At the risk of showing off my stupidity to the entire community, I thought I'd post my latest revelation concerning large renders in hopes of helping others who might be as clueless as me. I've bitched and whined and complained in this forum about not being able to make large renders, despite the fact that my computer is powerful enough it should have been able to render any size. I finally had decided it was due to me running Windows ME. Well guess what...that's not the case. A week or so ago Dalinese ask a question about screen resolution and large renders which got me to thinking (something I obviously do little of). I keep my screen resolution at 800 x 600 all the time, because I guess I'm half blind. I also render my images at that resolution. I thought okay maybe if I set it at a higher resolution I could make large renders. So my fellow clueless friends, here are the steps to making large renders: I set my scene up in Poser at the screen resolution of 800 x 600. Save as a pz3 and exit Poser Change my screen resolution to a higher setting (I don't know if it matters which setting...I just pick one). Open Poser and open the pz3 you just saved. Change your document size to whatever you want it to be. Render away...It works...even if you've used bump maps, shadows, large props and the whole ball of wax!!!! Now I don't know if everyone who makes large renders already knew this and that's what they were doing all along, but it was a revelation to me and maybe this little tidbit will help somebody else as well.

I am going to have to go back and try it the way you had yours set just to see if it keeps me from rendering large size now- LOL! I always keep my monitor at 1152 x 864 on a 19" monitor and the only reason I render at the size I do is so I can set the image up as wallpaper and look for flaws. Never had a prob rendering at any size so I'm going to try it your way and see what, if anything, stops me.

I'm not sure exactly what error message you got when trying to do large renders. Here's the one I'd received in the past. It goes something like this: "Insufficient disk space to render at this resolution." I think that was only experienced with Windows 2000 Pro and Windows XP. The solution for that problem (for me) was to install Poser on its own 30GB hard drive. Hey Poser is the biggest application on my computer anyway... I rarely get that error message any more, and the solution to that problem now is to defrag the hard drive. **** You can operate Poser in one screen resolution, but you can also render in a new window. This allows your final render to be larger than what is allowed for your screen resolution. I did that all the time before I got a larger monitor. Have you done your renders in a new window? **** It's hard to properly diagnose your problem without knowing the full extent of the symptoms or the error messages you may have received. You might just need to defrag your hard drive. That's one thing many "artist-types" forget to do! Of course, I'm both a techie and artist. *** Don't be hard on yourself. You're not stupid. And remember one great purpose of this community is to share information. Besides, I'm still befuddled by some of the simplest things.

Hi Ron...the problem I had before was when I tried to render in a new window (screen resolution at 800 x 600), was that it would freeze and the only thing I could do was C+alt+delete. This would happen everytime I tried to render large when the image included shadows, bumpmaps, large props, more than one character, etc., etc. As for defraging...I do that about everyday. I don't know why my above solution works, but it does and I'm thrilled to death. :-)

Whew, I'm glad your solution works for you, I tried rendering a large intensive file I have done before and it rendered just fine, but I couldn't see all the parts of my Poser workspace with everything so darn BIG- Hehe! It's nice that we can all post our pleas and solutions here, as what works for one may work for someone else, or help them find their own solution with more heads together working on it.

LOL Maggie...I set my scene up at the 800 x 600 resolution so that's why I could see everything just fine. Of course when I change screen resolution it's so teeny tiny I need a magnifying glass practically. The plus side for me is, that Poser will then allow me to change the window size to bigger deminsions without crashing.

Oh, Rockets, it's you! I was too lazy to read your name before. I'm glad you found a solution. (I know you're a very smart person!) In my experience, Poser is a program that challenges your operating system to no end. I was reminded of that problem when I switched from using the Preview version of Windows XP back to Windows ME. God, Poser kept crashing and crashing. I just couldn't wait to buy Windows XP and wipe my hard drives and install from scratch.

