Ok Poser6 patched. I am trying to render V4 with a char and an AS outfit witha nice tex from OOT I believe. It goes into the render then drops the render. I crank as many settings as low as I can. I use raytracing, black BG, set tes res to 4096 then when i turn it down by half and the bucket size all the way to 8 it renders. This is a Dell 3ghz machine with a good card and 2 gb of ram. What is it about Poser6 that is so freaking unstable? As far as i`m concerned i wont buy any more versions of Poser because I have many problems with 6.
TIA

Start your render
Start Task Manager
Click the Processes tab
Sort by Image Name (optional, but helpful)
Locate Poser.exe
Look at the Mem Usage column for Poser.exe
As that number approaches 2,000,000 (2 gigabytes), minimize Poser.  If you allow Poser.exe to get too near 2GB, it blows up and dies.  As you do this, you'll see the Mem Usage for Poser.exe reduce down to a far smaller number (usually less than 60MB for me).  
It will start growing again.  Repeat as necessary.

This won't interrupt the render, but it will hold off the dreaded out of memory crash while rendering quite a bit.  Very annoying during long renders though.

at this point ill try just about anything, thank you. the other problem is that sometime when poser has been minimized it wont return. but ill give it a try. I`m trying to learn carrara so i dont have to render in Poser, but I do like a poser render.
:)

Disable "adaptive bucket size", that way Poser will use 200-300 MB more memory before it decides that the memory is full.

will try that also Dizzi, thank you.

I know you said you wouldn't buy any more Poser versions... but I had problems like the one you described every time I tried to render anything but very simple scenes in Poser 6.

In Poser 7 - NO problems. I can render far more complex scenes now. I tried with a scene that never finished in Poser 6 (kept giving me the Out of Memory error no matter what I did) and Poser 7 looked at it, smiled at me and rendered the picture.

One of the reasons is that the memory handling has been much improved. And Poser 7 does take dual/quad cores into consideration.

I can heartily recommend an upgrade.

Memory handling in P7 has definitely improved. One of the areas of improvement is the address space it can use.
P6 can use up to 2 GB of address space, just like any other 32 bit application.
P7 can use up to 4 GB of address space. Although it's still a 32 bit application, it's compiled with the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag, Under Windows XP Pro you can set a swtich ( /3G) in the boot.ini file which will tell Windows to reserve 3 GB of address space for applications, instead of tue usual 2 GB. Under Windows XP Home you're out of luck, 2 GB it is. And under XP Pro 64 bit, Poser 7 can make use of 4 GB total.
Note: this is about virtual memory address space. The amount of physical RAM in the computer doesn't have much to do with it.

Thx, I just dont trust Poser anymore.....and after having spent quite a bit of money over the past several years dont want to spend anything else. I`ve bought way too many resources that dont look like the advert or just dont work. Sadly I will not be able to afford to move into max or maya or anything of the kind, the cost is prohibitive. Looks like the rest of my life will be bryce/poser(until I kill it)/carrara.
Thank you.

Quote - Start your render
Start Task Manager
Click the Processes tab
Sort by Image Name (optional, but helpful)
Locate Poser.exe
Look at the Mem Usage column for Poser.exe
As that number approaches 2,000,000 (2 gigabytes), minimize Poser.  If you allow Poser.exe to get too near 2GB, it blows up and dies.  As you do this, you'll see the Mem Usage for Poser.exe reduce down to a far smaller number (usually less than 60MB for me).  
It will start growing again.  Repeat as necessary.

This won't interrupt the render, but it will hold off the dreaded out of memory crash while rendering quite a bit.  Very annoying during long renders though.

Hi pzj99... clarification question:  what do you mean by "minimize Poser"?  I see an option in Task Manager to check "Minimize on Use" but don't see any manual option for doing something called "minimize" for a particular process.  Do you mean minimize on the desktop?  Thanks for any enlightment!  Tguyus

ah!  Thanks.  I was looking under the processes tab. 

Is "tes res" maximum texture size?   There can't be many textures that require, or are even grateful for, a size of 4096, I suspect.    I don't know how exactly that setting impacts CPU or memory, but, if there really are textures that size being loaded, you could probably reduce their size substantially and still have a very fine result.   

Reducing the bucket size often does allow a render to complete, more slowly, when it won't complete at all with a larger bucket-size defined.   Poser is supposed to reduce the bucket automatically, if the complexity of the rendering calculations is going to overwhelm the system resources.   That does happen, but I believe it happens more reliably at Poser 7.

I use pjz99's technique for freeing storage quite a lot.   With Poser 6,  you need to follow svdl's remarks:  there can never be anything north of 2Gb of memory in action and quite a lot of those 2Gb will always be taken by those annoying programmes that insist on scanning each other all day long.   I tend to minimise Poser well before it reaches 1Gb, but it doesn't always work, because the scene won't always return when it is maximised.   There will always be a delay before Poser draws the current state of the render, though, so don't despair, if you initially see a blank scene and a "Not Responding" flag in the window.

As far as Carrara is concerned, Poser 7 can't import directly to Carrara.   Poser 6 can handle just about anything that comes out of Poser 7 and Carrara 5 can handle most output from Poser 6.    If Carrara is your intended final render engine, though, don't waste time in developing elaborate materials in Poser (any release), because Carrara can't handle them.   Its own texture engine is very sophisticated, so anything Poser can do, I'd guess, Carrara can also do, but you need to work out how to achieve the same effect all over again.

Quote - Is "tes res" maximum texture size?   There can't be many textures that require, or are even grateful for, a size of 4096, I suspect.

If you want lower rez texture files, as long as you keep the same aspect ratio, you can just reduce any given texture resolution in an image editor (as you're implying, just spelling it out).

Some of Aery Souls tecs are that big, and have crashed me, and ive solved it by reducing the resolution. I generally reduce the bucket size to 8 and turn off tex filtering and shadows. i`ve been over it so many times and I reduce what I have been told I can reduce to the minimum. 
 Minimizing it works well, but ya have to babysit it.