I'm another P6 user frustrated by Poser's inherent memory clogs when attempting to do a decent render on more than three detailed figures. I've tried the usual ways of reducing runtime overhead using SVDL's and Ockham's excellent python scripts, etc. but still have problems when rendering.I've thought of upgrading to P7 just to get an external renderer freed from Poser overheads but, apart from the rendering issue, I'm quite happy with P6.

As Vue Easel is cheaper than upgrading to P7, is this a better course to follow?

Vue's renderer crushes all versions of Poser in two major ways:
Global Illumination
Area lights (not certain Easel does that, Infinite does for sure)

Quote - Vue's renderer crushes all versions of Poser in two major ways:
Global Illumination
Area lights (not certain Easel does that, Infinite does for sure)

Thanks for the speedy response but does it have any 'out of memory' issues like Poser?

In my experience with Vue 6 under 32-bit Windows, it was a heavy memory user - when I switched to 64-bit Windows and the 64-bit version of Vue 6 Infinite (I know, different version from Easel) it was MUCH better behaved, effectively ending "out of memory" problems.  Maybe others who are Easel users have more information.  From reading the feature lists it doesn't look like Easel offers a 64-bit version.

AFAIK Vue actually needs more RAM then Poser to run comfortably. It's just less prone to crashing if it doesn't get enough. And like pjz99 said, it does have a few cool features over P7, though they can take a very long time to render.

P7 is better at RAM management then P6, but it's still buggy when it nears its 32 bit limits. For me it starts becoming unstable at 2.0-2.5GB+ even though i have a 64 bit OS and 4GB RAM.

^^ P7 behaves about the same for me as well.  Still, depending on many things like texture data, I've been able to render 21 figures together in the same scene without crashing, even if it was a pretty unrealistic test (no textures or shading or complex lighting, small amount of morph data, etc).
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2734602&page=3#message_3199565

Quote - Vue's renderer crushes all versions of Poser in two major ways:
Global Illumination
Area lights (not certain Easel does that, Infinite does for sure)

Im not sure about Easel, but as a Vue 6.x Infinite user, I far prefer the rich atmospheres of Vue to Poser. Poser 7 is in many ways far better than Poser 6 and Ive achieved some renders I am really happy with with Poser 7. But...far easier to achieve something beautiful in Vue.

As far as I know, Vue 6 Easel is a standard 32 bit application limited to 2GB of address space.
It MIGHT be the way to go, but much depends on the kind of scenes you want to make.
If you want to make outdoor scenes, with lots of terrains, rocks, vegetation, and good looking atmospheres and skies - and good looking water! -  Vue Easel can do this far better than Poser 7. You can incorporate a limited amount of Poser figures into such a Vue scene, and it'll render just fine.

On the other hand, if you want to concentrate on the human figures, you're probably better off with P7, especially when you run it on XP 64 bit or Vista 64 bit. Poser 7 can use up to 4 GB of address space on a 64 bit OS, and I've rendered up to 8 figures in P7 with strand based hair (where Poser 6 invariably crashed if more than 2 figures had strand based hair).
This was on a quad core machine running Vista Ultimate 64 bit and 8 GB pf physical RAM.

If you want to do both multiple figure renders AND massive outdoor environments (like I do, see my "The Stand" series in the galleries here warning:nudity in that series), Vue 6 Infinite is by far the best you can get. Again, on Vista64 or XP64 and some pretty powerful hardware.

Many thanks for the responses!

Quote - In my experience with Vue 6 under 32-bit Windows, it was a heavy memory user - when I switched to 64-bit Windows and the 64-bit version of Vue 6 Infinite (I know, different version from Easel) it was MUCH better behaved, effectively ending "out of memory" problems.  Maybe others who are Easel users have more information.  From reading the feature lists it doesn't look like Easel offers a 64-bit version.

I'm running P6 under 32 bit Windows with 2 Gig of RAM (and a pretty large swap file!)  so I guess I might still have problems with Vue Easel.  I must admit the quality of Vue renders I've seen is very impressive compared to even the best P6 (and P7) renders, so I think I'll head that way.

One other point.  I'm using Morph reduction scripts and Mini-Me to turn posed figures into the smallest possible file sizes but I still have render problems.  I would guess this is because of the textures overhead across V3 and Apollo figures when they have several items of attire.   Question: does Vue require multiple instances of these textures across a figure in memory or is one instance shared across figure parts?    I believe this may be part of my memory problem with P6 renders

From my experiences with Vue 6 Esprit I have the feeling that Vue uses one texture instance only. But I cannot really confirm this.

