Sob! I am getting constant crashes on a scene I am trying to render with Firefly at production settings. What happens is, it starts rendering, but when it get to the hair of the character, the rendering stops, the render window becomes white, then the render meter disappears, and the image reappears on the render window, rendered normally down to the abortion point, and from there on, with the square buckets filled with a repetition of the last bucket that was rendered normally. The same scene, rendered with the Firefly at draft settings, completes with no problem. I have tried varying the settings of the production render, but I don't seem to be able to find the "guilty" one (or ones). Anyone can come to my rescue?? I'd hate to render the scene with draft. You can't believe how much detail is lost!! thank you! Orio

Might try two renders one without hair and one with ONLY hair and throw them together in your paint program of choice. If the hair casts shadows, you might have to add those back in or do another render with the hair but with a lower res texture.

Yes but WHY this happens? Has anyone else experienced this problem? Could you solve this and how? Pablo thank you, I appreciated your tip, but I'm looking for a real solution, not a workaround.

I am also having similar problems. My POSER 5 program stops responding usually while loading textures or if I have added additional lighting. I believe the hair has also caused this problem. I was wondering if it had anything to do with memory on the computer or speed of the processor. I am learing to always save my work before hitting render. MADKAT

I have 1 Gb RAM on a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz processor. It may not be anymore the state of the art but it should be a respectable system anyway. So I doubt the cause it's lack of power. I wonder if CL is aware of these problems.

Hey! I just came here to report the exact same thing! I have never had this happen before until just within the last hour! It hangs and does just what Orio says. I don't have any hair, just some objects sitting on a table with nine lights. I had just deleted a bunch of lights. I saved, bebooted, and the same thing happened. I am using a bucket size of 300. I'm going back to make sure my bucket size isn't too big.

An epidemic? (evil grin) a bucket of 300? Holy cow I never went that far! Anyway I have tried all bucket sizes, the problem stays.

Which hair is it? A few of Neftis' hair don't work well in P5 with Firefly for example but work fine with the P4 render engine in P5. It wouldn't surprise me if a few other hair models had the same issue.

I would not like to mention the hair because it works ok in draft mode so I don't think it's the hair's fault (and I don't want to damage the merchant with not sure rumours).

Whew! I went back and reset the bucket size back to 150 and it started working again! I tried it with ray tracing and without, both worked! I got just a 850mh III with 512 ram. Snif... The only thing I can pin it to is bucket size.

I closed Poser and restarted. Now it works ok, BUT, I haven't tried on the separate window. I have tried enlarging the main window to the same size of the separate window. I am of the impression, however, that is more of a RAM issue than anything else. Perhaps I should reinstall that RAM manager that I used to use time ago with Poser 4...

I phrased it unproperly. It's not a RAM issue. All my other software handles my 1Gb RAM perfectly. I think it's an issue of bad RAM management by Poser 5.

Maybe you are right. I understood that bucket size has to do with how much memory is used during a render. Maybe it just goes too far and memory problems appear. It sounds like more than just one thing can do it too. I've used bucket sizes of 300 before, and I don't think I was even pushing it this time. However, lower it back down, and it works. Would a ram manager fix this? I don't know anything about stuff like that.

Is that dynamic hair? Try lowering the bucket size, sounds like it's taking too much RAM. I had cases with dynamic hair and depth of field where I had to go down to a bucket size as low as 8.

I've been having similar problems recently. A room scene with lots of props, a full V3 and clothes plus hair. Firefly with Ray Trace... boom. Render stops dead when about 10-20% is left to be done. Very frustrating when you've waited 45 mins for it to get finished. I switched off Displacement Maps in Render Options and then it rendered. Try that, might help. :] Fish

Attached Link: Stefan's Firefly FAQ

See #14 in the attached link. Firefly seems to be a real memory hog. I have a Pentium 2.8GHz with 1.5 Gb RAM, and I still have to be very careful when it comes to rendering with Firefly. Sometimes I use the P4 renderer, just because it's easier. Personally, I've found reducing the bucket size helps a lot. I've gone as low as 8. It takes a long time to render, but it does complete the render. (I let it run over night, or while I'm at work.) I also turn off texture filtering, unless it's needed. Usually, it isn't.

