Well I finally got it yesterday.  I installed Poser 7 without a hitch.  Then I opened a Poser 6 file and made some changes for a project I'm working with and tried to render a 4000 x 4000 pixel image. 

A have a Core 2 Duo machine and didn't notice any huge speed boosts as the render proceded.  I have 2 gigs of ram and was running no other processes at the time. In my preferences I selected 4 threads as that is what the P7 manual reccommended.  About 3/4s of the way through the render Poser crashed with some cryptic message about the cache.  It rendered fine on P6 the day before with a complex reflection added that I'd taken out for this version.  I'd done several renders to the active viewport without a hitch prior to doing this.

Should I assume that this is one of the bugs that people have been struggling with?  Should I reduce the numer of threads to 2 since I have a dual core and not quad core machine?

Any suggestions for a work around anyone?

Other problem I'd noticed is that Poser seems to temporarily gag when I delete an object from the scene.  I had read in other threads that other people had crashes during deletions.  I guess it woud be best to save a scene before attempting a delete until this bug is fixed.

I have random crashes on opening pz3's - the cloth room 'cancel' command sends the application into a 3/4 hour 'hang' - deletions crash the app randomly.

I can only 'play' with P7 at the moment and keep a new file open and get a couple of renders from it because re-opening the pz3 causes the app to crash 90% of the time.

I have given up posting anything to Curious Labs support - my first 2 messages remain unacklnowledged/unanswered since last Monday/Tuesday.

Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln how did you like the play?

Tomsde
My only advise I can give you is wait until EF comes out with their first SR.  Poser 7 crashes on me a lot as well and I have a great machine.  It's not you it's Poser 7.  It has issues.  I'm currently using Poser 6 until they can get Poser 7 fixed.

Do you guys know how multi thread rendering works? Does a 2 thread render require twice as much ram as  a single thread?

I have a similar system and have made the same observations as Tomsde;  I tried to render a
2500 X 2000 picture of a 150 Mbyte scene, first with 4 threads, then with 2, and Poser crashed to desktop every time. Worked ok with single thread render, and somewhat faster than P6. I am using the 32 bit version of Windows XP, and I think I read somewhere that there isn’t much point in adding ram above 2 Gbyte unless you upgrade to a 64 bit operating system? But Poser is still a 32 bit app, so…?

I think the slow delete process must have something to do with P7’s improved undo functionality; in earlier versions of Poser you couldn’t undo deletes. Poser must store the deleted object in some temporary undo buffer, and that takes time, especially with the dense meshes most people are using these days.

Except for  the mentioned problems P7 has been remarkably stable and reliable for me.

Quote - Do you guys know how multi thread rendering works? Does a 2 thread render require twice as much ram as  a single thread?

Less than twice as much, but still more. Some of the things are shared between the threads (textures, irradiance cache, raytracing data), other things are separate for each thread (current bucket + all the micropolygons in it, general renderer state). When rendering in multiple threads, you may want to consider smaller bucket sizes to compensate for that.

If you are rendering with Separate Process (General Preferences > Render tab) turned on, I am confident that adjusting render settings can help. Please note that when you render in a separate process, the render engine cannot automatically reduce bucket size to counter a low memory situation. Therefore, please start with a lower bucket size (for example, 8-16) and see if that eliminates the issue. Regards, -Brian

Default Guy is right...he gave me the same advice and it worked...even though I don't have a multithreaded device.

I'll try keeping the threads the same but reducing the bucket size.  With Poser 6, until I got this upgraded machine, I couldn't render high quality images without reducing bucket size either. 

It will have to be tested of course, but won’t a reduced bucket size kind of defeat the improvement in speed you gain by multi thread rendering?

I guess it depends on how small the bucket is.  If the buckets are so reduced as to be less than an adaptive single thread could handle then it wouldn't be very useful to use multi-threading.  But if we could double the actual number of buckets over a single thread that should make it at least twice as fast.

What is the combined max RAM that all the threads can use? Is it 2gig for all or 2gigs per thread?

Poser can't use more than 2 gigs of Ram according to e-frontier.  They recommend that people have at least one gig ram, two even better, but more than 2 are wasted.  Apparently there aren't any 32 bit applications that can use 4 gigs of Ram ( the max my machine can take)--4 is currently only used on 64 bit systems.

yea thats what I thought. I guess I'll put 64bit on my wish list for the next upgrade.
So far P7 is orders of magnitude faster for rendering.

Also keep in mind that it helps if you have a fair amount of space on your hard drive when rendering to an external process and that the drive isn't overly fragmented. This helps, should the program need to seek the drive for virtual ram.

I seem to have solved the problem on my computer at least.  I went to the preference section and enable "separate process" on the Render tab, then tried re-rendering the image.  The results were astouding.  It rendered my 4000 X 4000 pixel image in able 10-15 minutes as opposed to hours.   :)

Hope that helps for those who've not tried it and had the same problem.

So glad I waited before jumping in with Poser 7.
It is obviously a beta release for us guniea pigs to debug for them.
I can't believe they didn't know of these crash issues before release.

Quote - So glad I waited before jumping in with Poser 7.
It is obviously a beta release for us guniea pigs to debug for them.
I can't believe they didn't know of these crash issues before release.

Its been the same every update since I first bought Poser at P2.  I gave up on P6 and have yet to download any of the service packs, as P5 works fine.  Occluding shadows aren't enough to overcome the lack of backward compatability and the fact that P6 was slower and chokes on big projects far more often than P5.  

And yet I bought P7 at the pre-release special.

Every upgrade, without fail,  The product gets rushed out,  it crashes often,  customer service can't keep up with all the complaints,  three or four months go by,  SR1 is released and while usually fixing "most" of the bugs, often comes with new bugs.  six months go by and SR2 is released and finally fixes most of the critical bugs without adding too many new ones,  but some of the annoying,  but less critcal bugs never get fixed.  Many disatisfied customers scream and rant in this forum after the release, vowing to never come back.   

But those with patience and perseverance eventually get a product that is truly amazing and without compare in the 3D world.  I love Poser and the development team!

Merry Christmas to all!

I don't regret upgrading as many of the changes have made my life much easier.  I'm willing to wade through the bug period.  Poser 6 was a dream to me compared with 5.  I liked the simplified materials dialogue, hate shader nodes.  The multiple undos alone made it worth my buying P7. 

HI:

Just bought Poser 7.  The problem I have
deals with it crashing.  I set up a poser scene, save it then reopen it no problem.  Then I simply repose the characters in the scene, save then when I try to reopen it later, poser 7 starts crashing.  It is very frustrating, all that work posing a figure in a scene, not changing a single other thing, and the scene will no longer reopen once it is saved and closed again...maddening.
I've tried this many other times with the exact same out come I am really upset!

I think we're all eagerly awaiting the first service release patch.