You should concider to rescale the used textures, since most Poser textures are much too hi-res for normal renders. A figure on a 12001000 render does not need two 40004000 textures. If you scale the textures down, memory needs will scale down too.

Just my 2 cents.

As you're talking about 3 or more figures, then you're not talking about a close-up render but a wider scene.  In this situation the solution suggested by bantha is a good one.  There are likely to be 6 large textures associated with human figures (assuming one for the head and one for the body) plus you may have equally large textures for the clothes (which may cover the body skin texture anyway).

There's a tutorial here that explains the process.

Vue is a worthy upgrade (I've got P7 and Vue Esprit) but you're still going to have a potential memory problem whichever program is used for rendering with the amount of data being handled.

Does anyone know about Vue xstream 6 ?

I have used vue 6 esprite and inf and xtreem, i own esprite 5 and 6 and was given 5 inf as friends brother working in far east for 3 years, so 3 years of fun with program till he gets back.
Problem is don't believe the hype as i bought esprite 6 and a dual core machine as wanted for p7 as well, vue 6 esprite is a glorious rip off program as it not dual support and does not have memory capability of inf and above.
It should have had dual and quad support and same memory handle as higher versions, and on a poser scene i have had 6 esprite crash on q6600 with 512 gt card 2 gb mem inf and xtreeem handle memory better.
I took scene round to friends they put on near same spec machine as mine under xp 32 and 64, and esprite and inf and xtreem crashed out.
I left scene with them for their friends and they render the scene in every other 3d application max resolution without crashing.
Yes i you got 4gb of memory or above helps but that's not the point, E-on lied about vue could import poser scenes with normal machine.
I have used xtreem and it is a superb piece of kit, so if you want render low poly poser stuff in vue not bad, for non poser stuff vue is a bloody superb program.
I render max resolution on p7 in 32 and 64 as it has superb mem handle just experiment.

Vue is just far superior in quality when it comes to rendering than Poser. This is not to say you can't achieve quality with Poser because you sure can. But give someone with artistic quality both programs & I'm sure you'd see the difference. Once you've worked with GI & GR it's hard to go back to Poser. There is just so many cool features. I feel the only thing in Poser 7's favour compared to Vue is the price tag.

Regarding memory. I use Vue 6 Infinite but I only have 1GB RAM. This really isn't enough but I work accordingly. I won't have more than two figures in a scene & I purge my memory constantly. If you can downsize those textures then that will be a huge factor. The only thing is you'll probably need the large textures if you need the detail for high resolutions for print. But, problem again, if you're doing large file outputs that'll eat more memory as well.

Basically, if you can afford Vue it's worth getting. If you can afford more RAM, the better.

Just an update:

On the Vue forums, I've seen reference to a tutorial about importing Poser items into Vue which has some valuable information about reducing texture sizes:

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/18.html

Well worth the read as it's put my mind at rest about duplicating textures, etc.

Many thanks to all for your valuable insights

Vue Easel here I come (when my credit card has cooled down!)

One thing you must do for these High memory apps if you're running windows is set up a large paging file, poser desperstely needs it and I'm sure Vue does too.  The paging file gets used as ram sortof, when you run out of ram windows uses the paging file as virtual ram,  I have an 8gb paging file set up so with my 2gb of actual ram and my 8gb of virtual ram I effectively have 10 gb of ram.

To set it up: on your computer, go to start/ control panel/ system/ Advanced tab/ under performance click the settings button/ Advanced tab/ under virtual mem click the change button/
chose which drive you want your paging file on/ select custom size/ in the two boxes enter 4000 and 4096   save that setting. and you will have to restart your computer.  If you have a second drive in your computer you can set up a paging file on it as well.  the largest paging file you can have on a single drive is 4096.

Beleive me this will help enormously.

cheers

Don't forget that for distant figures (and often for nearer ones) you can use procedural textures instead of texture maps (how often can you see the vein structure of someone who is 100 yards away?) This works for bot Poser and Vue, of course.

Also, Vue has (at least, Vue 5 I does - don't know about other versions) the ability to decimate meshes (that is, reduce the number of vertices/polygons, by an adjustable factor). For more distant figures this can also help in reducing memory overheads..

