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