I'm trying to render a 12" x 9" image in Poser at 300 dpi. However, the render hangs and freezes the whole program just about every time I try. Does anyone know what's causing this problem and how I can fix it?

No. A 3600x1800 render is within Poser's limits on render size (IIRC, the max 4096x4096). Have you tried rendering with "cast shadows" turned off on one or more of your lights to see if it is just a memory management problem?

Yeah. Turning "cast shadows" off doesn't seem to do anything; it just hangs in the middle, same as always. Haven't played with the lights as yet, since they're somewhat critical to the piece. May have to just break down and screw around with 'em. I've had this problem too, when rendering large pictures with figures in it; I'm using Mike, with PosaNation's Gen-X hair and Catherina's Tomy textures, if that helps.

What is your computer system? OS, processor and speed, RAM, and hard drive? What is in the scene you are trying to render? It's probably a RAM problem, but it's hard to tell without the details.

I've got a PIII 800, 640 Mb SDRAM, Win98, and it's on an IBM 20Gig drive, the exact name of which escapes me. In the scene? Just like I mentioned: Mike, Gen-X hair. Thas' it. Major pain, this is. I may have to go with a smaller render and just resizing (and sharpening, blurring, etc.) in post.

I don't know what to say. Your system should be more than enough to render a whole lot more in the scene than what you are attempting. You are having the same problem with other scene setups? The only time I've had a problem like that was when I was experimenting with rendering a one frame animation to an image file in sketch render settings.

I know. It's not the truly thrudly system I dream about, but it should be able to handle this no problem. Even turned down the 3D acceleration in case that was the problem. No joy. I've had this problem on more than one occasion, but the last time it ever happened was rendering a still frame with about 6 characters and a truely phenominal ammount of lights. This has one character and uses a mildly tweaked pre-set for lighting and it hangs. A pain, as I said.

Poser doesn't use the acceleration, so that setting wouldn't make a difference. have you tried rendering as a one frame animation to an image file? Something might be messed up Poser, and you might have to reinstall. Do you have the CuriousLabs latest update?

According to the Curious Lab troubleshooting FAQ, occasionally hardware acceleration can cause problems in Poser. As for rendering, I've only tried rendering as still images, rather than single-framed animations. I'll give it a try next time.

I don't know if the animation render would help or not. It would be worth a try, though. You should contact CL tech support, too.

Please make sure you have the most recent updates to Windows 98, including Second Edition, etc. Before I upgraded to Windows 2000 I had similar problems under Win98 but don't anylonger. Also make sure that all the tasks running except the one's you can't kill (hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE to bring up the Task Manager) are dead. Lastly, if you are rendering to disk make sure that the disk is defragmented. Beyond that.... :-( TomD

HI - just my 2 cents worth: From my experience it is not the final render size or resolution that causes the freeze in poser, it is the number of vertices in the scene and the combined memory requirement of all the texture maps in the scene that is more likely the culprit. For example trying to render 10 Michael figures with hi-res maps even at an output resolution of only 600x800 will choke most systems. But by making smaller versions of the maps and re-applying them, the scene renders. There are a lot of 2000x2000 texture maps out there and if you try to use several of them in one scene, even 512MB of RAM will not be enough. The way I work around this problem is whenever I buy or DL a new hi-res texture, I immediately make a downsized version of it (500x500 or 1000x1000). If I need the detail for close-up work, I use the original map, but if the figure is just a full length or background figure, I use the smaller maps, and thereby get more figures or items in my scene. Unless you are working with extreme close-ups, it is impossible to tell the difference in the maps.

Just because you have a 20GB hard drive does not mean you have a lot of hard drive space. If you have MS office premium installed and a bunch of DL'd art files, your drive might be too full to build a big enough swap file. Check to see that you have adequate space for one and a half times the size that the swap file is going to grow to.