Those who have been around longer may know this. In hindsight I knew it, but Poser fooled me again with it today, so for all newbies and others short of memory like me:

*Firefly produces no render if there is not at least one (1) figure in the scene!  The figure may not be 'hidden', but need not be actually 'seen' by the camera.

*So, if you want to make a quick 'check' render of the props background only, and you want to 'hide' the figure for speed, you will need to add a figure.

That's not my experience... (Poser 7 / PC)

nor mine.  my default scene is a sphere, a pedestal and the old infinity cove.  all have procedural textures and ambient occlusion on them, so they need firefly.  i've never had a problem rendering it.

edited to specifiy: poser 6, all SRs have been the same.

I haven't seen it either.  I often use figureless scenes, even empty scenes
when testing scripts, and never had Firefly refuse to render in any Poser version. 

(More precisely, it refuses for plenty of OTHER reasons, but not this one!)

unfortunately I can confirm this strange behavior in Poser 7 SR1 (never happened in any other Poser version before). There must be at least one non hidden figure in the scene. Otherwise Firefly renders a blank scene on my machine. And to make things worse, this figure must be a people figure (V3, V4, A3, etc.). I have tried it with many different props and with other "figures" like buildings, vehicles, plants as well. No way! Really strange and I have no clue why this happens.

just found some info about this error in the P7 forum at content paradise. It has to do with using depth mapped shadows (it won't happen if you use raytraced shadows) and with rendering in a seperate process.

Teyon over at CP wrote on March 11:

"We're already aware of it and working on a fix but thanks! We expect this to be corrected fairly soon.
Meant to add that if you turn off Separate Process, the problem most likely will correct itself. That's a temporary work around until the fix is ready."

Ah!  I don't use the separate process in P7 because my firewall interferes
with it, so I haven't been able to see that problem. 

Poser sends a file, roughly equivalent to a PZ3 but in different form,
to the separate renderer.   Must be something about how the renderer
reads the info; maybe it looks for figures and quits if it doesn't find any.

Quote - Those who have been around longer may know this. In hindsight I knew it, but Poser fooled me again with it today, so for all newbies and others short of memory like me:

*Firefly produces no render if there is not at least one (1) figure in the scene!  The figure may not be 'hidden', but need not be actually 'seen' by the camera.

*So, if you want to make a quick 'check' render of the props background only, and you want to 'hide' the figure for speed, you will need to add a figure.

This is only if you are using Multiple Processes in Poser 7, and will be fixed with the next SR!

Thank you all. For a moment I thought I was the only one having this.

Mayb I am wrong, but I remember having read somewhere at some moment in time that this has been an issue in older Poser versions (2? 3?) also.

Anyway, apparently it is going to be fixed.

B.

Is there any sense of an ETA for the next patch?