Poser 7 keeps crashing on me. It barely can render one image and I have to save and shut it down and relaunch it to do another render.

I have reset up the preferences in every way I can think of. I am rendering at 3000 x 3000 @ 300 ppi.

Below see all the settings I have narrowed down to use. And still it crashes after the first render....sometimes during the first render.

The file sizes range from 20megs to 55 megs.

I wonder that you may be running out of memory. That's a large size with that dpi.

Laurie

I am working with Poser7 with the last patch on a Macbook Pro with 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM gigs and a 2.66 GHz Core i7 Processor.

I know I have a powerful enough system to do the renders I am working on which is why I am losing my mind with these stupid crashes.

Can anyone help me figure this out?

Quote - I wonder that you may be running out of memory. That's a large size with that dpi.

Laurie

So how am I supposed to get a decent sized render for creating images for reproduction if I can't render in the larger sizes? What sizes do other people render in for publication?

As Is aid the render sizes range from 20 megs to 55 megs and the final .tif renders range in about the 20meg size range. Isn't that around what others doing work for reproduction render sizes in?

Regardless of how much system memory you have, Poser 7 is a 32 bit program and as such cannot use more than 3 Gb.

I am not familiar with MAC brand, but use whatever to see how much memory is being used by process before and when it crashes.

Question, when was the last time you cleared out cache, temp flies, registry etc and defragged your hard drive?   Jan

Quote - Question, when was the last time you cleared out cache, temp flies, registry etc and defragged your hard drive?   Jan

Well, if he has a Mac he wouldn't have some of that ;);

Laurie

Try loading your scene.  Open the general prefs, go to document tab and click on the clear cache button below the number of undo levels.

Resave the scene.

Close Poser.  Reboot the machine.  Relaunch Poser load the scene.  Check your render settings and see if the scene will render.

dpi is irrelevant to render size btw, just multiply the X and Y size required by 300 to get the pixel dimensions to render to.  3000 x 3000 at 300dpi would work out at 900,000 x 900,000 pixels which would crash most render engines tbh.

10" x 8" at 300 dpi works out at 3000 x 2400 pixels

Quote - dpi is irrelevant to render size btw, just multiply the X and Y size required by 300 to get the pixel dimensions to render to.  3000 x 3000 at 300dpi would work out at 900,000 x 900,000 pixels which would crash most render engines tbh.

10" x 8" at 300 dpi works out at 3000 x 2400 pixels

Interesting math. I set my images up to render in inches at about 16 x 20 or 11x17 at 300 dpi. When I turn that number to ppi it comes out to about 3000 x something depending on the other linear size. I do it at that size so I can get a bigger image to work with for better detail when I paint or do post work and then parce it down to smaller sizes as needed for printing smaller images or for offset reproduction.

I certainly don't try to render at 900,000 x 900,000 besides Poser has a cut-off size doesn't it at 3200 or 3400...something like that. The render window almost always reads at FULL size 3000 x 3000 most of the time depending on linear size set up. Lately I saved the default render setup stage as a square format 3000 x 3000 to give me something better to crop from. For quicker renders to look see I render at either 1/2 or 1/4 quarter size to get an idea what needs to be fixed for final render so how are you getting the 900,000 x 900,000 size?

Quote - Try loading your scene.  Open the general prefs, go to document tab and click on the clear cache button below the number of undo levels.

Resave the scene.

Close Poser.  Reboot the machine.  Relaunch Poser load the scene.  Check your render settings and see if the scene will render.

The UNDO levels was set as default at 50. What is the significance of that many undo levels? I reset it to 10 but I really don't see the value of even that many. I never see Poser undo that many levels back anyway on my system even when the default was set at 50.

I did empty the cache BTW and it still crashed. Basically I can only render one big detailed image at a time but only if I set the render specs as I outlined them in the capture frames  Posted here.

What will happen if i learn to work with fabric room or depth of field or reflections or HDRI lighting or even setting up certain files designed for it to use displacement maps? I willn ever be able to do any larger renders that way if it is crashing now for simpler or for what I consider simpler renders.

Quote - > Quote - Question, when was the last time you cleared out cache, temp flies, registry etc and defragged your hard drive?   Jan

Well, if he has a Mac he wouldn't have some of that ;);

Laurie

Never deragged any of my Macs...told it isn't really necessary because of the way the Finder works. I have thought of doing so but........leaving my system on in a semi sleep mode it automatically does system analysis and repairs during certain latr night hours.

