Hello everyone,
First post (I think) in the Renderosity forums, despite being a member for longer than I can remember. I have a question about the Firefly render engine for Poser 6.

I run Poser off of an external HD hooked up to my laptop PC. I know that my machine isn't that powerful, and I will eventually get a proper desktop and (hopefully) not have this problem. As it stands now, I can only render a moderately sized scene that includes a single figure and about 5 or so lights without causing my system to crash. I keep the rendering settings low, don't use displacement maps, ray tracing, texture filtering, or any other fancy stuff, and keep the bucket size and maximum texture size fairly low. My PC still has good days and bad days though. I've been working on a multiple render project (that will later be composited in Photoshop) that never lets me render 2 times in a row. I always have to restart the crashed program in mid-second render. Yet last night I managed to get 12 renders of a different scene, of similar complexity and the same setting and lighting, one right after the other with no problem what so ever. Strange.

So, my question is this. How much, if at all, does the final "rendered to image size" affect the amount of system resources required by Poser? The only difference I can see between the 2 projects is the size. The "always crash" image was 2000px by 1000px, while the "12 in a row" images were only 1200px by 600px (both at 72DPI). Does the final image size really cause that much of a performance difference? Does the program have to create a larger shadow map or something? I suppose I should really dig out my manual and read up on the subject to make the most out of my limited resources...

Thanks for any help/advice you give me.

pc's are strange...
 
Theres 3 machines on my desk right now...
dell 1.4ghz - 512mb win 98 - IDE drives - 128mb NVIdia
generic box - 2.2 - 1.5gb - XPSP1 - SATA drives - updated to SP2 - 256 Nvidia 5600   
higrade laptop - 2.0 - 2.0gb - SP2 - crappy intel graphics. 

Neither the laptop or the generic can play Farcry without crashing. 
3dmark - a benchmarking tool - won't run on the laptop - jerky on the generic.

Vue 5 on the generic is slow - on the laptop stupidly fast even with IBL. 

Poser 5 and Pro pack on all is roughly the same - though files like V3 load fastest on the generic. Poser 7 is OK on the generic that does crash more when rendering animations than P6.

Poser 6 IBL on the generc is OK - on the laptop faster than a naked roller skating nun 
on a F-15.

Which makes me think a possible answer  to your question lies possibly with the graphics settings.  

If you don't use ray tracing the image size shouldn't matter much, because the rendering is done bucket by bucket. But of course a bigger picture needs more memory for storage, so that could be a part of your problem.

I had similar problems with Poser 6, my problem was that I had ony 512 k memory. If you can, upgrade your memory to 2 GB, that should help. Updating to Poser 7 would probably help too, since P7 handles textures in a very different way. I could render bigger pictures on my laptop after the upgrade, and quite a bit faster too. On my main computer things did not change that much, but then it had 2 GB of memory - enough for my small scenes.

One more tip: go in the hirarchy editor before rendering, and click visibility off for all body parts hidden below clothings or props. No need to waste memory and computer cycles for Vicky's hip and legs when you see the pants only.

Hope it helps a bit.

Hmmm... Yes, it appears that PCs are fickle things. I'll check the graphic settings on my machine and see if that does anything.

Good to know that Poser 6 renders the image bucket by bucket. Sometimes I've gone as small as 8px by 8px when creating an image, but that takes forever. Turning off hidden body parts is a great tip too, though I usually do nude renders or make use of "second skins". With such limited resources every extra figure that I include in a scene increases the chances of a system crash.

Interesting that Poser 7 handles textures differently than Poser 6. I might have to look into upgrading my software.

I use Poser on a Dell laptop. It wasn't built to handle 3D.
It's a wonder I can even run Poser on it at all.

Desktop's are built to handle 3D Laptop's aren't.

(MHO)

Depends on the laptop. My laptop has an nVidia 8600GM graphics chip with 512 MB dedicated video RAM, and 3D apps fly on that machine (including recent 3D games).
Although I admit that my desktops are better equipped for 3D (8800GT is way, way better than 8600).

Well, I just checked the stuff in my laptop. I've only got an AMD Sempron Processor 3000+ that gives me 1.8GHz of processing power and 192 MB of RAM. Just godawful. No wonder everything goes so slow! I guess the next step is to carefully examine the guts of my laptop and see if I can upgrade the stupid thing. If not, it'll be a while before I have the cash on hand to move up to a proper tower. Darn. Until that time I'll just be stuck doing small, single figure, non-ray traced, non-displacement mapped renders. Thanks for everyone's comments and help.

That 192 MB of RAM (which means 256 MB main memory, of which 64 MB is used for video) is your main problem. If your laptop has standard SO-DIMM modules, you can expand the RAM.
Chances are that it's DDR-SODOMM, it's unlikely that it's DDR2. A shame, because the older DDR-SODIMM modules are significantly more expensive than DDR2 (which won't work on your machine).
Still, I can highly recommend expanding your memory with 512 MB. Should be affordable (for a 512 MB module you'd pay around € 22,- including VAT in the Netherlands, should be less than $30 in the US).

True. You need more ram. The cpu isn't a top racer, but your problem is the memory. 192 MB will slow even the OS down, I can see that you cannot do much in Poser with that Memory. See how much memory you can put into your laptop, and go for the maximum, probably 1 or 2 GB.  This will help a lot.