It's been a while since I needed to render in Poser, most of my scenes are rendered in Vue. However I've tried to render a scene with M3 + Morphs and V3 + Morphs and some clothing @ 4000 X 4000.

I've always had problems with the Firefly engine hanging and tried the P4 engine instead which used to be ok with Poser 5 provided I kept the image size below 4090 X 4090.

The render began and then hung at the 'Rendering Scene' stage. I tried several times and even left the thing running overnight but to no avail.

I thought that this problem had been fixed with poser 6 but it seems not.

I have the latest update installed and rebooted before the render to clear memory. I checked the task manager and it indicated that Poser was working ok but I think it just gets into a loop and goes nowhere!

I'm not looking for a miracle cure here, although that would be nice :D I'm just trying to find out if this is a common problem and asking for your comments, suggestions or ideas regarding renders in Poser 6.

Thanks for taking the time to read this - much appreciated.
Tony

Hi Tony, so I am not the only one who ecxperiences a hang-up when rendering. I never know when it will happen, but when it does all the content of the pull-down menues gets greyed out. I don't know if you experience the same thing. All I can do is close the application because it is no longer possible to click on anything, including save. I don't always save before a test render and have lost a great deal of work because of this intermittend problem. I don't have a solution but I hope it will get fixed soon. Helga

In my experience Firefly is better at handling large scenes than the P4 renderer (I once rendered 8 V3s with hair, all different hires skin textures. P6 Firefly. P4 render immediately ran out of memory). Try Firefly.

I am using the Firefly renderer because I am not happy with the quality of the Poser 4 renders. Yesterday I tried to render a naked LaRoo with hair, nothing else in the scene, and Firefly was unable to complete the render. It is really ridiculous. Slowly I am giving up to render anything in Poser. I export to Bryce and render there. I will try to install the Beta DAZ Studio and see if they have a better renderer. Regards Helga

Many thanks for your comments, it seems that I'm not alone with my problems.
I get an error message with all Firefly renders within a few minutes telling me that there isn't enough memory (I have 2GIG - how much does it want?) so my recent reders have been with the P4 which isn't bad but limits you to renders of 4000 X 4000 which is smaller than I would normally use.
I too would render outside of Poser if it were an option but I don't like Bryce and Vue 5 inf can't render the Poser hair properly.
Thanks again for your feedback.
Tony

Which operating system are you working under?

I'm using XP Professional.

Ah, strand-based hair. That IS a problem. The only app that renders strand-based hair decently is Poser itself. Vue is the only other app AFAIK that is able to import strand-based hair, but doesn't do a good job on rendering it. There's a big change in strand-based hair between P5 and P6. Keep the number of strands as low as possible, and keep the number of guide hairs as low as possible too. See the hair that comes with P6. Older strand-based hair is grown on hires skullcaps (lots of guide hairs) with a large amount of strands, easily 20,000 or so. That will choke the render engine indeed.

I'm using XP Professional as well. Ever since Microsoft did the verification update, everysooften the cursor hangs and the whole system then needs a cold boot. Arghhh. Usually in the middle of a render. Glad to know I'm not the only one.

I have had this problem from time to time. My solution was to get a program called "memturbo" (www.shareware.com). This dosen't cure everything, but it sure has saved the day more than once. I typically render using firefly, with the dimensions at 1024X760 and 150dpi, which is smaller than most of you like to work. I still get crabs from viewers on dial-ups who complain that the files are too big, but that's too bad. I prefer to give quality, and I feel for folks who can't get broadband, but that's life. I have found I can't render more than eight or nine figures in a scene without risking a freeze. I have 1.5Gig of ram.