I created a scene to render in Poser 5, and after 2 days of waiting trying to be patient to let the render finish, its STILL adding objects. Even worse, the progress bar has NOT moved, its just "stuck", doesnt seem to be doing anything...

Poser has alwasy been a great tool, but in all honesty, I LOATHE using it to render scenes. Lighting, lack of atmosphere, and this "no progress" when rendering is just too much...

I wanted to see if anyone else has this problem, or if its "just me"... Is it the settings?!? Are my lights too much to handle?!? Too many objects in the scene?!? After 2 days of waiting to see nothing, Im sure you guys will understand my frustration...

Im trying very hard NOT to kill the render, but I dont know what, if anything, Poser 5 is doing... Opinions, help or suggestions?!?

If you're using lots of lights with depth-mapped shadows, the renderer can spend
an amazing amount of time reloading the objects and calculating
shadow maps for each light.  The cure for this is either to cut down
the number of lights, or switch from depth-mapped to ray-tracing.

But in any case, Poser will sometimes get bogged down for no obvious
reason.  Don't be afraid to stop the render.  A restart, perhaps
after a reboot of the computer, may proceed normally.

I think you should upgrade

the core and renderer of poser 5, 6, 7 and PP are not really changed. theyve added new features, tweaks, etc but if you are putting together scenes that make Poser 5 hang indefinitely then do not assume that an upgrade to Poser 7 will necessarily render them smoothly.

IMO have a look at your lighting, shadow and render settings/options.
try a simple troubleshooting process of rendering at low settings with no shadows and 1x AntiAliasing in workspace resolution first, if that renders then try with higher settings, etc. it might just be one simple setting causing it to hang like texture filtering, etc.

Quote - the core and renderer of poser 5, 6, 7 and PP are not really changed. theyve added new features, tweaks, etc but if you are putting together scenes that make Poser 5 hang indefinitely then do not assume that an upgrade to Poser 7 will necessarily render them smoothly.

There have been changes to Poser 6 and 7 that address some of the problems which Poser 5 has, so an upgrade may help. AFAIK there have been changes to the adding object phase, so the problem occuring here might be fixed already...

I wanted to remain calm and patient, and make sure I wasnt cutting it before its time, but still, nothing had rendered...

Take a look at what I have, maybe Im doing something wrong... I didnt think the lights were "too" much, and Im well aware that there are a ton of props and textures being used, but is it such that it shouldnt render?!? The hair shouldnt be too much either, Poser renders hair all the time, and Ive used that light set and hair on dozens of Poser renders before...

(Im gonna hush, and see what you guys think)

Thanks for the help!!!

If you don't need smooth polys for any of the figures/props...turning that off can help occasionally (mainly with render speed), as well as setting a smaller bucket size down from 32.

Also, if you have any parts of the props/figures that aren't visible in the main window, try making them invisible if you can. Poser "usually" ignores stuff it can't see, and if it's not visible, it doesn't need to be calculated into the whole render process.

But it's been a while since I used P5...so grain of salt coming from me...

Another thing is that shadows take forever to render.  From what I can tell of your light
control panel, you have 14 spot lights, each with ray traced shadows.  And there are a lot
of things in your scene.  So for every object in the scene, Poser has to calculate 14
different shadows for it.  So do you really need every single light casting a shadow?
Or could you maybe cheat and just have a few lights casting shadows, like maybe
the brightest lights or lights where there is a particular emphasis on certain objects.
Or even more drastic, do you really need 14 spot lights?  Perhaps maybe an infinite
light here or there would be sufficient, with again spot lights on objects you want to
emphasize.

Looks like you are overweight. Depends on your system,, memory... But some have rendered armies with a half gig of ram

You can bring in one prop at a time until you choke, or you can make the front figures invisible,, render the rest,,, import it(render.tiff) as a background, make bg objects invisible,, figure visible,,, render.

This seems the quickest option to me. The lights... I cannot tell without more info.

I think the problem is with the lights somewhere matcreator.

At least thats what I think the problem is for me.

I had the same problem recently with Poser 5.

For some reason when you have lots of lights, and lots of shadows Poser doesn't like to render them.

I'm pretty much stuck using a maximum of six maybe seven lights.  Anymore than that and Poser likes to just sit there and do nothing, or it tells me it's finished rendering after only rendering a part of the image.

Sorry for taking long to respond, was trying to be patient, and wait it out...

I changed the lighting and rendering options for the scene, just after my last post, and in all this time, its still at 0% progress of "Adding Objects" =(

I have only 3 infinite lights and only 2 w/ shadows. Raytrace is on on all 3 lights. In the render options I set Pixel Samples to 2, Bucket Size to 16 and Raytrace Bounces to 2...

I suppose the next step would be to remove scene items and see what happens, but Im not digging that concept at all... I wanted to show alot of "stuff" in a scene, am I just sol?!?

Naw! You render in passes. Just pick a few in back and work your way forward... This can isolate an object that may be giving you trouble

I agree with the majority on this problem.  Also check the resolution quality of each actor/prop in your scene.  Too many hi-res texturing can choke the system.  Lighting is really a big issue, and the fewer you rely on the better.  Maybe using an overall IBL to fill the scene is the answer.  It will illuminate everything and reduce the dependence of other light sources.  Or render in three stages, foreground, middleground and background, and then reassemble the entire scene in Photoshop or PSP by layering each render over each other.  I have successfully created renders in such a matter when I felt the system was too overwhelmed by the volume of objects in the scene.