I've been using Poser 6 and I keep getting annoying out of memory messages, especially when I have more than 2 people in a scene. Once I get the error message, I lose the entire scene even if I have saved it. It must corrupt the files somehow.

I have 768mb RAM (which I recently upgraded from 256) and I'm using windows XP SP2. My graphics card is a Geforce2. I get the message less frequently since I upgraded the RAM, but it's still happening and causing me to lose many hours of work. I already close all other programs and even turn off my antivirus program when using Poser. I have plenty of space left on my hard drive.

Anyone have a suggestion on what to do to stop these out of memory messages? Would upgrading to a Geforce4 help at all?

Would appreciate any suggestions, thanks in advance.

These might help: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1403/1/595/ http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1406/1/323/

Install SR1 if you haven't already done so. Some of my scenes are rather taxing and I haven't yet encountered a memory problem. Upgrading your video card will not make one iota of difference. Poser does not use video card stuff, except of the OpenGL preview in P6. Otherwise, get more RAM, defrag your HD and make sure you have at least 15GB free space on there.

rebooting helps me sometimes. also try reducing the texture sizes in the rendering control panel.

Hmmm I have a similar setup but haven't encountered any problems. And I usually have my Firewall, Netscape Mail and MSN Messenger running in the background too. I bought Tweak XP Pro 4 not so long ago and it's really good for managing the memory. When I run it I am often surprised to discover I've got 500+ MB already in use that needs remanaging.

I've got a feeling that this memory issue is NEVER going to get resolved in P6 for some of us. I've got so fed up with the whole thing that I don't even bother posting about it any more, I alway's get very helpfull answers as to how to work around the problem but the fact is I NEVER had this problem in P5...other problem's yes but none so bad that I couldn't even render a finished scene! I now leave off all clothing and hair and do this in Postwork wich seems to be helping a bit. I reckon it's a case of just wait until Poser 7 for this to get sorted?

Are u using a lot of lights? U shouldn't need too many lights in P6. This is the only time I had a problem because I loaded a light preset that was for Poser 4 and it had something like 40 lights (an IBL would have done the trick). Poser gave up eventually and just shut itself down.

I've had simular problems in my work- especially if there's alot of texture in the scene. If you go to render settings and switch to the manual screen, You'll see a glide bar for the texture sampling size- it's usually set at 1024. set it as low as it will go- usually about 512. Next, go to the bucket size directly below it. Normally this is set at 64. Knock ten points off of it- set it 54. The render may be a little slower, but Poser won't yell at you as much. Another option that I used alot on my Red Sonja series, is breaking the render down into smaller files and then recombining them. Example- say you're doing an indoor scene. Take the ceiling, wall and floor, maybe one figure and render that first. Then re-import that as the background for the next couple of figures. Make sure you're lighting stays the same- you might write down the settings so you can re-create it. I don't know how old you are, but if you have access, take a look at Red Sonja and the Witch of Lankar:Part 11. This was done this way- it took five renders to pull it off. here's the adress; http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1040484&Start=1&Artist=mdbruffy&ByArtist=Yes Hope this helps.

Thanks everyone for the helpful hints. I will try some of these various things. I already did upgrade with the SR1.

I too tried to work around the problem for awhile, many of my scenes were done with each person rendered separately, then imported individually into yet another separate background scene. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't. In any event it certainly excelled at eating up a lot of extra time!

I originally intended to upgrade to at least 1 GB ram, but found out my computer uses an extremely expensive type of ram and that amount of RAM would cost me the equivalent of a new machine. So I thought I'd squeak by with the 768 for awhile - and just adding that 512 cost several hundred dollars. I'm not willing to invest much more in an older machine for what amounts to a hobby for me.

Still, I could almost cry when I think of some of the fabulous scenes and characters that have been lost due to that cursed "out of memory" gremlin.

E-Frontier needs to seriously hire someone to work out the memory usage on Poser for the next version. There's no excuse for this. I have a fast system w/2GB of fast RAM and 300 GB of disk space. Don't tell me they can't manage two high end textured characters simultaneously. They've got memory, it's called a file system. Use it. Or dump FireBug, whatever. Sorry, but this is really frustrating.

As of yesterday, I found a solution to the Poser problem - it's called Daz Studio.

Now that the 1.0 has been released (the beta was kinda buggy, so I hadn't used it much before) I'm pleased to report that not only did I get NO out of memory errors, crashes or freezes while using Daz Studio, but it's much more intuitive (read: easy to use) program than Poser. Plus, it's free.

The perfect solution for the casual hobbyist, like me.