I have not found any information or questions about this issues I am having. But when I create a scene in Poser 8 with Poser 8 items and render it always renders black. No matter what lights or combination of lights I select.  

The only render that came out so far. and it was an improvement. Was when I imported a Poser Pro scene.  And only added the indirect lights at default settings.  It only worked once. After that, the same scene renders black like the rest I have tried.

Then I tried adding a screen with the Mill Horse and the poser 8 dog.  It rendered black and when I went back to the pose window. I got an error message that the Mill horse texture was bad. It then disapeared. The texture that is.  Not only that but any mill horse textures I tried loading after that all said bad texture and would not load.

At least one scene that I saved before rendering. This was all poser 8 characters. one character with default clothes.  Would not open again. Said that it was corrupt.  I only saved the two scenes that I have created in Poser 8. And have not tried to re-open the second one yet.  Afraid it will get corrupted or find out it is already corrupted.

The black renders do not give any error messages. They seem to be going through the pre-render process just fine. Then it loads a black screen in the render window. Once in a while it will look like it is starting to render normally. Then jumps to a black screen. Again no error messages. And the program does not crash. I can close out of the scene, create another one.  I have tried restarting Poser 8, restarting my computer and have installed the hotfix. With no change.

I don't know if this is a bug that should be reported or a compatiblity issue with the computer's video card. But Poser Pro works just fine on the same computer. Any ideas?

Are you rendering with indirect lights on? They do generate a mostly black image at first, but you should start seeing the Red Ants™ after a while.

Could you try to set up a scene with a few of the primitives and render those? and see if they're black as well? And if they are, could you please upload them here so others could take a look at them? :) (the actual PZ3 I mean) 

Sorry for the long wait for a response. I had to go to bed and now I am at work. What it was doing was staying on the Preview window while it did the pre-render. Which took quite a while.  Then It would switch to the render window with a black screen. The rendering button would disappear. I waited a while afterwards and nothing ever changed. I was wondering what people were talking about when they mentioned red dots but I never saw any.

Since I entered the message at the forum here. I have uninstalled and re-installed. Rebooted a few times and now Poser 8 native content renders fine. With and without the indirect lights. I finally got to see the red dots. Now It starts the pre-render now in the preview window ( for only a few moments) and then goes to the Render window and continues the pre-render. Instead of stopping like it did before.

Haven't tried anything yet from one of my other runtimes. Just haven't had the time. Probably won't have time until later tonight. As in much later.  I hope this also fixed the bad texture message I was getting with the Mill horse but won't know until I get time to try again.

Still can't apply materials while in the Preview window. But most of the time can from the Material room. But I understand that this is a known issue.