Poser is suddenly crashing on both complex scenes and simple ones now =(. I never know if the animation scene will render all the way or hang up half way through. Its becoming like building a card house...you never know when its gonna fall down. Ive tried everything I know to get it right. Ive put sound in , taken it out, taken lights out , taken characters out....sigh.. my comp definatly has plenty of memory. Now , a scene with only two characters two boolean boxes and three lights crashes mid way through the animation!! arg! Why? Is it possible that Poser.exe or one of its files has become corrupt? Has anyone else had these problems? Would reinstalling Poser help?

Ive had them before. Not as terrible as you though, but my Poser has crashed during animations larger than 30 frames. This happened using a computer with 128 MB RAM, and 32 MB graphics card. I havent had these problems since I upgraded to 4.02 and then later 4.03 so you might want to try that if you havent done that yet. I suspected that it had something to do with the programs way of memory handling so I didnt pay much mind but if upgrading doesnt work... try rendering animations a little bit at a time. Thats what I did. Live well.. /Jacko

Yes did all that. Been using 4.03. I have pretty much ruled out memory problems. As I stated in an earlier post, I have had succesful renders with Poser even when rendering in Bryce at the same time (800 mhz P3 with 396 megs of ram). I just dont think memory is the problem especially since Poser is now hanging up on small scene renders.

Have you been using a new modelling technique lately? My Poser crashed mostly when I had imported objects such as .3ds files in the scenes?

Well, here is the mysterious part... The scenes did render at one time...then , For example, I might have just moved a light or changed a character position then boom! For instance, the current render is very simple reletivly speaking. I have had no trouble renders much longer and more complex scenes. The current animation worked fine on the first cut . I do them in cuts like on TV...cut 1 cut 2 etc. I usually spawn each cut from the last frame of the previous cut scene then when everythings rendered I put them together in Adobe after affects or something similar. Anyway, I spawned my current cut scene 2 from the last frame of Cut scene 1...nothing changed accept the sound track and a few minor motions from the central character. Boom! now it crashes. =( Now let's remember , this scene is spawned right off the one I just succesfully completed. Sigh, I thought it had something to do with the strong lighting I was using but I took out all but one light and it still crashes! I must admit , I didn't start running into these problems till I created a scene that had lots of boolean objects and lots of imported 3ds files. But if thats the problem, wouldn't it crash every time and not just sometimes?? It just doesn't seem to make sense. I am starting to think that huge scene that I made that kept crashing and rebooting my computer somehow corrupted Poser...is that possible?

Grook.. highly possible... have you tried re-installing poser over your current install? Sometimes that clears up the rsr corruptions...

Not yet...Its just such a pain to keep reintalling every time Poser goes shcizo. I was hoping to that I could nail down the reason its causing this problem so I can avoid it later. But, I just can't seem to nail down any consistancies in the crashes. I think Jacko might be on the right track with the 3ds files. It is the one thing that is differen't from my past renders. But if it was the 3ds props, then wouldn't they crash the render everytime and not just sometimes? Hmmmm I hate intangible bugs like this.

I've had these happen on my machine with 384 Mb ram. I tried moving poser to my temp file HD with 9 Gb or space and bang no problems no matter how I loaded up the scenes- I think what is happening is Poser grab a monster chunk of HD space for a temp file when it renders then lets it go, run of of HD space and crash. Hope this helps. btw I couldn't find any preference setting for temp files, like Premiere has and others.

I have two drives, one is 20 gigs and the other is 30 gigs. the drive Poser is on has close to ten gigs still free. So I don't think that's the problem. Besides, its not a problem on loading up , or even rendering a single frame...it locks during an animation rendering.

I have two drives, one is 20 gigs and the other is 30 gigs. the drive Poser is on has close to ten gigs still free. So I don't think that's the problem. Besides, its not a problem on loading up , or even rendering a single frame...it locks during an animation rendering.

I could be wrong, it's happened before, however is your drive defraged so that it is a contiguous free space?

Grook: Turn the BUMP maps off or take them out of each figure. This is an old problem with Poser dateing back to poser3. For some reason the rendering of bump maps totally screwes up the animation and causes the computer to lock up. I have rendered 900 frame animation with no problem. As long as the bump map option is turned off. If left on I get about 150frames then crash. The other option is to render to frames, this way when it locks up you just start the render from the last frame. BUt there are problems with this as well. only being able to render 255 frames at a time before crashing. Good luck Karl

Now that is definatly good info Karl! Lo and behold, I had just pumped up my bump maps for this particular scene. I have not had them on before. I didn't even think of bump maps as possibly being a problem. Thanks for the info!!