Hi all: I have Poser 6 with all of the updates running on my Pentium 4, 3.4 gigaherz PC with 2 gigs of RAM and a 128 megabyte Radeon graphics card which has open GL. I bought the latest DM's Marlene's place and Teena the Destroyer, and when I try to render a picture even at 800 x 600, I get a not enough memory error in Poser 4 renderer. It seems that the more hi-res the characters and props are, the worse my Poser 6 runs. I even made a fresh install on another drive so the runtime was not so big, and am having the same problems. Does anyone know if another graphics card would help or is there something I could do?? I want to render more than one character in a scene with detailed props and Poser is not letting me. It's very frustrating. Thanks.

Same boat as you memory wise, 2 gigs and even rendering a single character at times it'll pop up. So I've learned to adjust my FF settings when rendering out. Just mess around with your output settings until you hit the combo that you can render at that your comfortable with your output image. Your graphic cards onboard ram has nothing to do in the render pipeline, just for the display of your workplace so if thats sluggish while setting scenes up then yes a newer video card will help. Sad thing is it seems the program only uses actual physical ram and doesn't even bother to hit any virtual/swap that is setup, otherwise 2gig systems wouldn't be hitting this problem.

Also try and composite your final image, render each part say your background out to one file, then your character(s) out to another then edit them in. Just keeping the same settings and dropping them out of your display as you would a limb or such being hidden by a object.

Message edited on: 03/10/2006 23:54

Message edited on: 03/11/2006 00:07

and reduce textures if they are 4000+ pixels haha :P also lowering bucket size helps a bit

The P4 renderer will load the textures at full size, while Firefly will resize them in-memory to the maximum texture size specified in the render options.

Switch to the Firefly renderer, reduce max texture size to something reasonable (for a 800x600 render 1024 is more than enough) and render.

You could also use a 2D program to make mid- and lores versions of the texture maps themselves. Those super hires textures are only useful when doing large closeups, use mid- or low resolution in non-closeup situations.

Don't forget to save file close out Poser. Reboot and then go in and render. (I even turn off Norton, sound, etc.before.) I have had one Vicky take 2 hours. I have 2 other rutimes hooked up to Poser6. Something is wrong with your Poser, because I only have 1 gig of memory and I don't get the dreaded Out of Memory. I use to get in Poser 4 when I just let everything get too big. I have one runtime not connected, of stuff I never use. One runtime extras not connected for Poser 4 PP. Under Poser6 I put all the new stuff in Downloads, and made a Workable runtime. The only new thing I added to Poser 6 is Face offs Scrips.

Have you installed the SR1 or SR2. I'm using a slow PC with just 348MB and since installing SR1 only had memory problems when I'm trying to render while running way too many other programs at the same time. I must admit I never render with the maximum settings (PS I have NOT restricted the size of my runtime by installing multiple runtimes either)

Something strange I have noticed lately is that OOM errors seem to be coming from people with 2GB of RAM. I have 1GB of RAM, running a 1Ghz cpu, and I never get the OOM error. I got it a couple of times pre-SR1, but not since. I have a feeling Poser wants to play with some swap file area. This is not based on any research, just my personal observation on the boards. Just something interesting to think about. I would be curious to see if those with the problem removed some RAM, and tried the same image that gave errors got the same error.

I get it with both 1 gig and 2 gigs on 2 systems, so it's just buggy software. Hopefully ver7 will address this, (not holding my breath though)

Thanks to all of you!!!! I will try all of your tips!!!!

Problem with the 2 gig theory. I have 1.5 gig of ram and I still get it it is annoying as hell to have the thing tell you to make your bucket size smaller when using the P4 renderer

Hmm, interesting. There goes that theory. Ah well, back to the drawing board. Have people submitted reports to e-Frontier? That's the best way to get it fixed. The more reports they have to work from, the easier it will be for them to locate the source of the problem.

I have 2GB of ram and 265MB on my grapchic card (with open GL) I get the error randomly, not so much now though as before the SR's. I do expect this problem to be fixed in next update, not something that they would want to sell P7 on. I would not get a new program just because it has bug fixes!

