Here is something I am still trying to find out. I have seen some people with scenes that contain at least 18 or more figures, I can only get at least 8-9 and if I try to add more than that, Poser 7 just crashes or tells me I'm out of memory then it crashes. I have always wanted to do huge scenes with a whole lot of figures/characters in them but I don't know if people are photoshopping the additional figures into their scene (which would be a ton of work to do if they are) or their computer is just godly enough to handle whatever program it is their rendering so many figures in, which may or may not be Poser but something else? I'm not sure, most people I know that render on this site is using either Poser 7-8-9-Pro 2012 or Daz Studio 4

If anyone can help me out with this, that would be cool. Let me also say that, I understand how heavy a lot of figures are. I mean I get lag just by having two figures in an environment sometimes. rarely do I go over 4 or more figures. Some people use those figure generators. But to tell you the truth, those are kind of terrible for crowds compared to your own figures that can actually wear the clothing, props, hair, etc. 

Poser 7 is limited by the fact that it is a 32 bit program.  It doesn't matter how much memory you have on your system, it will be able to only address less than 3 Gb

Attached Link: Crowd

Attached Link: Robots

It wouldn't be that difficult to photoshop them in, if your other options aren't working out. You could render out groups of 4 to 6 people at a time, keeping your camera angles and light settings the same and then composite in photoshop. Use the rgb channels in ps to isolate the groups you render out (in tif or png, not jpg - or psd if p7 allows for that) so you can just layer them over each other. Render a separate pass for your floor/background image.

~Shane

You could also do as AmbientShade suggest, except create an alpha mapped billboard from the rendered smaller group.

e.g. Export the 2d image of the group plus a trans map from Photoshop. Make a trans mapped texture for a 2d plane primitive from that. Arranging at a tangent to camera angle. Repeat till you've build up a big crowd.

Not sure if that is similar to what the MOM crowd generator does with a script?

The other thing I do is pose a smaller group, export as obj, then reimport the obj as a prop. Although I do that more to get round the memory bloat inherent in tryin to use the DSON Importer loaded genesis in Poser...

But the principle there is just to remove all the cr2 data, and bake my figures in Pose and free up some RAM.

EDIT: thanks to Siri, or whatever crud powers my iPhone's spellcheck / type ahead for the above grammar... LOL.

You can also reduce the digital weight of background objects.  Use low resolution textures and lo resolution mesh to populate the scene.  Simplify material shaders, no need for displacement/bump maps on figures/props designated for background filler.  Anything that might add render time should be considered and reworked to reduce the impact.

Not only is Poser 7 limited by it's 32 bit status, it's also limited by the specs of your computer such as your processor and ram and your backround programs. No matter how much memory you've got, a 32 bit program can never use more than 3 gigs.

Laurie

Now is the time to get a copy of Poser Pro 2012.

Powerage's store here also has expansions available for sale: trees to make a forest, zombies for a  . . . what is the official word for a collection of zombies?  A "mall?"  A "stench?"

Anyway, some specific expansions exist for sale.

Quote - Now is the time to get a copy of Poser Pro 2012.

Trust me, if I didnt have to pay off a 40K student loan I would, and a new machine to go with it too. Maybe an Alienware or Rain Computer.