Hi all,
I'm trying to render a complex image (7 - 8 different characters, background, textured props) but I'm getting the dreaded "out of memory" error. Even by downgrading the render quality and closing down all the unnecessary processes and applications, I can't free enough memory of my 2 Gigs. Now I'm looking for alternatives. I guess I can render the background first and then use it as a background image in Poser.. but what happens to the shadows when I insert my characters ? Or can I do separates renders and compose them in Photoshop?
Anybody has some hint or tips on this matter?
Thanks in advance for any help :)
Ragnar

If you're on the PC:  One trick you can do, regardless of render quality - if you can get it to start, you can watch the process for poser.exe in Task Manager.  When it gets over maybe 1.5 or 1.8 GB, minimize it and maximize it again, and this will force Poser to shed a lot of un-needed memory that it's taking up.  I don't have Poser at the moment but it see attached image.

And so.

edit: needless to say, for long renders that's a royal pain in the tokus.

What I'll quite oftem do is a "shadow only" render of the complete scene and then a proper image render with shadows turned "off" and then take them into PS7 and put them together using "multiply" on the shadow layer.
Both must be "png" or any other like image type [TIFF for example]!

You also might reconsider your cast of characters.  This is a copy of my latest upload, and rendering ity caused me no memory problems whatsoever.  You can see it in all its glory at: [ **How Goodly**](http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1375868&member)

Credits: (From Left to Right)
P4 Man (Dork) custom morphed and textured to look like dphoadley. P5 Casual Boy in role of grandchild. P4 Girl with Anat's Lil morph and texture from Pitklad's Natalia Site, in role of granddaughter. P3 Business Man cloned and remapped by me to accept P4 skin textures, in role of tourist. P4 Man (Dork) morphed by me with morphs supplied by Pitklad's Domus, and momodot's MorphMan, in role of two Hasidic Jews.

The Hasidic Jew on the far right was clothed with Ghastley's Minuet Man breeches freebie, and the Poser 4 Man's Overcoat. His Striemel (Fur Hat) was made by taking Ghastley's Posette hunting top hat and fitting it with a morphable tube primitive from Gerald Day, and then texturing it with a freebie fur texture.
Background is a half tube primitive textured with a photo of Jerusalem as seen from Mount Scopus.
David P. Hoadley

Are you using the firefly renderer?  If so, in P6 I would constantly have my renders freeze up, then get the dread out of memory error (I too have 2gig ram).

The solution for me was to turn OFF "texture filtering".  Totally solved the problem.  If the textures are of good quality to start with, you wont notice any differences.

I know the problem very well - ran into OOMs more times than I care to remember.
Some tricks:

• Avoid dynamic hair. A real resource hog.
• Downsample textures. A 4000x4000 body texture on a background figure is a total waste of memory, 1000x1000 is more than enough. I've batch downsampled all my hires textures to med res and low res (somentimes even as low as 500x500), and made MAT poses for them. 
• Consider using lower poly figures for the background. Posette and Dork look as good as V3 and M3 at mid to long range, at less than a quarter of the polygon count.
• Consider making body parts invisible that won't be rendered anyway.
• Turn off texture filtering
• Lower the bucket size to 16
• Lower the maximum texture size to 1024

And sometimes even all these things won't do the job. Then I'd advise turning to another render engine. Although I've never tested them for myself, PoseRay (free) can convert your scene to a POVRay ready file, and POVRay (also free) is a very capable render engine. I've seen some stunning POVRay renders.

I usually use Vue 6 Infinite for complex scenes such as you describe. My latest render contains 30 human figures, quite a few props, and a fairly complex cave setting. Literally dozens of lights, with volumetrics. Completely impossible to render in Poser, but Vue 6 Infinite 64 bit didn't have a problem.

Thanks all of you for your information, I'll make a few tests and see what I come out with. Luckily it's a one time shot, so I don't have to run into this for many times :)
Thanks again,
Ragnar