Arrgh. After recieving some gracious help on this forum, and spending hours upon hours upon hours texturing, morphing, creating, keyframing, and all, my scene - which is ready to be animated, isn't rendering! Whenever I put in 'make movie', set all my settings, and all that, it says, "Writing Movie File" or something in the little box, but that's it, just freezes right there. I gave it ample time to do something. I've had experience with this problem before. But I've never done a scene of this magnitude with physical backdrops, lots of lighting, and everything. Usually I just restart my computer, then after all the memory is freed up, just go straight to the file and render the animation. No problem. But no matter how much I restart, it just won't work. I tried with different settings, I tried turning anti-alias off, keeping the 2d motion blur settings off,. My system is a P700 with 512mb ram. My software is Poser Pro, I have the latest upgrades. The resolution of the animation (if it helps) is 640x306. I've had problems animating before. I tried just rendering BMP files instead, and it still won't go. BUT, when I just do a test render (just plain render, not making the movie) with all settings the same, it takes about 3.5 minutes to load lighting and all, but it DOES it, with no problem. I suppose I could render it frame by frame, but that would be EXTREMELY EXTREMELY annoying! :D Anyone able to offer up any advice?

I'm just gonna throw some ideas on the table... I once had a problem where Poser rendered part way, then rendered garbage for the rest of the render. I fixed it by clearing up a lot of space for the swap file and then defragging the hard drive. Not sure if this'd work for you but I suppose it couldn't hurt. Do you have plenty of HD space for the work file and/or the Windows swap file? What video codec are you using to encode your animation? Perhaps your video codec set-up got screwed up somehow and they need to be re-installed...

Frankly, Ive never liked the idea of rendering a MOV straight out of Poser, just because of the way Poser does it in one big shot. The machine becomes useless until the render is done, and I just can't afford to lose that kind of time on anything. So I render as a stack of pict files and then put in something like Moover to create the movie file. That way, I can stop the render any time I like without losing any of the work to that point, and if Poser kacks about memory (which I suspect may be your problem), I can reset and continue afresh.

Attached Link: http://poserutils.tripod.com/index.html

Try batchgen. It will make rendering lengthy animations much easier. BatchGen - the batch script creator for Poser. BatchGen creates Python scripts that can be used to render multiple Poser files automatically. With the scripts it creates you can render a animations from multiple files and multiple cameras while you sleep

That swap file thing sounds like a good idea, I'll try that first, then try the other suggestions here. I'll post my results here.

Oh yeah - and the codec I was using was full frames uncompressed. I also tried the Divx codec, and rendering just to BMP's. Only thing that worked was just plain 'render' instead of make movie, but that'd mean I'd have to go frame by frame.

defrag and it will render, if you use the operating systems defragmenter it will take several hours, if you download diskeeper from download.com it will take 30 minutes or less. after defraging reboot your system. I have a athlon 1400mhz 80 gb hdd and 1500mb ram win2000 and if i dont defragment after a few days then my system would freeze(i do a lot of animation renders)

Sometimes it helps to do a new install of Poser on top of your existing install (to keep all the existing Pose/Figure/Texture/Etc... files). Also there is a program called 'Natural Pose' (http://innuendo.ev.ca/main.htm) that will import your Poser animations into Bryce (much cleaner renders). There is a demo of it at that site.

Hi This sounds like a Win98 memory problem. Are you actually sure Poser is hung up or just moving at a snail's pace? The other people have hit on the most common problems. Here's something you might try... reduce the resolution of your texture files and cut down the number of shadow casting lights. I did an animation with Poser that had 14 characters in a full setting with a bunch of lights and I was never able to render the thing when I was running Win98. I upgraded to XP and was able to render the thing, but it took 21 hours to render 125 frames at 640x480. That's when I'm glad I have another machine to work with when it takes this long to render something. Ed

Well, none of these suggestions worked, so I'm now rendering it frame by frame. If anyone knows a good script to render everything a frame at a time, and save each file to an image, that'd be lovely. :D Thanks for your help everyone.