I did clear the Poser Cache in preferences tab but it didn't seem to help much also lowered the number of undo's from the default 50 to 10 and I doubt i will even need it set that high.

Quote - ... What will happen if i learn to work with fabric room or depth of field or reflections or HDRI lighting or even setting up certain files designed for it to use displacement maps? I willn ever be able to do any larger renders that way if it is crashing now for simpler or for what I consider simpler renders.

In my experience the things you render have more impact on the memory usage than the render settings themselves. HDRI lighting and textures in general do not add very much to the memory consumption. For example a V4 can add more than 100MB to the memory used during render, dynamic hair even more (a few 100K hairs can easily use over 1GB). I do not know about displacement maps, but in general you use the scene to fill up your memory and then use the render settings to make everything slow :-)

Another memory killing are light sets within the scene.  The more you have active the longer the render which can choke and kill the app.

I always keep my undo levels down around 5.  I only use it occasionally because like most long time Poser users, we learned to live without it for so long.

Have you tried rendering the scene in pieces?  Background, mid ground and foreground and then compositing in your image editor?

Is there any way to you can lower texture resolutions on you mid and background figures?  Sometime getting rid of specular and even displacement and bump maps can help.

Never thought about a lot of this.

I know V4 consumes more memory than V2 for instance and that some product vendors use very high res textures for their character products. I used to parse some of these huge sizes down when i worked in P4 but never have since I got on my new machine thinking I had a mega box rendering tool. My how stupid we tend to get sometimes.

Not sure how to render in pieces.

I guess I can lower the undos cache to 5 to help.

I usually us a three to 5 light set-up and only one light usually casts shadows.

i know lights espeially shadow casting lights consume more memory especially when you have figures leaves trees and other natural environment stuff casting shadows for realism.

But what happens when you work with a product like Bryce or other 3D apps that create for instance, a whole jungle scene with rain and specularity and water reflections and bumps and.....?

Is there any way of getting the new DAZ gen 4 figures to work without ALL the ++ morphs for instance and select just certain morphs as needed for a particular figure for a particular render?

If V4 for instance is already a dense mesh adding the ++ morphs and hair and textures and clothes and props......how do people render with all that stuff in the stage?

I see images with three or four or 8 figures fully dressed and textured in sets and with props etc and it drives me crazy I can't get that? Seems no matter whatever kind of quipmnt i get it is never enough to do it the way I want to do it.

Should have just stuck to photography.  :(

Well Shante, it would be nice if a Make Art button made renders simple and correct all the time, but that is not going to happen.  With every iteration of Poser, we get new features which either mystifies or baffles us.  And it would seem that we are on a new learning curve again.  But I have found that there is no standardization among vendor content that will integrate seamlessly within a scene.  They don't render correctly or do not match with other prominently displayed content.  Now, I need to analyse every piece of content in the Material Room and correct all material zones which don't agree with my thinking or scene integrity. 

Valuable tips I can offer:

Never use diffuse_values are 100% (0.1), start @ 80% and work your way down.  Most objects in nature do not reflect diffuse lighting @ 100%; this could be a probably cause of render crashes, Firefly calculating far more than necessary.  High ceilings in a room, drop the diffuse_value further, your lighting may not necessarily reach those corners so diffuse reflection is lower.

Reserve displacements maps for closeup renders, though this may increase render time. 

Bump maps equally important and better if you do not want to alter the mesh.  Good for medium distances.  Really distance objects would neither need displacement nor bump mapping, waste of computing power.

If you want minimize morph++ to your characters, simply select the morphs you want from the Morph++ folder.  All the individual morphs are stored there, pick and chose what you want.

Reduce your texture resolution in your scene accordingly.  Again, distance objects can have lores textures with texture filtering on quality to convey a sense of depth of field.

And I would recommend material Gamma correction, but that would be a little too much to handle at this moment.

Quote - I always keep my undo levels down around 5.  I only use it occasionally because like most long time Poser users, we learned to live without it for so long.

Have you tried rendering the scene in pieces?  Background, mid ground and foreground and then compositing in your image editor?

Is there any way to you can lower texture resolutions on you mid and background figures?  Sometime getting rid of specular and even displacement and bump maps can help.

I thought specular, displacement and bump maps was determined by render preferences overall.

