I'd looked and can't find any documentation on why Poser seems to start beeping - seemingly randomly, and with no messages, during animation renders! It's not that annoying, I guess, but I was wondering if anyone know if it means anything (like your PC is about to melt from 20 hours of rendering). Does Poser now, or has it been requested in future releases to do network rendering (like Bryce lightning) or support multiple CPU's? Also, what do you folks usually use for final renders and post production? What performance are you seeing? I am doing 640x480 full renders in uncompressed AVI, and then taking this into a video editor for post work. I am getting about 30-45 seconds a frame rendering speed (on HP X2000 workstations, 1.4 Ghz P4, 1 GB memory and 200 GB disk each).

If you're using XP, NT4, or Windows 2000 Pro/Server/etc, you should have SMP support already from the operating system, and Poser's data threads are load-balanced betwixt the CPU's by the OS (SMP = more than one CPU, ie "Symmetric Multi-Processing".) 98 and ME won't cut the SMP mustard, though :/ The beeping comes from Poser's rendering subroutines being treated by the OS as distinct programs that end abruptly, hence the beeps (or something similar.) I get 'em here when I really load the machine down (Like when I run Poser, Carrara/RDS/AC3D or some other 3D model building proggy, Irfanview to see what previous renders look like, browse the web, get my mail, etc... having all of these programs open at one time, natch.) Won't hurt a thing - I wouldn't worry too much about it. I have almost the same box you do here, except I've only got 60GB of storage and half the RAM... then again I don't do animation all that much :) /P

It's possible your computer is equipped with a temperature monitor on the CPU and it is heating up during the long render. The beep may be the temp alarm on the processor. Other people have had this problem and found if they opened something on top of poser (even just notepad) it would stop. I had this problem a while back and it turned out that the mouse driver was tweaking Poser's nose every few seconds and a new mouse driver solved the problem. Hopefully one of these will help.

I have the same problem when I render complex images (ones with a lot of figures and props) but the images still seem to render okay.