What might cause the P5 Firefly engine (with ray tracing on) to freeze Poser at the "loading objects" stage of a Production-quality render of a Pz3 scene? The file loads and renders OK using the P4 render engine. (FYI, I've used Correct Reference Pro to make sure all of the objects in the scene link properly, so the freeze up shouldn't be caused by Poser trying to hunt something down.)

not sure if this will answer or help but i've noticed that when my characters have clothing on i hide all parts of the body covered up by clothes i.e the legs, feet and arms if the sleeves reach far enough, and that helped me..

I used to get this a lot with P5, you'll find that just one item in your scene will be causing this and you need to find it. The way I did it was to put each piece into the scene one at a time and render using production settings. If that one worked try the next and keep doing that until you find the culprit. The last time this happened on my system was with the ArtemisX gloves, they just wouldn't render with Firefly, I told DAZ about it and they confirmed the fault. All the other Artemisx stuff worked fine except for the gloves. Try and find what item it is that causes this and then use something else instead. thefixer poser coordinator

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2228908

Thank you everyone. I read Anton's thread, and will try the work arounds. Although, as someone else mentioned in that thread, there may be another problem different from the one Anton described, as my renders freeze totally, not just take a lot of time. (I let one run for 12 hours one time, and it was still stuck on "loading objects".) I never had this problem before, and this isn't that complex of a Pz3 that I created. But, as I said, I'll give the work arounds a try and report back.

Other things that factor in are the number of lights (especially the old style "Global Illumination" alternatives that put ten, twenty or more lights in), and the size and quantity of shadow maps.