I thought that the darn error message "There was a problem with Firefly renderer... not enough memory ecc.ecc." could appear only at the start of the process. I usually get it in the "Loading Textures" or in the "Rendering Shadow Maps" phase.

But yesterday I was around 50% of the actual rendering, about two hours of work, when suddenly the image stopped and the error message appeared.

Why so late? I assumed all textures were already loaded and all memory already allocated.

BTW, my render settings were (recalling from memory): 1600x1200, raytracing ON, texture filtering OFF, bucket size 64, texture size 2048, pixel samplings 5, shade rate 0,02.

Any particular suggestion to avoid this problem or I should simply lower the texture size as usual?

Thanks,

Giorgio

At that texture and image size I would have had a smaller bucket size, say 32 and my minimum shading rate would be 0.1, I don't think having it as low as you have it there would give any appreciable difference!  Just my opinion!

I have tried with bucket size 16 too and I have the same problem. This evening I'll change the shade rate and I'll retry....

Giorgio

Is this P5 or 6, if it's 6 have you installed SR3?

It is P6 SR3. Before rendering, I usually close all other programs and I stop all non-essential services, to free all the available memory. It's the first time I have had the memory error when the rendering was already in progress.

Giorgio

You can get this message at any time. It means that, while Poser was allocating memory for the next bucket, it didn't find enough, even after reducing bucket size to the minimum (defaults to 32).
If you watch Poser rendering (good against insomnia), you'll see buckets getting smaller and smaller, then the dreaded message appears.

So either you reduce manually the bucket to something smaller (8, since you tried 16), or you simplify your scene (reducing texture size for instance, or layering), or you use the 3 GB Poser tweak (Posted here some months ago, sorry no link).

Also with P6 you could do a set of area renders instead of trying to render the whole
scene at once.  Then you could use a Photoshop or an equivalent to join the
sections together.  This might also show you which part of the render Poser
is having trouble with. Plus doing area renders means you haven't lost a
whole render if Poser crashes, just the section that made it crash.  Then
when you figure out what made it crash, you can add the fixed section to
the rest of the scene in Photoshop.

I'm on an old desktop now and while I find I can still use Poser (Yayyyyyyy for me!), I find that I get that error a whole lot. First I get the message about Windows allocating more memory, and then another window telling me that  I've run out of memory and the render failed, or something along those lines.  The only way to exit Poser 6 for me at that point is to CTRL ALT DEL and then reboot.

Some work arounds that I've been doing:

1.  Making sure the shadow maps on my lights do not exceed 256;
2.  Resizing the texture files (using bicubic resample so it doesn't blur) for things I'm using in my scene to 1024 on the long side;
3.  Hiding body parts under the clothing that aren't going to be visible in the image;
4.  Hiding all but one item and then rendering that item. Then hiding it and unhiding something else and rendering that. For figures I often have to hide the upper or lower part of the body, and render the unhidden part, then hide that part and unhide the other half and render that.

Then I piece it all together in my graphic program. It works pretty well because I have the same lights for all renders so things look like they were done together.

As for raytracing?  Sadly I find I can't do much of that and have to do most of my shiny metal looks in post work. 

Resizing your textures can help a great deal.  But if you resize, make sure you pick "bicubic resample" instead of "smart size" so you don't lose detail.

It's usually down to shadow maps causing this so another way around this with Poser 6 is to render your scene with no shadows and sava as a PNG and then render with only shadows ticked, this will render only the shadows, save this also as a PNG. Take both into Photoshop or equivalent and put them together as layers. Use multiply on the shadow layer and then flatten the image and you are left with a complete image as if you'd rendered it in Poser with shadows on! Save as JPG and that's it, job done!

The beauty of this approach is that you can remove unwanted shadows easily before flattening and even adjust their intensity, colour etc.!

Quote - It's usually down to shadow maps causing this so another way around this with Poser 6 is to render your scene with no shadows and sava as a PNG and then render with only shadows ticked, this will render only the shadows

I've seen people post that.  But how do you do that?

Also, I need to hide the ground when I render. Is there anyway I can still get ground shadows?  For some reason I can't seem to get any ground shadows even when the ground is not hidden. I checked, and in the parameter dials the "cast shadows" is checked.

one can set the shadow map size down as low as 64 and still get good results, if the maps are properly zoomed in. but shadow maps are P4 relics from the previous century. AFAIK none of the professional rendering software use 'em, but I could be wrong. I agree, though; rendering the shadows separately and adding them as a multiplying layer in photoshop is un-natural and counter-intuitive IMVHO :lol:

Not sure I follow your logic Miss Nancy, if the image you're trying to render won't because the shadow maps are too memory intensive then surely the only option is to render the shadows seperately and composite it in photoshop, the end result is exactly the same unless you have tweaked the shadows first in photoshop before compositing and flattening!

Of course you could go the multi-pass route and do it in smaller chunks but my preference is shadows and image seperate!

Shadow maps are hardly a relic from a previous century. Any decent 3D application will offer the choice of ray traced and shadow mapped shadows.
Shadow mapped shadows offer the advantage of speed, but do consume RAM. It is also generally easier to create soft shadows this way.
Ray traced shadows don't consume memory like shadow mapping does, but are far slower to render. Rendering soft ray traced shadows can also be a very time consuming process.

Quote - Acadia, these settings for shadow only, note the tick at top right!

Thank you!  I'll try that tonight and see if it helps me any.

Any tips on getting Firefly to work on an archaic computer with only 384 MB of SDRAM?  I so much need to render a sword with raytracing but can't even if that and the figure's hand is the only thing in my scene.

I've checked the texture files and they shouldn't be a problem.  I was able to render the full figure and the sword in P4 render, but Firefly just runs out of memory.

its worth checking your settings for windows page file and free disk space.

At last I managed to complete the render!

I have switched all lights to raytraced shadows, set shade rate to 0.1 (0.02 was really TOO low!) and left textures to 2048.

You can see the result here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1305059&member

Thanks for your suggestions!

And just one thing... Most figure has a mininum shading rate of 0.2 !

Except you changed them manually, there is no reason to go under 0.2.

I must confess that when I decided to tweak something in the render settings window, I looked at the shade rate slider thinking: "Mmm.... I think someone said it was better to lower this value... What was the number? I am sure there was a 2 in it..."

As you can see, a very technical process...  :blushing:

Giorgio