Grrrrrr, I have been truying to render a scene all day and it just keeps freezing - exact description below: I can render the scene at 1500by1000 at 900dpi in about 20 mins with no problems. I am using the default production setting with raytracing turned on, displacement maps turned on and cast raytraced shadows. I turn the settings up to 2500byt2000 at 2000dpi and the render gets about 1/3rd of the way and then just locks up. In task manager Poser is still using about 70 - 99% of the processor capacity and about 600Mb of RAM but absolutely nothing progresses with the render - I have left it in this state for 4 hours and nothing happens at all - not one more suqare of the imageis rendered. I get no error messages of any kind it just stops dead. I have 1gig physical RAM and am paging another 2gig. The disk that Poser is installed on has 35Gig of free space so I do not think it is a memory problem. Any ideas what I can do?

2000 dpi? You're joking, right? Even magazines or fine art books don't print at such a high res, maybe 600 tops. Unless you're rendering for print there's no point in specifying anything other than 72 dpi. I'm guessing you're overloading Poser or it's just taking so long that it appears to lock up.

Oh it is definitely locking up, I sat here for 2 hours watching one little square and squat happened. I am rendering for a poster print - hence the high dpi

At 2500x2000 at 2000 dpi, though, your picture is going to print 1.5 inches by 1 inch, which is a pretty small poster. Are you sure those are the settings the poster will need? Jack

Poser does have some sort of bug where it gets stuck though... when it happens to me, I make some of the figures invisible, and do multiple renders, then composite the results in a paint program (I use Paint Shop Pro). I haven't found a rhyne or reason for what causes it, and that's the only solution I've found to date. Jack

At the minute I am just trying to see if I can render at that resolution before I think about scaling - rendering something A1 scale at 2000dpi is a loooong time to wait for a test image. Could the problem be that I am just rendering the image 'too small' for the resolution I am trying to use?

This is a rather complex image which would make layering rather difficult. I would import it into Vue but then I would lose all my shaders and the lighting I spent 4 hours setting up.

Could the problem be that I am just rendering >> the image 'too small' I wouldn't rule it out... Poser is a little "buggy", to be sure. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to tell. I rendered an image at 1024x768 at 72 dpi and let it run for fourteen hours before I killed it. I re-ran it as three separate renders, and the total rendering time was about 30 minutes. >> This is a rather complex image... I generaly find that shadows are the main problem; if the image can't be arranged so that the main figures don't shadow each other, then layering is definitely a problem. Perhaps you might try the multiple-render approach just as a test; if it still appears to be locked up then there's some other problem, but if that fixes it then we know we're dealing with some kind of Poser bug. Curious Labs tech support might be the next step, in that case. Jack

It's a plan of attack at least so I will try it (the image is lit by a flickering fire which = many shadows). Thanks for the help. If anyone else has any suggestions don't be shy :D

What hair are you using? Certain hairs - like Julian - cause Poser to stop responding.

Of course you said it renders at a lower resolution so that can't be it.

Sometimes reducing the bucket size to 16 or 8 helps. Reducing the number of raytrace bounces can also help. If you only use raytracing for shadows, you can reduce the number of bounces to 0. If you use reflections, it should be at least 1, if you're also using refractions, 2 is minimum. You can reduce the maximum texture size from 4096 to 3072 at the resolution you're using. THe maximum texture size should be at least as large as the largest dimension of your render, preferably somewhat larger (at 125% it's OK, increasing the max texture size beyond that only increases render times and lockup chances, but not image quality). Hope this helps.

Ok I know this is off the wall but you could try rendering it in DAZ|Studio. Its what Ive had to resort to doing when P5 refuses to render a scene. Your going to have to re light it and do some small adjustments,but you also going to get a great render.

I'm afraid DAZ|Studio is not an option. It doesn't have raytracing. And the last version I tried (0.9.0) crashed at much smaller and simpler scenes than Poser 5. The latest version might be better, though.