It's simply good computer practice anyway -- but until such time as CL gets the P6 memory bug fixed with a service release -- you'd do well to be sure to save your .pz3's prior to attempting a render.

Fortunately, I saved my .pz3 scene last night before clicking on the "Render" button. As it turned out, this kept me from having to redo the entire scene.

The memory bug kicked in, and the open verson of the .pz3 file got corrupted.

So I simply closed Poser, and cleared out the system memory by doing so. I was then able to re-open the saved .pz3 and successfully rendered the scene.

The memory problem is especially active with complex scenes. The more complicated the scene, the worse the memory issue becomes.

I am hoping that Curious Labs gets out a fix for this difficulty very soon.

This is the only problem of any real moment that I've noticed in P6 so far.

And this problem should go away with the first service release.

Other than that, P6 is a program that I can't give too many A+++++++++++'s to. If you're stuck with P4, then you have my sympathy. You're really missing the boat with this one.

I would second the idea of saving before rendering and add this: Before rendering, exit poser6 Make a copy of the pz3 and rename it. Go back in. Render. In other words...increments. That way if you can NOT recover your current pz3, and it is corrupted, you just go back a little way to the prior increment, make a copy of it, rename and go back in. This is hard hat territory until the problem is fixed. ::::: Opera :::::

This is hard hat territory until the problem is fixed. Yep.

One problem I've had with Poser 5, and to a lesser extent with Poser 6 is that from time to time a render totally freezes the PC - no mouse activity, no way out but a reset. I've turned off all acceleration, and that made no difference. Is this just me, or have other people had the same thing? Much less of a problem in 6, but still happens from time to time.

Is this just me, or have other people had the same thing?

The render lock-up problem used to happen to me all of the time in P5. Once again, it happened most often on complex scenes.

The only way that I found to consistently get around it was to do all of my rendering in Vue.

So far, I haven't experienced any of these lock-ups in P6. So far. But that's with only a few days worth of P6 flight-time.

My system has 1.5G of RAM. I will be upgrading the physical memory to 2G in a couple of weeks.

More memory will help the problem. But only a service release will fix it.

BTW -- if someone sticks with relatively simple scenes, then you'll likely never see the memory bug in operation.

I had a funky menu problem, but closing down and restarting cleared it up.

I've had the memory bug in Pro Pack and Poser 5--not so much lately, and though the memory grows dim, I'm pretty sure I had it in Poser 4. I used to call it, Poser's getting tired. Happened after about an hour or so of work-- sometimes hour and a half. You could tell when the lbraries and other stuff started to get a bit wonky. Shoes came out of conformation, tools were activated without being touched, sometimes just comeing near em. I'd usually save, under another name, just in case it was already corrupted, try a fast render in the preview window-- I did this just a few days ago for the Namihei pic,not an overly complicated setup. But I had tried a slew of lighting changes. And then I got out while the getting was good. So. . . Poser's still getting tired, huh? Not terribly surprised. I'll be very pleasantly surprised if and when they fix it. We complained enough about P5, no improvement really there-- ok, we got a little longer before fatigue set in, but no real change. There seems to be a tendency towards real change in Poser 6. But whadda I know? I just opened the box. Emily

This bug isn't quite the same as the older Poser memory issues.......I'll quote myself from another thread:

*So far, the only time that I've experienced a crash is during an attempted render. Some others are reporting crashes while working on the file itself -- not during a render.

The "crash" consists of an out-of-memory warning dialog, followed by a corrupted file. The program itself doesn't come down, but the file gets messed up. Missing textures, etc.

A back-up copy is a great idea.

I've been able to recover from the problem by exiting Poser, and then re-opening the file. After this, I was able to render the scene with no problem.

In a case like this, no one can really explain why some individuals have problems like this, while others don't. There are simply too many variables involved. Differing hardware setups, differing software configurations on individual systems, not to mention differing operating systems.*

This is one that I think they'll be able to fix.

If you have Norton Unerase (or perhaps another utility) and find you've just overwritten your Poser file with a bad version, or made a change you didn't really want to save after all, stop what you are doing, don't save any more files, then go look for a file named pzSav_(your filename here) in the erased files. You won't see this file in the recycle bin, or at least I don't; I must use Norton to view erased files and restore them. Poser saves the original file temporarily as it is writing the new version of the file, then it deletes the temp file.

My system crash was much worse in P5 - to give one example, I'd rendered a sequence of scenes with all the same figures etc, and had done five or six. The next one always froze the computer, normally at the end of 'adding objects', regardsless of how clean the machine was - fresh start, all other software shut and it froze at the same point every single time. Eventually, I got it rendered with a bucket size of 2.. It had even started to freeze the machine outside renders towards the end. So far, P6 is much much better - I've always been messing around when it has frozen. It's also always been Firefly that does it - the P4 render managed the same scene but it looked far worse.

Attached Link: Hanging on "Adding Objects"