Okay, so I have a figure and two dynamic clothes figures. Three figures total (one covered in P5 hair). Firefly will render each of them inividually (from the same scene, with the other two deleted out), but jams up when I try to render them together. WTF!? P4 Render engine doesn't seem to have that problem. Any suggestions? Thanks

Sometimes reducing bucket size seems to stop my renders from crashing Poser.

p4 engine does nothing like dynamic clothes...firefly is WAY more ambitious. Also, please describe symptoms of "jams up." Total cpu freeze? Poser not responding? Or render simply quits? ::::: Opera :::::

If it's hanging up at "Adding Objects" or something similar, I have that problem with multuple high-poly figures in a scene. P% hair would probably add a lot of polys. The problem doesn't seem to be memory related, or texture size related. I had a long back and forth with CL support on this and nothing was resolved. At the time I was running P5 on a second drive. Re-installing it to the C: drive on my XP system seemed to give me more wiggle room, why I don't know. It's a frustrating problem, especially when trying to render any of Hanksters cars along with M3 and clothing and a prop scene. Even dropping bucket and texture sizes don't make a difference, and I've got a high-end machine (3.0ghz P4/HT 1gb ram). And you're right, switching to P4 renderer does it fine, but without the effects I want.

Opera: These renders would crash Poser completely. Force quitting the application would take longer than usual. Poser was off in some dark, rendering 9th dimension... Jeff: Discouraging words, but at least it's not that I'm just doing something stupid or wrong... I was already thinking that I might have to render these scenes in parts and getto-composite it together in Photoshop. But I guess if you were trying to get objects reflecting off of each other then this wouldn't solve anything for you.

what about your page file? size and location? Can you state your system, please, processor, RAM and HD? ::::: Opera :::::

Opera: I'm running Windows XP Home, an Intel Pentium 3.6 GHz processor on each of two 60G drives, and I've got 1G DDR RAM. The file is 99KB, located on the computer's local drive, where Poser is also located...

Operaguy, not sure to whom you were referring for the info. For my setup, when P5 was on a separate drive, it was a USB 2.0 120gig drive with at least 100gig free. System is an HP7140 laptop, 60 gig drive, P4 3.0ghz HT processor, Nvidia 5400 64meg graphics card (though that doesn't matter for rendering, only when working in the GUI). At the time I'm not sure what the size of my paging file was, but it would have been on the C: drive in the default location. I never receive any error messages such as "low on virtual memory" or anything. And at the time it hangs Task Manager shows only about 200k of ram in use out of my 1gig. An easy way for me to make it happen was to place two of Hankster's SS7 Supercars in a scene by themselves. Each has a 400+k poly count I think. When I re-installed on the C: drive I could then render 2 of those in the same scene, but a third one would hang at "Adding Objects" as before. Which is always why it seemed to be poly-count related.

I just tried again and got this error message: A requested texture map does not exist or can't be read. But like I said, it renders each individual object no problem.

heiro,
"The file is 99KB"
If that means your pz3 is that size, can that be right? It must be way bigger than that.

If your page file, aka swap file or virtual memory allocation, is 99K, that is way too small...it should be 1.5 times the size of your RAM, so 1.5Gig.

I don't know about that texture map error...maybe you are maxing out RAM and the page file is too small.

Now, as for crashing, jamming and going into dark places...are you sure it is really malfunctioning? Not just taking A REALLY LONG TIME, like 14 hours, to render a scene, and you simply can't believe anything might require that much time?

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 01/26/2005 10:33

Jeff, sorry about the confusion... How much memory do you have on your laptop, and what is the size of your page file? From your report, though, it might be a non-simple problem, especially if you already shook it down with CL. ::::: Opera :::::

OG, RAM is 1gig. Paging file was max 1000meg. I just upped it to 2gig to see what will happen. In watching the processes in Task manager, I added some more columns to the display. I didn't realize P5 used VM when there was still plenty of RAM left. The VM usage would go over 1 gig while the RAM usage never got higher than 600meg. I referred to the wrong mesh earlier, it's not the SS7, it's the Vankwish by Hankster, 446k polys, 336k verts. And it hung on me again with two of them in a scene by themselves with Firefly production mode defaults. I'm trying it again with the increased paging file size and see what happens.

