I am about half way through the most complicated scene I have ever attempted. 5-6 characters, lots of props and set items, and now I find out that when trying to do a test render Poser just locks up and goes home. It starts off by eating up all available RAM 768 Megs of it, the program never enters a not responding state but once the RAM is gone, processor usage goes to 100% and that is all she wrote. I can let it sit till the cows come home and it won't matter. After some thinking, would using the P4 render engine help any? I think it is set to use firefly as the default so I am wondering if that is what it causing the locks. I am going to open the scene back up in P4 and see how it handles it. Just wondered if anyone knew of a workaround...

The brief stint I had with Poser5, it is by default set to render with the Firefly engine - you CAN change that setting and tell Poser5 to render using the Poser4 engine, but there's going to be certain things/effects that you are able to do in P5 that probably wont' render, I'd think. Not positive - I only had about a week's stint with P5 on my brother's machine before I decided I really REALLY did not like it and kept on with my P4... ~Seliah

Well if not for the material room I wouldn't bother much either. I just need to take a day and go through and try to standardize my installs. I have some things installed in the P5 runtime that I don't have in the P4 runtime which makes switching between the two hard.

I tried the scene in P4 and it works just fine, so it looks like firefly is my problem. I guess I will just have to see what kind of look I can get without the firefly render until I can let it sit and think about it all night, perhaps 8 hours of render time might be enough for firefly.

Message edited on: 05/24/2004 23:42

Where does FireFly stop? During the preparation stage or is it already drawing parts of the picture? If it's the latter, try lowering the bucket size.

What I do in this kind of situation (just been through the wringer myself with this) is I divide up the scene in segments left to right or in layers front to back - and composit in PShop or similar. So my most recent scene took 9 (NINE!!) renders in layers and then I put it back together in PShop. And it looked just like I wanted. That time it HAD to be done in P5 Firefly for reflections, P4 couldn't do it. The previous scene was 4 renders left to right - left background, foreground, right and far right BG. Because there were so many characters, 13 I think it was, plus the whole scen itself. Just a longer way to get there, but it works. :] Fish

Try decreasing the bucket size in the firefly settings. It works for me.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1773356

I have that problem also, I found by not checking the shadow maps it renders much better, Try unchecking some of those options. It all depends also on the high resolution of some of the figures. The image I did for the contest had to done in 4 layers. I discovered it was the outfits I had on my figures. "Sigh"

I discovered it was the outfits I had on my figures. When you have outfits on the figures, hide the invisible body parts in the hierarchy editor. No need to feed the renderer with geometry that's invisible anyway.

I know Lightwave is expensive and not everyone wants to go that route. I watch my processor temps in 3d apps and P5 will heat my processor up 40% more than Lightwave will and you can do a heck of a lot more in Lightwave - P5 got my 2nd processor up to 80C (I almost passed out and killed it right there).

Lightwave (big scene, texture maps and proceedurals) only gets it up to around 60C and that's with radiosity/ray tracing enabled.
Just some info

Message edited on: 05/25/2004 10:10

Ok lowering the bucket size to 15, and hiding everything you cannot see seems to have helped. I just put in a new light and was able to render it again. This is one of those times when I really wish I had the low res mike and vicky figures. It still takes it 5-6 times as long to render as the old P4 engine does but that is acceptable for the moment. I still have 3 characters and clothing that need to be added in but at least now it isn't locking up. I dread trying to do hair, as the hair always seems to lock it up.

All the above suggestions are good. But what I find is most frequently the limiting factor is the amount of RAM used by the texture maps. If there are several figures in your scene with clothing and each figure uses even medium resolution textures, then your RAM will disappear very fast. If the figures are small in the scene it is a waste of RAM to load a 3000x3000 head texture for each. You can limit maximum texture size in the Render Options panel to anything you want. Poser will rescale the textures and just use the RAM required for the smaller size - this can often make the difference between whether a complex scene will render or not. I once had a scene with one figure and about a hundred flowers that would not render. The figure used moderate res textures and I did not want to reduce them. I examined the flowers materials and discovered that each Petal of each flower used a 512x512 map. That may seem small, but multiply it by a few hundred and it is a lot. I used a batch processor (Irfan View) to resize all the flower maps to 256x256 (which reduced the RAM requirement by 75%) and the scene rendered fine.

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