I now only render in Poser to check things out. I don't texture in Poser (unless I need specific texture maps), I do it all in Vue. Poser has become my (very necessary) figure posing application - which is where it all started from... :biggrin:

Cheers,
Diolma

The maximum page file size is dependent on the amount of physcal RAM. On my Athlon64x2 4400 machine with 4 GB of physical RAM, the maximum page file size is more than 4 GB (haven't tried out what the max is, I just entered a "reasonable" 6 GB).
Distributing the page file across multiple physical drives can help performance, because Windows will use the drive that is the least active when it wants to swap out some pages.

Quote - The maximum page file size is dependent on the amount of physcal RAM. On my Athlon64x2 4400 machine with 4 GB of physical RAM, the maximum page file size is more than 4 GB (haven't tried out what the max is, I just entered a "reasonable" 6 GB).
Distributing the page file across multiple physical drives can help performance, because Windows will use the drive that is the least active when it wants to swap out some pages.

A much better understanding than me, I just remember doing it for my system which only has 2 gb of ram. That makes sense. learn something every day.

cheers.

Just remember that no amount of swap space can actually increase the amount of memory a single program can use which is 2 GB on normal Windows, 3 GB when large address aware (Poser 7 is, other versions not), and 4 GB on Windows 64 (for 32 bit programs, no real limit for 64 bit programs).

Swap space helps when you have multiple programs running (and since the OS is actually running several programs all the time you are always running multiple programs) and you have a limited amount of RAM. On normal (32 bit) Windows there is no need to ever have more than 8 GB in total (a maximum of 3 GB real memory and 5 GB swap space), on 64 bit Windows you want as much as possible.

Akso, if you're using three figures, the level of detail in the texture map doesnt need to be as high, so you could take the textures themselves into Photoshop and reduce their size, which will reduce the amount of memory needed to render them. Face it: if the figures are all more or less full body shots, do you really need a 4000x4000 head texture map? Probably not: you can whack it down to 1000x1000 and still have a high quality image, while using 1/8th the memory needed to handle it.

Insofar as which render engine is better? It depends on the image. If you need a lot of atmosphere, then yes, Vue is the way to go. But if it's just three figures posed in an environment that suggests controlled lighting (like an interior of some kind), Poser is better.

Quote - Just remember that no amount of swap space can actually increase the amount of memory a single program can use which is 2 GB on normal Windows, 3 GB when large address aware (Poser 7 is, other versions not), and 4 GB on Windows 64 (for 32 bit programs, no real limit for 64 bit programs).

Swap space helps when you have multiple programs running (and since the OS is actually running several programs all the time you are always running multiple programs) and you have a limited amount of RAM. On normal (32 bit) Windows there is no need to ever have more than 8 GB in total (a maximum of 3 GB real memory and 5 GB swap space), on 64 bit Windows you want as much as possible.

 
Interesting things to learn, I never knew exactly how it worked just that it worked.
I had all the same problems with memory clogs ect. that  people in this thread  and others were having,  I couldn't do much of a scene and render it, always got errors out of mem ect. So I went looking and found this about setting up a paging file in the documentation that came with Poser. And since I set up my paging files I have not had any problems since, with memory.
Plus it helped in other non poser areas as well. I run all sorts of apps at the same time, 3dsMax, Zbrush2, Zbrush3, Maya,UV mapper, and run around on the internet. Befor I set up the paging file I couldn't even run Max and Zbrush together.

I wish I had a 64bit windows, I have heard that its so much better for 3d than 32 bit. I am about to upgrade my whole system soon, and that is definitely one of the things I want is the 64 bit windows.

cheers.

Mike

Quote - The maximum page file size is dependent on the amount of physcal RAM. On my Athlon64x2 4400 machine with 4 GB of physical RAM, the maximum page file size is more than 4 GB (haven't tried out what the max is, I just entered a "reasonable" 6 GB).

You can actually set your page file size to whatever you want in Windows as long as it is smaller or equal to the maximum that Windows allows and can handle. The problem is that Windows will only use a certain amount of it. When you manually set your swap file size you will see a recommendation that Windows makes as to what your swap file size should be, as well as a maximum size.

The accepted standard for swap file size is 1.5 x the amount of RAM you have in your machine. This is also what Windows bases its recommended size on.

Quote - Distributing the page file across multiple physical drives can help performance, because Windows will use the drive that is the least active when it wants to swap out some pages.

The problem with this is that it is not always that clear cut when put into practice for three reasons -

Firstly, regardless of whether you let Windows manage your swap file size or set it manually, there is the above maximum that still applies and there is nothing that can be done to extend this.
 
