I thought that only the others get problem with Poser5 and FireFly. Now it hit me in the middle of my face. I got a nice scene and it renders well in Poser5 with the Poser4 renderer. When I use FireFly it stalls. It calculates the shadow maps and it even starts rendering (about 10%) then it seems to go into some kind of endless loop. I'm on a PC (AMD 2100+, 1GByte RAM) and the system monitor tells me that Poser is currently using 1.4 GByte memory. Still 600MByte left. I can start other applications and I can even access the Poser Menu Bar (all is grayed out except the Help). Seems that FireFly has gone to some endless loop. Didn't change anything on my Poser5 installation. I have SR3 installed (German Version, so don't tell me to try SR4). FireFly settings are - Shadow Maps - Polygon Smoothing - Texture Filter - Pixel-Sampling 3 Any idea how to improve the situation? Thanks - Walter

Can you post a screen shot of your render settings? That 600MB left is mighty close to the end if you have some hefty shadow settings. I would suggest disabling Smoothing and filtering first -- they use a lot of oomph, and then try them each one at a time to see what the impact is.

Hi ynsaen, here are the settings.

Uncheck texture filtering first unless you have a tiled texture that gets moire in the distance. See how that one goes. Given the size of the file already, and the size of the image being rendered, it is possible that the whole of it may exceed your available memory space.

I have had to drop the bucket size (feldgrobe) down to 8 before to get a monster scene to render, it takes longer, but eventually goes through. Also you might set the rendering-minimum rate higher than .5 if you can stand to. Maybe 1.0? And your picture is huge. Ynsean may be right that it's over the top.

I rendered this image, but now I added a Mil Dragon in the scene and it seems that doesn't work. I just did a render without shadow maps, but Raytracing on. This just rendered fine, but due to the missing shadow maps the picture is partly overcast and doesn't look well. I'll try your hint caravaggio and see, if it improves. Are there any settings like swap size that may help? Thanks - Walter

if you've got at least a 2048MB swap file, hon, not much more will fly with too much overhead, lol. If it's shadow maps that are killing you, adjsut the depth of the map downward, this is a pretty heavy load, and that would help a lot.

the mill dragons textures are huge, if he is nto the focal point or is set back from the camera a bit, I would reduce the size of his maps and see if that helps, I have various resolutions(sizes) of most of my maps for just this reason.

Yeah reduce texture size as much as possible. I have a rule that no texture goes above 1024x1024 unless absolutely necessary and most textures in my renders are 512x512 or 256x256 if I can get away with it. Here's a break down of how bad things can get with memory with various texture sizes. I'm assuming Poser 5 uses 32bit/bit color (rgba). 1024x1024=10485764=4,194,304 bytes 2048x2048=41943044=1,677,7216 bytes 4096x4096=16777216*4=67,108,864 bytes Of course things are cut in half if its 16bit per pixel which I doubt on a rendering engine. As you can see, every time you double the res of a texture you more than square the memory usage. Now I'm assuming here firefly needs to have texture unpacked in ram to rasterize efficently. They may have some scheme to keep them compressed like some video cards do but those algorythms can be fairly slow and most cards accept packed textures through the bus but unpack them in card. Since firefly appears to be a plugin and poser appears to be "sending" stuff to firefly, I'd seriously bet the assets are doubled, one is in poser and one is sent to firefly to render (that's why you see adding objects and adding textures on the render bar). The firefly one disappears when you rerender or exit firefly. Firefly might even cash them, who knows, but I'm betting all resources are doubled when sent to firefly. If you have one of those fancy skin texture sets, check the usage of lipstick, eyeshadow etc. I've bought packages that have a 3000x3000 texture just for the face and yet another 3000x3000 texture for just the eye shadow map. Yeoch! That's 36 megs just for some eyeshadow. Also check all material nodes and make sure you don't have an unused material or material that could use the same material on another part but isn't. For example, I've had figures with a face map but found the nostrils had a map from another figure texture. That's double the texture space right there, just to map some frickn' nostrils. That's real expensive.

Well, you may not believe it, but it works. Just changed the settings according to caravaggio (thanks guy) and started a long render overnight. It's morning now here and I have the render. Cool. It was a heavy scene, I agree (13 spotlights with shadow maps). A bit rework and I will put it in the Poser Gallery. Thanks to all for your help - Walter

(13 spotlights with shadow maps) What can help a lot too is reducing shadow calculations to just the necessary. Turn off the shadows for lights that don't need it, turn off shadow casting for objects that don't need it (in most cases, walls and floors don't need to cast shadows) and keep your shadow map sizes as low as possible. Similar to the texture size calculation above by Mason, shadow maps also occupy significant amounts of memory.

Thanks stewer, I already reduced the size of the Mil Dragon Maps. Floor and Walls are not casting shadows due to the selfshadowing problem we discussed already in another thread. It renders fine now (approx. 50 minutes on a AMD 2100+) at production level. Added also DOF and it's gettin' better and better. Thanks to all your help I have a feeling now, where I can tune FireFly to get results. There are a lot of options. Thanks - Walter

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=614960

Ok, it's done. This is my first Poser5 render for the gallery and it finally worked out the way I wanted it. Thanks - Walter

Looks spectacular -- I've commented on the look of the picture in the gallery, more on the artistic side than this thread covers. But that's a lot of lights you used...