I know this mostly belongs in the SM ticket thingie but I've already opened a ticket about this.. and problem is it's apparently hard to recreate...

But I'm doing an animation and I can see those missing buckets (blank squares) in a lot of the frames, which is ... annoying to say the least.

So.. anyone from SM here? Can anyone promise that this is indeed being looked into and fixed in an upcoming SR? I can wait as long as I know it's being fixed eventually and that the team haven't just given up because they couldn't recreate it.. it's a genuine problem...

The animation I'm doing right now is at a fairly low quality (for the sake of speed) and without any IDL. So IDL isn't the culprit here.

Do you render to a movie or to an image sequence?

 Image sequence. I don't want the whole thing to die if Poser throws a fit :)

TrekkieGrrrl,

I am not an expert, but do follow the posts in this form. One old trick that I have found that really makes P8 stable (big scenes with no problems) is to give the program a high memory priority through the Task Manager. I’ve had little if any problems after reviving that method of using Poser. Might help.

By the way thanks for all of the free stuff you have contributed to the community. TrekieGkrrrl stuff is a favorite in all of my Runtimes. Byron

I just tried it with a 180 frame animation, but unfortunately the problem does not appear.I know that the problem does not only exist on your configuration because I have had it a couple of times as well.
I just hoped we had a reproducable scenario which Smith Micro then could easily solve

 Thing is it's not even all the frames. Which is a way is more annoying because it flickers, you can see the missing buckets as grey squares (even with a prop in the background)

I could have done a "Render over Black" in this case, thereby camouflaging them, they do take the colour of whatever the current background colour is, I've been able to verify that little bit.. but ... it really makes Poser 8 useless for animations as it is, it's no fun retouching god knows how many frames in an animation... On a still it is possible, but I used Poser 8 to render this because it renders faster than Poser 7.. but of course if it leaves out bits of the pictures, the speed isn't really worth it.

And LordB - it's not that I have problems rendering the scene as such, it renders fine, but there's a single bucket missing here and there - as far as I can see at a glance, it's at the same spot (that's always something I suppose)

I sent a file in to SM where I could make it make the missing bucket 3 out of 4 times - but they still couldn't make it come up with the error :(

I'm full aware that these kind of errors are the hardest bugs to fix because they're so random - now you see it, now you don't... but I hope it hasn't been swept under the rug as an "unsolvable glitch"

In the image sequence I did, there was one problem which may be related to this, so I reported that to Smith Micro as well.
One thing you should try is to increase or decrease the bucketsize and number of threads (not by much to 16 or 64 and 3 or 5 threads instead of 4). Often animations will work. Not a solution, but maybe a workaround.

 hm the changing bucket size may be an option. I will try that, I can see I need to re-render some frames anyway :) (luckily not all 563 of them...)

I don't do anims (at least not regularly),   but this also happens on single frame renders  It has been reported to SM.  My work around is to render again..  (Not really appropriate for an animation though.)