I've done hundreds of complex scenes with as many as 17 Mil-figures or equivalent rendered to sizes 1500x1500 and have had this happen only once. Strangely, when it happened, the scene was not one of my most complex, so I don't think it is scene complexity alone that causes it. What did distinguish my problem scene from my other renders was number of textures and their sizes, along with almost everything in the scene having some transparent element.

I reduced texture sizes and tried another render - it still forze, but completed more of the picture before doing so. I turned off shadows (in options panel) and the scene rendered fine, but I wanted the shadows rendered, so I then deleted one of the foreground figures, turned shadows back on, and the scene rendered OK. In the end I had to render that single figure without the other scene elements, and composite the two images in a paint program.

Bottom line is that it might be RAM related, but I am also suspecting lighting and shadow-casting as being involved in these mysterious "freezes" where Poser 5 really isn't frozen, it is just in some kind of endless loop perhaps trying to calculate shadows for one transparent object casting a shadow on another transparent object, etc.

It would be interesting to hear from others about what circumstances were when they have encountered this problem. It doesn't happen very often since SR 4.1, but it DOES still happen.
P.S. - I still wouldn't go back to P4 for a zillion dollars ;-)

Message edited on: 05/30/2004 14:35