD 1.6G, 1.5G ram, ATI Radeon ALL-IN-Wonder Graphics card and a slaved HD just for graphics work. I've also allotted the full system resources to the Fire Fly render engine by increasing my VM to the limit (absolutely nothing else running). I've upgraded P5 with all the SR packs so it is fully up to date. I've clocked the CPU usage at 100% while trying to render this project and XP reports that the program is running. I have more ambitious projects in mind but am hesitant to start them until I get this problem solved. For what it's worth, I am going to rebuild my machine with the new P4 3.6G hyperthread processor (as soon as the matching MB's are available) and the new ATI 9700Pro graphics card to speed up the render time of my projects. Aside from that, does anyone have any insight to why the program seems to be hanging as I've stated and how to solve it without sacrificing quality? I would be very interested to know how long it took some of you to render large files under the same conditions. Thanks in advance, Larry

I think it is just Poser 5 being buggy. Sometimes I get this on really little files too. And other times I can render a massive one with no problem. Sorry, I can only suggest saving often coz if you close down and reopen sometimes it works then.

Extremely cool scene, by the way! I can't wait to see it rendered!

Thanks, the shadows that FF produces is key to this. It'll just need a little touch up in PS if I can get it rendered.

depending on how its lit, you can render this in p4 and get pretty decent shadows. use spotlights to light it above, play with the shadow settings (set shadow map sizes to 1024, shadow intensity to .7 - .8. make sure your ground plane has shadows enabled, or just use one of the poser primitive props (flat plane) to creae your own ground plane, which you can texture with whatever you want. render witht he p4 renderer with shadows enabled. honestly, ive given up on the firefly renderer long ago... just too quirky for me. in fact, im back to using poser 4 propack, since it renders much faster, even when both programs are using the p4 renderer. cheers, -gabriel

I don't have a copy of P4 anymore. I was using a friends copy but felt guilty about it so I sprung for P5 and srtipped P4 off my machine. Thanks anyways.

i meant use the p4 renderer within p5 :)

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Have you tried ctrl-alt-del after the bug, then reboot your machine, then try again? You may be at the max for the FireFly engine, or maybe not. Lately when I've been plagued with these kinds of freezes-- much smaller scenes-- the computer reboot has helped, sometimes. Also, have you defragged recently? Any Poser doesn't do work with dual processors so if you were thinking of upgrading that way for P5, don't bother. Another possibility is the Environment Creator lights sold at DAZ. I haven't tried them yet, but people who have say they render beautifully in P5 with either Firefly or P4 renderer. At $30, it's cheaper than a computer upgrade, if they work, of course. They create their own lights so are not dependant on Poser's buggy light set-up. And you can translate older light set ups into the Environment lights. I include the url for the discussion in this forum. As I say, I haven't had time to try them myself, but I plan to, and they might be a work around. Emily

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In my (limited) experience, it's very often the lights that cause 'adding objects' hang in Firefly. Search this forum and the Poser5 beta forum for comments on P5 lights, especially ones which are Off. There are also some shadowing options in the lights which cause problems, but I can't remember the details right now.

"They create their own lights so are not dependant on Poser's buggy light set-up" umm.. i dont think thats possible. the only light sources in poser are the poser lights... you can alter their settings and parameters, but theres no way daz has created another type of 'light source' for poser. there are some python scripts out there, but all they do is automate setting of parameter dials over all lights in a scene, which makes dealing with light sets that have multiple light sources less of a chore. cheers, -gabriel

Thanks Gabriel. I wasn't thinking about that when I posted my reply; it dawned on me afterward what you meant. DOH! Thanks Emily. Yes I've tried rebooting several times and I just defraged last week. From what I've read about the new Intel 3.6, it is a single processor that works like a dual and I don't know how that would affect P5. If I could determine it is the lighting I might take up your suggestion. I'll probably upgrade anyway (I'm a tech geek and I have to have the latest & greatest. Besides, it'll probably help speed up Bryce renders too). Thanks for the link.

