I've found the limit as to what my laptop will render. I've got a Vicky and Michael in the scene, both closed, a PWFW set, one of REMC's undead, and a few other props. And my laptop chokes every time, even after a fresh reboot with everything but Poser shut down. Her hair isn't too complex (Koz's wave), his is the Daz Wedge. None of their head/body textures are over 2000x, most are closer to 1400. Lighting is minimal, one of the "Illustrender" sets. The way the scene is set up, compositing would be a serious pain in the ass. I'm not even sure exactly where it reached the "too much" point, either. I know that it would render last night before I added the zombie corpse, but I don't remember if I changed anything else between then and now. Anyone have any ideas as to how I could enable the render without sacrificing elements or quality

What OS are you running and how much memory do you have?

Theres a freeware app called Menmax it allows you to "redistibute" your memory it works great. The URl is http://t-rod.rsn.bth.se/tiberius/index.php3?page=memmax. Also you might think about saving your models, once posed as obj files which require less memory.

Win 98, unfortunately, so most of the neat tricks to change my allocation won't help. Yes, I know, I need to upgrade to XP. 125 MB RAM. Usually it's not this bad. I've got FreeMem that usually seems to do the job for allocation, but even IT is choking on this one scene. I just can't figure out what part of it is so amazingly too much. Gaaaah.

Might not be a memory problem. Sometimes Poser gets confused and the scene becomes unstable (this might have happened in any saved version). My advise would be to reboot, construct a simple scene first, render it, save it, load it and render it again. Then start building from scratch. This worked for me several times. I never had a persistant problem with any scene in Poser. Complex scenes just become terribly slow. Pose each figure separately, save as a character, reboot, start Poser and move each figure in, then render and wait and wait, finally something happens and the screen starts building up.

I've had the unstable file problem before, and it Sucks when you're at the final render point. I'd just never seen the "low memory" dialogue before on a render. I guess it's what I get for trying to make a laptop fly when it's barely capable of running.

Try removing some of the bump maps, or user lower rez bump maps. The two things that really drain ram resources while rendering are bump maps and trans maps. If you can limit those you might be able to render your scene.

Another thing you can try is to deal with Michael and Victoria. With all of those morphs, they're real resource hogs. If you're rendering a still-frame image, you can export Mike and Vicky, fully-clothed and posed, as .obj files, and then load those into the scene instead of the CR2's. You'll have to reapply the bump maps and transparencies, but the meshes alone will only consume a few megabytes each, and you won't have the overhead of all those morphs clogging up memory. If it's an animation, you can still do some trimming on both characters with Morph Manager, removing unused morphs.

I thought I was the only one this happened too. Traveler, question, when you remove a texture in the materials doesn't it still stay in the memory. Example, you are fiddling with a scene and change a lot of things with textures but you don;t like it so you delete it. I have noticed the textures still stay. Any way to get rid of these. If you save the pic it saves the textures not being used also.

In a world filled with causes for worry and anxiety...
we need the peace of God standing guard over our hearts and minds.
 
Jerry McCant

I don't think that Poser stores the images in memory, because if you render, then alter the map, save it, and re-render poser updates it. So it must draw the file in when rendering. What may be stored in memory is the location and maybe the low-rez version you see in the texture display mode. When rendering poser will draw in the bump map, trans map, textures, generate the shadow maps, etc. That is where your memory is being chewed up.

Now that's definitely a place to start. Mike and Vicky are far enough from the camera that the bump is almost pointless. Off to give it a try!

ahhh... i see..... It just seems that pics I make a whole lot smaller than others just quit like everyone else is talking about. Pretty frustrating

In a world filled with causes for worry and anxiety...
we need the peace of God standing guard over our hearts and minds.
 
Jerry McCant

KayJay: How much ram do you have on your system?

I have a 1.3 athalon with 640 ram

In a world filled with causes for worry and anxiety...
we need the peace of God standing guard over our hearts and minds.
 
Jerry McCant

You should be in good shape to render bigger scenes. Liek I said try limiting your maps, or use lower rez maps for non-close-up shots. Another trick is to turn off shadows for all lights except for your main one. Those shadow maps can really gobble the poser memory too.

Wow. Um. It's amazing what you can do when your harddrive hasn't been pushed to capacity. Ooops. When the hell did I use up 12 gigs of space?????

Thank you so much Traveler. I was wondering if the lights had anything to do with it. I am soooo lousy at lighting that sometimes I have a lot of lights, many blacked out. I need to try that.

In a world filled with causes for worry and anxiety...
we need the peace of God standing guard over our hearts and minds.
 
Jerry McCant