Yesterday Firefly died on me with an "Error occured during render" and the old "Texture would not load" messages. I tried again after restart. Same result.

I restarted my computer. Same result.

I updated my virus and spybot data bases and ran scans on Spybot search and Destroy and !Avast. No viruses or spybots. Restarted Poser. Same result.

Tried renders of different objects and figures.

A cube will render with shadows. It WILL NOT with any texture applied.

I am running Poser 7 Sr-3 on a Windows XP sr2 machine for years. No proplems.

NOW I have a problem, and have no clue on how to proceed. I turned off the windows firewall in case of interference. Same result.

My machine is 1.87 Ghz with one Gig of RAM. A Dell Dimension desktop. It still works fine. I have put in an error report to Smith-Micro. 

Has anyone else run into this before, and does anyone have any ideas on what else I might try?

I was out of disk space once and didn't notice it. Poser did what you describe.

 I was thinking  that,too. I just checked and I still have 2 gigs worth of space on the disk. Plenty for the windows swap file stuff. So I am officialy out of ideas.

You could always try the usual suspect, the prefs files...

um, can i be the first to say holy crap!?   you've been doing those renders on a box with 1GB of ram?  and only 1.87 GHz?  all those figures, all those textures, all those props?  all that transmapped hair?

i must be doing something wrong.  the computer gods definitely don't like me nearly as much as they like you. maybe i need to sacrifice an old drive and burn some incense. 

on topic, yes i've had this happen before, but i can't for the life of me remember how i made it stop.  not with Poser 7 but Poser 6.  just kept telling me i couldn't load textures when it obviously had the resources to do so.  it was so long ago, i can't remember how i got out of it, but i do know that it wasn't a persistent enough problem for me to need to ask about it.  so my guess is i just did the typical cleaning type stuff of clearing caches, getting rid of temp files, and letting it sit when off a while instead of just doing a restart.  and every now and then i do a search to find large files where my OS is, so i can get rid of nasty large things i don't need.  not much help, i know.

 The pref files were the first things I deleted.

"um, can i be the first to say holy crap!?   you've been doing those renders on a box with 1GB of ram?  and only 1.87 GHz?  all those figures, all those textures, all those props?  all that transmapped hair?"

0__0   You know my work?  I don't think any computer gods like me. I just carefully set up my scenes and do them in the best way I've figured out to not crash my machine.

Maybe I finally wore out the poor old firefly with all the renders of multiple figures!:laugh: Finally came the straw that made my camel into marmalade?:lol:

I don't really know what happened. Maybe the firefly,exe went corrupt? Don't know.

 Well you could try installing Poser on top of the old one, that should help fix if something was corrupted. And it won't mess with your installed content of course.

2 gigs is not much free space though, so I would also look into freeing some more disk space. Windows has this cleanup tool that compresses unused (or rarely used) files, it's great on smaller harddisks.

 I'll spend the day looking for my poser disk. I recently moved and everything except my PC ,bed,a table and a few chairs are all in boxes. Looking for one disk in thirty boxes in two rooms should be a weekend worth of work.:crying: I started looking yesterday. Should be through by Sunday, I guess.

I used CCleaner and that cleared up another 250 Mb of space. I just need a Tb hard drive on a NEW PC to really ease up my space problems. I have 114 Gb of poser on HHD one which is only 120 Gb in size,with 2.5 Gb of free space on it, so I don't have much room there at all. I have two other HHD's with a total of 15 Gb of free space between the two. I have my Pz3 files on one and My Pictures on the other.

That arrangement has work really well for the past year.

I once got this error because of a missing texture file.  I only figured it out beause in the bit that rendered, a figure was missing part of a texture.  I don't recall the details as to why it didn't ask for it when I loaded the scene...

I once got this error because of a missing texture file.  I only figured it out beause in the bit that rendered, a figure was missing part of a texture.  I don't recall the details as to why it didn't ask for it when I loaded the scene...

 It's firefly itself. It will render anything without a texture. It will NOT render ANYTHING WITH a texture map, even if you applied it to a cube. I tested it before I posted this this thread

Good and Bad news.

I found my Poser install disk.

My machine CANNOT read it. It's DVD-R. My DVD-R drive broke when I moved to the new apartment tower. and has been tossed. Just a DVD player cannot read it. DAMMIT.:cursing:

Going to have to re-download it from SM. If it costs anything, I AM SCREWED. Being poor sucks ass.

A DVD drive should read a DVDR disk-I do it all of the time (although mine are DVD+R disks).  Make sure there are no smudges on it.

If you have a thumb drive you could take it to the library or to a friend's and try transferring it to the thumb drive there.  IIRC it is less than 2GB.

Try contacting Ratscloset for a hand if that doesn't work-do a CS request and add 'Attn. John"

 All format DVD readers for computers are less than $30. Check any of the online suppliers.

When I get that texture message I close poser restart and then reduce the bucket size from default 64 to 32 or even 32
,What are your ender settings?

 64. I tried down to a bucket of 4. Same result. No texture= render. Add any texture=NO render.

I found a DVD writer for $20 on tigerdirect.com. When I get money, I'll be buying.

Ach! Sorry to hear about all this. Yeah, you need a new pc period, and a small windfall of cash to get it, lol.
Too bad we couldn't do a small whip-around for donations, lol. I know the financial state you're in is similar to mine...it sucks Bobo, and Bobo ain't happy!

I stopped getting that texture will not load message when I changed to render in a separate process.

Now, if I overdo the scene complexity, the render just stops somewhere, but Poser does not crash.

By the way, on 1 gig machines, I've used ready boost and a flash drive to add ram, and it does help remarkably for cheap.

 I've heard of using a flash drive for extra RAM, but haven't found anything USEFUL on how to do it. You have any information on that? I even named my 1 gig flash drive 'RAM' in the hope of using it so!:laugh:

What is ready boost?

Joel, what type of Ram does you computer use? Is it maxed out?

 Maxed out in both speed and number. My machine is running as fast as I can get it without some kind of tweaking or boosting. Just looking for any more I can squeeze out of it.

I finally got Poser working after I re-installed SR-1,2,and 3. It's crashing like a dodge-car BUT is working mostly.

Sith-Micro wanted to sell me another copy of Poser for $79 USD since I couldn't find my copy on disk and wouldn't let me buy an extended download service for my original purchase.

Bastards. DAZ doesn't do crap like that. I want a reset download, I go to "Order history" and reset it. No muss, no fuss!

I told them "NO, thank you!" and hung up.  They really disappoint me.

Quote -  I've heard of using a flash drive for extra RAM, but haven't found anything USEFUL on how to do it. You have any information on that? I even named my 1 gig flash drive 'RAM' in the hope of using it so!:laugh:

What is ready boost?

It's available as one of the options when you first plug in the drive, if you have it on autoplay. There's a ready boost tab. Conversely, you can just search windows help for ready boost.

That is, if you're using Windows 7 or Vista.

If you're using XP, which I think you are -- I just checked -- um.... not so much, I'm afraid.