I've recently gotten DAZ's Mil-Dragon and I've been playing around with it. However I've got a problem, I can't seem to render an image of it. I position the figure, apply the textures it comes with and when I click to render it the little gray box appears saying 'Rendering' but then nothing else happens. It doesn't lock up my system but it locks up Poser and clicking the 'stop' button does nothing... I've let it sit for over 2 hours and come back and nothing has changed. The only way out is to press ctrl-alt-del and end task on poser (it doesn't say the program has stopped responding). Anyway it gets weirder, I can't render any image with the dragon in it but I did make a short animation (in AVI format) with it, full textures and everything. I've got a 32mb 3d graphics card (nVidia TNT2) and 256mb of RAM so I can't believe it could be a memory problem... Does Anyone out there in Computer-land know what the problem could be?

256MB of RAM is a bit on the low end, especially for high-end models. The video card doesn't matter much. Is your Poser version patched to 4.03? That'll make a big difference if not. Also, make sure that you have a large enough swap space (virtual memory). Well, that's a start for troubleshooting, anyways. Kuroyume

256 on the Low End?! Jease... I was running it on 128 until just a few weeks ago (before I got the Mil Dragon) and didn't come across any problems... I'll have to check on the patch, and I have a 500mb swap file... Bigger or is that fine. Thanks for your help.

Have you cleaned up your temp files, Maybe time to defrag. Just a thought. Tashar 59

P.S. Try saving Pz3, close poser, then try again. Tashar 59

I couldn't render the Mil Dragon, either, until I switched from Win98 to XP recently. Had the same trouble with a Bryce picture I set up - almost 2 million polygons. Don't know if this is the only solution to the problem, though .....

I am on Windows 2000 and can render it fine in P4.

I had the same problem. My computers a bit old these days, a pentium 3 450 with 320 meg of ram, Im also on windows 98. The only way I could render it was to reduce the size of the texture maps. There so big and detailed it didnt seem to make much difference to the render. I'm saving for a better system until then I don't think it worth me getting poser 5 because I get a feeling that will really kill things.

Actually the video card driver really does matter. You might try updating your Graphics Driver..... Had a problem recently with rendering a tree pack.... updated the graphics driver and it fixed the problem. It was also an Nvidia card. I downloaded the Aug 2002 driver.

This used to happen to me all the time when I tried to render a scene with 2 Vicky & Mike characters. Then I updgraded off Windows 98 and everything worked fine. The sad fact is: Poser 4 + high-polygon models + hi-res textures + Windows 98 = Poser lockups. Do a search through the past message threads and you can read about all the other people who have problems with Poser & Windows 98. I don't mean to sound harsh, but it's September 2002- it's time to upgrade your 4 year old operating system... especially if you want to use "state of the art" software like the Mill Dragon and Poser 5. --John

Thanks everyone... I'll check out new video drivers... And artbyphil, just how small did you have to shrink the textures? As for updating to a newer windows version... I'm not made of money :) I guess if that's the only way it'll work I'm out of luck.

John.. You are right in some respects about maybe it's time to update...can't disagree with that, but this guy was not even on about Poser 5. XP wasn't even out when they released Poser 4 and much of the models were written with Win98 in mind. When they started to develop Poser 5 was XP even readily available, afterall it's taken 2 years hasn't it? Remember - it's supposed to have been tested on damn site lower end machines according to the program specifications. Upgrading your ops system may work for some people but I also think updating drivers, additional memory and upating outdated hardware may help... I'm shifting to a new system with XP for running P5 with a shed load of memory, but judging by some of the posts... this may not even help.

The problem with Windows 98 is that only 128 MB of RAM is the ceiling for any application. This is true of all Win 95 derived OS's. NT based (NT, 2000, and XP) do not suffer this limitation.

I'm on Poser 4 on XP and it consistently fails to render above a certain size, saying "out of memory". As I only use it Poser rendering for checking the look of a figure before I export it, no big deal, but there's something wrong because there's no way it's REALLY out of memory - it's a s/w bug. Also, with two or more Victorias / Mikes in the same scene it disables the "body" morph controls for the second one (or rather, it ignores their values). I assume this too is because it can't find the required memory, but the problem is with the s/w not with the computer RAM.

I ran the textures through j peg optimiser (photoshop plugin) so I could compare the two versions as I worked. I think I reduced them to about half the size (in megabites not in scale) and they didn't look much different really. I renderd the dragon with just the head texture (full size) and then with the reduced version to compare and (to me at any rate) there didn't seem to be much difference. another option that as worked for me is to take the dragon into bryce and render it there (if you've got bryce of course) though this is a longwinded way to do it.

Don't have Bryce so that's not an option... I did manage to render just a head shot with full textures but I guess I'll have to shrink some of them antway. I'm having some troubles with downloading video drivers but I think I can sort it out... My computer just doesn't look as good as it did before :)

Ok... I just want to thank everyone for their help here... I finally got the right drivers downloaded and working and now I can render a full scene of the Dragon (textures at full resolution too)... It's probably something I should have thought to try myself but then that's why these boards are here (to help the brainless like me to remember the obvious :) ). So special thanks goes to poseschool for being the first to slap me upside the head and mention video driver updates... It does obviously render slower than other images I've done but I expected that. Thanks again :)