Until two days ago I was rendering multiple character scenes with complicated lighting. Suddenly my P5 is crashing on every render, even single charceter with simple lighting at 72 dpi. Rendering in P4. It renders a partial pic and then stops, can't cancel out. No detectable viruses, no other programs running. Anyone ever have this problem? Know of a possible reason or solution? Thanks in advance.

PS Window 2000 XP, antin aliasing on.

Dumb question--have you tried rebooting to clear out the resident memory on your machine? This is particularly a problem if you've been working in Poser or Photoshop a lot.

You might also want to scan for spyware. It can really clog up your available memory. Unfortunately, I know this from experience.

Pigfish9, scanned for spyware - in fact, took computer in for full system check. I know what you mean about clearing out the resident memory (learned the hard way), but no, I'm certain that is not the problem. As far as my rendering goes, I'm doing what I've always done, only, for some reason, it no longer works.

Pigfish9 wrote: "Dumb question--have you tried rebooting to clear out the resident memory on your machine? This is particularly a problem if you've been working in Poser or Photoshop a lot" Dumber question - How do you clear out resident memory? Thanks, Fin

Turn the PC off and let it sit as a techie once told me "until all the energy runs out" which basically means until you are sure everything has stopped running (1-3 minutes) then restart the PC.

Duh. Now I get it. Thanks, Pigfish.

"Window 2000 XP" Windows 2000, or Windows XP? And if XP, Home or Pro? If you haven't changed any render settings, are you using props, figures or light sets which are new? Lights are particularly bad for crashing Poser 5. Take a look in your main P5 directory and see if there are any .tmp files in there. If there are, delete them. This can happen if P5 crashes during a render - those .tmp files are from shadow calculations I believe. SR4 should fix this - do you have SR4 applied? Aside from that, have you tried opening an old .pz3 which you know rendered okay and rendering that? Lastly, have you made any changes to your PC - installed or deleted any programs - or changed the system configuration in any way - including adding hardware such as printers or scanners? Not that I'll necessarily be able to help with any of those things, but thinking about them might give you an answer yourself! BTW if you have XP have you tried system restore back to a point where you know it was working okay?

I do find those temp files inside Poser 5 sometimes.

When this happens to me I shut down and off, then blow out the guts with compressed air! Amazing what those fans will pitch in there filter or not. Otherwise just wait and come back to it after a while.

Karen1573, Windows 200Pro, I do have sr4. Checked the P5 directory and found lots of temp files. Installed a new printer recently.

OK, delete the temp files for a start. Someone recently posted that they had had a problem with poser after installing a new printer. Something to do with the network and the way Poser is set up to scan networks... I think. I will try and find the link.

Karen1573, I eliminated the temps, tried another render on an old file that rendered fine in the past, got partway through the render and bang another crash. Then found another temp file in P5 root. I do have the latest updates. Any idea? Also, I'm scouring the forum looking for a tutorial on how to increase virtual memory.

Are you rendering lots of lights with shadows? There is a thread somewhere about decreasing the size of the shadows. Trying to render shadows with global lighting locked up my P5 frequently when running WinME. I just recently added some memory and upgraded to XP Home. I'm scared to even try that type of render now.

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=74444

Here is a thread in RDNA about setting virtual memory. Also see this message about improving speed in P5: http://www.runtimedna.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=72272 I found 3 messages in this forum concerning printers interfering with Poser, but they seemed to indicate that the program would fall over from the start, not halfway through a render, so that may be unconnected. Are you rendering with the firefly renderer or the P4 one? Have you tried adjusting the settings? Have you moved anything in your runtime directories? (<-- clutching at straws here...)

Those printer-related threads: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1734138 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1900848 http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1555904

Karen, I am practically reduced to tears at the amount of help you are giving me. Thanks so much! You mentioned xp system restore - don't have a clue what that means. How do I do that? I render with p4 engine, and I do use extra heavy lighting, but the point is, I can go back and re-render a file that rendered fine a few days ago, only to have it lock up again mid-render. I am off to chase down these links you provided. Thanks.

You're welcome... what goes around comes around :) System restore can only be done with XP, so unfortunately that's not an option as you're on Win 2000. I realise you're using the same render settings as you were before with the old .pz3s. But I was wondering if something in your system that's changed had affected either the P4 renderer or the Firefly renderer. Do you usually only use the P4 renderer? Can you try with Firefly and see what happens? Also could you try ticking "ignore shader trees" in the render options for P4 and see if that makes any difference? Also, if you turn off shadows in the render, will it render then? If it does, then it might indicate a problem with memory allocation? The final test would be to reinstall Poser 5. However if you then find it hasn't solved the problem, then okay, you've performed an important diagnostic step and now know the problem is with your system and not the program, but you've gone to all the hassle for nothing. Much better if you can solve it first! I recently did a reinstall as I was having problems with crashes. It didn't totally solve the problem, but it did improve it a little. (Still looking for the cause, which I now think is hardware related, probably memory.) So I guess sometimes Poser can just become unstable. But I took that opportunity to divide my content up into separate runtimes and reorganise it ruthlessly, so it was a good thing anyway :o) If you do reinstall, it's not such a huge job with P5, as you can back up your content libraries and then link to them from within the fresh P5 program.

Poser does not only generate .tmp files, it can also generate poserTemp.##### files. They are responsible for quite some render crashes. I've experienced render crashes like you describe (mostly in Firefly with large complicated scenes, the kind of work that is absolutely impossible to render with the P4 rendere). Rebooting the PC, deleting all .tmp and poserTemp.* files, then starting only Poser and Task manager often does the trick. The poser.rsr file also can become corrupted. Reinstalling the 4.1 service pack often helps.

Run CorrectReference on the library items against the texture directory. Many vendors put file references for text files in outside Poser and P5 chokes looking for them, on loading and particularly on rendering.

How do you setup separate runtimes?? I think I definately need to do this ;)