Maybe running ME has something to do with the problems I had rendering, I just don't know. I do know that I've found a solution that works for me. Maybe some of the others who have posted here with the same problem I had will find some use for my tip. I guess I should have titled this as "If you are running Windows ME, have your screen resolution set at 800 x 600, and Poser freezes up when you try and render in a new window...read this!" LOL

RonKnight..your "Insufficient disk space to render at this resolution." maybe a cause of a copy of things...first you don't have the hard drive space... 2nd the swap file is to small. You to set your swap file to be aleast twice what you have as ram...you will also see a massive improvement in the way Poser work... 3rd...the ram in your system might be the problem...if you mixed and matched ram it's possible it reads that you have say 512...but the bad ram may be bringing you down to 256..forcing the system to say "Insufficient disk space to render at this resolution." 4th...make sure you have the latest patches for your Windows ...select "Tools" from Explore then "Windows Update"... If all else fails...set back and wait for Poser 5..

sounds to me like a vidio card problem with the render resolution. as to the disk space error. well I run both win2k and xp get it on both. to fix it I go to win temp dir and clear it out deleat every thing in the tmp folder, its seems this fills up and poser complains. i run a MX400 with 64 megs of ram for primary and a tnt pro 32 megs secondary card for second moniter. if i am running poser in the tnt card and try to fool with the resolution while poser is running the card hangs and need to reboot to fix. i dont have the problem on the MX400 card. so sounds like this may be your problem. as for windows Me trash it, its buggy has mem leaks vid problems you name it. If nothing else go back to win 98 SE or go buy XP. XP till you get used to it can seem flaky but is more stable and faster than all the other windows os systems. laters Vel POSER 5 I WANT IT YESTERDAY :)

Yes... I noticed (when I had 98) that Poser never crashed rendering to the workspace window. Maybe it writes directly to the screen memory rather than making a big buffer in RAM to render into... so the windows 98/ME memory leaks don't cause a problem. H:)

starmkr, the official response to the insufficient disk space problem is the swap file and/or moving Poser to a different hard drive or partition. For me, this solution was the easiest: Just give Poser its own hard drive. It uses more space than any other application I own. I still get the error once in a great while, and then I defrag. That's all she wrote. I won't mess with swap files and such. I get lost in some of the complexity that others take for granted, and I've been known to screw things up that way. My solution was easy for me to do, and worked. **** Oh, Rockets, the main concern I have is that you found a way to get past that problem!

Well, a would like to add my little thoughts, too: You all are talking about image renders... The problem is that you cant do a movie render higher than your screen resolution... and doing a movie render is when poser normally crashes with "insufficient disk space". In my opinion This behaviour has nothing to do with your actually memory size, as sometimes you can render 10 frames, then you can render none, and on your next try you can render another fifty... Anyway, I switched over to C4d, and the rendering quality AND speed are astonishing...

I've had insufficient disk space warnings usually when trying to render to a larger window. And also before I upgraded to 1 G of memory-- I had 383Mb before and it couldn't handle or even load the very high res textures now out there. I'm installling my 120G firewire drive today, because I have a super-bloated Poser file and only 6G's free-- it's not enough to render to a separate window. I can render to the Poser display window-- and make it almost as large as I wanted the final render, 1500 or so-- I would prefer 2500, it's better detail and postwork cleanup at that size barely shows when shrunk. So, yeah, for some things-- given at least 512Ram, which is all I have on my laydown puter-- increasing the display resolution works very well. Emily

hendrikm, I don't bother with movie renders, and I've received the error message as described above. By the way, you're the only one so far who's tried to tie this to a movie render...

{{{{By the way, you're the only one so far who's tried to tie this to a movie render... }}} and of course YOU would know wouldnt YOU? give me strength!!!!

Obviously you haven't bothered to read most or any of the existing threads on this issue. hendrikm made a statement: "... and doing a movie render is when poser normally crashes with "insufficient disk space"." Now go through all the threads, and over to Curious Labs and their FAQ. Find a previous statement that says the same thing. I'll be very suprised if you do. "Oh Lord, give me strength, and a good sense of humor. There must be a full moon."