Hi,
I've been having problems with the firefly engine ever since it was introduced and wondered if anyone else was having the same difficulties.
Machine spec:
P4 3Ghz, 120 gig HD (40 gig free)Windows XP Pro with latest service patch. NVidia GeForce FX5900, Abit AI7 motherboard and Poser 6 with latest sevice patch.

Scene content:
V3 character with jumpsuit and saphirefox hair and Stonemason's bridge from Daz 3d. 4 lights but only 1 casting shadow (non raytrace)

Problem:
I've never been able to do much with the firefly engine because it gives an 'out of memory' error most of the time. Today I got the message and reduced the image size down to 3072 X 3072 @300dpi and a bucket size of just 8. No texture filtering, no depth of field and no raytrace. everything else was set to default and after half an hours rendering, I got the maeeage again. My machine is quite fast and the scene is not complicated so any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
Any help would be appreciated but I have already tried most things like lowering the texture size, bucket size, image size and turning off everything that was not needed.
thank you for your time.
Tony

Tony, you don't state how much RAM you have on board. If less than 1Gig, that is the problem. I've found that 1.5 is best. More than that, Poser does not take into account. Meanwhile, you have obviously tried many important things already. I believe the issue is that most of RAM is taken up storing your props and their textures, so when the render begins the engine runs out of room. A couple more ideas, you may have tried these already: 1) Before rendering, back all the way out of Poser and reboot. When you come back in, don't fiddle, just render. 2) You might have to go to selective passes and composite. For instance, can you make the bridge invisible and render? Then, make everything else invisible and render the bridge. Composite in 2D. 3) do you have AO turned on for any of the lights? If so, be sure the hair has "visible in raytrace" UNchecked. 4) sorry to say, Vicky is a heavy lady. She takes up a lot of resources. Hope something helps. ::::: Opera :::::

Thanks for the reply Opera, oops, I forgot to mention that I have 2 gig of ram.

I have been compositing separate renders but it would save a lot of time if the whole lot could be rendered as-is - maybe in Poser 7 or 8 :)
Cheers
Tony

I have high hopes that your wish will be answered, bog, particularly if poser is sold to some company that can fix poser's memory problems, e.g. eovia. the usual business cycle for poser is for company "a" to sell a patch for the previous version, make enuff money to cover its costs, then sell to company "b", which then repeats the cycle. and this is a good time in the cycle for e-frontier to sell, IMVHO.

that would be fine with me! Eovia seems a great match and they are showing all the signs of wanting to be the MOST poser-friendly host app ever. ::: og ::

Carrara likes to throw memory allocation errors at me, so i'd say that a 64 bit Poser version will be the only chance to fix the 32 bit inheritent memory limit. (Of course they could also implement their own memory management, but why waste time and create more bugs with that in the days of 64 bit systems?)

I contacted the technical department at e-frontier.com and have just received this reply which is a superb example of excellent customer service and it's far more detailed than I would have expected. I present it here in full in the hope that it will assist other users with a similar problem.
"Dear Mr. Hayes,
Hmmm. It sounds as though you're more than a little familiar with Poser and the general workflow; my normal advice in a case like this would be to advise you to start with the most basic Firefly settings- fairly small render size, perhaps 1024x768 or thereabouts, maximum texture size set to perhaps 1000-2000 pixels (since you're rendering to an image no larger than 1024 pixels, the image maps will get scaled down on the render anyway, so you don't lose any quality in the final render by telling Firefly to subsample them when it loads.) I'd suggest turning the minimum shading rate up to 4 or so, and leave raytracing off, and see how that goes- obviously that won't give you the image quality you want but it should serve as a starting point to see which settings cause the most problems. From there you'd probably want to start by decreasing the minimum shading rate to 1.0 or so, then turn up the render dimensions, then (very carefully) adjust the max texture size.

Given that you're an old Poser hand, I can skip the usual advice about not using too many shadow-casting lights and keeping your scenes simple; I imagine you've also tried deleting your Poser preference files, just in case they've gotten corrupted (although your description of the problem doesn't indicate bad prefs.) My guess in this case is that either (a) Firefly is choking on too many large image maps (this is unfortunately rather common, and we're working to improve its ability to handle image maps) or (b) that there's some other problem that stems from either a faulty Poser installation or something about the scene- complex Material Room setup?- that runs Firefly out of memory. Given that you have as much RAM as Poser will address, it might be worth adjusting your Adaptation Threshold settings in the Misc. tab of the General Preferences- changing the Memory Limit Buffer would give you at best an additional 32Mb of RAM to work with, which probably wouldn't be enough to get the job done and would expose you to crashing rather than simply terminating the render. Adjusting the adaptation threshold, though, might get the job done as raising that value causes Firefly to reduce the bucket size quicker, rather than trying to hang onto bigger bucket sizes; this makes for a slower render but more efficient memory use.

By way of troubleshooting, I'll suggest the following-

1. Try setting up your render with the minimum shading rate set to 2 and the maximum texture size set to 1000 pixels or so. If you're rendering a 3000x3000 pixel image with the foreground figure taking up around 2500-2750 of that, her face won't take more than 500 or so pixels, so putting a 4000-pixel image map on it is overkill- if you were doing a closeup on her face it'd be a different story. Turn up the adaptation threshold settings to 0.75 if you can't get a good render with these settings using the default value of 0.375.

2. If you can render successfully with these settings, try turning the minimum shading rate down to 1.0. You can turn on raytracing as well if you've got reflection or refraction (water, glass, etc.) in the scene, otherwise leave it off.

3. Finally, if you're successful with the min shading rate set to 1.0, you can start increasing the max texture size, although again you should use a setting that reflects how big (in pixels) the biggest object for which you want to see high levels of detail is going to be (does that make sense?) You can also try turning the minimum shading rate down to 0.5 but going below 1.0 increases the render time and resource requirements a lot for diminishing returns- unless you're using displacement maps or other complex Material Room functions.

I hope this helps!
Regards, Colin Gerbode
Technical Support"

I hope you find this of interest.
Tony

SHEESH! bogwoppet you might consider starting a post in the general poser forum and provide this letter. That could help a LOT of people. I don't know if EFrontier would mind, but I don't see why not; it could head off a lot of frustration with Poser. ::::: Opera :::::

yes, colin is a great guy. I've talked to him on the phone a few times and he's always knowledgeable and helpful.

Ditto on that... if Colin could be cloned, he would be a godsend for tech support everywhere! -jay

Hmmm... It still sounds like the message is that you can't get there from here. I want to get all the detail possible out of my textures. All my final renders are at least 3600x2700. With ray tracing and shadows. Which is why I switched to Carrara 5 for final renderings. I have once received an "Unable to Allocate Memory" error, but that was with a 330 Megabyte scene file. And, when I poked "Render" again? It went right ahead and did it. I'm running 2 Gig of DDR2 512 memory, but it's still a good idea to shut down Poser if you've got a huge scene up on that also. I WILL be nice when everything is 64 bit, and we can use more memory. You hate having limitations when you're just trying to get a job done.

operaguy, much thanks for posting Colin's answer. Seems tome my probs are solved now when I will follow his instructions. ^^ I don't wanna miss P6, it's right the thing I want to get in human-figured images. But until now it was luck to handle it quiet well. I am begging that it's over soon :O) Thanks again

Tony, Just where did you send your original question? I've sent a few questions their way and never gotten a peep in response.

I went here and have always received a reply.
http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/18?sbss=435

Hope this helps.
Tony