I am trying to render a whole scene...background and 3 figures. I started it at 6:50 am this morning, and it's now 5:12 pm. It's been "adding objects" since about 7:30am this morning. I don't have any error messages, and Poser isn't saying "not responding". Is this normal? Is my computer hung up and I don't know it? Should I cancel it?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2228908

How much do you have going on in the materials? Is the Mat Room full of nodes? This tends to make Poser slow down a bit. I assume this is the same image you had been working on previously with the background image? You had mentioned that it was going to have a dragon. Is that a high-poly figure with high res textures? I am assuming you also have your warrior in some decent armor. Lots of shininess going on via nodes? It does appear something may be wrong though. Unless you have lots of nodes/textures going on, I don't think it should be going for 10 hours without at least beginning the render. What are your render settings up to? Production quality? That tends to slow things up too. I have gotten into the habit of doing my own manual settings for final renders. The auto settings at the upper end tend to be overkill in some areas, and sometimes wind up skewing my work.

hehe...same exact thing here honey...put an image to render last night at about 11:00 pm CST and it's STILL adding objects...and yes, I have a lot going on in the material room...I also have a pond with water reflections...soooo, I'm not expecting much development beyond this for quite a while...this is like the third time I'm trying to render it, because I just thought it was froze up perhaps, but now I'm letting it go to see if it will eventually get beyond adding the objects...actually, I saw a post on this forum recently where the guy said he had a render of like 36 hours or something similar...doesn't surprise me...

All I have to say is you people have a lot more patience than me. If a scene takes me a half hour to render, I quit and try some other settings to shorten the time. I might give it an hour if there is a lot of raytracing going on, but no way would I ever render a 10 hour scene.

an hour?? Fazzel, do you have an umber 'puter or do you just do uncomplicated scenes? my computer is verrrrry near top of the line, so my rendering is not slow because it's outdated...my render time reflects the complexity of my scenes...simple scenes = relatively short render time....complicated scene = me render looooong time ;P LOL

LOL blonderella, My computer isn't near top of the line, but no way would I consider an hour a long time, even if I had a top of the line. My habit is to do low end full scenes, and high end area renders while working, then when I am ready, I start up my hardcore render and go to bed... Almost always, my renders are done by the morning, but if there are a few actors in the scene, chances are I am waking up, going to work, and then maybe getting home and eating dinner before it's done.

Gahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! More than 14 1/2 hours and STILL adding objects!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Geez. I know my laptop isn't hung up because I checked and was able to open up my browser. And Poser isn't hung up because it isn't saying 'not responding'. I've been forced over to my desktop which is totally boring because all of my graphic software is on my laptop. I have no idea if I have alot going on in the material room. I don't use that room. I tried a background on a square, and that's the extent of my material room knowledge. I couldn't get it figured out in the Pose room though, so I ended up using an imported background for this render. I have a warrior dressed in the M3 Tunic/pants/boot, with the deathbringer sword and one effect, a sheath, a belt pouch, and gold pouch. The Millennium Dragon with some fins and head armor, and a female in one of BVH's fantasy armor sets, with hair. I added textures to everything, so I imagine that there is 'something' going on by way of the material room, but sheesh!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have a Pent III 1.8 gig processor with 512 DDR Ram. I got a 'low memory' when I tried rendering a draft render with a bucket of 32, so I reset the bucket to 8 before trying to do a production render. After almost 15 hours I'm not stopping the render now. I keep thinking, it's probably almost done, and an hour passes with nothing changing, LOL

Ahhhh...there it is...

512MB RAM...

There is your biggest roadblock. Plus, with a bucket size that small, you are looking at a final render done by Wednesday ;-)

Is there a hard drive light on the laptop? If so, is it blinking a lot? Without a gig of RAM you are probably looking at a lot of disk I/O. And with such a small bucket, you are looking at a significant amount of render time once it begins rendering.

You seem to have quite a bit of textures in the scene too. That's going to hurt.

You may want to think about defining your swap file for windows if you want to use the laptop for your renders. I just did that last week, and it has made a pretty good difference. Once you manually set the size, it cuts down on disk framentation, which helps speed up swap file operations.

On windows 2000, right click on My Computer, choose Properties, click the Advanced tab. You should see a button labelled Performance Options, click that. You will see a section that says Swap File, with a change button. Click that. You will see fields for an initial size, and a max size. Make them the same number. There should be a recomended amount on this screen. You can use that under most circumstances. What you want is one and a half times your RAM (~768MB) Make sure you click Set, then OK.

