Okay, I've got V4 and a scene prop that is 20,000 polys in size with textures that weigh 9MB, I use the attached render settings and it crashes everytime.

Can someone help me with what needs to be done to get this to render? I'm using P8.

The file size of the textures doesn't really matter, they need to be uncompressed to full 24 bit color resolution once loaded.  The biggest thing for me that made rendering more stable was to disable "External Process" in Edit -> General Preferences -> Render.

Knowing nothing more about the scene, we have to guess.

With smooth polygons enabled, and min shading rate = .2, you're asking the renderer to produce approximately 5 micro-polygons for each pixel in your render. This can be fine, or it can be a disaster, depending on the apparent size of the largest polygon in the scene. For example, the Poser ground plane has rather large polygons. The renderer subdivides all of a polygon if any part of it is visible. Placing the camera low to the ground, and at a shallow angle of view (i.e. nearly horizontal) you can easily end up with a lot of micro-polygons. The ground plane alone can easily reach over 250 MB of RAM. While experimenting with this phenomenon, I have successfully consumed over 1.5 GB of RAM using just the Poser one-sided square and nothing else in the scene. This makes Poser crash.

But that's just a guess. Without knowledge of your render dimensions, the actual geometry, and the camera viewpoint, it's really hard to judge if this is an issue or not.

Have a look here:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3528946&ebot_calc_page#message_3528946

Hmmmm, interesting reading. I didn't know what to include as info to help you help me, thanks for letting me know.

I guess the first thing to note is that under Edit/GeneralPreferences/Render all I have is SeperateProcess and that was already disabled, threads is 4. Am I looking in the wrong place???

Here is a quickie render to give you an idea of the scene. The camera focal is 55mm and somewhat around chest/head level. The biggest polygon is probably the stone floor. It is actually a cylinder cap that has been subdivided once. So instead of of skinny triangles for the whole there is an edge cut once around, so the outer band is 4 sided polys with the innner band skinny triangles.

Your help is most appreciated and your knowledge is welcomed.

missy woot!

I would set the figure to non-render in parameters and try again. See what item kills the render or combination. In windows run the task manager and see how much memory gets used as the render proceeds.

What size are you trying to render?

That is the sort of geometry that causes this problem. Without wireframes, I'm not sure, but I suspect you're filling 1/4 of the pixels with just two polygons. If a bucket includes those two, both will be subdivded.

As markschum suggested, render at a smaller size that does succeed and watch the memory. Try increasing the min shading rate on the floor prop and see if memory use drops.

Sorry, I seem to be keeping key info from you guys...you know how us women are. lol! The render size is the default window in P8, for me that 1100x900.

As for the polygons they seem to me to be equally distributed but maybe I'm not looking for what you are looking for. When I modeled this the i beams are high poly and the lowest poly item(s) would be the floor and/or staircase.
V4 you probably already know about all too well in regards to polys.

I am finding this confusing because it's really not a complex scene, 1 figure, 1 prop that's med poly size and Poser is borking. (???)

I'll try what you suggested markschum and see where that leads me to.

How many lights do you have in your scene?  How big are the shadow maps for the lights?

  Can you post a screen shot of the round globe that shows all of the lights in the scene?

> Quote - As for the polygons they seem to me to be equally distributed but maybe I'm not looking for what you are looking for.  ... > I am finding this confusing because it's really not a complex scene, 1 figure, 1 prop that's med poly size and Poser is borking. (???)

Figure count and prop count have little to do with memory. It is polygon count, and micro-polygon count.

Equally distributed has nothing to do with it. It's a question of which polygons intersect whatever bucket Poser is rendering at the moment.

I took your drawing and tried to show what happens. The green square is a bucket. Within it, a whole bunch of your radial polygons are visible. Each one, no matter how small a piece is visible, is completely broken up into micro-polygons. These micro-polygons are how smoothing happens, and also displacement. With min shading rate of .2, you get about 5 micro-polygons per rendered pixel. However, this includes pixels outside the bucket, since it's all or nothing - either a polygon is subdivided or it isn't, entirely based on whether any part of it is visible in the bucket being rendered.

I tried to flood fill all the floor polygons that would be subdivided if the bucket lands there. The front one that just covers the corner of the bucket wouldn't flood fill properly so I scribbled over it.

Anyway, all those green polygons will be recorded as tiny micro-polygons while working on that bucket. That's a lot. The issue is because you have a lot of thin but otherwise large polygons concentrated in the center. Any bucket in that area will be subdividing nearly half the floor.

The whole point of bucket rendering is to avoid having to process a large subset of the geometry. It is the fundamental way in which memory needs are greatly reduced from non-bucket based rendering techniques. But when you make a bunch of rather large polygons fit into one bucket, you lose the benefit.

If the topology was of a bunch of relatively small polygons, then even if there are more, that isn't the dominant factor. The dominant factor would be that you would only be getting micro-polygons for a small subset of the floor, which overall is very large. As it is now, a large subset is being built - literally millions of micro-polygons are being created.

If you uncheck all the boxes in your render settings, will the scene still crash?
If it works check the boxes one by one to pinpoint the problem.

Isnt your indirect ligth quality a bit high? Im still learning that ligth but i have never tried a render at such high settings.

Acadia,
2 lights, IBL and Infinite, shadow maps at default.

Jonny,
Good idea, that will be part of my trouble-shooting.

BagginsBill,
Very very interesting and seems to be making sense with previous successful renders that were more complex than this one (150,000 to 200,000 polys).
So I have been under the wrong imprerssion of low poly count equaling faster/more stable renders (ie, the low poly floor). I very much understand what you are saying and it will be interesting to subdivide this floor to try and limit the bucket micro polygon thing happening, your drawing and info has made it quite clear. Thank you so much for your insight.

Please let me know if you feel I am still not getting it.

Time for missy woot to model! teehee