Ok....heres the problem...a weird one i think... when I built my WinXP P4 2.8E HT 1MB machine a few months ago, I installed P5 with SR3...and everything was OK....I did a few renders with DAZ GI packs just to test speed....like I said, everything is fine. then a few months later, i made a scene and was trying out light sets to see which one best suits the scene....then I find out the GI light sets by DAZ and a few by RuntimeDNA NOW sometimes works and sometimes dont....its just a matter of luck....what i mean is when I load them in my scene and render, the box that appears just says "Loading Textures" and it stays that way....no progress.... ...just when it sounds weird already...it gets even weirder....if I quit and restart the program, the light sets work...then if I switch to other light sets, then load the GI light set or some RDNA (like pastel) then P5 hangs up again....if its a fresh P5 boot, if I load the GI light set right away and DONT touch anything else, i noticed that theres a 70% chance the render will go through.... i've noticed a couple more ways to get GI going... the point here is why is this happening? i didnt change anything in my computer. in fact since the time i first tested P5 on my new machine, I must have used my machine 5 or 6 times in that few months cause I only use that machine for graphics and no internet.... what the...? i did 2 reinstalls of P5 with SR3...no change.....uninstall and reinstall.... then i run the comp in various states like with no HT and with HT...still no change.... can anyone please advice a next step? thanks very much.

I have found with erratic problems like this you want to run the system monitor and log cpu , memory swapping, disk I/O. Then run the program and if it appears to lock up (no error messages) leave it for at last 5 minutes, then cancel out of it (CTL-ALT-DEL) and look at the system monitor log. This will tell if the system itself stopped (no cpu) or if it was very busy with memory swapping or disk I/O. In some situations you get in a position where the system is doing very little but memory swapping. There are a few utilities that will help find a memory leak (application finishes with memory block but does not correctly release it). hope this helps.

i think this was a common problem in poser 5 that was fixed in sr4,i could be wrong,but i used to get this a lot with the sr3,but when i installed sr4 i have not had the problem since (touch wood) i hope this helps

thahats right shazz, it was fixxxed in sr4

I agree with shazz501 and odeathoflife. I had a problem with a particular light set in Poser 5, can't recall which one it was now but when I upgraded to sr4 I didn't have that problem anymore. Is your version upgraded to sr4? If not, download it and install it.

I sometimes have a similar kind of problem, but these are no real freezes. I have to click the workspace -studio in Poser speak I think- and the loading starts anew and always comes to a good end. I run P5 04 325 (help>about Poser) on a WinXPPro machine, PIV 3.06GHzHT, 1,5GB DDRam. It has nothing to do with your puter, but with the complexity of what you are doing and just did. Up to now I never had a real freeze caused by Poser. KFC (keep fngers crossed)

The problem has been around since P5 came out, and the fix is to delete all lights (manually or with a python script) before loading a new light set. The problem is with swapping lights with the same name, but different parameters, and some unexpected code syntax that P5 encounters. SR4 did address most of the occurrences, but not the ones that are due to some conflicts within the lightset file itself such as a conflict between the naming of the light and the naming of the corresponding shadowcam. The reason this is so hard to track is that the freeze does not occur at the time the lightset is loaded. It only occurs when a render is attempted and Poser encounters the conflict which it cannot resolve resulting in an endless loop (not really frozen).

whew! thanks for the info guys! much appreciated...at least i now know that its not my computer... i'll try upgrading to SR4.1...it sounds like thatll solve the problem...ive been a loyal SR3 follower and never bothered to even download 4.1 since theres lots of talk about how it causes other problems like with the background setting...but since i have a backup of SR3 i can always revert back to it if i find SR4.1 worse or causes new problems... thanks again for the advice all! much appreciated! =)

but then again...howcome this problem just showed up? a few months ago i didnt have this problem with the lights? but then again maybe i could be wrong...maybe when I rendered, the light just happend to work... hmm....i'll upgrade to 4.1, see what that does. also, i didnt have this problem on my old Win98SE Celeron machine....surprisingly I NEVER had almost ANY problems in 98SE with a crapy Celeron...

i used to find it was mostly RDNA lights that caused mine to freeze,after loading one set of lights then loading a set of those it froze everytime,that isn't to say the lights are bad,far from it,they just seemed to disagree with poser before sr4 :D as Ronstuff says there is a python script in freestuff that resets the lights which i found very useful if you have a problem with sr4,i believe it was created by Ockham and it deletes all lights then just places 1 light,if you have no luck with sr4 give that a whirl :D

Message edited on: 06/10/2004 09:43

thanks again for the info. much appreciated! :)

Also, the background color niggle is mentioned in the readme for the 4.1 patch. It just takes a few seconds to follow the instructions and delete a node.

Delete ALL scene lights before you apply a new light set in P5. P5 lights are different to the P4 lights, they contain more information. So if your light set also uses something like "Light 1" for a name, P5 gets confused and your render gets stuck. I used to have this problem a LOT. I use the "Delete all lights" script (sorry I don't remember who did it, but I think it's in freestuff) and remove all lights before using a new one. Not had it freeze since I started doing it this way. This includes removing the default lights.