I tried to do a search on this but couldn't find anything: I seem to have a problem with doing renders of Vicki3. The strange thing is that it doesn't happen all the time, but in about 50% of the cases when I try to do a render it seems to hang. The little window comes up but nothing happens. Even if I click on the Stop button it doesn't do anything and I have to force-quit Poser. (This is in Poser4, I haven't tried it in Poser5 yet.) Does anybody else have this problem and is there some solution to this? Thanks, Sue

It might be an issue of just letting your system resources to catch up. This has happened to me a few times with V3 and other figures with hi-res textures. Turn off your computer for a while and restart. If you continue to have these problems make sure you don't have too many programs running at the same time. Hope this helps: PapaBlueMarlin

Thank you, I'll try that. Meanwhile, I've tried it in Poser5 and so far I haven't had this problem there. Thanks again, Sue

Sounds like an out of memory isue. Used to have that a lot on my old PC (only had 160MB and ran win '98) If you have enough RAM and enough free disk space (Poser uses a lot of disk space to render esp, high poly/high res text renders) it might be a memorie leak under win '98

I have that problem about the same amout of times as you, esp. after I have added hair to her....I hate it because I'm used to surfing or other things while it's rendering, but I found if I turn off everything but Poser, it doesn't do that.

I have 512 MB RAM, about 6GB left on the HD and Windows ME. I think you're right Axe, it must be a memory issue. I'm like you, Dizzie, I like to do several things at the same time. And these were just little test renders at the default size, so I didn't think it would be a problem. Of course the high-res map is quite big - maybe I should make a lower res version for the working and testing phase. The interesting thing is that I did not have this problem in Poser5 and I noticed that the textured preview looked much better in Poser5 than in Poser4: in P4 the skin texture looks quite blotchy and in P5 it's nice and smooth. I just started the work in P4 because in some ways it's much faster. Thanks everybody! :)

"I have 512 MB RAM, about 6GB left on the HD and Windows ME." Do you really only have 6 GB left on the hard drive?! That's not much room when you're dealing with graphics. If that is indeed your free hard drive space, you need more room on the hard drive. I had used Poser 4 with Windows ME, and found it to be a most frustrating experience. Poser 4 still has lots of bugs and used to bring my computer to its knees at times. The best solution I found was to increase my memory to 512MB (the max my computer can handle), install Windows XP. I also installed Poser on its own 30GB hard drive, and strive to keep the maximum amount of free space for Poser to do its work.

Yes, you're right, I need to clean up my HD to free up some space. I've also been thinking about getting an extra (USB) HD, I guess I should do that sooner rather than later. :)

I think that one important thing is to upgrade to Win2000 or even better XP. These OSes handle huge memory requirements much better. I think you have a memory problem and upgrading to 1 Gig RAM won't help much with ME. I run XP with 512MByte RAM and 4Gig HD Space left without any problem yet. If it is the case, do remove all morphs you do not need. This saves you additional memory.

Attached Link: Windows XP Home System Requirements

Um, folks, Memory is not equal to hard drive space. Memory is handled on your RAM chips. Memory is volatile. You lose it when you quit a program or turn off your computer. Your hard drive stores data. When you run programs, the computer takes the information from your hard drive and stores in memory to do its work. (Pardon an old tech for giving this mini-lesson). One thing to watch out for: sometimes when we deal with a computer that has a small hard drive, and an old operating system, we're talking about an older computer. Some older computers may not be able to handle Windows XP. We want to provide the best advice possible to help with this problem. That's why it's best to tell us about your computer (including free hard drive space, processor and memory) right off... It will help us provide the best potential upgrade strategy for one thing. I've included a link to a page which describes the Windows XP Home System Requirements in case it helps. You can use that as a starting point for more Windows XP information.

Sue..your texture differences between Poser 4 and Poser 5 sound like the bump maps. If they're JPG and not BUM, Poser 4 shows blotchiness. Poser 5 (and ProPack) use JPG directly and show them okay. It's true that XP handles memory better but it is also true that XP uses more of it for itself than ME or Win98.

Actually, rogergordian, the hard drive does play a part in memory as well - the swap file. As the RAM gets filled up, some of the information is put on the hard drive, in an area reserved for back-up to the RAM. It's not as fast as the RAM, but it's faster than searching for all the bits scattered about the hard drive. When you shut down your machine, the OS clears out the swap file. The next time you turn your computer on, it recreates the swap file. Depending on your OS and your settings, your computer might always have X amount for swap file space, or it may be set to use up to X amount or X percentage of hard drive space. If your hard drive is full or nearly full, it will affect how your computer runs because it doesn't have enough space left to create the swap file. I have a 4 GB partition set up just for swap space to make sure that I don't run out. It works quite well. Pardon a young tech giving this mini-lesson.

I have a brand new computer that came with XP-- I have a lot of memory and processor and Poser seems to like to have around 16Gs on the scratch disk. I'm not the only one who has noticed this. Seems stupid but I 've got a lot now and I'm keeping it that way-- yeah, I still have these kinds of freezes,by the way, memory leaks still happen and there still seems to be a 2 to 3 hour time-out on all the Poser's, 4 PP and 5, I've worked on [three different computers, 2 Sonys and a Dell] Emily

Showing the white box then hanging seems to be a problem with bump map calculations (Poser does these before rendering, I think) - disabling bump maps in the Render Options dialogue or downsampling them in an image editor fixed it for me when I was using Win98.

Thank you everybody for all the suggestions, they've been quite helpful. Spit, you're right, the bump files are JPG files, I didn't think about that before! It makes sense then that I didn't have problems in P5. This would also line up with RHaseltine's idea about the bump map problem. So it seems that the problem came from the bump maps and the memory issue, right? What I don't understand is why didn't P4 ask to convert the JPG files to BUM files? I was using the V3 High Res maps from DAZ and loaded them with the MAT pose. Did that make a difference (as opposed to loading a bump map manually)?

I think that using the MAT files force feed the .jpg bump map into Poser so it can't complain; it just chokes on it. Glad things are working better!

Thank you, Crescent. :) It's good to know about the bump maps and MAT files issue - hopefully next time I'll remember to check the file extensions.

Thanks all of you , this just fixed a bumch of problums I was haveing with a few different mesh's that i totaly gave up on and can now use :)