Leezace,

in reality Stewer is probably the best person to ask. But Firefly, which is descended from Tempest is Renderman compliant. My Renderman "baby experiments" coupled which a lot of reading suggests that you want to set your (bucketSize^2 / shadingRate) such that the result is a power of two number. Buckets are square. Power of two numbers are also square.

If the result number is not power of two, the remainder micropolys advance to the next bucket. What effect would this have?

• assuming raytracing is enabled, no geometry or textures can be discarded because they could potentially be called for a raytrace operation. Memory footprint.

• remainder micropolys are held (unnecessary memory footprint) while the renderer busts the next bucket into micropolys (memory footprint). The "old" remainder polys are added to the bucket along with whatever "current" micropolys will fit, while the "new" remainder micropolys get advanced to the next bucket (unnecessary memory footprint). Lather, rinse, repeat.

• So what happens when your CPU is running at 99%, memory is about to boil over and your hard disk is thrashing because it can't keep up (compared to RAM speed)? You guessed it. An ungraceful exit.

I don't think your self-described "lack of knowledge" is at fault. Poser can be tempermental sometimes. By the way, I hope you're rendering animations as still frames rather than as an AVI file. Much easier to recover from a crash.