Howdy everyone. I didn't think it was possible, but I've encountered a problem with rendering in Poser. I can't get this one scene to start rendering. I don't even have shadows turned on and it never begins. It just sits there. That is how I see it anyway. I've let it sit for a long time (easily much longer than any other render would've been done and re-done). I can't figure out why. The scene I am trying to render isn't terribly complicated. 4 figures, some props, and a background picture. Only 4 lights, too. I'm trying to render it in Poser's window (not a new window) at 600x450. Given that's a larger area than I usually work with (400x400), but I doubt that is the problem. So, I need help! I really dunno what to do and am on hold (with this) until someone can help me figure it out! I'd truly appreciate any help. Thanks in advance, everyone!

Can you please let us know the size of the figures' textures, Hair textures, Clothes textures, CPU, the amount of ram on your system, and Operating system?

Can you up the memory alloted to poser? Try saving, quit the program and reopen. Sometimes if I have been rerendering scenes over and over, it finally gets stuck. For test renders I turn off antialisising as well.

does anyone know exactly how antialiasing really works? it dithers the colour of the pixel by what is in the surounding pixels...it actually blurrs the edges of the objects in the image. if left side pixel is white and right side is green, then the pixel in question becomes light green. once I read that, I only use antialiasing when no reflections or transparencies in the image, so almost never. reflections and transparencies are funny with the pixels around them. they don't match at all.

Quick aside for Jaqui:

That's how your eyes work to compensate for differences in depth of field. If you look at a straight edged object - such as a the side of a chair - against a highly contrasting background, you'll see that at the edges there's a little blur. Anti aliasing reproduces this effect.

It also compensates for the corners of the square pixels we work with - sort of smoothing them out so they don't have a zig zag appearance against whatever is behind them.

Anti aliasing definately adds to render time but it also adds to the realism of the render.

Sometimes it can be bypassed by rendering the image at a much larger size (at least 2x) and then reducing the image size in a photo-retouching software. When you scale down an image, the software averages out the pixels; the same thing happens as with anti aliasing:

"it dithers the colour of the pixel by what is in the surounding pixels...it actually blurrs the edges of the objects in the image.
if left side pixel is white and right side is green, then the pixel in question becomes light green."

The quality varies depending on the image - quality being defined as the ability to create realistic edges.

Jaqui, I hope that didn't sound condescending. If so, "oops, I did it again..." Sorry ;)

Anti-aliasing is a post render operation so having it on or off shouldn't influence whether the render will start. The only time I would ever turn it off is to do a test render or to create a pixel perfect mask for use as an alpha channel in another application. I find high res textures are the worst culprit for render stalling, especially if you've got a few of them loaded or some are hanging around in memory because you were using them a minute ago. I have some high res eye textures and if I try four or five different sets before I choose the one I want to use in the render, that's pretty much a guaranteed render lock up. It's like having five high-res Vicki textures in one scene. Geometry and morphs that are present in the document at the time of rendering also occupy memory. If you strip unused morphs out of your figures and remove props and figures that won't be seen in the render, that will help.

Hi, this stalling happens usually on systems with not enough memory running win98 (ME, etc) if there are numerous high resolution textures in the scene. Reducing the texture resolution (can be done in any paint program) usually helps without sacrifycing quality too much (especially if you render to 600x450)

"not enough memory running win98" is always the case as win98 cannot address memory above 256MB. Hey... but remember... it's not a bug, it's a feature!! Adding more memory seems to make the problem worse. Poser crashes at the point where the paging file begins to be used. H:)

I'll correct that, Hogwarden ;-) It's 128 Meg, not 256. There's a thread about this over in the Poser Tech forum at the moment and the new DAZ tech guy recommends a cache management program called "cacheman" as a way to address the problem.

Attached Link: http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3120-20-0.html?qt=cacheman&tg=dl-2001

Thebert - I'm using figures I use a lot with the exception of a texture for the Zygote Dragon. It's two different textures at 2000x2000. One is about 500k and the other is 150k. As for me, I'm on a Pentium 3 1.7 Ghz with 256 of RAM. I was just thinking about my background picture (on a Square prop). Could it be that I am using a BMP? I usually use JPGs.

I have the same Win98/Poser problem as Yunas sometimes, and I'm positive that it's due to insufficient physical RAM. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Poser doesn't use virtual memory at all. Yunas, if you're using hi-res textures, try resizing them to half their current size. In some cases I only had to reduce the skin texture, not heads or eyes. It's also possible that even though it doesn't seem like it, you've loaded your scene with more than your computer can handle. I can't render with four human figures unless they're all lo-res in both geometry and texture. Two, yeah, with a minimum of props. note to self: must expand RAM ... must expand RAM ...

I've found that '98 sucks for Poser work. Win2000 is the way to go, Poser just runs so much faster. I have had the same exact problem, and then I took the same exact file to my Win2k machine (which is 200mhz SLOWER, btw), and not only did the render start sooner, it rendered faster. The problem is '98 machines with over 64MB of RAM will access the swap file before it needs to - which is nuts, if you have 128, or 256, your swap file shouldn't need to be accessed on simple jobs, and it will always run slower than real RAM. There is a fix, but it only marginally improved performance for me. I will find it and post it to the tech forum this evening.

I can not render an image that has a texture map of 3000x3000 (Vic 2 Body) When I resize the map to 2000x2000 it works fine. I have an old P II 400 with 128M of memory. I also have win 98.

My problem is with RAM most likely. I got that program Cacheman and when I opened Poser it showed almost all my RAM being used. Then when I rendered it filled and started to use W~ay too much VMEM. Thus, I'm just getting more RAM. ^_^