Under most conditions, it is advised to let Windows handle a swap file on its own. However, since you are probably doing a lot of read/writes, you should try to constrain the places where windows can write to. Important: Defrag your disk before doing this! Also, once you do it, try to defrag on a normal basis, maybe once every couple of weeks. This helps more than you realize.

Sorry to hear you are having such difficulty, but until EF makes some improvements to Poser's memory management, we are all stuck in slow rendersville.

Hope this helps!

BTW: I posted a step by step on your background question this morning. Did you get to take a look at that?

Are you serious????? That long? OMG! My laptop will up and burst into flames by then. Guess I'll stop the render and do it in draft mode and fudge the rest in PSP somehow. I'll use some photo finish effects or something....or just try something else.

How do you delete a background that was imported? One other thing I can do is to import the background. Load the figures where I want them, add the lights, and delete 2 figures and the background and render the figure on it's own. Then rinse and repeat for the mage and the dragon. Then assemble it in PSP later. Only I don't know how to get rid of the background once it's imported into the window.

Message edited on: 07/10/2005 22:33

Straight from the Poser manual: Selecting Display>Clear Background Picture deletes the currently displayed background image (if any). As for the long render, Wednesday was an exaggeration, I think ;-) The compositing idea is good. You should try out my suggestion about the swap file though. It really made a difference to me.

....almost 24 hrs and still adding objects.... ;P Acadia, I would love to just do it in draft and fix-er-up in Photoshop, alas, this image is going to be printed...on a large scale...like, 16x20 (we have a large format printer)...sew, I have to let it run its course because unfortunately I need the quality ;/

A couple more thoughts I just had. How many lights are you using? And how many of them have options such as shadow casting and ambient occlusion on them? That will slow you down a ton. And have you looked at the mini-walkthrough I gave on the previous posting? I put a step by step guide to using the one sided square in the background for you. Hope this helps!

I cancelled the render... I didn't want my computer to blow up, lol That green light was flashing a whole lot. I use Windows XP and I'm not sure I found the area you are talking about or not. I went to system properties, advanced, and clicked "settings" under the "Performance" area. In the next window I clicked "Advance" and see something called "Virtual Memory - A paging file is an area on the hard disk that Windows uses as if it were RAM. Total paging file size for all drives: 767MB".

hehe. I have no idea how many lights I am using. I use premade lights. I think I was using a soft blues.. I think it was a free set from DNA. I know there are more than a few dots around that light "globe". Plus I did have "cast shadows" checked because it's a forest scene so the figures need to be somewhat shadowed.

Message edited on: 07/10/2005 22:56

I haven't had a chance to do what you suggested in the other thread. Poser was tied up with this render all day, and my desktop can't run Poser.. hence the laptop. Once I get back to work I want to upgrade my desktop to something bigger and better, but can't afford to do that right now. So I'm stuck using my laptop, which until now has been more than adequate for what I've been doing with Poser.

One quirk of Poser is in how it handles shadows. The usual shadowmap system seems to do a complete Load Objects before producing each shadowmap. Raytraced shadows are slower to render, but doesn't need the multiple Load Objects, so total time can be less. But Windows XP is using enough of that 512MB that you can easily get into using virtual RAM, swapping to and from the hard drive, and Poser 5 doesn't seem to do things in an efficient way when that happens. I tell myself I should upgrade this desktop, when I get the money.

Chances are, if it's seemingly stuck at "adding objects" it IS stuck and will never get on to the actual rendering. Some hair did that in Poser 5 (a few of Neftis' otherwise great hairdos for instance) if it's "adding objects" for more than ... an hour... I'd cancel it. Personally I wouldn't even wait that long, but that's depending on howlong rendertimes you usually have. Back when I still had only 512 mb ram, I too did the "go to bed" thing. with 1 gb, it's way better, now I only surf Rosity for a while.. with the loading time here you get used to waiting ;o)

And people look oddly at me when I say 512MB isn't enough RAM. Though they look oddly at me when they see the pictures.

Nope, 512 isn't enough RAM. I've known that 1 gig is about optimal in order to work with Poser. Unfortunately I didn't know that at the time I bought Poser, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. I had my laptop before Poser. I initially tried using Poser on my desktop (384 MB SDRAM), and the most I could render was a draft of one figure, then I had to reboot. I couldn't do a production render at all, so I tried my laptop and had better success. When I upgrade I want the largest hard drive that there is, and the maximum amount of RAM that I can get too. I was taken to the cleaners in 2000, when I got my first computer. Man, the sales guy saw me coming. Gave me the cheapest and least amount of stuff for the maximum price ($2,000). One year later I dumped the tower on the desk of another company and told them to gut it and layed out a list of what I WANTED. It cost me an additional $1,700 for a new hard drive, processor and motherboard. That was 4 years ago. I'm more knowledgable now when it comes to the hardware and while I'm no computer expert, at least I know what I need vs a sales guy giving me a snow job in order to offload junk that they can't sell to anyone else. Whenever I do get another desktop, I will invest in a Dell. I'm very happy with my laptop and the support that I get from them. I won't ever buy locally again.

