Hello everytime I try to render on manual settings the render (still takes ages) but comes out blank.

Anyone else have these problems ... am I doing anything wrong?

Rendering on Auto is fine.

If you switch to manual, and click on the "Acquire from Auto" button, you should have the exact same settings as you were successfully using on auto. Does that work?

If it does, you have a basis for experimenting with manual settings.

If it doesn't, something is terribly wrong. ;-) 

Aha i will give that a try hopefully it will work !

On the manual option there are settings like increasing bucket size etc ..... I think my pc ... i7 Processor 6 gigs ddr3 will take advantage of these , and perhaps render a bit faster?

I usually stick with the adaptive bucket size, but I haven't done a "serious" render* for ages, so hopefully one of the experts will chime in with some advice. In general, upping the bucket size will make the render go faster, up to the point where it runs out of memory... Whether your renderer can take advantage of all those gigabytes depends, I think, on your Poser version and your operating system.

(*In other words, for artistic purposes, rather than checking that something I made works properly.)

Using Poser Pro, Windows 7 RC,

i7 920 processor
6 gig ddr3 ram
4870 graphics card

Any advice on maxing out my setting would be gratefully appreciated.

since you have 6 gb ram you either have a 64 bit Operating system or ...    In Poser Pro I believe one of the render options( external render? ) uses the 64 bit renderer.   I would start doubling up bucket size until you see high memory useage. Say 256 to start.  Use multiplre threads as well. 

Use the same  scene to render , something with a few hair would be good.

and stop doubling my bucket size when the ram usage gets 5 gig plus?

Also there is an option where the rendering threads are for ram usage it appears to be in - figures though...... eg -2048 is the highest amount I can input, should this not be +2048 and does this mean it is using 2 gig of ram?

I had the blank render problem, when I had my preference setting to "separate process".
It would render in preview, but not in Firefly.

But, this would happen only with props.  Once I added a Figure to the scene, then the prop would render.

It was very weird. 

I ended up unticking the 'separate process' check box and firefly would render away.

Cool more options! :-) thaks a lot!