I am debating on upgrading from Poser 8 to Poser 11 as I am running into a memory error in the preview window that I believe is related to the number of image maps I have loaded into a scene at once. I use a ton of maps for each character and would prefer to keep doing that. (I know the obvious solution is to consolidate the texture maps together, but I have my reasons.) My questions is: What is the limit on the number of maps I can have loaded at once in Poser 11? Aside from this error I really have no other complaints with my current version.

This could be an issue with your GPU or CPU as much as Poser. Keep that in mind. I have not read of any limitation, but they may have that answer at the SM forums.

Don't recall any information published in the user manual, however, if the resolution is significantly high on all your texture maps, you will slow down your system to a crawl. It would be best to analyze your scene and determine if any background figure(s)/object(s) really require hi-res maps, especially if you are using depth of field in your render. Portraits and close-ups would definitely require hi-res, full figure and distant renders not so much.

Boni posted at 10:30AM Tue, 03 October 2017 - #4315240

This could be an issue with your GPU or CPU as much as Poser. Keep that in mind. I have not read of any limitation, but they may have that answer at the SM forums.

Thanks for the reply, I will try looking there.

hborre posted at 10:34AM Tue, 03 October 2017 - #4315250

Don't recall any information published in the user manual, however, if the resolution is significantly high on all your texture maps, you will slow down your system to a crawl. It would be best to analyze your scene and determine if any background figure(s)/object(s) really require hi-res maps, especially if you are using depth of field in your render. Portraits and close-ups would definitely require hi-res, full figure and distant renders not so much.

The specific message I get is: "Texture could not be loaded. Image map file could not be found, or there is not enough memory to load." Since the figures will load individually without issue, I don't think it is an issue with finding the textures. I also get the message: You are out of memory! Please save a copy of your work and quit soon. Saving with low memory may result in a truncated or corrupt file." When this happens I am barely using half my system resources, the computer otherwise runs fine. In fact, if I don't go messing around too much before getting this message my system will even render the image at a fairly normal speed, (even though I am supposedly out of memory). I don't use too many effects, no depth of field, and my render settings are pretty low too. Most of the texture maps I use are actually quite small (on average about 2000x2000 or less, I never use anything above 4000x4000), but I do use about 40 of them per character. This has lead me to believe it is software limitation.

I figured out how to get rid of the error! But I still don't fully understand why I was getting it. I think it was because I had all my Preview Render settings maxed out, and when I reduced them I have not had any further issues. All I can think of is maybe Poser was struggling to display complex shaders made up of many maps in the Preview window, but even then my system resources were far from taxed so I don't see how that was an issue. It worked though which I guess is the important thing.

Thank you everyone!

I assume Poser 8 is a 32 bit application and so can only access a limited amount of your system ram, so although you may not be using all your ram poser could still be maxing out. Poser 11 is a 64 bit application and so can access more (probably all) of your ram provided you have a 64 bit operating system.

On older versions of Windows like XP you could run out of Desktop heap which would cause problems like described above. It was a fixed amount of memory used to manage desktop images and files, shouldn't be a problem on newer versions of Windows.

Poser8, being a 32 bit app can only use 2GB RAM. Your system can have a ton of RAM to spare, but any 32 bit app can only use 2GB. (3GB with a hack)

Poser11 is 64 bit, so it offers a lot more depending on what version of Windows you are using.