Hi group. I've been tearing my hair out all day trying to get a scene to render, but every time I try it, crashes. The rendering progress bar disappears and the area goes grey. No explanation from Poser. Enough clicks eventually brings back the image, but that's of no help when I try setting up the render again. Once it worked in firefly without the shadows option but crashed again when I turned that on and continued crashing even when I turned the shadows back off.

This is killing me. I've put so much of my life into this graphic novel- more than 2 years now (!) and now THIS happens.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Try reducing the bucket size to something small like 16 (MB), or less even, if it lets you.

You can try rendering the scene in smaller parts, and then adding them together in gimp, or something. Right next to the render button, is render area...

When I set up a little scene, I save, then when something goes flaky, I exit, and run Poser again. Sometimes it helps clear Poser, as things can clutter up. You may have done this already.

My process, is to boot up.

Call up taskmanager (with the old 3 fingered solute).

I'll see then my max physical, my page file, and my total max (physical + virtual).

Load up a figure, or a prop, or a scene, and watch your page file value go up each time. Once it passes the physical value of RAM you have, things will slow down a tad. Note that if you load something, and then delete it, your page file usage will not go down to the value it was before you loaded the deleted item (in this case save the scene each time you are happy before loading the next item, then you can safely exit and rerun Poser to clear the clutter should you be ready to render). Now when you press the render button, your page file use goes up some more, per light, and if you have shadows on, then more so, as you say. I note you have a fetish for the G2 figures at over 97k poly each, if only you had gone with P4 figures (self inflicted crisis, I say).

I'm running XP 32bit. The typical scenario of virtual memory is 3GB (HD space), in addition to physical RAM. Which is shared between the XP OS, and the user applications (half each).

I've set mine up to be greedy, and use more virtual memory, in addition my Poser 6 has been set to know it can use more virtual memory, if it is present. Worth the effort to learn and do.

____________
I've found that to do well with any figure you really need to have a passion for that figure,

...and I hope you develop that passion for yours.

Sorry that was a bit rushed the point about taskmanager, is if you click on the performance tab, you can monitor you memory use. That way you'll know in advance if you are pushing your system too far.

____________
I've found that to do well with any figure you really need to have a passion for that figure,

...and I hope you develop that passion for yours.

Chromium wrote: [View Post]

Try reducing the bucket size to something small like 16 (MB), or less even, if it lets you.

You can try rendering the scene in smaller parts, and then adding them together in gimp, or something. Right next to the render button, is render area...

When I set up a little scene, I save, then when something goes flaky, I exit, and run Poser again. Sometimes it helps clear Poser, as things can clutter up. You may have done this already.

My process, is to boot up.

Call up taskmanager (with the old 3 fingered solute).

I'll see then my max physical, my page file, and my total max (physical + virtual).

Load up a figure, or a prop, or a scene, and watch your page file value go up each time. Once it passes the physical value of RAM you have, things will slow down a tad. Note that if you load something, and then delete it, your page file usage will not go down to the value it was before you loaded the deleted item (in this case save the scene each time you are happy before loading the next item, then you can safely exit and rerun Poser to clear the clutter should you be ready to render). Now when you press the render button, your page file use goes up some more, per light, and if you have shadows on, then more so, as you say. I note you have a fetish for the G2 figures at over 97k poly each, if only you had gone with P4 figures (self inflicted crisis, I say).

I'm running XP 32bit. The typical scenario of virtual memory is 3GB (HD space), in addition to physical RAM. Which is shared between the XP OS, and the user applications (half each).

I've set mine up to be greedy, and use more virtual memory, in addition my Poser 6 has been set to know it can use more virtual memory, if it is present. Worth the effort to learn and do.

Hi Chromium, I'll try lowering that bucket size. I usually run it at 20.  I hadn't thought about that area render option. Sounds awfully messy. Maybe as a last resort. What I'm having some success with is in removing the figures and just rendering the props over the background image. It's my hope I can then strip away all the props and just render the figures over a background picture of the rendered props, if that makes any sense. Had a lot of trouble getting those props to make shadows on the original background, but now I seem to have gotten that figured out. This is an outdoor scene back on Earth with the figures a considerable distance from the camera, so although the render area is my usual 800x600, I'm asking Poser to cover a very large area and I suspect that's why it's crashing. If that's how it works. I'm really quite clueless about a lot of this. Their tutorials seem to be written in some foreign language like Klingon or Albanian, for all the sense they make to me.
Thanks for your help.

OK, I seem to have gotten it worked out my own klutzy sort of way. First I rendered all the props over the background picture I'd drawn up, then rendered my two figures over that and Poser didn't crash. I was really afraid something was breaking down (besides my sanity,) but scenes I'd rendered previously didn't give me any trouble when I tried them out, and that was a BIG relief. This is just a hunch but I think the problem had to do with some free and (very) inexpensive props I'd acquired recently from turbosquid. In a couple cases, their tech team had to modify them before I could use them in Poser and I suspect their hogging of memory was what caused the problems. I've got three more I have to do that same way, then it's back to the setting I'd constructed using nothing but props from Poser's primitives folder. It'll be another week or so before I can post scenes from Varinka and Alex's wedding, but I'm getting there.

Glad you got your scene done...  

Your way is a good way.

I'm dubious about large objects, I check the file size first, and large things (a high poly count) get removed.

____________
I've found that to do well with any figure you really need to have a passion for that figure,

...and I hope you develop that passion for yours.