Hi i use poser 5 with a Intel P4 3Ghz and 2 Go of DDRAM and Windows XP. I install the last patch for poser download on the curiouslabs site. i have 2 problems : - first, poser never use more than 50% of CPU ressources, even if i define HIGHT Priority for the process. - second, render often crash when the memory use by poser is more than 1.5 Go. The process of poser is running, but i can wait 2 hours or 2 days, render will never finish. if you know the solution, please help me...

No idea on the resources allocations in XP. For the second point, most frequently the problem is memory management (on Poser side). I have the same problem some times, and solved it in one of the following modes (depending on the scene i am rendering): - if the scene involves many figures of moderate size (i.e. crowd, groups of people or some people with complex props and scenery in wide view shots), turning the maximum texture resolution down to 1024 or less (512 is decent too), can solve the problem. You don't want to use this trick if you have a closeup shot... since the textures details would be awful. - in other cases, splitting the scene in 2 or more 'layers' is also a good option. The background should contain the objects that are far from the camera, the front layer the closer ones. Render the two or more scenes separately, save the renders in psd or tiff format (for having also the alpha channel in the image) and then compose the layers in Photoshop or PSP or an image software of your choice. - for hope sake, sometimes only reducing the bucket size in render options to 16 or 8 can just solve the problem, so you'd like to try this one first. Regarding render times, the worst slowdown is caused by raytraced refractions and atmospheric effect (i.e. volumetric light). Shadow maps calculations are also a big time consumer. If you have many lights in your scene, try to activate shadows only for the main lights, and turn off the shadow option for the filling and ambient lights. Hope this might help. Happy rendering

I believe Curious Labs has a patch on their site for Poser on a system with more than a gig of memory. I'm not sure whether it's for all versions of Poser or not and Curious Labs site seems to be down at the moment so I can't check.

You only get 50% load because your P4 uses hyperthreading, pretending to be two CPUs and Poser can only use one CPU.

Message edited on: 09/13/2004 15:07