Hello, I am having a problem with P5 Sr4 and performing a firefly production render.Here I am spending hours setting up a scene and testing the render in draft mode all is ok.The Problem is when I goto render in production mode with no shadows or other adv features I get to "Adding Objects..." phase of the render dialog and it just hangs, I left it there for an hour and no change. Just what causes the Adding Objects... freeze ????? Example of scene load: Using M3,M3 ultra body suit,Mil horse,and Mil Enviroment and default lights for Mil enviroment. Help please this is not the 1st project P5 has kidnapped and refrused to render for me. I am running on a very above average hardware platform Intel 3.2ghz and 1gig of ram XP all the latest drivers. I dont think I am exceding the limits of my hardware. Thank you in advance.

I have had this problem before as well, and I find it usually happens when I use hair made by Neftis. I still have yet to figure out why, but if I switch to (say) Kozaburo hair it is fine. Does anyone know why this is? Does it have something to do with a lot of transparency layers?

Attached Link: http://www.keindesign.de/stefan/poser/firefaq.html#14

I think the trouble is just the sheer size of the textures on Neftis' hair, because if you reduce the size of the textures (by resizing them in Photoshop), that fixes the problem. Firefly has problems if you have a lot of large textures in a render. *Just what causes the Adding Objects... freeze ?????* IME, it's a memory issue. See number 14 in Stefan's Firefly FAQ for what you can do free up some memory. (The MilHorse takes a lot of resources, or so I've heard.) Poser just doesn't use system resources very efficiently. Even if you have a state of the art computer, rendering in Firefly can be a challenge. (If you haven't upgraded to SR4.1, doing that may help, but don't expect miracles.)

I don't know if this will help you or not but it sure did help me out......I got my puter back in late 2003 2.6ghz and Poser would always lock up on me when trying to render something big through firefly. Video card! That was the problem, I had a Nvdia FX5200 and was getting lag from high graphics online games too so I bought a Radeon 9800XT and now NO PROBLEMS rendering anything :) I'm sure you don't need to get a 9800XT as they are pretty expensive but I would look into seeing what type of video card they put in your computer. Solves a lot of problems with a good one :) Hope this helps! I just re-read your post and you are having the exact same problems I had with "adding objects" it would always lock up on me.

Poser doesn't take advantage of video card memory, unfortunately. I'm glad it worked for you, but most people find the video card doesn't make much difference. I have a fairly new Radeon (bought with Doom 3 in mind ;-) and I still can't render really large scenes in Firefly. If there are a lot of characters in an image, I render them each separately, then composite them in Photoshop.

Thanks, this all makes sense! I'll try reducing the texture resolution, as I really love her hair products. 8-)

[Poser doesn't take advantage of video card memory, unfortunately. I'm glad it worked for you, but most people find the video card doesn't make much difference] Weird, I have never had another problem since changing cards.

You can reduce the Neftis textures to one quarter the size (half the height and half the width), and the hair still looks pretty good. It's worth trying, anyway. If you don't like it, you can always reinstall and get the full-size textures back.

Attached Link: http://www.poserpros.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=17060

This might help.. it's a thread over at PoserPros, with a fix for firefly and Neftis's hair.

Hmmm, interesting solution ... sort of like rebuilding the hair from the ground up. 8-) Thanks Gareee, I'll give that a try.

NP. Glad I remembered it. I just wish the files would be updated for future customers.

Thank you for you replies. I can say its NOT the neftis hair issue for the files in question dont have any neftis hair in the scene. I can also say its not the video card or drivers. It could be a memeory issue with textures. I will take a look at the links, Thanks again. Happy Rendering.