hornet3d posted at 8:39 PM Mon, 10 April 2023 - #4461624

My observations from this.  While I can understand why this has happened it came as a surprise to me because I was not aware of the issue or that the content I had was built in this manner.  I also understand why you have to restart Poser once the CUDA error had occurred ( I love the "Sawing off the branch you're standing on things" as an analogy) although I my case, deleting the content and restarting Poser only gave me another CUDA error.  Now I am not blaming anyone for this, I am not even complaining but this discovery means that any existing content I have may have this issue so that I need to check the materials before I use the content otherwise I will be forever restarting Poser. 

I do have a further issue with using old Poser content in that is can sometimes cause Poser to lock up in the sense that any slight change, such as changing the camera view point, means Poser starts some sort of process for a few minutes and once whatever it is has been completed any slight change has the same result.  In other words the slightest change means a four or five minute wait before Poser can be used again.  I have never had this happen building a scene from scratch on Poser 13 only if a use a scene created in Poser 12.  I need to raise a ticket but no body else has the problem so I need to do more work to decide if it is system related and to ensure I can duplicate at will.

I tend to use a lot of older content too. Generally I will convert most of the materials to physicalsurface but maybe not all of them -- once an object has so many materials you need to scroll down to see them all, it's such a pain I might skip them. Then render. Then check the log. Whether or not there was an error, you'll usually get warnings for materials that have issues, so those might be things that require some attention. Also check the render itself of course, if a material is suddenly all black (and isn't supposed to be), or just looks terrible, that needs some attention. Other materials that are not important features in the scene might not be worth fixing; maybe they aren't optimal, but if they don't throw an error and don't visibly look bad in the scene, and are background elements anyway (especially if you use depth of field and they'll be out of focus!), why spend time on them?

I have run into things that just wouldn't render (in P12). If it's not clear what's wrong with a specific old material, probably throwing away the shader and just plugging the maps into a physicalsurface node will fix it.

I've also run into things I just couldn't render with Optix, but worked ok with non-Optix GPU rendering (in P12). I don't know whether that will still be an issue in P13 (I would think updating Cycles will replace most of the old bugs with new bugs!), but I would certainly try a non-Optix GPU render (after restarting Poser) before trying a CPU render. Given the time disparity it's usually worth it. Switching everything to unimesh helps but does not fix everything.

I have not seen a 4-5 minute wait... but I have had Poser freeze up for at least several minutes, maybe longer than that. I generally just assume it crashed and restart it. Saving often is an ingrained habit. Someone more patient might figure out the underlying issue.