Question.

I tried to create a scene with Poser 7. It includes the medieval Tavern Setup with bar-room. All Pre-Sets.
Also three of my characters I created seperate and imported into the scene.

1. It gets extremely slow, it's a pain to move the characters into place. (I tried to workaround the worst pain by morphing and posing the characters seperately a couple of days before.

2. When I start to render the program heavily breaks down up to a crash.

My system contains a non over-clocked:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo - E6850 3,00 GHz
4GB RAM (GEIL)
Vista Ultimate 64

First Poser was incapable to use the 4GB RAM...
I got myself a nice tool called "PE Explorer" to make Poser 7 using the full 4 GB RAM during rendering.

It only helped a little. Still, when I use scene presets including more than one character the rendering process dies after a while :-(

I tried it in two variations now. Rendering normally, full... or Rendering the area
Rendering the area brings a slightly better chance of success, yet the resolution is not as good as if I used the normal full rendering.

Any clues? (As I said, I am using preset stuff medieval Tavern, and only the tap-room not kitchen and or anything else. My three characters are M3, V4, M3... partially with their own textures)

Anything I might have missed? Is the size of the texture-files in total also an issue?
 

All versions of Poser are written in 32 bit instructions, and can only use up to 3GB of RAM, regardless of operating system.  Pretty much all 32 bit applications behave that way.

What render settings are you using?  screenshot please :)

Hi and thanks for the answer.

With PE Explorer you can force Poser to use more than 3 GB. When I render my stuff, just like this -> http://rhian-skyblade.deviantart.com/art/Having-a-chat-at-the-tavern-77009738 and my Perfomance-Monitor tells me that 3,75 - 3,8 are in use during the process. Nothing else beside Poser runs during that time.

(I do not dare to show my stuff here yet, until I am good enough :D )

This took nearly 1 hour of rendering.

The Background you see there belongs to the Medieval Tavern, and I used the Tap-Room / Bar Preset. It contains tables/chairs which you can't see and bottles, a bar, and a keg, and all such things. Nothing fancy with ray tracing... the only item I used ray-tracing for were the glasses/spectacles.

no no, how about a screenshot of your render settings :)

Will post two screenshot-links here in hmm 10 minutes. Need to wait for the rendering process to finish before I can access any menus.

For this I will edit this post.

Ok here it comes: http://rhian-skyblade.deviantart.com/gallery/#_browse/scraps

Three Screenshots.

The only thing I can think of to suggest is to "babysit" poser.exe, and when it grows to 2GB, minimize it, repeating as necessary; there are still some memory crashes that I have been able to avoid using this trick.

Thank you for those hints.
I am very new to this all and haven'´t dared to toy with the rendering settings yet. Impatient me couldn't wait to start doing some texturing and characters blush

I will try that with my next rendering attempt and let you know what the result was :)

Wow this really helps a lot. I think, the next coming weeks I will work through the chapters about render settings in my book. Perhaps there are some good clue how to achieve good results without straining my system way too much

Really you have some very conservative render settings, I don't think you will get much (possibly any) improvement by adjusting there.  Other things you can try is render with fewer polygons; use smaller texture maps (you can simply reduce large image maps in size if needed); or at worst, render with fewer objects in the scene and learn how to composite separate renders together in your image editor.

" Nothing else beside Poser runs during that time."

That's not true, you're running Windows.  And Windows is where Poser's math is calculated.  Poser does'nt have it's own Swap File, and relays on Window's; so Windows gets a pretty good workout, when Poser is around.  Windows XP has a Memory limit of 2GBs, per application; with Windows counting as an application.* * So that 4Gbs of RAM use you're seeing is'nt all Poser.

pjz99 - Applications that are Large Address Aware can receive 3GBs per application, but you would need Vista and Poser 7 to qualify there; unless you go with stewer's work around...

Rhiana - If you're using Vista and Poser the first thing you can look to is your Virtual Memory setting; where you'll, probably, need to increase it's opening size.  Your's should open at at least 2GBs.  This would allow 3GBs for Windows(2Physical(RAM) + 1 Virtual,) and the same for Poser.

The next thing you can look for, even before render settings, are your figures' morphs.  When you Save, as a .PZ3, how big is the scene?  There could, potentially be 100s of MBs wasted by Morphs set to "0".  This is especially true with Daz figures.  If you've got all of V3 loaded, with all of her morphs INJ'd, you're probably bogged pretty bad.  I could shave 190MBs, off a 250MB V3.PZ3, just by removing morphs set to zero; with SVDL's removemorphs.py.  And that's just the quicky.  If you're really interested in conserving space we can get into how I consolidated all of my V3.PZ3 morphs, and ended up saving 240MBs, off that 250MB .PZ3!

I still hav'nt seen the render setting?  I saw the link:

*http://rhian-skyblade.deviantart.com/gallery/#_browse/scraps

*but there are no images there.

Aside from that would you please post a link to PE Explorer?*

*OP is using 64-bit Windows and Poser 7, already stated. 

