Fellow enthusiasts, I seek your help.

When it comes to larger renders, my Poser just freezes. I have this scene with a lot of high- res figures on it, and when I try to render it, here is what happens: it spends a lot of time with making calculations and when it's  done with those, the rendering still doesn't commence. 

My machine, by the way, is quite a strong one, an Intel Core Duo with 1 gigs of RAM. When I make the render, I usually set the render settings to the highest possible quality. I hope there is some other soloution to the problem, because I would not want to make compromises when it comes to actual quality. I'm probably not the first one to have this problem. Can anyone give me some advice?

Sincerely:
Szabolcs85

Large hires renders can take many, many hours, even days to render.

Maybe your bucket size is too large also? In your render settings, try a smaller bucket size (8, 16, 32, 64, 128).  However, note that a smaller bucket size can also add time to the render time, but it can also help prevent the dreadful "out of memory" error part way through the render process.

I suggest that you would need much more than 1GB of RAM to handle 'highest possible quality' renders. I have a Core Duo iMac with 2GB, and I have to reduce some settings to get reasonable render times - but with only minimal reduction of final image quality.

In your render settings, do you just move the 'auto' slider all the way to the right? If so, I would expect any reasonable size render to take a very long time. If you have a few figures with lots of polygons in your scene, and high-res textures, then 'a very long time' will effectively turn into forever, because you'll always end up cancelling it after a couple of days!

Have you tried a good-size render (say 4000px) on the 'Final' setting, rather than maximum?

(edit) - sorry, I'm assuming Poser 7 or Poser Pro - I'm not familiar with render settings in earlier versions.

The best recommendation would be to really double-, triple- check your scene and make some conclusions about what is actually important and what could be changed to get you up and rendering.  High settings do not necessarily mean great quality.  You might be taking a hit in shadow quality, resolution, etc.

Do you characters, objects, props which are just background fillers that could be downgraded to low-poly or lo-res textures?  Are there too many lights?  Are you using raytracing as opposed to Depth Shadow Mapping?  Are there objects not in the scene that can be eliminated?  Hiding back-facing poly's?  Unchecking raytracing and casting shadows for hair?  Have you considered rendering in passes?  Render foreground, midground and background passes and assemble everything in a 3rd party program that can handle layers. 

There are many options that you can take if you think it through and make changes which will not take away from you final scene but give you the quality render you are after.

Thank you very much...

Come to think of it, I might have an idea...

I will render the scene in multiple stages, and at each stage, only some of the figures will be "visible". And I'll put the end result together with my trusty Corel Photopaint...

I'll give it a shot, as soon as I have the time.

another trick; put high resolution figures up front, but if you have any figures at a distance, or blocked by the 'primary' characters, use lower-resolution figures, successively lower as you get away from your focus. Can help on the poly count. (i.e., use V4 up front, in front of V3, V2, V1, and Posette in order, for example...;)

I have 1.5gb RAM on a 2ghz system and still can't do high res, multiple figure renders without crashes. So I render one or two at a time and put together in Photoshop.