seems to be getting stuck.  I didn't think my settings were that different to other things i have rendered.  But for some reason it gets to a certain percentage then doesn't seem to move.

Guess I will have to wait until the morning to see if it is really stuck or not.

Love esther

I have one light set on inverse square. No IDL.  I bet that is causing the problem.

no - I changed it and it is still crawling.  Perhaps because I am saving as a photoshop doc but I've done that before without slowing my renders to a standstill.  I think something abnormal is happening here.

it is stuck on 73.8% for the last 20 minutes. It didn't take all that long to get to this stage but now there is no progress. I wonder if it's jammed or justbusy rendering that next 0.1%?

reduce your bucket size..thats stupid huge. try 16 or 32.  I've never seen someone try 128 before.

well I've got 12 cores so I thought that might be okay.  Okay, will reduce it.  that is probably what has caused my problem.  Thanks MagnusGreel.

I didn't even know if render to queue uses that setting box anyway.

Love esther

oh and I'm pretty sure I've had that number before and been okay with it.  

At the moment it is rendering to my screen (at the same time as render to queue is supposedly going) just for comparison - both have bucket size 128,

and so far the screen one is progressing but hasn't got to the 73% mark as yet.

Love esther

to quote Stewer (who as you know does the programming)

"One general change from Poser 7 to 8 is that the old rule of "large buckets make faster renders" doesn't necessarily apply any more - especially with the different handling of multithreading. Personally, I found that a bucket size of 16 is a good all round settings for Poser 8, and setting bucket sizes of 64 or more like in Poser 7 is rather counterproductive."

aha.  okay will try it;

thanks

I made it 16 and tried rendering again in queue manager and you will never guess what - it is stuck at 73.8 again.

well it didn't take long to get to that point so you are right about one thing - the bucket size doesn't seem to affect render time.

But something is jamming up my queue manager which used to work beautifully.

I will have to leave it overnight but I have a feeling it will say 73.8 in the morning.

anyone else had this happen?

Love esther

Sometimes - just every now and then, and for no particular reason - I find that PP2010 will choke on a particular scene; it'll crash out doing a render, and trying it through the queue will hang at a particular point, i.e. the same symptoms you seem to be having.

Narrowing down the culprit can be tiresome, but last time I did it I found it was a particular clothing item. When I deleted it and then loaded and conformed exactly the same item with exactly the same textures and shaders, everything went like clockwork.

I can only assume that sometimes errors occur when Poser's reading a geometry file or textures and shaders; try reloading stuff one item at a time and see what happens - if you have the time and the patience.

I confirm what cspear writes and add that it has also happened to me using Poser 7.  Deleted a figure from the scene, added THE SAME FIGURE from my library and the render went fine.  Like the file was corrupted or something, but fixed after re-loading the figure.

Rªnce

Quote - Sometimes - just every now and then, and for no particular reason - I find that PP2010 will choke on a particular scene; it'll crash out doing a render, and trying it through the queue will hang at a particular point, i.e. the same symptoms you seem to be having.

Narrowing down the culprit can be tiresome, but last time I did it I found it was a particular clothing item. When I deleted it and then loaded and conformed exactly the same item with exactly the same textures and shaders, everything went like clockwork.

I can only assume that sometimes errors occur when Poser's reading a geometry file or textures and shaders; try reloading stuff one item at a time and see what happens - if you have the time and the patience.

Yea!

I will have to try this. Periodically I have the same problem. Today, I have tried to render a scene 7 times (gradually reducing the render quality with each attempt), only to have it stop in almost exactly the same spot.

I even tried with a bucket size of 4. It got a little bit further along before crashing. I have a Core i7 860 and 12gb memory. 4 shouldn't be too high.

Thanks for the advice. If it turns out to solve the problem, I will be eternally thankful. 

I had a hair prop in a scene and left it there, but invisible and put in a hair I had never used before that I just bought (lewanna hair) so maybe that is the culprit as that really is the only change i made, oh apart from some lights I think.

I left it until the next day and the scene has changed from 73.8 to 73.9 after about 12 hours. I think I may as well cancel it hey.

Sounds like it's not stuck, just progressing slowly. Could it be busy raytracing a reflection on an eye ball or something like that? Did you turn off texture filtering by any chance?

maybe, but I just tried again with the replaced hair, and within 10 minutes or so it was up to 73.9 and hasn't moved since.

I will try not applying any tooning to the hair.

I'm pretty sure this scene (before the change in hair) used to render.

can't remember about texture filtering. Probably on. I can turn it off.

Keep texture filtering on. Filtering off can make things very slow in certain cases.

oops just turned tex filtering off.  well queue manager crashed during rendering of that one.

but i have just restarted it and hit render to queue again.

