Greetings,

I've been trying to render a complex scene with 77 characters resulting in a blank gray screen.  I asked a Poser tech for help and got a very nice and cooperative reply which I thought I might post for you all in case you have the same problem.  I am impressed with the Poser techs: they have always been willing and anxious to help me, even if they can't solve problems immediately.
Hats off to them.

"Poser was tested with fairly complex scenes...heck, I actually ran a test myself with a model that had 1.5 million polys and it rendered pretty quickly.  Keep in mind polycounts, as that can affect renders as well as the texture resolution involved. Most Poser characters (the G2 figures in particular) have no less than 75,000 polygons. Multiply that by 77 or even 50 and well, we're talking a lot of polys, which can slow render times. As for you getting a blank or gray render I've a feeling that's actually a bug or glitch in the program itself...infact, I think I saw something about such a thing in the bug tracker regarding background images. So that's more than likely the cause of the grey screen, which is already being worked on (or is fixed by now...haven't checked). Regardless, Poser 7 isn't flawless, it has problems and we're doing what we can to work through them but hardware can play a heavy role in things, especially now that Poser 7 relies more on OpenGL.

 I had a talk with the product manager and he actually told me the preview is set up beyond Poser 6's higher preview settings, which while cool, may slow things down on slower systems or systems whose cards can't cope with that. In situations like that he suggested lowering the Preview texture size to 256 or 128 and turning off multi-layer transparency. Doing both of those things sped up preview display a lot (switching to Fast Shade instead of Full shade preview helps too). I'm not sure how much changing the preview settings will affect Firefly's actual renderings if you have it as a separate process but it lets you work with larger scenes in preview anyway.  I should mention that most folks wouldn't need 77 full figures in a scene too. Things requiring that many characters who wouldn't be dead in front of the camera, would be better off using a mix of cut-outs and characters I think.  That would decrease the strain on the computer as well as make the scene more manageable. Regardless of all that, the service release is coming, so I don't think your wait will be very long. I again apologize for your disappointment in the program and hope you find the service release, once available, to be a vast improvement."

Sincerely,
Teyon Alexander
Technical Support

I've had some conversations with Teyon regarding P7 problems and have found him to be willing to, at least, listen even if he can't fix them right away.

I know some people haven't had good experiences with eF tech support but they've never failed to respond to me quickly and, as I said, at least listen and acknowledge my input.

Thanks. We try to do what we can to help. Sometimes it's an easy fix and sometimes it's not, unfortunately. 

Say, do you have that file still?  We may need to borrow it for testing.

and remember : if you put Poser 7's FF into a seperate process, make sure you allow it on your firewall... or you get a plain grey render...

AH yes! I'd actually forgotten that one. Two lashes for me! Good brain there, Khai! 

See, we're human. :)

o.k., so noted. keep it to 1.5 million or less. maybe poser uses 500 - 1000 bytes of RAM per polygon, in toto.

Well, I'm just saying it worked well enough for me with that many. I didn't try going above that. Who knows...the right system, anythings possible. :) Still, keeping scenes below a million would be wise whenever possible I think.  I mean, unless you don't have any other choice in the matter. Keep in mind, that's personal opinion, not official record or anything. My experience may vary from others. Here's the render I spoke of though (shameless self promotion).

Teyon,

I have the file, but I would imagine you would need all the figure and tex files to refer to, right?

If you want it I can send it to you.  It's 50mb without the figures and tex files.  So it may be best if I burn a disc and send snail mail.

Larry

Yeah, we'd need the figures and additional content. It's okay. I'll have a go at recreating the problem with Simon Casual. 77. golly. :)  Anyways, thanks for letting us know about your experience with the program.  This is a message for anyone having problems with Poser or any e frontier product: Contact Tech Support. We will do what we can to help and if we can't, we'll do our best to make sure the problem won't reaer its head in future versions.