Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1095831

I'm currently rendering a 180 frame animation at 250 x 250, using a clothed V3 with Kaz hair and some props. Poser 5 cannot complete the render. I do not have a very robust system at this time. I have a PIII 550 with 640MB of RAM, running Win2K.

I experimented with different codecs for the AVI (Divx, Huffy UV) and also rendering image files. The result is the same. The animation hangs.

Narsil made the following statement in another thread (http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1097003)

"Poser 5 takes a long time to understand. I have only just started to make worthwhile animations.Yes you can do animations with firefly- hint ,its to to with the bucket size in the renderer;-)"

I played with the bucket size and found that I could render more frames and prolong the crash by decreasing the bucket size. Has anyone else played with this setting?

Yes, for various reasons but never this one. As for animations - render to bitmaps not to an avi file. If (when!) Poser crashes you can set it to render from the point it left of via 2 different ways: 1. Poor, obvious - set the "time" settings in the aniamtion render dialog box. 2. Better, pointed out to me recently: Set the play period (start and finish) for each render session - more accurate/easier. Then use something like the free program "Virtualdub" to stitch the .BMP files together to make a .avi. I use the freely-available MS MPEG4 V2 CODEC for many of my animations. Simple settings and generally good quality (set keyframes to anything - depends on whether u want the final animation to be pausable, set smoothness/sharpness to 0 or smoothest, and bitrate to whatever you can stand - the higher the better the chance of good quality).

In General also Make sure you are making smaller animations that you will stitch together later. I also second the recommendation of outputting as bitmaps. (These are good ideas in any 3d animation software.) So far I've only been doing test animations in P5, with 2-3 clothed mill figures and not much else. I think the longest I have done thus far was 200 or 300 frames. and I havn't had any hangs yet. Hopefully I'm one of the lucky ones... But I'll be very interested to see if I start having problems when I get down to my real project.

I had to do something similar with my dance studio animation (394 frames at 640x480), and I was only using Poser 4 at the time. Admittedly, I was also using Win98 with only 128MB of memory ....

I have been doing 400x415 with 16bucket, 4 raytrace (6 will kill even the newest highest mem system (24hours for 450frames!)) production firefly/raytraceon/noshadows and exporting as PNG - then I bring it into Jasc Animation Shop 3 (import full series of the pngs), crop, and then you can save as you want(avi, gif, seperate images, etc.). I need it for sprites (which is why I set the anti-alias to 1) for flashmx so export cropped frames from Animation Shop as png (keeps the transparent background information) then import to new symbol at flashmx. Do have to admit though that my win98/amd 650 laptop took around 24hours to render a 300 or so frame with same settings. Maybe XpPro does make a difference? or does intel?

Make sure that P5 isn't still dumping excessive numbers of shadowmaps on your harddrive. That was a problem that was supposedly fixed, but then re-emerged sometime after the latest patch was installed on my machine and others. Cut down the number of lights that cast shadows to the miniumum possible, this will also help to speed rendering. Also check out that there are no single sided squares near the camera. This caused problems (excessive micropolygon subdivision) with early releases of P5, and there's some rumbling that this may still cause problems. Bill

I'm running Win2K SP3 with all of the most recent patches. If anyone has any more ideas, please post them. My next idea is to see if I have the same problem when I build a new system.

Have you tried resuming rendering at frame 20? Does it continue from there onwards for 20 frames? I like the image - leapt out to me. I don't suppose the animation is this lady actually picking up the weight from the ground until she's sat up straight? Are those real reflections I'm seeing in the metal? (that'll slow things down/increase memory usage etc. etc.)

who3d,

I've restarted it after a fresh reboot. The scene renders the animation for 19-21 frames, and then Poser just locks up. I'm now on frame 76 of 180 over four render sequences. If Poser was not locking up, I would be finished with the render by now.

The reflections are ray-traced reflections generated by the Firefly renderer. I really like the renderer, but if I still have the problem on my new system, I'm probably going to get Vue, since DAZ Studio is not ready yet.

"She" is doing concentration curls.

Yeah, Firefly has looked to hav epotential for a while now :) Hmmm...it might be interesting (though not terribly useful) to cut out the reflective materials, or perhaps reduce the number of "bounces" light can be traced along, and see how that affects stability (whether you can render more frames or not). However since either would be prone to affecting the quality of the render, you might not feel inclined towards doing this. It becomes steadily more apparent that Poser has some serious memory leak/s in it somewhere :(

I had the same problem with animation I was doing with posette dancing in front of a mirror. I never did get the damn thing rendered totally in P5 until I turned off the reflections and change the material on the wall to just a standard simple wall texture. I tried it on both of my machines and I would always get to about frame 150 and P5 would lock up. Funny thing is that the thing rendered better on my laptop and it has a whole lot less horsepower than my desktop. Most of the time I had to cold boot the machine to get out of it. I tried changing the buck size... went all the way down to 4 changed the anti-alias settings, turned the rays down to 2 and it still wouldn't go any farther than frame 150. I finally got the thing rendered by taking the pz3 back into PPP and removing the walls and floor then imported it into C4D and setting it up there. It was the last time I tried an animation in P5. I gone back to PPP and importing in C4D to render. I haven't had nearly as many headaches or temper tantrums. I'm sure my neighbors are appreciate it.:) Ed

who3d,

I agree with you on the memory leaks. Paul C. Bos reported a number of memory leak related problems to CL that he discovered during his development of the Environment Creator for Poser 5. IMO, I think P4 has some as well, but they are not as severe. And I was never able to get Metacreations or CL to acknowledge it.

Hmmm... I think I should recreate the scene with Don or Judy and some P5 primitives. If I can get it to hang, then I can send it to CL and post it for download for other P5 users to try. If enough people have the same problem, mabye they will fix it.

EdW,

I've heard a lot of good things about C4D, but it is a little too pricey for me since this is a hobby. :) I'm looking at Vue 4/Mover 4 as an animation renderer.

C4D is a great option, but it is pricey for just a hobby. I was lucky when I got my copy. I bought it on eBay for around $500 a year ago. Vue and Mover are a good combination too. It's really too bad P5 is so buggy. I was really looking forward to being able to not have to import to another app to get the effects. Simply hasn't happened so far. Ed

Any news on this issue? IS C4D planning on supporting P5 pz3 imports? And finally, how can you import PZ3 created in Poser 5 to P4 PP? (I didn't think that was possible.) Or are you recreating it? Of course then you lose any of your advanced materials and material animations. Thanks! -Tim