Well, I've been using SR-1 since the day is came out, upgraded my memory, and tore out a lot of hair, but Poser still seems to have the same annoying lockup problems in rendering that it did before. The behavior (and I've asked about it here before, and tried all the tricks I know) is that in P4 or FF, it will "blank out" on the loading textures or adding objects box and lock up. I've created a test scene to try to replicate the behavior, and results are in the JPG attached:

(All orginal renders were at 635 x 549)

Example 1: One figure. FF "standard settings" No problems.
Example 2: One figure, background prop. FF Standard. No problems.
Example 3: One figure, background prop, set prop and sky texture, FF standard settings. No problem
Example 4: Same scene as above, now with FF "final" settings except texture size limit is 1024; bucket size at 32. Blankout and lockup. This happens with the P4 renderer as well.

What is so frustrating about this is that there doesn't seem to be any pattern in what will make it lock up. I've run into it with other scenes less complex that this one at just the standard FF settings, and I've successfully rendered scenes more complex than this at higher settings. I have 2 GB of memory, and if the memory gauge is correct, poser is NOT running out of memory loading the textures (it had over 800 MB free when it locked up on this one). Is there some sort of resource limit in Poser? Polygon limit? OpenGL problems? Windows XP settings? Bad Mojo? SATANIC POSSESSION?
I didn't have nearly this many problems with Poser 4.03 as I have had with 6 in rendering the same sorts of things. WHAT GIVES!? I don't think I'm the only one this happens to (am I?) and I would appreciate any advice, support, comments, suggestions, or exorcisms anyone could offer. Thanks.

Computer specs:
Athlon 64 3400
2 GB DDR 3200
128 MB ATI 9700 Mobility Radeon
60 GB Hitachi 7200 RPM HDD
Windows XP Pro

Have you tried it after a fresh reboot? How heavy are the texture files, have you tried downsampling them in Photoshop and substituting them for the final render? Maybe Poser is trying to reduce their size internally and clogging up on them?

Yeah, it will still do it after a reboot. I've reduced the sizes of (some) of the textures, but it didn't seem to help much. Like I said, this is an extremely common problem for me. The test scene has some very high res textures (which is what I'm trying to troubleshoot) - not really practical to resample all the textures. It just seems like Poser is running into some sort of resource limitation all the time; not physical memory. I can't help wondering if it isn't something with the videocard (I don't think ATI has the greatest drivers). I'll experiment a little with the software renderer. At this point I'm wondering if I'm not just better off sucking it up and investing in something like Bryce to do the final rendering, and just leaving Poser to do the scene creation.

Try a much much lower bucket size - 32 is towards the high end of the range - fast but high resource. Try the same scene with a bucket size of 4 and see what happpens then

I do have the same problems. SR1 did fix some of the problems (Like some of the memory issues), that to the point we are able to use P6 now. I feel their will be another Patch for P6 in the future. I did get low on memory, and a BSOD when rendering. P5 had two patches to help smooth things out, although I wasn't satisfied for the system I have, compared to the recommended specs written on the box(s) to use P5 and/or P6.
I lowered my bucket size to 32 to reduce the problem and it helped. Although I am unable to make renders no bigger than 2048x1024. I also checked my Hardware issues as well, like cables, heat problems, power. Helped as well.

WinXP (SP2)
AMD Athlon XP3200+(tm)
2GB DDram PC3200's (400mhz duel Channel) (1x1GB, 2x512mb)
128MB Ati Radeon 9600xt
160GB HD (7200Rpm)
80GB HD (7200Rpm)
Samsung 17inch TFT (Flatscreen monitor), 12ms set at 1280x1024 (75hz)

Message edited on: 06/08/2005 17:17

I used to render the same scene 30 times, tweaking away at lights and shadows. Then turn the cam 5degrees and lockup. Reboot last successful pz3 and ! lockup. Do it 5 times and lockup! Turn it off in disgust and unplug it from the wall.... Have it work. This was P5. Saving all your props and figs with all their alterations and reimporting them new has been lucky for me. You should be able to do three of these.

bluecity, you don't need to resample all the textures. If you set maximum texture size to 1024, that's the resolution textures get loaded for rendering, regardless of their actual size. Downsampling is only recommended if you want a high maximum texture size for some texures and save memory on other. What you could do is flip a little switch in Runtime/prefs/Poser.ini. Changing 'WRITE_MEMORY_LOG 0' to 'WRITE_MEMORY_LOG 1' will make Poser 6 SR1 leave a log file behind in the location where it is installed (i.e. where the 'Runtime' folder is located). The log file will present you a detailed listing of memory available at the start of a render and how much memory is needed for loading textures. This should also allow you to figure out what particular step of the process is failing. I'd guess Poser chokes on one particular texture, if that's the case you should be able to tell which one it is by reading the log file. Uli

Thank Uli; I'll give that a try.

I made a little discovery; I opened a scene (very similar to the one above) that has never been able to render before at all in Poser 6 (either with FireFly or the Poser 4 engine) in Poser 4.03. It rendered just fine!!!!

This would lead me to think that either:
A) Poser 6 has a problem with it's rendering engines as the same scene on the same files/content works just fine in Poser 4.03
B) There is something in the runtime folder that is giving Poser 6 a problem, possibly left over from Poser 4.03 (All of my content is in Poser 4's runtime directory - it's what I was using before I got 6).

In many cases, memory errors are caused by texture filtering. Texture filtering, according to the tutorial manual, triples the memory requirements of a texture. If your're using texture filtering (which the 'final' setting of FireFly has enalbed, as far as I remember), try disabling it and see if it works then.