Let's say for example you have 4 hard drives. You have set up your swap file to extend across the second (D:), third (E:) and fourth drives (F:) as per the recommended configuration (this is strongly advised because any disk I/O on your Windows partition slows swap file access down so you want your swap file to be on other drives to give it the most throughput you can as well as allow Windows to load its own files as quickly as possible). Now, if you have a 3Gb swap file with 1Gb chunks on each drive, and your application is using 2 Gb of it, it's obvious that Windows cannot allocate the application's swap space to the drive that has the least activity bcause it is necessary to fill up more than each swap file chunk can handle. This means that you cannot say with any certainty that your application's data will always hit a particular drive which has some of your swap file space allocated to it.

What's also important is that if you have more than one application using the swap file Windows will employ a first in first out approach to filling the swap file. This means that part or all of the chunks of your swap space on your fastest or least used drive may already be used so the application you may want to use that space can't.

The second thing is that using the least busy hard drive's swap space is a great idea in theory but very hard to enforce in practice. Windows will make a best-effort to manage your swap space for you but will not always do so completely economically for a whole bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that the more time Windows consumes on managing the data being written to the swap file, the longer it takes to actually write the data.

The last problem is that your least utilised hard drive may not be your fastest. Windows doesn't make any changes or allowances in the way it stores data or utilises swap space based on the performance of your hard drives. If you have 2 fast SATA II drives with NCQ (Native Command Queuing) technology and an old 120Gb PATA ATA/100 drive and your swap file extends across all three drives, Windows will not make allowances for the fact that the 120Gb is probably 5 times slower than the two SATA II drives.

In my experience, the best possible way to enhance your swap file performance is to place it all on a small but very fast drive which is used for nothing else at all. Something like a fast 80Gb NCQ drive would work nicely. Secondly you want to make sure that your swap file is NEVER fragmented. Fragmentation will always occur if you let Windows dynamically manage your swap space for you. What you should do is, once you have installed your Operating System, set both your swap file minimum and maximum sizes to the same recommended 1.5 x your RAM size on a different drive to the default that Windows puts the swap file on when you installed it. This ensures that a new single contiguous file is written to the new swap file drive and the size will never change because minimum and maxiumum sizes are the same. Windows will not let you completely remove your swap file on your default Windows drive but it will make it very very small (16Mb if memory serves me well).

Please don't take offence svdl! I wasn't trying to shoot you down. I was just adding my 2c of knowledge to the equation. :biggrin:

Wow! that's cool. So since I only have 2gb actuall memory, I should have a swap file of about 3gb on my fastest drive that is not my windows drive, and make the min max the same.?  I don't have a whole drive I can spare for just a swap file. But am I understanding correctly?

That's about it Phantom. What you should do is run a defrag on the drive you want to put your swap file on first which will also prevent fragmentation. Just remember that you also don't want the drive to be used very heavily by other applications either. You will have to weigh up the pro's and con's and take it from there.

Of course if you really want to get technical you can also make sure that your swap file is located on the outside of the platter of the hard drive instead of the inside because data is transferred to and from the drive faster at the outer edges but that's another whole kettle of worms.

{{{{On the Vue forums, I've seen reference to a tutorial about importing Poser items into Vue which has some valuable information about reducing texture sizes:}}}}}}-------__-------
What is a joke about this is E-on stated that they had worked with E-frontier on implementing poser imports into vue 6 and as such i and other people bought into the E-on lies.
I was not amused to find my money stolen for a cheap cut down version of Inf which esprite is, as single core and handles memory inferior to Inf and above.
If they had worked with poser programmers then they would have written vue 6 to import poser stuff without having all the bloody memory problems, and i ain't doing side grade to 6 pro studio.
That company will never have any of my money again, no more will i have my money stolen on a pack of lies, the no of people around the world who are spitting mad they ripped of over vue 6 esprite.
Funny thing is because of what was done with 6 esprite 1 year after vue 7 out you most probably find 60% of people posting vue stuff will not be using an original.
I bought 5 esprite and was given 5 inf as gift, but vue 6 i bought because, i bought into the lies that can render all poser stuff i make,.
For small poser bits and non poser stuff vue is fantastic for what it can do, but i and other people will never ever by a vue product again, im sorry when ya tell lies then that's it.
They should never have said you could bring poser stuff into vue when they new full bloody well lots stuff wont import and certain size poser imports will crash program.
They will make vue 7 esprite a cheapy cut  down version of Inf and above.

urbanarmitage: no worries, I'm not that easily offended :)
You added a lot of extra detail to my previous post, and you're definitely right about setting up the swap file to use only the faster drives in the system. One of my machines is set up that way: it's got 2 74 Gb Raptor drives (very fast), one 300 GB SATA-II drive (non-NCQ, alas) and one 160 GB PATA drive.
I set up Windows on one of the Raptors, and the swap file on the other Raptor. Extending the swap file to the SATA-II drive didn't increase performance, and extending the swap file to the PATA drive actually did decrease performance. This is consistent with what you wrote.