Processes can claim a full 3gb if compiled with the 3gb switch (and Poser 7 is); Windows native processes run in their own process space.  Additionally, each process can claim up to 3gb of swap file; see Poser doing just this in the task list screenshot I showed above (not this one, a few posts back).

edit: uh, forgot to mention - when poser 7 gets anywhere near 3gb of RAM though, it blows up in my experience.

Ah, missed that spec., sorry.

pjz - Are you running Vista, how many bit?  Hey, am I seeing Poser having run for 182 hours!?

Running Windows XP Pro 64-bit - yes, that is really 182 hours of CPU time, but keep in mind most of it is split across 4 cores during rendering; so it's really more like 45 hours of total real rendering time.

Awsome!  I really need to learn more about 64bit, thanks!*

"Additionally, each process can claim up to 3gb of swap file;"*

So how were you getting 3,567,036K, from Virtual; that's like an extra .5+ GB?  If you've got Poser running in a multi-core CPU, can each process you're running Poser in have 3GBs, of Virtual?  How much could each process have of Physical RAM?  And how many process' can you run Poser in, all 4?

I'm really not sure why it went over 3GB there, from what I know it "isn't supposed to".

Poser (all versions) only runs in 1 process, which is limited to 3GB; when rendering in Poser 7, the renderer runs in multiple threads within that single process, up to four threads - but all sharing that 3GB of process RAM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_%28computer_science%29#Threads_compared_with_processes

2/20/08

I am not running 64 bit, but I traced a portion of my Poser instability problem to overheating in my computer case. Poser is memory, disk, and processor intensive. I frequently hear the processor fan pick up speed while rendering. Make sure that there is adequate ventilation in the case. Overheated compants do not work well, and can lead to system instability and crashes.

LMK

That 3 GB limit applies to Windows XP 32 bit when started with the /3GB switch. In a native 64 bit environment, 32 bit applications compiled with the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag can use up to 4 GB of address space.

Several of my scenes could NOT be rendered in XP, not even with the /3GB boot switch. But they could render in XP64.
One of those renders went up to 3.8 GB in FFRender.exe (could not be rendered with the internal renderer).

Hi everyone and thanks for sharing your insights! :)

And also a big thank you to Angelouscuitry :)

As soon as I am home, I will check for the virtual space.

Does it also make sense to tell Poser 7 to render hardware based (does Poser use my graphic card then? because it already uses the CPUs and RAM haha) and not software based? Sorry not home right now so dunno where I saw it. Only know it were two check boxes.

I will try to tune down the morph stuff until only those are loaded I need (Given, it's not a whole package of morphes) I probably have to redo my toon, since I made her with V4.1 ... and now I cannot load the new muscle morphs into her (only works with newly made V4.2 chars). She is still running around with the normal facial morphs. Unless there is a way to turn her into V4.2 with Poser.

For M3 it is easily possible. He has single morphs for face, lips, eyes and so on.

Will write more when I am back from work :)

PS:
Poser uses the Dual Core CPU fully...but here it doesn't matter if you have a 32 bit or 64 bit OS.

And for using more than 3GB, you will have to use a 64 bit OS & a tool and force Poser to suck up more than that. I use "PE Explorer" for that. Sadly 4GB is for 32 Bit Software like Poser the technical utmost maximum. :-/ too bad.

Poser 7 will use 4 GB on 64 bit systems out of the box. PE explorer is meant for 32 bits applications that were NOT compiled with the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag. No need to use PE Explorere on Poser 7

I had a horrible time with that Tavern from Daz. It is resource heavy. I will also try you tips.

BTW Windows Xp has a memory limit of 4 GB, not 2. Vista goes up to 8.

Hmm I apparently didn't explain it well.

I run Vista Ultimate 64 and that was not the reason why I got myself PE Explorer :D

I used that tool to change the flag (you also can use EditBin) for Poser 7 to use more than max 2 or 3 GB. Because it doesn't use more than that without the changed flag. Reason why I started all this fuss :-/

Now Poser 7 uses during my more complex scenery renders about 3,8 - 3,89 GB of RAM.
Even if I had 8 GB, Poser 7 can't be forced to use more than max. 4 GB...

Too bad. I wonder why they do not create 64 bit versions that work with much more RAM than now.

THat is what I'm trying to explain. Poser 7 DOES use up to 4 gb on a 64 bits OS. Out of the box. No need to change the flag, it's compiled right in.
Poser 6 and older, on the other hand, are traditional 32 bit applications, limited to 2 GB, and PE Explorer can be used to change that.

Since Poser 7 is STILL a 32 bit application, the maximum amount of memory it can use is 2^32 bytes = 4 GB. The 2 GB limit imposed by Windows XP 32 bit is due to a (rather arbitrary) decision by Microsoft years ago that the upper half of the available address space was reserved for DLLs and system, and the lower half for user processes.

Full 64 bit applications can use far more memory. XP 64 bit and Vista 64 bit allow up to 128 GB of address space per process AFAIK.  At this time the limit is hardware imposed, theoretically XP 64 and Vista 64 applications should have an address space of 2^63 bytes each (8 exabyte, whcih is 8192 terabyte).

I have Vue 6 Infinite 64 bit, and on several occasions it has used over 20 GB of address space.