Is there a way to selectively decide what gets what in a render?

Though I do use bumps, I don't use displacement maps and specular maps do make the skins look better otherwise I could just use the old P4 Render Engine like I did in the beginning of my use of P7. But the P7 render quality is so much nicer....apparently at a cost.

Some of the bckground props are so detailed thinking of retexturing them selectively on a render by render basis gives me the belly churns. I already take too long setting up my little scenes. But I guess I would have to figure out how to do that for the future good of my renders.

Hi

Thanks for these tips...really help put meaning to all those damn dials.

Never knew what those individual morphs were in the ++ folder. THanks for the clarity on that too.

Short of opening all the textures for all the stuff in the scene and sometimes i use a lot of stuff in my stupid pursuit of trying to make my scenes look like a photograph (as I said Stupid!) How would I Selectively adjust texture resolutions? What is TEXTURE FILTERING ON QUALITY?  Though i do know what depth of field is having been a photographer, I absolutely do NOT know how to apply it with Poser. Would be very cool being able to but I am sure that too will tax my system.

I don't know the controls in the MATERIALS ROOM. I look at that and my eyes cross.

Not much of a techy kind of guy I am more of an illustrator so tackling the damn lesrning curve of the app is more than I can sometimes handle. I just wnt to sit down and set my stage and render. I guess that is what I meant about having the magic button to push to simplify things.  :(

Quote - Well Shante, it would be nice if a Make Art button made renders simple and correct all the time, but that is not going to happen.  With every iteration of Poser, we get new features which either mystifies or baffles us.  And it would seem that we are on a new learning curve again.  But I have found that there is no standardization among vendor content that will integrate seamlessly within a scene.  They don't render correctly or do not match with other prominently displayed content.  Now, I need to analyse every piece of content in the Material Room and correct all material zones which don't agree with my thinking or scene integrity. 

Valuable tips I can offer:

Never use diffuse_values are 100% (0.1), start @ 80% and work your way down.  Most objects in nature do not reflect diffuse lighting @ 100%; this could be a probably cause of render crashes, Firefly calculating far more than necessary.  High ceilings in a room, drop the diffuse_value further, your lighting may not necessarily reach those corners so diffuse reflection is lower.

Reserve displacements maps for closeup renders, though this may increase render time. 

Bump maps equally important and better if you do not want to alter the mesh.  Good for medium distances.  Really distance objects would neither need displacement nor bump mapping, waste of computing power.

If you want minimize morph++ to your characters, simply select the morphs you want from the Morph++ folder.  All the individual morphs are stored there, pick and chose what you want.

Reduce your texture resolution in your scene accordingly.  Again, distance objects can have lores textures with texture filtering on quality to convey a sense of depth of field.

And I would recommend material Gamma correction, but that would be a little too much to handle at this moment.

 

Thanks...I'll try to remember this.

So, this is how I would adjust for individual sharpness/resolution for the different elements in a scene? Just select the item I want to reduce and go here to do it?

I agree the Poser 7 technics are trash, even if i prefer to use it than the newer versions of poser.

I have to always make a 2nd file of my projects. sometimes it happens, that while the program crashes during a render, the whole file is damged and only good for the trash.

i make the body shadows now most time with photoshop, just use a quick render to see where to put the shadows. it saves a lot of render time.  the same i do with the sharpness tool in photoshop.

Quote - I agree the Poser 7 technics are trash, even if i prefer to use it than the newer versions of poser.

I have to always make a 2nd file of my projects. sometimes it happens, that while the program crashes during a render, the whole file is damged and only good for the trash.

i make the body shadows now most time with photoshop, just use a quick render to see where to put the shadows. it saves a lot of render time.  the same i do with the sharpness tool in photoshop.

Hmm!?

Never had that problem. When I was working in Poser 4 it crashed a LOT!

So I got used real quick to save all changes as I went along to make sure that didn't happen.

Now if Poser crashes it just closes but the saved file is no longer in RAM but saved on the hard drive so I don't lose anything......that is as long as the hard drive doesn't crash too and that has happened a few times too but not recently.

THe nice thing about a laptop is the battery acts as a backup power in the event power goes out. But I can't tell you how many hours of work I have lsot since I started working in a digital environment because of these darn power spikes, browns and outs while working on desktop units....and believe it or not most of them have occured while backing up!!!!!