Whenever I get a "requested texture map cannot be found" it normally means out of memory to me when I have multiple figures etc and they previously rendered fine by themselves. The P5 renderer seems to have gotten rid of this option (from what I have seen) but if you can render without bump that normally fixes it. I sort of alternate between the bump and the shadow and can normally get something but it nomally jsut means out of memory in essence.

...900k polys is a lot by anybodys standards. That's, what, ten or so V3's? I run a P4 2.66 with 1g and I don't think I could do anything to get that much poly weight to work smoothly.

I realize that's a lot. It would be nice though if P5 would give some sort of warning when it's reached it's limits, instead of just hanging, never sure if it's still going or not.

Og to answer a previous question, about are we sure it isn't just taking a long time? I'm as sure as I reasonably can be. When it takes 5 mins to render two identical objects, adding a third identical shouldn't make it jump to an hour should it? Adding tons and tons of lights I could see an exponential jump in render time, and often do. And FYI, the two cars rendered fine after upping the page file size to 2gig. But adding the third one it looks like it's hanging again, at Adding Objects... It's been stuck at 276,796k Mem usage, and 1,092,180 VM size for 5 mins now, the render should have been done 5 mins ago. The CPU is still maxed out, and the machine isn't stalled, so I'll let it sit and let you know. That's with three of the Hankster Vankwishes at 446k polys each.

frankly, there may not be anything wrong. it just might be that you are pushing the envelope of capability on 1GigRam. IF you had 2Gig, you could push the swap file to 3 gig. I know it seems bizarre that the issue is the swap file when it appears that RAM is not maxed. I do not grok that completely... might be a "stupid poser trick." I am not knowlegeable about that. Maybe DaleB or stewer or one of the other gurus will see this post and help. [when they heard my ambitions, they suggested I go get 4 gig ram, and I did.] ::::: Opera :::::

I've seen many posts hereabouts that say Poser won't use more than 2 gig of memory period, virtual or otherwise. Actually some have said that it's a Windows limitation. I don't know one way or the other. Anyway, it's been 35 mins, the memory usage is still the same, CPU still maxed, machine not stalled, just Poser. FYI, the pagefile usage is 1.3 gig total by all processes running, so it's not even reaching that limit.

One question, why is the swapfile size dependent on RAM size?

The fortunate thing is I can still render the scene in Vue, which doesn't use much memory at all. Hopefully CL is re-thinking how they do rendering in P6.

well, the people helping me, both here and at PC Club where I purchase systems say to set the swap file at 1.5 times you actual RAM. It have not penetrated into that too much to grasp the "why." About Vue...are you sure you would be any better off in Vue? Sure you can move the scene over, but if you attempt to emulate the shadows and reflection qualities you are attempting with Poser, will the Vue render time be any quicker? ::::: Opera :::::

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=10139&Form.ShowMessage=2077843&Form.sess_id=28459519

Programs can utilize 2Gig RAM, but if you have memory over and above that, the sys and swapping, etc. have room to breathe and not infringe on the full 2Gig for the program. This is discussed in the attached thread.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 01/26/2005 12:57

Re: Render times. Render time isn't an issue, as long as it renders at all. If the scene won't render in Firefly then it does me no good. I don't see a link. Am I missing something?

The link is there now, dunno what happened...

It probably depends on Windows version as well, and my Win98 experience is likely irrelevant. But I did find that Poser could seem stalled in the early stages of preparing for a render, when loading objects and textures. Possibly because it doesn't know what the total size of the objects and textures might be, it doesn't display a progress bar. If you're using shadowmaps, and many lights which cast shadows, you can have a considerable overhead at this stage, but you do get the progress bar. I found that switching to raytraced shadows, at least on the complexity of scene which I was rendering, increaded the actual render time but, by eliminating the shadowmap stage, improved the total start-to-end time. It's also clear that speeds plummet when virtual memory is used. I suspect, based on imperfect knowledge, that Poser's internal workings interact badly with Windows virtual memory operation. By eliminating shadowmaps, I suspect that raytraced shadows may reduce virtual memory paging. I'm not in this for the money, or I would go for WinXP and a lot of RAM. The point about enough RAM for Windows, on top of the program, has been true ever since Win3.1

