I don't mean to offend, but the funny thing is that people in my country who are not familiar with this Software often laugh when I mention it. The thing is that in Serbian, word Poser in slang language means something like "Shiter" or "Shit-boy". Other interpretation is "someone who got lucky" depending on how you use this word...

So when I work in Poser and after a good torture with exporting issues, when I finally got lucky and get what I wanted I always yell POSER!

Maybe there is something more in that? :)

From my experience, you have to restart Poser from time to time. When it can't  export background picture, no matter if you have specified in render options to do so, try to do so with preview render by changing some render options. When you succeed with that switch to FireFly and save your presets. Remember that there can be a huge bug concerning Export and Render, depending on what options you use. Also there is a huge memory leak and Poser can often crash, and so this might be also a reason why it sometimes messes with renders.

The same thing above works also for issue when Poser doesn't export images as 32 bit depth PNG slides, but 24 bit instead. Then instead of transparent background you get gray background color.

REMEMBER also that what you get by rendering 1 image in Poser ( by pressing render button in upper right corner of the screen) is not always what you will get when exporting animation as PNG slides. It's quite frustrating, I know, but you have to be patient and try to figure out what options you should use when Exporting slides.

Sometimes unchecking 2d and 3d motion blur option is enough to fix this problem. Why? I have no idea. I hope that in new version of program they will fix this issue, since this Poser8 is most unstable version. Although PoserPro have also this issue, but P8 have much better render.

SOLVED

Thank you for your reply.

The thing is, it doesn't, work in my case, since I have exported 250 slides as PNG images. It is animation and not a still rendered image. It has no sense to manually fix background of all 250 slides. I have stayed up all night trying to resolve this, and I have found out that resolution must be higher. Much higher. I also tried exporting animation with green background and then I was using AfterFX to remove background. The difference is minor. The solution is to at least double the resolution size and so the rendering time also... :(

I had the same problem no matter if render over background is checked. It seems that there are some bugs with Poser renders. Try to change display settings for Preview mode from OpenGL to Sree3d. Do simple render. Than change to FireFly. It won't always work. I haven't found the right reason why is this happening.

Ok, I have uninstalled and reinstalled new Nvidia drivers, reinstalled NET framework, C++2008 and finally reinstalled Poser8. It works for now. It seems that Poser CAN'T export movie with transparent background at all.(????) At least I have managed to export series of PNG images with transparent backruond (by turning off OpenGL mode) instead of AVI file. I will have to combine them into one sequence in Vegas. It seem that it's only solution. Pitty...

Well, I have installed Poser Pro and tested it. It also has similar issues, but this time exported animation can have picture background, but  no transparent background. Again GRAY background instead of 100% transparency.  Exported PNG pictures still have no background.

And then... I updated graphic card driver from version 190.0 to new 191.07 (Nvidia) and my Poser8 installation went even more crazy...You know that little slider under render settings called PREVIEW TEXTURE RESOLUTION, when it's set to maximum of 4096? Well it went crazy, showing me 4096 but there is no slider. When I try to move invisible slider little bastard reappears, but max number is no more 4096 but 2048 instead, and that's it. Can't revert it to 4096.

REASON for all of this is definitely INCOMPATIBILITY of POSER with NEW Nvidia graphic card DRIVERS.
All my previous animations that I have produced in POSER PRO with old drivers were working fine ( transparent background and image background with no problems). If I could only remember what version of drivers I was using...

THAT'S IT!!!
I had enough of POSER8!!!
All animations that I export, no matter if I use FIREFLY or PREVIEW render don't have background image, BUT when I try to import avi to VEGAS or PREMIERE - GRAY background is aplied!!!
I have tried everything, all options, deleting material options  for background, switching codecs, trying all RENDER OVER options and still there is gray background instead of transparent. Pictures have transparent backrounds, animations don't. AAAAGH!

I AM definitely switching back to Poser PRO. No matter how many times it crashes, bugs with version 8 are really to much.

Thank you all (two of you) for responding to my post.

Thank you Superman Sir.
At least I can stop banging my head on keybord...:)

Ok now!

When I save render as PNG or  TIFF  images or as animation-BACKGROUND IS NOT VISIBLE.
BUT, when I export RENDER as JPG or PSD BACKGROUND IS VISIBLE!?

Any ideas?

THANKS!

Quote - put the image on a flat plane and use that as the background..

That is not a solution. My question was if anyone has a solution for this issue when Poser renders are not including background images even when background is selected to be included in render.
Reinstalling application doesn't help. I don't wanna PLANE instead of background. Thank you.

Please, if anyone had same experience (BUG) can you give me advice how to fix this problem?  I'm in the middle of work and can't figure out why there is no background on exported images and animations. I have checked "Render Over Background Picture" thingy and still no results... I have changed render settings couple of times and results are the same... Is it something with FireFly render? Bug, or I am missing something?

Attached Link: http://www.uploadhouse.com/viewfile.php?id=4827103&PHPSESSID=4c36256f9da58f302495bac4e1d01bda

"Render Over
Background Picture" checked

Quote - they may have already answered this in poser forum, but it takes the same amount of time to render an uncompressed video as it does to render a series of uncompressed image files AFAIK.  the advantage to rendering series of image files is that poser may crash during the rendering.  if it crashes during a video render, you have nothing, but if it crashes during an image sequence, at least you have the first few images.

just between you and me, poser is the most crash-prone app I have ever used.  I know some will deny this, but it's just a lame attempt to shift blame from the coders to the user.

This post was deleted in Poser forum.

Thank you all. Anyway, I have found simple solution by myself. ACDSee Pro2.5!!!
How could I forget about that?! :)