There's one thing I'd like to correct: when an OS (not only Windows, Linux/Unix and Mac OSX work exactly the same way) swaps out memory, it writes one or more pages of a certain fixed size (OS dependent, in Windows it's 4096 bytes per page) to the swap file. This disk access is cached, so the importance of the disk speed is lessened.
If an application uses a huge amount of swap space, it will usually mean that swapping pages in and out will happen quite often, but not that the transfers themselves will be huge. You can monitor the amount of swapping with Task Manager (the Page Faults column tells you how many pages had to be loaded from the swap file).
When you have a small amount of physical RAM, you'll see that the application will have a lot of page faults per second. A clear indication that you should get more RAM.
A shortage of physical RAM will not only increase the amount of swapping, it will also diminish the performance of the swap file per se. Reason: the amount of memory set aside by the OS for disk caching will also be too small.

Disk cache is the reason that Windows ALWAYS puts application data in the swap file, even if there's more than enough RAM available for Windows itself, the entire application, plus all of its data. The more disk cache Windows has available, the less physical read/writes to the swap file have to occur. And it's the physical disk access that's slow, easily 1000 times slower than memory access.
Disk cache is also the reason that installing more than 2 GB of RAM on a Windows 32 bit system is NOT a waste of resources. The applications may not be able to use the address space, but Windows will use the RAM for disk cache.

jugoth - I guess some people get unlucky. I have Vue 6 Infinite & I import Poser stuff all the time, & I only have 1GB RAM.
Yes, maybe Esprit has more memory issues but most people can work around any problems they may have.
E-on still has alot to do to get this program perfect regarding Poser import but the pros far outweigh the cons in my view.

3DS Max is more crash prone than Vue on my systems.
Vue 6 Infinite works VERY well on both XP 64 bit and Vista 64 bit, and a decent bit of hardware (Q6600, nVidia 7800GTX/nVidia 8800GT, 8 GB RAM).
And I've imported up to 30 Poser figures, hires textures and all, into a single scene, without crashing Vue.
This would not have worked with the reposing and Poser shader tree options. Then again, I tend to set up the partial scenes in Poser very, very carefully, so that reposing is not needed. And I prefer to use the Vue material system throughout. In my opinion, the mixture of Vue materials and Poser materials just doesn't look good, the scene looses integrity.

svdl - So when you imported the 30 figures, these were without textures?

I import them WITH textures - I simply load the .pz3s. One .pz3 per figure, including clothes and hair.
After importing, I adjust the materials and save the imported .pz3 out as a Vue .VOB file, then I delete the imported Poser object from the scene.
Finally, I rebuild the scene from all the .VOB objects made in the previous step. This workflow allows me to create huge Vue scenes. 

Even though you converted them to VOBs I'm still amazed you could work with 30 figures. There again, your 8 gigs to my 1 is a huge difference!
How low did your resources get?

Hmm, can't remember exactly. Something in the order of 30%-40%, and the system remained fairly responsive.
And the fact that I'm running 64 bit makes a huge difference. That scene was plainly impossible in Vue 5 Infinite. The max I got in Vue 5 Inf was about 20 figures, quite a lot of them lower res (Posette/V2 level) with reduced resolution textures.

So, altogether how much resources do you reckon you saved by reloading the figures as VOB's rather than  PZ3's?
It's been along time since I saved anything as a VOB.

Again, it's a guess. This workflow allows for about 1.5 to 2 times the number of Poser figures in the scene compared to straignt Poser imports. Of course YMMV

Quote - jugoth - I guess some people get unlucky. I have Vue 6 Infinite & I import Poser stuff all the time, & I only have 1GB RAM.
Yes, maybe Esprit has more memory issues but most people can work around any problems they may have.
E-on still has alot to do to get this program perfect regarding Poser import but the pros far outweigh the cons in my view.

Vue may have some problems, but in looking through the galleries, the results I see coming out of Vue definitely makes me want to learn how to use it.  I'm sure that the problems with it will get worked out.  All I know about it is what I see and it puts out some gorgeous stuff!

I want to put together a better computer system too, mine was never ment to be more than an office computer to start with.