I don't think any of that applies, at least not to me. It's not a matter of preparing the render. It's just stopped. I can hit the cancel button but it never cancels, though it will say canceling. P5 seems to like Virtual memory more than actual, since it seems to use up 4 to 5 times more of VM even when there's tons of RAM available.

so, after you hit cancel and it says cancelling...even if you let it attempt to cancel for, say, 5-10 minutes, you are frozen? ::::: Opera :::::

I've experienced this problem quite often. The "Adding Objects" stage for the final render seems to be the critical part. I always watch memory use when rendering in Poser (and I always save before render, rendering is the most crash-prone action in Poser!). When there are NO page faults and memory size adjustments for 2 minutes during this stage, the render has crashed, and Poser must be killed. Do it from the Processes tab on Task manager, that'll kill it instantly. End Task on the Tasks tab easily takes minutes to kill off Poser in this situation. Why does it happen? I'm not sure. It seems like the render engine goes into an infinite loop and never breaks out of it. It may have to do with the fact that the object sizes in Poser are very small compared to the object sizes in other 3D apps (I have to increase scale by a factor of 250 when I import something in Max, for instance). Firefly is not a specialized Poser render engine, it's pretty generic, and it may run into floating point rounding errors. I've mailed CL several times on this issue, but never got an answer. The weirdest thing is: sometimes a scene will not render on my P4 2.8 FSB800 with 1.5 GB RAM, crashing like you describe, and it will render fine on my AthlonXP2700+ with 1.0 GB RAM.... One thing that definitely helps: before rendering, save the scene, quit Poser, delete all .tmp files and all poserTemp.* files, then restart Poser, load the scene, and render. Sometimes I reboot the OS before restarting Poser, especially when I suspect memory pollution. It may make the difference between a crashed render and a successful render. The standard production settings are somewhat too high in most circumstances. The main culprit is maximum texture resolution. Let's take V3 for example, she usually comes with hires texture maps. If you have a V3 completely in view, she'll be about 1,000 pixels high in your final render, which means those 4000 pixels of the texture map will get compressed to 1000. So a maximum texture resolution of 1024 will not decrease the render quality, while dramatically increasing render speed and chance of succesfully finishing the render. There's a thread on maximum texture resolution here on the Poser /Poser Technical forums, can't find it right now, it can't be too old. Worth looking into. Hope this helps, Steven.

Huge textures are certainly an issue. For some purposes, you might need more resolution, but I'm not entirely sure I understand how Firefly does anti-aliasing, not enough to do more than wave a hand in that general direction.

Thanks for those tips svdl. A quick question if I may: Where exactly do we find the ".tmp" (assuming you're only referring to tmp files generated by Poser) and "poserTemp.*" files?

Thanks Steven, Yeah, I don't really see a solution to this really. In my example I had saved a scene with the three cars and nothing else, default lights. I loaded the scene up again after a fresh reboot, deleted one of the cars, and tried to render in FF production mode. It got a lot farther than before (with all three cars, 1.3mil polygons, it hung at the first "Adding Objects stage with the progress bar empty), now it's hanging at a later Adding Objects stage with the progress bar full. It had already gone through a couple shadow map renders. But if I start a blank scene and add two cars it renders fine. I think there is definitely some cleanup that Poser is failing to do. Guess I'll just have to setup all my high complexity scenes in Poser, and then render them in Vue. It's just not worth the hassel to hopefully get the render in Poser. And having just purchased Vue 5 Esprit, I'll have much better lighting and environment possibilities that P5 ever will.

The .tmp files are located in the folder where you saved the scene, the poserTemp files are in the main Poser folder.