Love esther

this is a new problem. I routinely make lots of scenes with 3-5 fully dressed poser figures in a dreamhome or some other poser building, holding props etc, with tex filtering on or off etc.

Wonder what is it about this particular scene that has caused this.

Maybe i should delete the hair and try and render again.Might try that next.

What you can also check is if there is any object intersecting the camera, those can also slow a render to the grind.

okay, will check that next. Just trying rendering with bald V4 at the moment, since it was when I changed the hair that the problem appeared.

Rendering has usually been pretty quick on my computer with render to queue, so this is unusual. I'm sure I have had objects intersecting the camera before without problems except for a render of a wall at the end of it.

Love esther

I just saw the moment of "conversion", my render was at 40. something percent and it just flicked to 73.9 - that seems strange to me.

and stuck there of course.

maybe if I choose the output as png instead of photoshop?  That is something else different that I have done with this scene is choosing output as photoshop, I wonder if that could be affecting things?

the render using the posing camera got stuck at 73.9% as well.  

Now trying rendering to output png

this has set me back with my comic making by days.

Love esther

output as png still stops at 73.9%  

I am out of ideas.

I deleted all the lights, created 2 new ones and rendered to queue again at 16 max bucket size, and it is still stuck at 73.9%

this is bizarre!

I tried lesser render settings, and it still went to around 41% then suddenly jumped to 73.9% where it is stuck.

Love esther

esther

your output format won't affect rendering, so that's a waste of time.

Take all your characters out of the scene - keeping a backup copy of course - and render. If it completes, the problem isn't lighting / render settings / basic props.

Add the characters back into the scene 1 by 1 and see what happens. As I said earlier, identifying the culprit can be time-consuming, and it may be better use of your time just to start over.

Good luck!

probably you are right.  It's been two of my days off and I haven't done one render.  what I've just done is saved a figure to my figures library, fully dressed, then imported to a new scene and am trying a render as we speak.

If that works then I might try importing the scene into a new pz3 and trying again.

Love esther

I can't believe I"m talking to a chicken.  But you seem like a knowledgeable chicken.

Love esther

well the problem seems scene specific, as one of the fully dressed daz figures alone rendered fine.

I'll try importing the whole scene into an empty scene and see what happens.

Love esther

Not a chicken, a - well, a male hen.

hehe, okay I imported the whole scene into a poser document and began rendering.  There is something different happening already.  Instead of going from 40% to 73.9 it is actually on 53.6% so far.  so maybe that is a good sign.

and increasing...

it's up to 86.9 which is the highest it has ever gone in the last 2 days.

it's been on 86.9% for the last 10 minutes. I have a horrible feeling that it might be stuck again.  this is so not good.  I won't cancel it though -  I will keep waiting to see.

still 86.9%  -  i think it might be jammed again.

I'm cancelling it.  I'll take your advice oh feathered one, and delete a figure and see what happens.

and whilst waiting I have imported the scene into vue and will try and render it there.

I took out a fully dressed poser person.  the camera is a bit different because it was the posing camera, but now it's stuck on 20.3% rendered in the queue.

Well maybe stewer is right and my camera has something off about it.

Love esther

I made the camera visible and looked at it from on top. It didn't seem to be halfway through anything.

but anyway I placed it more carefully and am trying again.

Rendering in vue didn't work.  Vue is too slow at the moment with such a big scene.  I suppose after import I should have saved the home as a vue object.

Love esther

maybe this whole problem will go away when I finish cloning my hard-drive which has been going on whilst all this has been happening.  but normally I don't have problems doing other stuff on my puter whilst poser is going.

Love esther

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember you're on a Mac, right? If you can open Activity Monitor, select the FFRender process that is stuck, execute "sample process from the menu", and send me the sample log it creates in a PM, then I can have a look at what what the renderer is doing and that could give us a hint of what's going wrong.

Hi Stewer,

thanks, but I woke up this AM and the scene had rendered, apart from one prop that was in the preview but not in the rendered scene.  (never had that happen before either)

I will try another scene that was stuck before if I still have it and if it doesn't render I will do as you suggest.

Love esther

I'm wondering if it wasn't the camera like Stewer first said, because everytime I get a nice looking viewpoint in  my camera and then check it with the top camera the main cam is seemingly behind a wall.

I changed my mind. I don't think it was a camera problem because I rendered several views of that scene, some with same camera setting, and just the hair was different.  But I deleted the hair when I tried again and then it still jammed. I think something else has gone wrong but I don't know what.

Love esther

Stewer took a look at my samplelog and thinks I have some AO that is making my scene slow, and that it is still rendering.  Sure enough when I left it for 2.5 days, it did render.

I'm not sure what I did that caused that.

Love esther