Hello, I was rendering a huge image (with 7 characters), and my computer was hanging up on it, with the "out of memory" poser message. It was weird to me, because i have 1 gigabyte of RAM... Anyways, looking deeper in my image, i noticed that i had by mistake applied some unnecessary textures to some figures. Let me take an example : i'm working on a man with his clothing. I use a MAT pose to change the man's skin, but by mistake i have the jacket selected. There are then some parts in the jacket which are now with "man parts", and textures applied to them, even if i do not see them. When i realized that, i edited the "ghost parts" to leave them with no texture at all. Doing this wherever it was necessary did allow me to do my render without problems. I know that won't apply in all cases, but maybe it can be of use to some of you...

Wow, that's interesting. I know I make that mistake all that time - apply MAT poses to clothes and cameras instead the figures they're supposed to be applied to. :-/

Usually 'out of memory' means something quite different, it seems to be Poser's catch all 'something went wrong' message. But sometimes, it really does mean what it says. If you have textures loaded that are no longer applied to anything, you can clear them by restarting Poser. But if they're applied to something that won't be visible, you have to go through the materials dialogue.

People make the mistake in thinking that Poser stores textures like they are stored on disc ie a skin texture jpg at 56k only takes 56k in ram. That isn't true. No matter how you compress a texture on disc, poser will expand the texture to its full size in ram at 24 bit (actually I'm betting its stored as 32 bit for ease). This means each pixel takes up 4 bytes. For example, a 1024x1024 pic at 80k on disc expands to 4210688 bytes or 4 megs in ram. Yeoch! Add to that any duplicating poser may do for any of its shader nodes or other things. Now poser may cache the original pic in ram as compressed but sooner or later it has to expand that texture to do its rendering. Some 3d cards do allow compressed textures but again they either expand the texture when rendering or the algorithm to extract pixels slows down rendering. In any event since Poser 5 has those shader nodes that do textle operations I doubt they store the bitmaps compressed. Plus what's worse is if poser is obeying powers of 2 as they stated in P5. What happens here is the dimensions of a texture must be a power of 2 (16,32,64,128,256,512...) in size. What poser does is make the next largest sheet to put that texture on, rounding up to the next power of two. So when you load up Syria which is 3000x4000 what poser will do is create a sheet that is 4096x4096 to place that texture on. That's 4096x4096x4=67108864 or 67 megs!! A 5000x5000 texture will get you an 8192x8192 sheet. That's 819281924=268,435,456 or 286 MEGS! for just that one texture!!!! Add to that a bump map or those replaceable make up textures at the same res and its no wonder 1 gig won't hack it. I don't know if Poser requires square textures, I'm betting not which is a relief in that respect. That means a 16x1024 pic won't create a 1024x1024 texture in ram. Also I doubt poser supports a texture smaller than 16x16 without putting it on a 16x16 bitmap so don't bother with a 1x1 or 3x3 texture. Just use 16x16 cause you won't save any space. This is why I reduce all my textures to around 1024x1024 max res and always try and use a power of 2 for the dimensions. And yes, watch those added in textures on unused material nodes. More than likely poser mindlessly allocates all those without looking to see if they are used. Also watch the Preview material. I have seen textures assigned to those ie a skin texture from another map pack gets put on that material. V3 can be real bad cause she has some extra materials that refer to clothes items. I found one of my v3 models had maps from the clothes pack assigned to those nodes so she was loading like 4 extra maps she didn't need. BTW Morph Manager 4 has a save option that strips unassigned materials from a cr2. If a material is not in the obj it is removed from the cr2.

I agree this is all very interesting stuff. I also very often have ghost asignments. Thanks for the tip!