I usually don't take the time to find out where they are, I just run the following commands from the command line:

d: (I have Poser installed on my d: drive)
del .tmp /s
del poserTemp. /s

An idea: make a batch file like this:

d: (use the drive where you installed Poser)
cd
del .tmp/s
del poserTemp. /s
poser.exe

And change the shortcut properties of your start menu item to point at this batch file instead of poser.exe

Poser will take longer to start, but this way you're always certain of a clean start.

Message edited on: 01/26/2005 15:37

Thanks, that's a good idea in any case.

I am looking at performance and seeing interesting numbers also, but not the same ratio you are reporting. I have an animation that has been rendering for over 10 hours. CPU is pegged out at 98 or 99 without letup The peak memory usage says 615,980K Memory useage is flickering around 450,000K as I watch. VM Size flickers along around 490,000k sometimes it goes up and down from there, but maintins aprox the same ratio. note: I have 4Gig RAM on board and the pagefile set at 4290MB. my other processes are not moving and add up to less than 100,000K So......either these are acurrate figures and Poser is utilizing only around 1/2GigRAM and yet swapping out more than that to the hard drive (even though I have 2Gig sitting there waiting for it), or....these numbers are somehow 'ghosts.' For instance, Poser might be "finishing the task" of what it can do with the processor in one cycle in just that one-half GIG and then it is waiting for the next cycle, etc. In otherwords, the bottle neck is the CPU and there is over-abundant RAM. However, I agree with you and have been asking quite a while on other threads: then why is it swapping out to the HD -- why can't it stay completely in RAM? I hope some of my hardware mentors see this and chime in. I am very low on the knowlege food chain with this stuff. ::::: Opera :::::

Opera: You're doing animations. There is a big difference with stills. In an animation, you don't use hires texture maps and hi-poly figures, so even a system which is low on RAM can render those fine. I'm not surprised at the numbers you quote here. A hires still, with many hi-poly figs and hires textures/bumps, easily grabs 1.2 - 1.5 GB of RAM plus an equal amount of VM. Funny thing is, often the total of RAM plus VM exceeds the 2 GB limit, so I think quite a lot of VM is a copy of what's in RAM (not everything). Or maybe Poser IS compiled to use up to 3 GB. Why not completely in RAM? This has to do with the way modern multitasking OSes work. Most of the RAM gets assigned to the system cache, and whatever goes to VM is retained in the system cache and written to disk when possible, that way the application runs almost as fast as if it were completely in RAM. And now it's possible to have multiple memory hungry apps running side by side (I often have both Vue and Poser open, sometimes 3DS Max too, all with rather complicated scenes) without slowing them down too much.

cool. makes sense. All the more reason I am glad to have my dual raptors roaring away here next to my desk! Reading the above comments, I will definitely contribute the fact that sometimes I just KNOW things are not released from some extreme test render I did (because the next, simpler, one does not revert all the way back to expected time, and I bail all the way out and come back in. I do this before any important all-night animation render as a SOP. ::::: Opera :::::

I wonder , CL know about this? Guys ,Thanks for info !!!

Wow. I had to go away for the day, and return to a very informative discussion... Thanks all.

They know about it from my support request at the least.

"And you're right, switching to P4 renderer does it fine, but without the effects I want." In my experience P4 renderer hangs in the exact same way, every day. I have shadows turned off, not using very complex lights, and with 3 figures and only one or two conformers per figure, no props, no background objects, it hangs on "Loading Textures" Unnacceptable. There has to be a way to kick poser out of that, we are on service pack 4 now, there has got to be SOMETHING we can do for this. I have a 3.2 ghz system with 1.5 GB ram and a new 400mhz board. I have my virtual memory settings tweaked specifically for poser5 compatibility, according to all the stuff i've read. yet it still does this. I dont care how long it takes to render, i just need to be able to either CANCEL a failed render, or make it finish rendering somehow. I don't even bother with Firefly as I do so many renders I need them done fairly quickly. Is there any more info that's come to light about this?

I'm with you 100% Darkworld. With P6 coming out I wouldn't count on any more P5 service packs. Unless there is enough complaining. I for one won't be buying P6 any time soon, unless I know that the many problems I have with P5 are gone. New features are useless if you can't get a render finished with the figures I need. Lately I'll be rendering a scene merrily along, making a series of stills, making some minor pose changes to various figures, no light changes. And then all of a sudden the render hangs, either at "Adding Objects" or in the middle of the actual render. I think P5 has some serious bugs still that CL is either ignoring or too stupid to figure out.