I've been having many issues with Poser5 locking up during a render; almost always with "Adding objects..." being displayed. My experience is that this is related to bugs in Poser5 related to the complexity of the shadow maps created to do shadowing. I do a lot of work with dynamic hair, and not surprisingly, hair strands create fairly complex shadows. I find that a large number of lights w/shadows, or large shadow map sizes, or large number of complex objects, or any combination of the above will cause Poser5 to hang. I've found that the next step after the "Adding objects..." function is the "Rendering shadowmaps..." function. I suspect it freezes on "Adding objects..." because it's trying to transition to the "Rendering shadowmaps" and can't. The solution I've used is to reduce one or more of the variables I've listed above. This has solved the problem for me.

One other thing that helps occasionally is rendering in non-production mode of Firefly first, then rendering in Production. I've found every once in a while, this will get a Production Firefly render to work when it fails when I try to render it first. This leads me to believe that the issue is related to memory allocation for shadowmaps (but I have to admit it's a leap).

Try to go to the lights properties palette and uncheck the "depth map shadows option", leaving only the "ray trace shadow option". It works for me. Compiler

Thanks Zenman, what do you mean by "reduce one or more of the variables"? If it's true what you say about the hair, perhaps I can eliminate the shadows for the "scull cap". Hmmmm, I'm going to see if I can do that. They're not needed anyway. You know...you brought up something I'm a little short of understanding on. What is a shadow map? Thanks

Well, this is a kick in the head. While trying to revert to my saved file after trying Zenman's tips P5 crashed and somehow wiped out my whole file???? I will now have to recreate this from scratch--Damn it! If Poser was a human it would have my fist in it's face right now.

i always use 2 copies of major undertakings like this, because crashes often result in corrupted save files, especially if the crash occurs during a save/load operation. listen - before you start this again, try something for me. go HERE download docmemory 2.0, its free. make the boot disk using the setup utility, and then reboot your computer with the disk in your drive. run the test - no need to run the hardcore burn-in test, just run the quick test. let it run the full course, until it says 'Passed = 1 or Fail = 1' in the lower right. this will run several diagnostic tests on your RAM and check it for errors. chances are, this is a problem with poser, and not your memory. but faulty memory is a very common cause of problems for computers, and the freezes, crashes and corrupted saves/downloads it creates often get blamed on other things because RAM is the last thing people suspect. it should, however, be the FIRST thing you test if your computer is running unstable, and its probably the easiest piece of hardware to check as well. trust me, do it. everyone else reading this thread should to, only takes a few minutes to do (depending on how much memory is installed), and bad RAM can cause so many problems. i once bought two brand new 512mb sticks of sdram and installed them in my new system. my downloads were being corrupted, i was losing save files, etc. id work on a large file in photoshop, save it, and never be able to open it again becase it was corrupted. i checked EVERYTHING, this went on for a week. checked the NICs, HDDs, m/b, reinstalled windows & other software, etc etc. i never suspected my RAM since i had JUST bought it, brand new. anyways, hope this helps. and dont put it off until later - think of all the work you could lose because of a faulty stick of memory :( cheers, -gabriel

Have you optimized your texture library with CorrectReference? This problem of loading textures and objects shouldn't take more than 10 minutes max for a 75MB file, more likely about five. CorrectReference is a free utility here which you run against each of your library items requiring a text file (CR2, HR2, PP2 and Mat Poses). You tell it which directory you have your text files in (usually the textures dir) and it will find each of the text files and rewrite location in an optimal fashion ... usually truncating the address to below runtime. You would be surprised how many downloaded files have drives other than C, listed and many still reference Metacreations and Poser4. Poser5 runs like a rabbit when the files are optimized ... and drags like an anchor when they are not.

Thanks for the idea, Blackhearted; I'll try it. I'd love to be able to identify the problems I'm having on memory.

