I was rendering a series of images yesterday, and actually kept my Poser session running for more than 5 hours. Around mid-point in these sessions I did a render of a big figure in a 1000X1000 pixel window, and found it took about a half hour to render, which seemed pretty excessive. But a couple of hours later I did another similar render, and it took about 45 minutes. Then, my last render of the day was a smaller shot, about 300X500, a closeup of a hand. It took over 45 minutes and never finished rendering-- I eventually used a screen capture to get the parts of the render I needed and then canceled it. I'm not quite sure, but I think the render of this last shot may have gone to sleep a few times, and only been reactivated when I hit the return key to display the screen (screen saver turns the screen black when I'm not actively imputting to a session.) I also noticed during the latter part of the day that Poser was responding very slowly to posing commands. I was working with a single figure, David, who had about the average amount of morph targets loaded on him. I've only been using Poser 5 for a short time. This kind of experience makes me think that I should go back to using Poser 4, or experiment more with Daz3D studio (which has its own problems, unfortunately.)

Save your scene files before rendering. The when it bogs down close the app and let the memory empty.

Restart, load your scene and render again.

I have a pentium machine and it happens to me too after a few hours in P5. Not just rendering either; everything slows to a crawl: camera movement, screen refreshes, ect. It happens in P4/PP too. Just not as soon and not as bad.

Also try to turn off the screen & energy savers when rendering. I find that if I leave the computer during a render and the screen goes black, the render seems to stop. It starts again when I "wake up" the computer though. This is a Mac G4 with OSX 10.3.5.

With OS X, one other possibility is excessive use of VM. The problem is that, in trying to run top or VM_stat in terminal (or watch processes with whatever process-viewing GUI you have), Poser 5 is so poorly written that it may be difficult or impossible to get a valid reading on virtual memory usage before Poser crashes. The current VM setup is such that if slowdowns occur, it's usually necessary to restart, because there's currently no safe way to "reset" the VM process on the fly. I agree - go into System Prefs and do what Marianne said. But I believe Poser 5 is beyond salvation, and that we have to wait for a complete rewrite to bring it up to speed with other OS X apps.

Poser running for 5 hours???? No wonder you have problems. Poser's memory management is abysmal. It grabs memory when it wants it but never lets it go (even if it no longer needs it), and then grabs MORE memory just to repeat what it's already done. In other words, it's a memory hog. One fairly successful strategy to use with Poer is (like in voting), "Save Early and Save Often". Save as soon as you've accomplished a step. (In fact save during the process of accomplishing that step - you can always delete the saves later). Always save to a new name. NEVER overwrite a previous save unless it's about 3 years old! (OK, I exaggerate, but you get the drift.. keep old save for longer than you think necessary). Always save before doing a render, and again immediately after it finishes. As soon as you notice that Poser is slowing down, save. Then Exit Poser. Re-start Poser and re-load the save. Sometimes it doesn't make much difference, but other times it really does. That may seem like a lot of wasted effort, but believe me, once you get into the habit you'll appreciate it. Not only that, but the save/exit/reload gives you the time and excuse to take a short break and have a cup of tea/coffee (biscuits optional) or walk round the block (with or without dog and/or cigarette) and generally unwind and allow your mind to re-focus on what it is you are actually trying to achieve:-)) Which can work wonders sometimes. Cheers, Diolma

Joe: Long time no hear. I also recommend from personal experience NOT switching between users while rendering. Better yet, don't have more than one user logged in while rendering. Remember also that around midnight every night, OS X does some HD housecleaning like disk optimization or defragging. Bad time to be competing for CPU and disk access. I'm using a dual G5 and latest Panther. Go not back to P4, that way lies lameness. Considering the amount of postwork P4 made you go through on your comics, it's worth it to get P5 under your fingernails to eliminate some of that. What's new in your end?

Attached Link: The Fear Mongers

Duane-- Nice to hear from you! I completed a second graphic novel for Modern Tales, The Fear Mongers (see link attached to this post.) Also attached is a pix from that story. I tried experimenting with using the Poser 4 renderer in Poser 5, and it apparently doesn't cause as much bog-down. But it's annoying that Poser 5 is so slow, and on top of that, it seems more incompatable with Daz3D figures. As for Daz3D Studio, I've tried working with that, but it crashes often and I've had a lot of difficulty getting a render out of it. When I use Poser 4 in the "classic" environment, it now crashes. I'm actually tempted to try to get it working again (re-installing the software.) I want to move forward with the new technology, but the new technology isn't ready for prime time, it seems; and I have artwork to do!

I have a related but different problem. I am using a dual-G5 1.8 Gig Mac with 1 gig of memory. It handles most things fine. However, when doing a big render, it runs out of memory. As far as I can tell, I cannot reallocate memory in System 10.3. When I go into System 9, which allows one to reallocate memory (normally), it will not allow me to reallocate memory for P5, so I am stuck with what I guess are the factory defaults or something (128 megs). Is there any way to crakn allocated memory up to 500 megs or so? Is there a way to reallocate memory in System 10, but Mac has (for whatever reason) hidden it? Any help from any Mac gurus would be appreciated.

That's interesting, Bichworth, because I asked earlier in several places about allocating memory for Mac OSX. What I was told was that OSX automatically gives you the memory you need, and allocation is no longer necessary like it was with OS9. That kind of makes sense, because I've been using Daz3D figures that would probably cause a crash with the default memory setting. The other thing I heard is that Poser in MacOSX uses virtual memory a lot. So if you don't have sufficient free space on your harddrive (3 gig or more), then you might be having problems for that reason.

It's not just MAC. I have a 3.2 ghz system with 1.5 GB of RAM and poser 5 crashes a LOT. Basically after a point the "cancel" button when rendering does nothing whatsoever, even in a fairly simple scene. I will certainly take everyone's advice here and save every 30 seconds, which will probably add hours to every project, but I don't see how else to beat the tools into submission here. Saving your head off was completely unnecessary in P4.

Absolutely pathetic coding on their part. Not crossing my fingers for any fix, after all they are on service pack 4 now? And the software is still bloated with bugs.

Message edited on: 10/15/2004 20:53

"Saving your head off was completely unnecessary in P4." Lucky you. That wasn't my experience through two Macs and several upgrades. I haven't taxed P5 enough yet to know, but so far the cancel button has been responsive. How populated/overpopulated are your scenes? Are you leaning on Professional or tweaking Draft to achieve similar results (now that I've figured out how to get antialiasing without fullbore Professional, life is good and rendering times are actually comparable to default Draft)?

Oh my system hates me if I use professional render at all, so I always use the P4 render button. Cancel button won't work with 2 or 3 characters often, it seems to hang a lot on transparency maps, even with very few props in the scene. I've learned my lesson, there is no way to deal with it other than save constantly and do a lot of "paste onto background".

When I first started using P5 it seemed not to work as well, possibly because I was doing a few things wrong or asking too much of it. Like that professional grade render; I've seen very little qualitative difference with it. When I stick to the Poser render, don't use bump maps, and have only one light activated for shadows (though other lights are in use), it runs fairly quickly. (What's the trick to doing anti-aliasing? I just click the anti-alias button, like for P4.) If you can learn to composite the picture in your head or on a sketch pad, you won't need to have more than one character in the document window at a time, except when characters are in close relationship with each other

Yes I never render with shadows, that slows me way down and I have too many projects to spend that much time on rendering.