Okay, so I was playing with the material editor in poser when I accidentally clicked on one of those annoying key's you're always seeing next to the parameter dials. Well, of course most of you probably know that this is to make that field animatible. So, I'm like, "Sweet! I can animate textures, like rivers, flames, and clouds!" Then I think, "Clouds, I do a lot of cloud backgrounds!" (because its cool, mind you) and I'm like, "that would be totally sweet to animate a cloud background!" (giving no head to the fact that I've done very little animating of anything.) So I open up a really cool image I'd been working on for a while and edit the graft for the density filed to the cloud cover to slightly change over the animation time frame. The first attempt, which took nearly 2 hours to render (which is when I realized an empty document would have been better to test on) and I realized that I had used the defaults of 30 frames/sec with 30 frames, setting my animation up for 1 second. Unfortunately, all I got was a white, 1 sec segment. Realizing my frame rate, I quickly changed it to 6 frames per sec and 30 frames for a film length of 5 seconds. (I was just testing, and I'm not Lucas Arts, after all.) So, continuing on, rendered again (forgetting to delete everything so as to waist as much time as possible on the render again.) and another 2+ hours I come up with a 5 sec segment of complete white space. At this point I say, "dude, that's not to sweet." But luckily, I got to play 4+ hours of the new Jedi Knight for the X-box. Anyone happen to know what I'm doing wrong with the animation technique? Thanks, Dude P.S. Due to 2+ hours of render times, I have officially put in a request for a 3G Pentium with 2G of Ram!

So many things that can go wrong, so little time ....

I can't really say. If I could see your material and render settings, I might have a better chance of identifying the problem. It might be as simple as failing to enable "render over background shader" in your render options, or neglecting to set Quality to "current render settings" in your Make Movie options.

You do have Service Release 3 installed, right?

You'll definitely want to save your current scene and start over, experimenting with a blank scene (preferably in draft mode, at low resolution) until you get the hang of animated materials. Do a few still-frame test renders at different points on the timeline to make sure everything's rendering properly before you commit to a full-sized, full-length render in production mode.

What does a still render look like?