Would anyone care to speculate as to what would cause the P5 "Firefly" renderer to hang while "rendering light 1 shadow map" for this scene?

For clarification:

Scene includes 3 spotlights, 1 "half tube" background prop, 1 Ground plane, 2 Loudspeaker props. The Background, Ground, and loudspeakers all have attached raytrace reflection nodes. {...nothing I haven't done before...}


I included 2 camera angles; so the resulting shadows could be seen.


I like how the renders turned out; but I planned for raytraced reflections. {I have an addiction!}

Thanks in advance.

Did you have raytracing turn on or off at the time of the problem?

Oh, Oops... I did not say that did I...?

Yes, raytracing was on.  The demo images are done in the "Poser 4" renderer.

Then it is possible that the program did not freeze but was only working very slowly.  I have had some serious slowdowns with Poser when using reflections.  You have to watch out for too many interreflections.  I tried a scene with three reflective and refractive cylinders, several other reflective surfaces and four lights with one casting shadows.  The shadow map took over eight hours to be prepared (over night).  But then ther whole rendering process ran so slow that I did interrupt it and altered the composition.

Poser does not seem to have very good optimizing code such as bounding blocks or slabs etc.

Thanks for replying!

I agree that sometimes Poser takes a long time to render shadow maps; but this image is not so different from others that I have created. In fact this image could be considered "low reflections" when compared to others... and after rendering the attached images, I let Poser "hang" for 6 hours.

No matter what adjustments I make the "progress bar" stops at the same spot, and refuses to move.

I often use many reflections (many objects with raytraced reflections) in a single image; that is why I say I have an addiction.

Have you tried to delete all the lights and use a different set with the same properties to see if there are the specific lights causing the problem or something else?

You can also render the scene twice with one of the light off and then try to mege them.

Good suggestions Tormie.

I did not try to "redo" the lights; but I think I've eliminated everything else from the list of possibilities.

Thanks!

Try to use ray traced shadows for your main light, they don't use much memory and looks nice, just remember to set shadows in the parameter dial to something between 0.5 or 0.8 or will get very dark. Hope it helps, very nice scene  

Thanks everyone for the assistance, and comments.


However, nothing worked! I tried everthing twice. I even went so far as to one by one remove objects, textures, and lights from the scene; but each time the render would hang at the exact same spot.

I finally decided that the .pz3 was corrupted; so I completely rebuilt the scene, and now it works fine.

{Ironicly, by that time I had lost interest in the "loudspeaker" props; so i removed them.}


All things considered, I guess this wasn't a "3D Nightmare"; just another Poser learning experience.

Thanks again!

Can't help with the specific problem, but while snooping around the big forums for technical information I ran across this thread.  While it is specific to P6, it had some interesting information about the firefly render engine and long or hanging renders.

Interesting observation about Poser6,Firefly, and obj Materials in re: Renderin
http://market.Renderosity.com/mod/f...=2228908&page=1