I'm rendering an image using firefly, props and figures from the P5 runtime folder and Vicky, who is in the P4 runtime folder, as well as reflection. It renders fine in the same window and rendered fine at 600x800 in a new window but any larger and I get a Caught C exception error.

I reported it to CL but haven't heard back.

I was reading a thread here that suggested the pz3 file could be corrupted when this happens but after getting the error 3 times the other night I tried it again in the same window the next day and it rendered there with no problem.

I can't use the P4 render as it screws up the reflection.

I downloaded and installed the patch days ago but I didn't get any of these problems before the patch - at least nothing that I didn't think wasn't human error. I'm regretting downloading the patch and dreading having to re-install.

Has anyone had a similar problem? I'm trying to render huge at 300dpi.

For some people rebooting the PC seemed to help. I was probably the one who suggested pz3 corruption, but that was just just speculation at the time. The "C exception" window is actually a piece of debugging code that CL seem to have seen fit to leave in the patched code. The same problem may well have been occuring in the unpatched version, but it now gets reported rather than just causing a render freeze, which will give CL a better opportunity to trace the cause of the problem. Bill

Rebooting doesn't help me. I tried rendering with checking the "smooth polygons" off and with "cast shadows" off but both make the image look like crap. :( Nothing seems to work. Still waiting for CL to respond.

FWIW, I am getting exactly the same problem. Combined with a C exception every time I try to load a saved PZ3 file (saved with P5 mind you), I am VERY frustrated! Anyway, I've reported this to CL, so let's see what happens. [sigh] Fab

It's a memory problem, I think (though it's clear that Poser is violating processor memory canons or the exception would not activate). You could try eliminating shadows for all but your main light and setting that to raytraced shadows. That will save some memory. Try turning off shadowing for any objects that don't actually cast them (like the ground). Eliminate any lights you don't need and replace the ambient lighting by applying the diffuse texture at some fractional value of ambience in the ambient channel in the materials editor. Get more memory!

"Get more memory!"

If P5 needs more than a half a gig of memory I want my money back.

It doesn't NEED it exacly, but it WANTS it for sure. I've seen commit charges over 700Mb on fairly simple scenes with hair in them. You can cut WAY down by shutting off shadows for objects that don't cast any and killing them for all but one bright light. And if you cut down on the number of hairs per poly in the hair lab, you can often save gobs of it. I've found it fairly solid except when I try something with a lot of hairs in it and I put that down to my only having 256Mb of RAM.

This is still a problem with P5. I'm not running scenes with hair and so far I've never even tried to render a scene that needed virtual memory. Nevertheless, I still get this problem when memory usage gets high. Currently I'm using XP which is based on the Windows NT kernel, and while Micr$oft OS's may be an easy scapegoat when anything goes wrong, the NT kernel is mature and well known to be rock solid in memory use. Using virtual memory (disk) rather than physical RAM should be transparent to any well written application under NT, the only effect being a slowdown in performance. This is patently not the case in P5. Hopefully feedback from the debugging code will allow CL to identify the problem code and fix in in the next patch. Bill