I'm using Poser 4, and for some reason, this one shot I got will not render! I've done a bunch of them up to this point with DAZ's Michael 3, and hadn't had this problem. Basically what I do is render the background first, then render the foreground character (Michael) so that the render process isn't so big, and it's been working. In this one shot, however, I rendered the background animation just fine like usual, then imported it as an AVI background, and tried to render Michael over it (like I've been doing)... but it won't work! The animation just hangs on the first frame, but it does render if it's a simple BMP image, so I don't understand what the problem is. I've tried rendering it as an image sequence since I have Virtual Dub, but then it runs out of memory after the 30th frame. Any suggestions?

maybe you saved/loaded your background image in some gigantic format/resolution by mistake and it is sucking uip all the memory. try a 'gentle' render of the animation, like on draft, just to see if this is resource overload. ::::: Opera :::::

It's not the background file because I tried removing it, and just tried rendering Michael, but the same problem occured. I also tried rendering without bump maps, and still no success. This is very odd...

"but then it runs out of memory after the 30th frame."

Since you did render as an image sequence, have you tried starting the render again at the frame where it left off when it locked up? In other words, if it dies at frame 30, then reboot, and start your render again on frame 30. I don't know why it's crashing, but if you can't figure it out, that's one solution that might allow you to get through it via "brute force". Message edited on: 01/21/2005 14:16

What's your default set at 30? You'll have to adjust your default frame rate. I render animations in P4 just fine but you'll have to play around with the frame settings until you can get it just right for your scene. The longer the avi the more frames you will need. Try upping the anti on the frame rate? see if that helps?

I'll check it out and see what I can do. It's an odd problem since I've never encountered it before, and I've done nothing new in terms of settings. But thanks for the help, I'll see what I can do with it.

What I do on mine is add a 'key' frame for every 30 frames sometimes I'll even go lower if I have a very large avi like a 'key' frame at 15 instead of 30 to go faster. I'm pretty sure in P4 the frame default is 30. In animation everything has to do with how many 'key' frames you add not just the amount of frames.

"In animation everything has to do with how many 'key' frames you add not just the amount of frames."

That's not entirely accurate, zippy. You can add as many keyframes as you want along the course of 30 frames in the timeline, but if you render your animation at a framerate of 30 frames per second, it's still only going to last 1 second when you play it back. If you render at 60 FPS, then it will speed up your movie x2. 15 FPS will cause it to play back 2x slower. Message edited on: 01/22/2005 16:06

When I render in Poser4 what I use is a key frame at 15 and it rendered slightly faster not slower than when I used a keyframe at 30. To get a minute you need 60 frames total. 30 is half a minute, not really long enough to even see the animation. If you stick to 30 frames while adding a larger avi background you may need to add more keyframes at 15 to make it move faster in the animation? Depending on the size of the file he ends up with. So, in a minute what I did was add 2 keyframes instead of 1. 30 frames then a key frame then 30 more. Am I close? For each 30 add 1 keyframe right??? If he's adding a larger avi file to the background then he would have to go higher or lower on his keyframes? I tend to go lower on mine. I like my animations to render faster than the 30 default. 15 keyframe goes faster on my machine than 30. a bit faster by a second not much. I just keep playing around with the settings, depending how fast or slow I'd like it to go. The more frames, the more time it takes to render the animation. Took me an hour once to render a very large animation on my laptop until I learned to cutdown on the frames.

Message edited on: 01/24/2005 11:59