I'm having trouble with this scene I'm doing. It's a basic Caesar stab scene and I have 4 Michael 3 figures in the image with hair and cloth simulations. I also have a whole bunch of props in the scene as well. I've tried to render the figures and the background separately, using magenta as a transparency color but it does come out quite right. If I have all four figures rendering at the same time, Poser freezes. If I have one figure and the background rendering, Poser freezes. Thanks!

Couldn`t you replace a couple of the michaels with the poser 4 man or some other smaller (in megabytes)character? You could leave the caeser one at least as a michael 3.

Hmm, well the robe that I'm using to substitute for a toga will also work with Don. I suppose I could try using that figure for the senators. I'll go ahead and try that now.

Also if you have Michael 1 you can use him for the background guys...The same thing happens to me when I use to many MIL 3 People:)

Yes, I can confirm this problem. I have just attempted to render a scene with two Michael 3's and a Vicky 3 and Poser hangs every time. Task manager says it's busy but in reality it is doing nothing or looping.

a few notes: using magenta as a transparency color You don't need to use a transparency color. If you save your file as PSD or TIFF, poser saves an alpha channel to the file. Are your figures wearing clothes? Hide every body part that's hidden by clothing, that'll save you both memory and render time. As others said, substituting hi-res figures with low-rew ones for the background is also a good idea. If you have decent textures on them, they'll still look very good. Finally, some more info about your rendering settings and the computer you're using couldn't hurt. It sounds to me like you're possibly running out of memory, or going beyond the limits of RAM that Windows can handle per app. If you open the task manager, what does it say about Poser's RAM usage?

It is using 1.51 GB of my page file usually which equates to some of my RAM and all of my virtual memory. I have it on Production render settings with smooth polys off but even when I change it to Draft settings it refuses to render. My computer is a 2.53 GHz P4 with 768 MB of physical memory and 1.5 GB of virtual memory. I will attempt some of the methods you suggested today, stewer. I would rather not substitute for another figure as Mike 3 is the best one I've got right now.

Where exactly and how does the render fail? Is it doing the "adding objects" step? Does it proceed to "Rendering"? Is it completely frozen or does it abort rendering halfway throuh?

It stops at adding objects.

Its nice to see the finished picture, most people dont bother showing the pic. You could have rendered the 2 figures at the back and the background as a picture and used that as a background and rendered the foreground picture.

I tried doing that but Poser crashed in the middle of rendering.

Some ground shadows would look good for your image

Yep, this is a major Firefly problem. Ran into it using 4 V3s, Don plus Posette plus a complex background and lots of light, on a P4 2.8 with 1.5 G of ram and 3 G of VM. It does NOT have to do with available RAM or virtual memory, it also does not have to do with the 2 Gb limit per app. Usually turning down the bucket size to 8 helps, not always. I also try reducing maximum texture map resolution (but not below 1024) and increasing shading rate from 0.5 to 2. Usually I can get it to work that way. I hope SR4 will address this problem.

This might have something to do with what's called 'crosstalk'. There was a file created called a 'null' which fixes some problems from that. http://www.daz3d.com/pages/faq/techtips/crosstalk.html All that stuff also could just be too complex for your resources to render but I'd try the null thing first.