@onnetz: Unfortunately, if the renderer quits on me before completion once, it will quit in exactly the same place when I use area render, too.  Hence my need to render upside down to get the bottom half.

@Miss Nancy: Poser's render engine is great if you keep to low resolutions. But as soon as I get into the 4k x 4k range, all kinds of problems crop up. I don't want more features. I want stability.

Perhaps it's just that I do not know how to optimize materials and shaders for high resolution renders. Venders seem to enjoy complicated nodes, and the results are lovely at low resolutions. But, alas, my 32bit Poser 8 does not seem to be able to reliably handle such complexity.

However, judging from these forums, 2010 also seems on occasion to quit rendering part of the way through for no apparent reason as well, and I'm thinking that's it's just because it's not really designed for high resolution renders with high quality settings AND overly complicated materials/shaders.

So one should adjust the materials and shaders to optimize render stability. But it's a lot of work. I do wish products came with low, med, and hi res options, but I suppose that's asking a bit too much of venders.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.