Ok, I have recently purchased P5 and think it's incredible compaired to the rendering quality of P4. Now having said this, Lately I've been having trouble getting an image to render. I make a scene just like i did with P4 and go to render and it locks up every time and i have to kill the process. I don't know if i have a "weak" pc or what. Just incase it's a pentium 4 1.6 with 256 RAM. I always get the "Windows low on virtual mem" everytime as well. Does anyone else have this problem? or am I alone here?

You are really kinda low on ram, and it may not be locked up... just slow.

256 is quite low on ram for P5. If you're running 98 it's even worse as 98 only allocates 128M per program. Also, as you add more into the runtime things slow up. Try to keep your main P5 Runtime as lean as possible and use either Downloads-- put a separate runtime in there-- or add other runtimes in their separate folders, like one for scifi or fantasy. Sorry to say, but if you want to work with anything but the included content-- if you want to add Vicki3, for instance or any of the Daz figures in multiple scenes, you need around 1G of memory-- I have 2 and it still freezes at times-- XP system and as much processor as you can afford. The program's cheap, the puter upgrade is steep! Emily

no kidding...i was ok with PP...But wow...I guess i'll be spending all my $ on RAM. Weird how fast things become "old". I've only had this computer 2 yrs and i had PP then and was so fast...Now im crashing...lol..Thanks guys...

In the meantime, you can reduce the value for "bucket size" in the render settings dialog. This will make the renderer use less memory, at the expense of longer render times. Also, using ray traced shadows instead of shadow maps saves memory.

If you're still using the "out-of-the-box" version, you should apply the latest patches from the CL website. Although there are still crash and freeze issues with the latest versions, the original release was extermely poor in this area. In particular a bug with way that the render engine handled polygon subdivision, meant that the presence of single sided square props would often bring Firefly to its knees. A lot of peoples reported problems disappeared after CL identified and fixed this. As far as memory usage is concerned, RAM is preferrable for performance, but Poser (or any applications) cannot tell the difference between virtual memory and RAM anyway, that's handled by the OS, and so as long as you have maxed out you're virtual memory, it should still work, even if runs like a slug. There is, however, a logical upper limit to 32 bit application memory of 2GB, and if you have have a scene that requires more than this, Poser is going to crash no matter what your specs. The best solution, if you are trying to render a complex scene is to cut down the size of the texture maps, ie. resample them in in paint program. Bill

I used to have that problem when I used poser on my laptop with 128Mb, it would lock, then I maxed it to 512Mb and it would render anything I'd try throwing at it. That was on a 700Mhz PIII Same thing used to happen with 256Mb on a 2Ghz P4 when using Poser5, I maxed it out to 1Gb and it got a little faster and didn't choke as much, but it would still stop rendering if I put 2 Mike's and 3 Vic's into the same image, I didn't even have to skin them. It wasn't endlessly repeatable. Though it did seem to relate to how long I'd had the program running. Before I gave up using P5, I used to save and restart poser every hour or so, that tended to smooth it out. later jb

I'm using Windows XP Pro and I get that message nearly every time I render. I just close the window and it renders fine! Windows can be a bit of a whinger. :0)

smiller you lucked out. most times that message presages a freeze and no way you can click out. Awhile back on a bullsession at PoserPros, Jaager said Kupa told him there was a poly limit for the core Poser engine-- which we all know hasn't changed with P5, right??--The base polys of V3 are right around that limit-- or the fully morphed version is, one of the two. Memory is the first thing to go with age, ya know. So, since that little conversation, I've figured that running V3 on Poser 5 was working on borrowed time much of the time. There are ways to keep it going-- cutting off all the extra functions of XP, things like that, cutting texture sizes back. But that's the one I hate to do-- I paid through the nose for that texture and I Can tell the difference. In the last analysis, you're gonna have to purge the memory often. I went from one pz3 to another Once on P5. I was able to save it but couldn't render it-- and this was with simple scenes with a reduced textured Stephanie-- only one figure. I just just don't even try it anymore. If i want to do more than one scene in an evening, I close out the program and reboot-- it still might not work, I'd say 30-40% of the time. Emily

Now that one seems like the SAME thing that's going on with me...Seems like even when i try to render twice in one day that's when i get trouble...P5 is really heavy....But i'd rather upgrade than go pack to 4...Because when i finally can render, I really really tell the difference...And the worst part is i have to use P4 style rendering to even get an image at all...

Duh! Poser 5 has a 4MB memory leak per render. Add that to poor, really poor memory management, and many other memory leaks, and ... Ergo, the only real way to stop P5 running out of memory is to not use it. Failing that use it as little as possible between reboots. (Per my definition that means the program doesn't work worth a , but many will jump in to says 'tis wonderful.) I've not had it crash on me (excluding Interlok triggered ones) - even on 5.0 pre-SR1. And my memory configuration has always been limited to < 2GB. E.g. 1GB real, 960MB virtual. A coincidence? Maybe, but I've optimized that virtual memory size for another application, so I've not tried messing with it. Plus I gave up using P5 for anything real some time back because it behaves just like (read 'as badly as') Poser 4 does with 5+ clothed complex figures in it, except it all occurs in P5 with just the one simple nude figure loaded! An EVM just waiting for SR4, or is it 5? , or maybe 6? - but holding out little hope of a satisfactory outcome, ever.

No patch is gonna rebuild that core engie which is very outdated. But I haven't gone back to ProPack either-- because, well, because I had just as many crashes in ProPack, I just could do a lot more with a lot more figures before I crashed. ProPack wasn't slow like 5. I know some people pose and everything in PP and render in 5. But the libraries-- how on earth can you go back to library maddness and I do admit I am very fond of FireFly as a renderer. I hope Daz Studio puts me out of my misery but it's bound to have some quirks as well, maybe I'll prefer Firefly it just would be nice to have a choice. I still don't quite understand why CL didn't rebuild the core. I'm hoping it wasn't incompetence, but. . . Oh, I don't remember if I gave system specifics-- XP Pentium 4 2.4Gprocessor, 2GRam, 30G available space-- around 4G virtual. Emily

Ok, you have those specs and it still crashes?! Ok so im going to get more RAM and my friends building me a new board with 2 pentium 4's...So I'll be ok there. But wow..Now I'm really kinda upset knowing that even after that it's the program itself that's not going to get any better.hmf...Oh well...

"Duh! Poser 5 has a 4MB memory leak per render." - layingBack Not on my machine! You must be a W98 user.

• Not on my machine! You must be a W98 user * No they exist on XP and all other varities of Windows. Just to dispel one of the myths that seems common in this forum, memory leaks have nothing to do with the OS and cannot be fixed by any changes in memory management. They are purely caused by errors in the programming, so if any one person has a memory leak, everyone has the same, until the programmers provide a patch to fix this. The memory leaks in P5 SR2 (although I haven't yet checked that the situation still exists with SR3), mostly manifested themselves in Firefly production mode rendering and (possibly) with shadow mapping. One more thing, if you want to check for memory leaks, is not to confuse RAM usage with memory usage, the two are not the same thing, and this has lead a lot of confusion in the past. Bill

I find this hard to believe, I've rendered 900+ images in one go for animations. The time taken per render remains the same and surely my PC would run out of memory if this were true. Show us the proof!