On the issue of the swap file. Yes, you found it. Use the Custom Size option, and enter the 767 for both Initial and Max values. Remember to defrag first. Lots of light = long render time ;-) Yes, 1GB is a good amount of RAM, though probably more is better on WinXP. I'm still using Win2k, and refuse to "upgrade" to XP. My colorful stuff is in Poser and Photoshop, thank you very much! Nope 512 isn't enough if you do any sort of intensive work with your machine. It is enough for people who just surf the net, and people who play games, but have a hardcore video card. The thing about RAM is that you can't "waste" it. No matter how much you have in your system, you can find ways to use it all up, I know with the 10 different windows I have open at any time, I sure do... Sorry to hear about your past troubles. Yeah, you have to really know your stuff to buy from a local store. I have been building my own for years now. I think though, when this box has finally run its course, I am going with an Alienware. They build some sweet machines, and I don't just mean the looks! Dell is good and reliable though.

The only advice I'd give on buying a PC is pretty basic. Two key things: 1: You can save a lot of money by staying back from the leading edge of CPU speed, but CPUs are rarely a drop-in upgrade. 2: Have expansion in mind. With USB you don't need to worry quite so much about space inside the case, but RAM slots are a limit. If you have four memory slots, don't get 1GB of RAM as 4 x 256MB. When I made mistake #2, the SIMMs were measured in kilobytes.

10 hour render? what's unusual about that? woops..thought I was in the Bryce forum...never mind..;)

Pakled.. you just reminded me why I rarely render in Bryce LOL

If your renders are taking hours upon hours to do, maybe you should read this and see if you need to change your render settings: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1406/1/323/ Like I said, if I can't get a good quality render in a half hour, I figure I am doing something wrong and I try something else.

Acadia, Check out another posting, that is newer than this thread. It is titled: My first 'more than 1 figure' render since SR1..and guess what ? There is a good link about texture maps and the effect they have on the render process. I actually just learned something new from it. I have always assumed, bigger is better. In other words, I figured, put the best texture on something that the render process can handle. That is not the case. The link will explain better than I... Hope this helps!

Thanks Lou. I took a look at that thread, but it doesn't seem to apply to me. It's for Poser 6 and poser 6 has been having memory troubles from what I've seen. I have Poser 5. I did take note of the efrontier link and will look that over this afternoon. It seems to have some good information in there. I did manage to finally get my scene together by placing the 3 images on the background where I want them, deleting the background and 2 figures and rendering one figure each time. It took awhile, but in the end it was faster than trying to do the whole scene at once. I'm pretty good in PSP so I managed to get the figures in with some perspective shadows and deleting bits and pieces of the figures so that they look like they blend into the background shrubbery. I'm not feeling well today, so I'll tackle the background on a square tomorrow and see how the advice I got for that pans out.

blonderella, I'm guessing when you wrote "do you have an umber 'puter", you're not asking if it's dark brown. I think you meant "er 'puter". It is not English; it is German, and means "over"

Attached Link: Not in poser :-(

Here is a scene I rendered saturday morning
6 mike2's each wearing a full bodysuit for 12 actual figures
9 sanctum art props with hi res textures
one stonemason prop.
6 omni lights
5 of which are casting soft shadows

total scene polygon count just a little under one million

Hardware: first generation "E-mac" G4 700MHZ processor
256 megs of RAM.

rendertime: 16minutes!!!

the problem is not our computer or windowsXP

its poser ;-/.

Any render that takes more than 2 minutes gets nuked.

You know, since I switched to Poser 6 my render times seem to have decreased a great deal. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the number of lights in a scene. With Poser 5 I used Complex Global Lights most often, and with Poser 6 those same lights preview nearly black and I can't see the figure/scene to make adjustments, so I've been using other lights specifically made for Poser 6, or making my own. And I never have more than 3 or 4 lights on the little globe now. Some renders still take an hour to do, but I certainly haven't had a 10 hour "adding object" render with Poser 6.

When you look at the task manager and it says Poser not responding, that doesn't mean that it's hung. If you click on the processes Tab you will see that poser is working. BTW, set your SWAP file to 2048 MByte for all disks and minimum and maximum filsize, this should help a little bit. In the IT there is one thing always valid: You can replace RAM only with MORE RAM ;-)

And there is an old Chinese proverb that says something about needing money to do that, LOL