Oh well, guess there's nothing we can do. I mean why is it so much harder than Bryce I wonder... you can hook up a scene in Bryce that could literally take 60 hours to render. But it wont crash! Poser tries for less than 60 seconds on loading textures before it decides to give up. I actually woke it up one time and managed to pull off Saving the file.. but I haven't been able to repeat that trick. If I have to save before EVERY single render that's going to add a LOT of time. Because saving on my system takes almost as long as the render itself... I guess it's just very inefficient programming.

Yeah, sometimes I can spoof it into saving while it's hung, still trying to cancel. But it's hit or miss. I don't always think about saving before every render, becuae the majority of the time I don't have a problem. It's when it decides to hang when I've made no changes other than a camera angle or figure pose that really gets me. Would be even worse if you have to reboot before every render. They definitely need more error checking in the app.

This is, I am afraid, one reason why I will not be joining any headlong rush to P6. Unless there's a serious improvment in this area -- I will accept a slow render but an overnight run stuck on "Loading Textures" is a sign of something seriously wrong with the program design -- the extra features in P6 look as if they will be wasted.

Definitely a waste if no improvements to the render engine/logic are made. Seems like with some of the new features they're getting away from a figure posing tool and trying to become more artistic.

Back to the rendering problesm: I just remembered that some of the Neftis hair props released with Poser 5 caused some serious problems with renders. You mentioned using dynamic hair - is it one of the Neftis models? Could be the cause of the crashes, since the scene you describe is not overly heavy. On the other hand, dynamic hair is often a big problem for the render engine - I couldn't render a scene with only a single figure wearing a few clothing items at high resolution and quality when using dynamic hair - replacing it with transmapped hair solved the problem nicely (1200x1600 pix, default production settings, three spotlights - one with volumetrics, rendered in about 90 minutes). I haven't found a distinct pattern in what the P4 render engine and Firefly can handle and can't handle. Some of my scenes rendered fine in the P4 renderer and crashed on Firefly, others refused to render in the P4 renderer and rendered fine - and fast! - in Firefly. But no real pattern. I almost always use Firefly, I use volumetric lighting and raytracing on a very regular basis, and procedural materials in just about everything. And I completely agree with AntoniaTiger about the need for a STABLE render engine. I don't mind waiting, but I want the render to FINISH! Still, I ordered P6. I don't expect updates for Poser 5, since CL didn't do any updates for P4/PP after P5 came out either (renaming Poser 4 to Poser Artist is not an update in my books). I can understand that a small company like CL just doesn't have the resources to support all their older products. But I do expect them to support P6 in a decent way (at least, I hope they will....)

They should still support, and make updates for, P5. I just bought it a couple months ago, so now I shouldn't expect updates and bug fixes? Small company or not, their methodologies in marketing don't endear a lot of people to them, regardless of how nice they all might be. You expect them to support P6 in a decent way, but look what happened with the release of P5? A LOT of people were pissed. And it took them 4 service packs, and it's still not right.

Jeff, you're right, they should continue to update P5. My main reason for ordering P6 is point lights - that is one very useful "new" feature (heck, every other 3D app has had them for years!) I don't think CL will add point light functionality to P5 in a service pack. Would not be a sound business move. And I definitely hope CL has learned from the blunders it made when they released P5. We'll see.

I'm not looking for any new features in P5, far from it. I just want it to work as advertised and not be hit or miss. But little things that need fixing, like remembering paths. When I save a render I expect it to remember the last path I used for saving renders, not for whatever pose folder I clicked last. That's an incredibly annoying thing. And when a conformed figure is chosen and you move a camera, the view shouldn't suddenly fly away until you stop moving the camera. Things that should never have gotten past alpha testing, much less beta. And a conformed figure should share the parent's properties with respect to posing and body part cameras.

Attached Link: Hanging on "Adding objects"