I'm new to Poser, so perfectly willing to admit that maybe I'm screwing something up ... I've got Poser 5 SR3, and I've created an animation sequence that has Vicky3 moving between 3 standing poses. Testing the animation within Poser (by pressing play) works fine. I can move to any of the frames and render it fine. I can render an animation in sketch mode, or as a sequence of still images, and the resulting AVI is fine. However, if I just try to generate a rendered movie, I get nothing: Poser takes all the time generating frames that I'd expect (about the same as rendering the sequence of stills), but only generates a tiny AVI file which has nothing but the background color! The file does "play" and seems to be the right length, it's just missing the figure. Doesn't seem to matter which codec I use, I've tried everything from Cinepak to Indeo to DivX to uncompressed and they all have the same result. Any ideas?!? Maybe I've screwed this up, but I can't figure why still images or sketch rendering would work fine but movie rendering doesn't.

When you go to render make sure that it says 'Current Render Settings' in the Quality box on the 'Make Movie' screen. I got in such a fit coz I only got stills for ages! i do hope this is the solution.

That's how it's set (Current Render Settings). Interestingly, I got a working AVI when I rendered using "Current Sketch Settings", so the AVI building process works - just not when I use the current render settings! Off to do a quick test, if it fails I'll post back those settings in case something jumps off the screen at anyone.

The only object in the movie is the figure ... no background, no change to the default lighting, etc. Very peculiar.

I have the same problem. Here's my question to Curious Labs: > Question: > I render short animations frequently. After I upgraded to SR3, the > Firefly renderer does not render animations. I get multiple frames of the > background color (which changes as I change the color). Nothing in the > scene renders. I am using the main camera with default Firefly Production > settings and with Draft settings. The scene contains mainly default > primitives from the Poser Libary (a ball, a box, the ground plane). > > Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong? And their answer: Hello there, uninstall Poser 5 completely; then, make sure all startup processes are disabled; especially any anti-virus software or Internet security programs. This is accomplished in Windows 98, Me, and XP by going to start >run > type in "msconfig" > click the Startup tab > uncheck all items. For Windows 2000 users, we recommend downloading, installing and using a Startup Control Panel found on http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml Restart the system. Reinstall Poser 5 from the CD, then immediately update it with the SR 3 updater and restart the system. We reccomend running Poser while all 3rd party processes are disabled. The msconfig utility or the Startup Control Panel can be used to reinable which ever processes you need once you have Poser updated and running reliably. ============================================= I haven't tried this yet myself; I've put my animations on hold and gone down other paths. I'd be curious to hear the results if you try this and it works.

Spaghead, what happened to the text label for "Post Filter Type" in your Render Options dialogue?

Try rendering as an image sequence, then assemble the pieces into an .avi using VirtualDub, Animation Shop, or some other video editing application.

damn, i got the same problem!!! what the f***? did you ever get that problem solved? i'd love to hear the solution. thanks.

Well, I'm stumped ... I performed a complete uninstall/reinstall per Zenman's suggestion, making sure that absolutely nothing was running on the machine while I did so, and I'm still getting the blank AVI renders. BUT ... I was able to narrow down the problem a little bit further: if I choose the Poser 4 renderer, IT WORKS. It's only the Firefly renderer that's failing.

Installed again on a totally vanilla Win2K box (nothing but opsys) and getting the same failure there - Firefly render with default settings and an animation with just the default figure moving a bit generates an AVI with nothing but background. At least it's not limited to my WinXP box.

thanks very much for listing your findings. i emailed curious labs about this trouble last week via email, but I still haven't received a reply. I'll post it here when I receive it. i am hoping that they will give a solution other than reinstalling the software. i wonder how many other people have this trouble.....and what's curious labs planning to do? anyway, thanks again!

If there's anyone here who IS ABLE to render an AVI with Firefly, it would be a great help if you could share your configuration with me. No need to clutter the board - just e-mail me directly with "the usual" (CPU, MHZ, RAM, Video, Opsys, Poser 5 version). If you can include a copy of the uninstal.log file from your Poser dirctory it might help provide a clue, maybe something got missed in my install (three times, and in biggerthom's, and in Zenman's ... ;-)

I can render just fine. uncompressed or not. There is no problem for me. I can still render out an avi WITH an avi in the backdrop or just a pic. I can't imagine what would cause this to happen to you guys but my guess it isn't poser.

3ncryptabl3_lick, Thanks for responding ... I'm glad to hear it's working for you, that rules out a lot of potential problem areas. Could you possibly post back or e-mail me your hardware+software config (i.e. opsys, cpu, mhz, RAM, and starting to look important, video card?) Biggerthom & Zenman, could you do the same? Thanks!

Problem SOLVED: I changed the color depth on my video card from 16 bit to 32 bit, tried a test render, and it works just peachy. I'm not sure why this works - I'd have thought that the AVI render was a straight computation process, independent of the video subsystem (it certainly doesn't display anything while it's rendering), but I'm certainly willing to accept an unexplainable fix as long as it works! Thanks to all those who read & replied here or via e-mail, everything must've finally clicked into place tonight.

Yeah that's my one BIG complaint about poser5 rendering, you can't see it. I wan't to see it. I don't know if it would be faster or not but I'm certainly more interested in seeing it render and taking the time hit than not be able to and being forced to wait.

If you render out as still frames you can see it rendering. I know you want this functionality with an AVI render, but if you really want to see it, it's the only way. Also, it the only SAFE way to render complex animations in Poser 5 anyway. Best of luck! -Tim

Thanks Spaghead f telling us who to slove the problem... I had actually the same problem with both Poser 5 and "The Elderscrolls Construction Set - Morrowind" . Both problems is solved now =) // Gald