I avoid FireFLAW like the plague. I use the p4 renderer unless it is absolutely necessary to use FireFLAW. It has a HUGE memory leak which they have yet to address. It is also much slower than the p4 renderer for same quality. In order to get sharp textures you have to crank Fireflaw's settings way up, which makes it glacially slow, to get the same results from the P4 renderer.

You don't need to use Fireflaw unless you're rendering real reflections, P5 Hair, etc. I find that most procedural textures render fine in the P4 renderer surprisingly enough. I didn't think it could do them, but it does.

-Tim

Attached Link: http://www.jfitz.com/software/RAMpage/

Caravaggio there are programs that automatically free unused RAM when free RAM goes below a threshold. RAMpage is one of those programs. It's freeware Link attached

1. You mentioned the render indicator ... this goes away with the last patch. You may not have the latest patch from Curious. 2. Slowdowns in P5 are very common with files that do not have an optimized texture link between object and it's texture file. Run CorrectReference, a free utility, and run it on each of your library files ... but do just a few at a time as this hogs your CPU until all files are optimized. CorrectReference rewrites the link to the text file so that it loads and renders fast. I do it on all new downloads as a matter of course. 3. P5 dynamic hair is a serious CPU hog, and even under the best of circumstances, loads and renders like a greased glacier. I don't have that kind of patience.

Fireflaw? I'm sorry to disagree, but I think the firefly renderer isn't entirely to blame. If I'm not mistaken the memory leak that people notice with P5 was also there in P4 but wasn't as much of a problem due to the lower overhead of the P4 render. It uses less resources, so it leaks less resources. Also, I find the poly smoothing and displacement mapping to be its best features and now that I've used them a bit I can't go back. Too bad the P4 renderer doesn't have the smoothing or I could get by with it once in a while perhaps. Off to check on RAMpage...

Yeah, the smoothing defintely comes in handy sometimes ... as do some other features from time to time. But I must say, I can throw just about anything at the P4 renderer (any length, an complexity, etc.) and it doesn't choke -- which I can't say for Poser 4 itself, interestingly enough. Huolong: What do you mean by "the render indicator ... this goes away ..." I have the latest patch and I still have a render indicator. (And having one is fairly desirable.) Are you talking about the "little man" side-stepping, maybe? I'm confused, can you enlighten me? Thanks, Tim

I haven't seen the little side stepping man since my last upgrade. After correcting all the text references in my library via CorrectReference, Firefly renders just fine. Firefly renders slow the first render which is why I render just for the hell of it after any major addition to the file I am working on. Subsequent renders move quite rapidly. Even the best of vendors have some strange linkages in their file references in their library items. Some put their text references outside of Poser in a nonstandard drive such as D:, when most folks main drive is C:. CorrectReference searches your specified directory and fixes those references so that it points to where you put the text file.

Actually, unless I'm mistaken, I don't remember seeing the "sideways stepping-man" since Poser 5 came out. I removed him manually from Poser 4, but as far as I know Poser 5 never had him ... at least on the Win version.

I too have just been having problems with rendering in poser 5, I dont play with it as much as i would like to, i will try some of the suggestions made here, but i get it with having to much light, I have a decent system, i think the best solution would be for poser to make use of hardware acceleration, it would make poser run better on almost all systems straight away. I like poser it does it's job just have to work with it a bit

Hardware acceleration most likely will help, but Poser will always struggle if the file references in the library items are not optimized. I have found file references to the D:/ drive, while most folks use the C:/ drive as default. Poser has to search all over the place just to load and render. Regardless of the other problems listed above, one should always run CorrectReference on one's library, even on Poser4, but especially on Poser5