What is the colour depth of your texture maps? I have seen this caused by too low of a colour depth, and it gets compounded if the image has a high pixel count. ~EA

If I'm understanding the problem correctly, try this. Go in the hierarchy window and turn off the glass part of the glasses, then try it.

I have this problem often, esp. with props. Its been discussed before in this forum and we reached the conclusion that it probably had to do with running Windows ME or 98. Whats your OS? Maybe its time to update. You could also try to get a RAM recovery app like RAMpage or MemTurbo, and recover memory just before you do a render. Since installing MemTurbo I get fewer render troubles. Actually I dont think Ive had this particular problem for several weeks.

I have been having that same problem just recently. (Well.. since upgrading to ME.) I am glad Preston asked about this.

I had it too, renders exactly like that, and it took W2K Pro (I imagine XP would do the same) to get rid of it! It seems to happen with larger amounts of RAM especially. I really hated to buy an OS that I didn't know if I'd need or not, but after trying everything else, I decided to bite the bullet and go for the OS, and I couldn't be happier. I hope you figure it out! One thing you may want to try is making your light map sizes larger, and your shadows around .5, and see if that works too. It did seem to speed up my renders somewhat..... course it may have been my imagination too. ;)

I also bought W2K Pro, but later discovered that both my graphics and sound cards needed updating before I could install it - so now Im stuck, and still fighting with ME :)

Aaargh! I've heard nothing good about ME, why did MS even bother?

Actually, ME worked just fine on my old Compaq computer, caused less crashes than 98 did, but then I built my new box and 98 AND ME wouldn't work with the high end graphics card and 512mb DDR ram (I have a feeling it was more the DDR part on the ME account, it's supposed to handle higher megs of RAM than 98 is) But I have 2K Pro now and it works BEAUTIFULLY! I've had Poser crash once, and it was my fault in all honesty. And yes, I had that smear problem with some props on 98. Best bet is to upgrade the OS. Go for XP or 2K pro. Either one solves a LOT of Poser rendering problems.

I have win98se with 512mb ram and stopped having this problem when I installed the 4.03 update.

Attached Link: http://akin.free.fr/poser.htm

I get it on 95, I think it's to do with bad geometry.

My OS is Windows 98. I'll go search the forum for 'obsolete printer driver' issues. Thanks!

I haven't had that but the weirdest I've had is I bought the texture pack from Daz for Essisal vicky clothes by Burton. I don't know who made the textures I bought. But when I went to even look at the clothes in Po explorer, it would go black and say Fatal error, press any key thing.???? I'm no computer person so I just returned it to Daz. I also bought poser from curious labs and it said 4.03. but I still did the patch because, my poser is always saying newer version, thing?????

Just to make everyone more confused, I think the last time this error was reported it turned out to be related to the monitor bit depth. I see some heavy posterization (color banding) in your second image, which is a giveaway you don't have 24-bit color selected. Please try this tip and let us know.

I have the same problem on my ME system. It always happens when I render in a new window. I thought it was a RAM problem until I bumped up my PC to 384 MB and still got the same error. It has to be an ME thing. The printer driver theory sounds a little far fetched to me.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I use 32 bit color and my renders looked exactly like that.