Huolong, it's not likely to be related to file access (i.e. path references being wrong and poser looking for files) because I can fix my problems by changing shadow map sizes or the number of lights with shadowing enabled. Larry-L, a shadow map is a texture map created by Poser5 during a render that defines the shadowing in a scene. It creates on for every light that has shadowing enabled. Since it's a texture map, it can be different sizes, and each light has a dial that controls the size. The dial controls only one parameter, but the size is square, so a shadowmap size of 256 is a 256X256 texture map. Making it larger takes up more memory. The variables I'm talking are: 1) reduce the number of lights that have shadowing enabled (turn of shadowing on some lights) 2) reduce shadowmap sizes 3) take out some objects in the scene

...or as you mentioned, #4 is to turn off shadowing for objects that do not need shadowing for the scene.

Since you have to rebuild your scene anyway, you might want to try this: First build the center figure with props, cloths, etc. Set all the lights, and save the lights, then the .pz3. Render it in Firefly with your chosen options to make sure the smaller scene works by itself. Then create a new scene, and build the second figure with everything. Save it under a different name. Continue until all figures are done, as seperate scenes. Now create a new scene with the default lights. Import the first scene and render. If it renders, then import the remaining parts one at a time and render. If everything renders correctly at this point, it looks like it's the lights. If it fails at any point, you know you've got a problem with the number of materials and complexity of the scene, or that P5 isn't releasing all the memory back to the system after a render. Finally, when you reach the point where it breaks, reboot the machine, and load everything that caused the problem without doing any renders. Try rendering again. If it renders, the problem points to a memory leak in P5 and it's definitly a P5 bug. Very controlled testing can help pinpoint the problem. I'm working on building a scene to send to Stefan at CL because of just this kind of lockup. My problem right now is I delete all my pz3 files at the end of a project, so now I have to recreate the problem and life is very hectic around here. Hard to concentrate on a real project.

Boy, thanks for all the tips. Gabrial--I started to redo the file before I read your reply and I am saving 2 copies now. I've never had any problems whatsoever with my system, programs or files in any way until today. This could just have been a single fluke; however, I am not above prudence and will do what you suggest. Huolong--your suggestion sounds intriguing. I'm all for optimizing anything. Where does one get "correct reference"? Zenman--It's important for me to have shadows for my spotlights; but, I will reduce the map sizing and turn off shadows for hair as well as all unnecessary objects. I have already finished half the file (I had a lot of the objects, poses & figures saved) and I am test rendering in FF every step of the way. So far so good. Thanks, all of you have been a great help.

CorrectReference is freestuff here. Your problem sounds exactly the way P5 behaved before. It is necessary to run CorrectReference on each new item added to your library ... due to the fact that so many references less than optimum (Metacreations, different drive, etc)

Well, a CL tech finally got back to me and said it's probably the hair on all my figures that's causing the problem. I created 12K hairs in the hair room for each figure. I figure I can eliminate a couple of them and use just the scull cap to acheive the look I need in this one. Anyway, I'm just about done recreating the file and it is rendering okay for now. Come to think of it, the other file I referenced that I couldn't render in FF too had 5 actors all with extensive hair. It would seem for now that the P5 hair room & FF doesn't play well together unless it's pretty simple stuff. I think CL is going to have to work on that if they want to be taken seriously by proffessionals. Thanks once again to all of you for the help. I've learned a lot more than I knew this morning.

Oh! and to solve the hair problem for the future, I guess I'm going to have to learn how to use a Wacom tablet and PS to do hair. I love challenges!

You can get great hair with volumetric hair props; search in freestuff for "hair" and you'll see a number of male hairprops that don't use the Hair room.

hmm.. try the daz short curls (?) for mike, or vairesh's david hair. theyre both the type of look youre going for here, and wont kill your processor.

Yeah, P5 hair can make a difficult problem serious

Well, I got rid of the hair. That was it, after that it just renderd on. I finally posted it: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=333656&Start=1&Sectionid=1&WhatsNew=Yes I'm done with this one. Thanks agian all.

Larry, have you seen PJ's low-cut styles for men? Much cheaper than a Wacom--not that a Wacom isn't agood buy anyway, but these are truly jazz-cool. http://market.renderosity.com/softgood.ez?ViewSoftgood=15054 Emily