I built a complex scene with five posed and fully dressed characters. All went well until after my first full render, when I noticed some issues with the posing that needed to be corrected and some poke-throughs on the clothing. I fixed those, and then did a quarter render. Upon returning to the preview window, I started getting messages that there was not emough memory to load textures. Also some messages that texture files were bad. I closed poser and reopened. I still get the messages about bad files. I rebooted the computer. Then I managed to load the screen without any problems. I did a render. Upon returning to the previes screen, Poser hung and had to be closed.  I tried again. This time it crashed before doing anything. I changed previoew mode to SreeD. Now it seems to be a bit more stable, but I still have the problem than after any render whatsoever on this scene, it complains that it can't load the textures due to insufficient memory.

My computer is a quad-core with 512 MB on the graphics card and 4 GB of RAM. Am I overstraining it?

It sounds like you're on Poser 6.  Poser 7 and later mostly fix this kind of thing, I haven't gotten an out of memory message since Poser 6.

It may help you to periodically minimize the Poser window and restore it again.  This generally forces Windows applications of all types to release memory that they no longer require, it's a simple workaround for memory-leaky applications that I've used for a very long time, and in particular when I used Poser 6.

I am using Poser Pro.  It eventually game me a message that I should try to render in a separate process, which I have figured out how to do. I was just getting excited that the problem had been solved, when the dreaded out of memory message emerged again. Thank you for the suggestion to minimise. I didn't realise that released memory, I'll certainly try it.

Something that can help a great deal is if you reduce resolution for unnecessarily large texture sizes - 4K x 4K textures are common, and each and every map (color, bump, specular, transparency) requires the full color depth with no compression be loaded into memory at the start of the render.  For 5 characters and associated clothing, this is a whole lot of memory.  A 4K x 4K map requires 16M x 24 bits (24bit color) = 48MB of memory, while a 1K x 1K map requires 1M x 24 bits = 8MB memory.

Thank you pjz99, that is certainly a very good point. I am using purchased skin textures and they are all very high resolution. Two of the characters also have strand hair applied. As it happens I got this particular scene rendered after numerous attempts. Perhaps I should make medium and low resolution versions of the skin textures for scenes where the figures are not viewed in close-up.

I considered using face room textures, but getting the face and body colour to match is something I just can't get right.

Perhaps the answer is to resample the textures. I am going to try that.

I was extremely sleepy when I wrote that last post - a 1k x 1k map requires THREE megabytes of memory, not eight (8 bits = 1 byte).

Hy, I just installed a new harddrive and have memory gallore but every time I try to open a poser file a window pops up "Out of memory !". Does anybody know this problem? Can anybody help ? How can I enlarge the memory spared for poser at Win XP, 1,5 GB Ram, 163 GB HD space ?

Please help !

You shouldn't get that just when opening Poser, it may be your install is damaged.  Contact Smith Micro support.

Quote - You shouldn't get that just when opening Poser, it may be your install is damaged.  Contact Smith Micro support.

It seems I didn't say it clear enogh, the problem occures not when I open Poser, but when I open an old poser pz3 file.

Okay, that can be caused by a variety of things.  The first thing to try is go to Edit -> General Preferences -> Misc tab and uncheck Use Binary Morph Targets, if it is enabled.  Poser does not do very much "sanity checking" of data on read and write, and the "out of memory" message it gives can often be misleading.  If disabling that option allows you to open an old scene file you may be able to recover at least some of the data in it.