I'm not saying it is Dreamland's fault, but while I was trying to render a very large scene with their country home and V4, my monitor went off and said it was saving power. Normally, when this happens if you strike a key or move the mouse the monitor comes back on unless you leave it alone for some time. This time the monitor stayed black. I thought I would have to buy a new monitor. Once I closed out of Poser (the monitor would flash on and off for a few seconds, long enough for me to close the program) the monitor is working fine. I have an i7 with 64 gigs of RAM and a 4 GB graphics card running Windows 7 Pro. I never have had this happen before. Is the scene too big even for 64 GB? I used the whole house with Vickey in the pool and it was almost done rendering when this happened, drats. Now that I am not rendering the monitor is fine. Does anyone know why this happened and what I should do about it? Thank you, Sherrie

It could be a coincidence or could be something your not even thinking about. Microsoft released 4 different updates in August that they are now pulling and telling users to unistall if you downloaded the updates. They updates caused screens/pcs to freeze, not reboot, get hung on certain things and so on.

But if it's not that... I have to ask how many polygons is in the the whole scene? What type of lighting & shadowing are you using. Different light sets makes renders take longer and use more power. Have you considered rendering in layers? Render the house first. Then render Viki next and compiling the two in Photoshop or some other program. Is your Viki current? They have released updates to her earlier this year. Not sure what the updates changed but maybe updating her would help.

It sounds as though the computer went into sleep mode but i am not sure why it would not wake up when you hit a key or moved the mouse.

 

You could try changing the time for the computer to go into sleep mode or even prevent it from going into sleep just to complete the render.  To change the settings go to the control panel - hardware and sounds then the power options. 

 

 

when the program is taking all CPU capacity at normal priority, then the various sytems responses are tuned down. So it might response quite slow on the mouse / keyboard, and then it may have to awake the video-part of the system. The solution is to lower the priority of the rendering process.

Note: even when rendering in low priority, I sometimes experience some slowdowns. Not on the mouse, but on the video-side of things.

Of course I cannot assure that this is the cause, but it might be worthwhile to look in this direction too.

Thanks. I think I had too many lights. I downsized the picture to 1500 by 1500 from 1700 by 1700, deleted all of Dreamland's lights - there were a lot - and just put in three lights - and it rendered fine. How weird is that?

Quote - Thanks. I think I had too many lights. I downsized the picture to 1500 by 1500 from 1700 by 1700, deleted all of Dreamland's lights - there were a lot - and just put in three lights - and it rendered fine. How weird is that?

Whew, glad you got it sorted out.

Attached Link: http://openhardwaremonitor.org/

When a monitor says it's going into power save, it usually means that the video subsystem has stopped sending signals to it. I'm wondering if your PC overheated; you might want to check that the fans are working, especially the one on the video card if there is one. You could try running Open Hardware Monitor while you're rendering to keep an eye on temperatures, fan speed etc.

Rendering a larger image shouldn't require much more memory, just more time, which is another thing which makes me wonder about overheating.

That said, I have noticed it seems possible to push Firefly 'over the edge' in ways that I don't understand. One not particularly complex scene I'm working on takes an age to render in its entirety, but if I separate the characters and buildings and render them separately I have time to run two renders, composite them together and take a coffee break, and it's still quicker than rendering the whole thing.

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By the way, before some pedant takes the OP to task for claiming to 'crash' a monitor, it is possible. My day job involves investigating transmission errors in digital video paths, among other things, and I've seen that some monitors will just go to sleep if they see too many errors. You have to turn them off and back on again. ;)

     My strategy is to use mesh lights (unseen IDL emitters) rather than a myriad of Poser lights, and then use a modest number of Poser lights right in the area of interest to gain specularity.

     Maybe clever placement of some simple primitives set as not visible in camera and to not cast shadows would give you most of the needed lighting.

     Bob, I render in large dimensions fairly often;  Firefly will use noticeably more memory for larger pixel dimension renders, though it isn't linear, e.g., doubling the pixel area increases RAM usage, but less than twice the previous amount.  The overheating of a video card is a good thought;  even if the fans are running, they may be too weak for the task.

Quote - Bob, I render in large dimensions fairly often; Firefly will use noticeably more memory for larger pixel dimension renders, though it isn't linear, e.g., doubling the pixel area increases RAM usage, but less than twice the previous amount.

Thanks for that, I hadn't investigated render size vs. memory at all thoroughly. Must do so next time I have Resource Monitor running during a render. I'm assuming there will be a buffer for the final image, which should grow linearly with the number of pixels, but all the other scene elements will take up the same amount of space.

Quote -   I'm assuming there will be a buffer for the final image, which should grow linearly with the number of pixels, but all the other scene elements will take up the same amount of space.

     Spot on.  That's what it looks like to me.

Heat may have been a problem. But I have a lot of fans and just replaced the main case fan with a new one. Also, nothing is blocking my PC.

     In any case, I think the array of Poser lights was too resource-heavy.  Where feasible, you might try mesh lights. You'd need to render with IDL to use that method.