I didn't think about sharing this until I read an articles about Poser Crashing after trying to do a long render.

If you know that Poser 8 is going to need some hours to render a complex scene then make sure you adjust your screen saver mode or your computer sleep mode.  I have notice with long renders such as indirect lighting that my computer's sleep mode isn't Poser 8 friendly.  I used to walk away from the computer only to come back to see that Poser 8 has crashed. So one day I sat in front of the computer to watch was was actually going on. This meant that I had to move the mouse to keep the computer from going into sleep mode.

Long story short. No crashes.  If you rendering complex scenes then make sure that you adjust your computer so that it doesn't go into sleep mode.  I know it is the sleep mode because sometimes after long periods of time in sleep mode my computer doesn't wake up and I have to restart it.  Some others may be having this same issue. Give it a try to see if it help with the crash issues.

Frederick
Poser By Design

You may want to disabled that sleep mode and see if it helps you.  In Windows, it's under Control Panel -> Power Options -> Power Schemes -> Always On.

I haven't used sleep mode or even screen savers in over 9 years.

Quote - I haven't used sleep mode or even screen savers in over 9 years.

Same here, for that very reason. If I have a long render that's going to take all night, I just leave Poser to do it's thing and just turn off the monitor.

(edit): I did have problems with Poser 7 crashing during a render before I switched the render to a separate process. Since then, no crashes.

Laurie

 Not to hyjack this thread, but has anyone else had a problem with Poser renders crashing with threads set to 2? I've got an AMD 6400+ dual core and it WILL NOT render using 2 threads even with separate process checked.

Quote - > Quote - I haven't used sleep mode or even screen savers in over 9 years.

Same here, for that very reason. If I have a long render that's going to take all night, I just leave Poser to do it's thing and just turn off the monitor.

(edit): I did have problems with Poser 7 crashing during a render before I switched the render to a separate process. Since then, no crashes.

Laurie

Yeah I just heard that separate process thing might be the solution to my long animations crashing Poser 8 since it opens and closes FFRender for each and every frame and hopefully thereby releases said memory back to the system in large chunks instead of a bunch of small ones. I'm currently on frame 316 of the 801 frame animation and I've added four more characters to the scene as well.

Task manager shows Poser using just under 400 megs of ram and FFrender is using anywhere from 212 Meg to 450 megs and releasing it all back after each frame. I'm also ony using 1 thread now instead of 2. Cross your fingers! I know I am!

I think that you definitely don't want your system going into standby or hibernate if you're rendering, anymore than you want a cat anywhere near the keyboard. Results probably vary for screensavers depending on the application, the system and the screensaver itself, but I'd disable them as well. I have my monitor set to  power down after 10 minutes of inactivity and that seem to work fine.

My problem is that even uncomplicated scenes render excruciatingly slow in Poser 8 :(

A simple v4 with hair portrait rendered in the main window takes two hours (compared to 10 minutes in Poser 7) - with indirect lighting it's an all-nighter.

I also can't play a game or watch a video on Youtube while I render - it simply hogs ALL the memory. Will rendering in a separate process fix this, or is there something else I'm doing wrong?

My system is a Dell XPS 420, Intel Dual Core 2.33 GHz, 3326 MB RAM, 32 bit Vista

I've pretty much decided that indirect lighting can wait until the patch.

Dmon: I've never been able to do anything on my computer while poser is rendering. Going back as far as p4. Poser is such a prima donna.

You have a Dual CORE. Go into Task manager and set the afinity for Poser to one of the two CPU's and then set the affinity of whatever else you want to do to the other CPU! Mutitask away!

I read in the pdf manual that if I had dual core, I could use 4 threads. This was great, it sped up render time greatly. I produced an image and posted it at Deviant Art. I restarted my computer and tried another older pz3 file this time using IDL.  After more than an hour and almost at the finish of precalculation, my screen darkened suddenly. I stopped the render. Closed Poser 8, then tried to shut off the computer. It hung up and wouldn't shut down. I unplugged my laptop but then it was still going on battery and still wouldn't shut down. I called a friend and he told me to pull the laptop's battery out. I did, waited a little bit, put the battery back in and booted and thankfully my computer was fine. I thought there for a little bit that Poser 8 had crashed my computer. I guess that I'm going to have to adjust back to two threads and await the serial update of P8.

 I'm on a mac and not having render "crashes" but getting texture error messages and this is how my renders look.  Believe me, the updo ponytail 2 (from here in the MP) and the beautiful zetta boots (from daz) do not have textures that look like this.  They have lovely textures normally. Fortunately SM know about the problem and are working on a fix, but at the moment poser 8 is virtually unuseable for me. Love esther

 Well I have a dual core and since Poser 7 I've used Render in separate process with four threads. Works great.

Perhaps your laptop didn't have sufficient cooling? That might explain the crash. Also even when you shut down Poser, Firefly.exe is still running most of the times. You can see it (and kill it) in the Task Manager.

I do have a screensaver on my computer, mostly for the nice look. >It hasn't interfered with my renders... yet.

And the solution to cats walking on the keyboard? I always make sure I have some other window in focus before I leave Poser rendering overnight. Sometimes, if it's my messenger program, I can see my cats have been trying to communicate with the outside world... :lol:

Wow, setting the render process to 4 threads really did wonders for me!
Thanks much for the tip :D

And I gave Poser permission to access the internet every start-up, that took care of the invisible library problem.

I don't run a screensaver and I don't have a cat. Now I can start rendering ;)