No I think its a bug int heir post rasterizing system. I get it on my system (1.1g with 768megs ram and 27 gig HD) when I a fill up the scene (Downtown modelw ith 4 mike characters and 1 vicky character plus 3 or 4 cars). After about 10 to 15 renders it starts getting odd FX. I'm a graphics programmer by trade so I understand what they maybe doing in their system. I'm assuming they render their scene in a memory buffer using either a reverse painter's algorythm or a bsp tree (I don't think the use bsp trees) into a render buffer and a zbuffer. Then they take that rendered image (this is just the rendered polygons with lighting) and output each scan line through second stage filters like anti alias and perhaps shadow. They could either do shadowing during their render process or they can do it during their second pass process. I'm assuming they do it during the second pass process using the shadow maps as light maps for each scan line to filter through. Now here's why I think its in the second pass filtering instead of the poly renderer. 1. You don't see this effect in their preview mode. I'm assuming preview mode is basically back to front poly rendering with low res textures. Since this is probably the same routines used to renderer their offscreen buffer to setup their second stage rasterizing then I don't think its in the poly rendering. 2. Most of these FX are screen aligned and not polygon aligne or camera aligned. Again if it were a poly rasterizing bug, the smear would probably change direction as the camera or the shape changed. 3. Seems to be memory related which may not absolve the poly rasterizer but since post process stuff can be more memory intensive than the polygon rendering the odds are that its the post process. 4. These flukes do not show up in other render modes like cartoon or wireframe. If it were a poly rasterizing bug then cartoon mode or other modes would fail as well. This still could be a poly issue when rasterizing actual textures but its becoming rather doubtful. One thing you could try is turning off post process features like antialias, shadow and bump and see if this effects the outcome. Now I have seen other bugs that do indicate a polygon issue namely when rotating a scene with a really huge shape like a building interior. There I'll see polygons "spike" as though the vertex is improperly computed. This could also be an effect of their preview render mode if they are just brute force rendering polygons from front to back into a zbuffer or back to front if no z buffer. A long polygon cutting across the scene from back to from will tend to plop on top when it shouldn't, especially if they are using a gross estimation of poly position as s primative depth sort. My question is, do they dump the textures not used on a shape or are those kept in ram? For example, if I load 3 characters with different maps then delete them all, their textures still stay in my texture list. Are they fully loaded or are they just referenced? Poser won't let me use the same named texture from a different sourse saying its already loaded yet I can change textures in photoshop on the fly while poser is running and have those changes show up when I run my next render.

Looking at the above picture I'm also wondering if its a transmap issue. Notice that it blows up right when it reachs his eyebrows, which I assume are transmapped. Alpha textures and objects usually get sorted out last in a render process because you can partially see through them. I'm wondering if this is an effect of the glasses and their alpha with the eyebrows.

The bad printer driver is not a likely story, incidently, I had 2 or 3 customers who were crashing, rendering my stuff in a new window, and this fix the problem. I can't remember how I came up with the idea though, I think one said they had just installed a new printer, but it did fix it for them.

Hi just a thorght use to have similar problem with old 98 computer (running xp now) with web sites that used frames, you know the scrolling menu bar at the side type,k it seemed to occur when the screen was moved while the page was loading could something similar be happening? for instance a clash of code from the spec's map and the face map.... just an idea Dave

OK, thanks for all the suggestions. Here is what I've discovered thus far: a. the past threads with related issues seem to be inconclusive (some suggest the printer driver, some the monitor, some the operating system, etc.) b. turning off transparency as well as bump maps, textures, etc. doesn't change the problem once it presents itself. c. I've gone from 16 bit to 24 bit color and the problem still exists d. I've deleted all spurious printer drivers without an improvement e. deleting the prop eliminates the error but doesn't solve the problem f. I was able to export the prop as an .obj and re-import it and it solved this render g. the best work around is merely to render in the Main Window instead of in a New Window - the problem doesn't occur then Thanks again for everyone's help!

I think it all depends on what you can live with. I HAD to render in a new window, as I do high resolution print work. You may have to address the problem again at a later point, but at least for now you've got a work around, and if it works for you, that's what's important.

I still vote for an OS problem. I regularly had the same problem. I checked for bad props, updated video drivers, used lower resoultions, re-installed POSER and patches, and many other helpful suggestions. However, once I switched to XP the problem went away. In my first render after using XP I put 5 Vickis and 5 Mikes all with high rez textures, miscellaneous props and a bunch of lights. The problem was gone. You could always try to render the scene on another machine..

Well since you deleted the obj and reimported it, that sounds like a mesh problem but the blur is not mesh oriented. Its screen oriented. The only thing I can think of then is by deleteing the mesh and reimporting it you moved memory around a bit. If nothing else I'd bet money its an internal memory overwrite problem in poser. I've had this happen in the main window but again on really memory intensive renders. Ironically I've seen this in the Magellan pics on the floors and some other props. I'd be willing to bet that ship is blowing out their memory big time. One other suggestion would be to defrag your harddrive. It could be your OS is having a hard time getting a good page swap file. I'm curious if MAC owners get this problem?