Hello everyone,
First post (I think) in the Renderosity forums, despite being a member for longer than I can remember. I have a question about the Firefly render engine for Poser 6.

I run Poser off of an external HD hooked up to my laptop PC. I know that my machine isn't that powerful, and I will eventually get a proper desktop and (hopefully) not have this problem. As it stands now, I can only render a moderately sized scene that includes a single figure and about 5 or so lights without causing my system to crash. I keep the rendering settings low, don't use displacement maps, ray tracing, texture filtering, or any other fancy stuff, and keep the bucket size and maximum texture size fairly low. My PC still has good days and bad days though. I've been working on a multiple render project (that will later be composited in Photoshop) that never lets me render 2 times in a row. I always have to restart the crashed program in mid-second render. Yet last night I managed to get 12 renders of a different scene, of similar complexity and the same setting and lighting, one right after the other with no problem what so ever. Strange.

So, my question is this. How much, if at all, does the final "rendered to image size" affect the amount of system resources required by Poser? The only difference I can see between the 2 projects is the size. The "always crash" image was 2000px by 1000px, while the "12 in a row" images were only 1200px by 600px (both at 72DPI). Does the final image size really cause that much of a performance difference? Does the program have to create a larger shadow map or something? I suppose I should really dig out my manual and read up on the subject to make the most out of my limited resources...

Thanks for any help/advice you give me.