Well, Poser did it again with my fresh install and a very small runtime. I tried to render a 1280 x960 image of Alandra in a bed of LB Botanical's flowers from Daz. How do I make my maximum texture size? I can't find the menu for that or see it on Render Settings. I also have Vue 5 and have seen people do wonderful renders of Poser scenes in Vue. When I import Poser scene into Vue it looks awful. Anyone familiar with Vue and Poser? Thank you.

Ah, LB Botanicals. They have been quite a bit of a PITA. It has to do with the way the .OBJ came out of the modeler. I ran them through Spanki's S.T.O.M.P. utility, and suddenly I could render twice as many of those trees and flowers without Poser locking up. Maximum texture resolution: it's in Render settings, on the Firefly tab. Don't try rendering with the P4 engine, it'll ignore that setting.

Where do I get Spanki's S.T.O.M.P. ??

It's in Renderosity freestuff.

Thanks. I found it also at Morphology when I ran a search!

Attached Link: http://www.zaxys.com

I think the problem with Poser 6 and OOM errors is due to the fact that the program can only address 2gb of memory total. I had 4gb of RAM installed and would get OOM errors or it would just quit when Poser's memory usage was right about 2.1Gb. So I added another 4Gb of memory and the problem is still there. Hopefully, a new version will take advantage of more memory if it is available.

Attached Link: http://www.brianmadden.com/content/content.asp?id=69

"...program can only address 2gb of memory total." It's not a Poser limitation, it's an operating system limitation. If Poser 7 is 64 bit then there's hope -- if you have a 64 bit system of course :-) "By definition, a 32-bit processor uses 32 bits to refer to the location of each byte of memory. 2^32 = 4.2 billion, which means a memory address that's 32 bits long can only refer to 4.2 billion unique locations (i.e. 4 GB). In the 32-bit Windows world, each application has its own virtual 4GB memory space. (This means that each application functions as if it has a flat 4GB of memory, and the system's memory manager keeps track of memory mapping, which applications are using which memory, page file management, and so on.) This 4GB space is evenly divided into two parts, with 2GB dedicated for kernel usage, and 2GB left for application usage. Each application gets its own 2GB, but all applications have to share the same 2GB kernel space."

That would be true if I was using Windows but I'm using OS X which is a 64 bit OS and most other graphics packages I use can access more than 2Gb. Poser is the exception.

Ah so. Well, keep your fingers crossed. I wouldn't bet on it though.

e-frontier would be completely out of its mind if Poser 7 didn't support 64bit operating systems. Just about every professional graphics package supports 64bit already. The next Vue version will be both 64bit and 32bit. And I hope (fingers crossed) that the port to 64bit will inspire the Poser programmers to rewrite the core using modern programming techniques. Especially OO, so that scripting will be a breeze to implement.

I certainly don't disagree with that. More to the point though I'd place a complete rewrite above 64bit. Realistically, I don't think going to 64 would be a substantial additional task so it's more or less icing on the cake. It really seems that the number of bits is not the issue here anyway. Plenty of other 32 bit applications like Vue and even DS can render scenes that reportedly bring Poser 6 to it's knees. Since you'ld expect the render engine to be relatively independent, being off the shelf technology so to speak, then either Firefly is really punk or just being near Poser's antiquated bits castrates it. Me, I'd kill the fly and go with the Shade engine or go Renderman like DS, but the howls of protest would be enormous - maybe Poser 10 but they're probably stuck with it. I'd be happy if they just keep the product and not sell it off yet again. Hopefully the emergence of DS, MakeHuman, Quidam (sic), etc. means that this area is finally heating up and EF will be motivated to really do something with Poser.

I holding out hope that new 5.0 version of Strata3D may offer me a better solution. It's always had a great renderer and I've heard rumors of direct Poser import. Version 4 can sort of import Poser files but you lose alot. It's useful for those times when you really have to have volumetric fx like smoke, fog and clouds. It's already multiprocessor enabled (using all four in my Quad) and 64bit and 5.0 is due to ship soon. Certainly long before a new version of Poser appears. Here's hoping.

Interesting. That would be another sign that Poser is getting more recognition. I played with the older free version of Strata barely but I've never really looked at any Poser stuff rendered in the application.