I know I should have saved the images, but I'll try to explain it, as i think it will be clear enough without pictures. Twice in the last two weeks I have come up against parts of my scene that render black, when everything else renders just fine. In one case it was oranges, in another, the spherical tops of bedposts. (Made me wonder whether the fact that both were spheres was just a coincidence.) The bedposts had identical settings to the rest of the furniture in the room, and same texture..and they were the only thing that didn't render correctly. The oranges were my own texture/settings so I admit I could have done something horridly wrong setting them up!

In both cases, the only way I could fix them was to start over. For the bedpost knobs I ended up using an entirely new shader and just postworking to match up with the rest of the furniture. But I remain mystified....

Your computer MAY need housecleaning.  If you are an AOL user, use their free McAfee Security center to safely clean out your cache, registery, temp files etc and defrag the puppy-especially the cache.  If you don't have it, use the Cleanmgr that comes with Windows.  If you been "working" Poser for several hours, things begin to not work properly -after you have cleaned hourse, do a defrag, then power down the puppy for about 10 seconds.  See if that works.

I use a Mac, does this work, also?

jenay had the same problem on his image "2 girls at an ancient place" , check them out on his gallery (nudity).

He posted that he solved the problem by restarting Poser.

Well, since I don't know squat about Mac, I did a Google search using the phrase "Defragmentation Utilities for Mac and the list of web sites are in the thousands.

The answer is yep, you need to clear your cache and defrag your computer.  By doing both you get rid of a lot of pesky ills, slow performance, quarky Poser operation, sudden shutdown etc.  Your Mac manual should have a section on maintaining your computer, or something related to it and see what utilites it has for defraging and cleaning.  Jan 

If the model has rendered correctly before then try a reboot and restart Poser.

If its a new model then you may have a geometry problem , so try "Normals forward " setting and see if that helps .

"Spherical tops of bedposts" is a guaranteed sign of a normals-inverted
problem.  As Markschum suggested, check the "Normals forward"
box in the Materials room for that model, or for the section that contains
the bedposts.