I am composing a large scene with seven characters and their associated clothing.  As you can guess, just having seven characters is tough on Poser 7 but with the added clothing, Poser chokes and refuses to render.

I want to maintain scene integrity so I can tackle the job by rendering in layers.  The question is Will characters that I make invisible affect the character limit or will I be forced to delete them? 

One way, I can simply make the characters visible again, the other way (deleting the characters) forces me to load and reload the scene again and again until I get all the characters and props I want rendered.

Thanks all!  Hope this is clear!

Maybe you've done this already and it's a pain in the butt, but when I encountered that
problem I found that closing the program and then reopening it resolved the crashing
issue after an attempted render.

Good luck.

PS .... And how about if you save the scene in different stages of character deletion?  That
seems like it would make it easier for experimenting.

Just a couple thoughts.

Poser appears to ignore invisible characters and props.  I have done this in the past but nothing on the complicated side.

Here's how I go about such a scene...

1. make all bodyparts invisible that are covered by clothing
2. remove all unnecessary texture maps (for parts of your scene that are not visible, like an inner mouth texture, when the figures mouth isn't open)
3. turn off "visible to raytracing" for transmapped hair (if you can get away with it)
4. check render settings
5. render at small size, but same ratio of final render (like 400x400 instead of 2000x2000)
6. start final render right after you got a small render that was ok.
   (in that case, Poser loads all textures much faster, as they are still cached!)

That's how I did this render (http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1910863)
Took about an hour to render, twice the size that was posted to the gallery.
Scene uses IBL/AO some spot lights, all figures with high-res textures, some of the clothes
shading rate set to almost zero
OK, cloth doesn't matter that much in this image :-)

Currently I have a render running, with 4 x V4, 3 x M4, all fully clothed + some props with lot's
of transparencies and raytrace reflections...
It's been rendering for about 30 minutes and shouldn't take more than another 30-40 minutes...
Image size about 2500 x 1500.

So, Poser 7 can handle such scenes :-)

 THANKS!

Poser does seem to ignore the invisible characters which makes deletions unnecessary. 

Msg24_7, that is amazing.  While cloth doesn't matter in your render I think all figures are counted so it's pretty much what I was looking for.  I hadn't thought to turn off the unseen body parts (though I can only do this on one figure.  All the rest are wearing very skimpy clothing and boots.

I'm not sure how to remove textures, though.  I may have actually consult the manual!

My current scene has 8 characters (One using a second skin).  If I get it to work, I'll post it here!

I could decrease the size of my PZ3/PMD files by deleting morphs which I would not ever need from figures in the scene. This is a modest memory savings in the size of the saved file. I do not know if this allowed faster renders, but it did allow the files to load a little faster, and I could sneek in an extra prop of two before it wouldn't render.

LMK

Quote -  THANKS!

...
I'm not sure how to remove textures, though.  I may have actually consult the manual!

My current scene has 8 characters (One using a second skin).  If I get it to work, I'll post it here!

Go to the material room, select your figure/prop, then go thru all material zones.
For those you don't need, select  all the nodes and hit delete.

If, you delete one by accident or change your mind and rearrange your scene, you may have
to reapply the respective MAT Pose or Material Collection.

Another tipp about populating large scenes...

1. Set up your basic scene (like rooms, buildings, whatever) and save.
2. Open a new empty document load your first figure, load clothes, hair, textures and pose as close to what you want in your final scene.
3. Save this scene using a somewhat descriptive file name.
4. Open your "final scene", import your pz3 with the figure you set up a moment ago and
       move it to it's proper location within the scene, adjust pose, etc.
   Repeat these steps for all figures.

This won't make much of a difference when using just 2 or 3 figures, but Poser can get real slow when loading and conforming cloth or hair for your sixth figure,
You may accidently conform clothing to the wrong figure or apply a MAT pose to the wrong item.

Martin

 I am still topping out at 7 characters plus clothing.  Of course my story needs 8 in this scene.

Still 7 seven characters EACH one outfitted is almost 21 figures and at that seems like a lot.  Normally I'll have only a few characters in each scene but I need to defeat this as saving up for a more powerful Poser 8 (Why do I hear so many nightmares about stability) is months away.

msg24_7, thanks!  I did as you said and actually it had the figures and their clothing line up a little easier as I imported them in.  What this did was make it easier to hide figures as I progressed in layers rendering.

Right now It goes like this.  Put ALL characters and props in the scene.  Check angles.  And then render without backgrounds.  I'm not using shadows so this will work.  BUT when I do use shadows with Ambient Occlusion I will have to do the scenes with only a few characters.

Thanks you all for your help!

The scene below that I decided not use but it shows 7 characters, outfitted, no second skins but for accuracy sake even the girl you can barely see is wearing boots and a training suit.  Also the girl with the glasses is using hair that is a figure.  To save even more memory, I changed ALL other hair to hair props. So actually, I have 8 figures, 7 figures as suits, the glasses girl is also wearing 4 figures (shirt, skirt, socks and shoes), so really I am rendering 20 figures. 

Is that good?

Hmm, I just tried to upload the Tif file.  It didn't work!!!!  Must be bedtime on the west coast of california.

Maybe the forum software doesn't like tif attachments...

 Maybe!  I find it hard to believe that a site dedicated to artists wouldn't like every type of image except for PSD files.

I had no idea you were the one that created Cool Fever and other great products for my favorite character.  Thank you for the cool stuff!

and where can I get an Autumn Day?  I love it but the link leads to 404ville.  After I cleanup the pad I'll try again.  I had no idea I stayed p to 5:25am trying to get my Manga done!

Attached Link: http://www.runtimedna.com/AS3Design/

Glad to hear, that you enjoy the stuff we've created :-)
Actually, AS3Design is two people.... Alex, my wife and me... and she's the one creating most of the stuff :-)
So Alex is the one who deserves the credit for Cool Fever and most of the other stuff available.
So far I did only some smaller models like the Needful Things series or recently, the Cat Walk.

We really need to work on the homepage and fix all the links. Some broke, after the makeover of the RDNA site. 
An Autumn Day is available from RDNA.
Here's a direct link to the product page...
http://www.runtimedna.com/Splendid-Scenes-An-Autumn-Day.html

Martin