Had Poser 5 for 5 days and still have not managed a single render! Stuff Poser 4 would bust through in 20 minutes just runs for hours and hours. When I finally lose patience and hit "Cancel" this process runs indefinitely until I shut down and lose all my work. Is this typical? Have Windows Professional and a fast system - like I said, P4 would slam through it. Now, when I try to render with P4 version of P5, it works only if I check "Ignore Shades", but when I do this I lose all the textures I applied manually. Can somebody help? Please and thank you

Are you by chance using the Bombshell hair? That one would always crash Poser 5 for me, alas. Particularly large textures may also overload things a bit.

Are you sure you have installed the SR-3 update - that makes a LOT of difference to stability.

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html#14

also, some light sets have huge shadow maps....they will kill rendering quite often

Much appreciation for the responses. Will give them all a try

It is a typical response for too little memory and/or some hair objects. Neftis hair doesn't like FireFly. Sometimes, if you are using a texture off an auxiliary Runtime, the first time of accessing it, Poser 5 can get hung up. Some light additions-- say you've changed the lighting several times, this can get Poser 5 very wrought up and it freezes either on Texture gathering or objects added, in my experience. If you do have a lot of RAM and/or swap space, consider upping your bucket size-- I used 150 last night and rendering was almost Poser 4 fast. This was with a fully head loaded M3-- no body morphs-- and set and lite hair and costume. Emily Ps, for all my doing things right, it still froze on me during the 7th render when I added an extra light. Might have been the light, but sooner of later, in my experience, you reach a render limit and it will freeze no matter what.

I should have added..with lights, I've now gotten the habit of deleting the lights prior to assigning any additional light set... there have been just too many hangs when I've changed light sets. You can do this with a delete light python script..i think it was here in the free stuff..can't remember exactly where it came from now.

It is a typical response for too little memory and/or some hair objects. Neftis hair doesn't like FireFly. Sometimes, if you are using a texture off an auxiliary Runtime, the first time of accessing it, Poser 5 can get hung up. Some light additions-- say you've changed the lighting several times, this can get Poser 5 very wrought up and it freezes either on Texture gathering or objects added, in my experience. If you do have a lot of RAM and/or swap space, consider upping your bucket size-- I used 150 last night and rendering was almost Poser 4 fast. This was with a fully head loaded M3-- no body morphs-- and set and lite hair and costume. Emily Ps, for all my doing things right, it still froze on me during the 7th render when I added an extra light. Might have been the light, but sooner of later, in my experience, you reach a render limit and it will freeze no matter what.

Recently, I installed SR-3.
The threshold value of the freezing went down significantly for FireFly render.
Or, it was worse with SR-3.

P4 render of Poser5 worked fine for both cases.

I never did install SR-3, but do have the other updates. Using the "reset lights" python script by agiel in freestuff before changing lights, eliminated about 80% of my hangs. The rest seem to be related to textures. As already stated, some of the better hair (Neftis for one) uses large texture files. You can reduce the size of them as some have done, or simply use the Poser 4 renderer. The other thing that seems to drive P5 a bit whacko is .bum files. Be prepared for "slowness" and "confusion" when you use them. Also, if you render to a new window, avoid trying to cancel....that will sometimes freeze your computer. I try to get what I want by testing in the "same window". You can cancel there without any problems. I leave rendering to a new window for the very end.....when I'm just about ready to do a final product. Finally......save very frequently :)