https://www.posetteforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3416&p=41044#p41044 ----------------------------------- Endosphere Wednesday, 07 January 2009, 08:01 AM Re: So, You're Still Using Poser 4 ----------------------------------- That's good advice on the texture maps, maovin and Tormie. I also use Poser 4, and have seen the "missing body parts" problem many times. It happens randomly to me when I start to get more than about four or five Posettes or Dorks at a time in a scene with a lot of props. Posfan made a good point about crosstalk which can definitely be a problem, but in my experience missing limbs often seem to be a RAM/memory issue with Poser (made worse by the fact that at least on my machine Poser 4 prefers to run out of phsyical memory and stall rather than utilize virtual memory). One thing that works for me sometimes is just to save the scene, close Poser, maybe reboot my computer or maybe not, and then reopen Poser and the scene. That doesn't always work, though, so here are some other suggestions if you are having the missing limbs issue: a) Look at not only the size of texture maps being used in your scene, but also the number of different texture maps Poser is currently holding as active. If you've been making a lot of changes to the elements of your scene Poser may be holding many texture images in memory that you're not currently using (so that if you wanted to change back to them you don't have to pick "Load Map" again). In this case exiting Poser and then restarting it will clear out all the textures that are not currently in use from memory. b) If your composition doesn't call for a relative close-up shot, you may not need bump maps at all in the scene. You can get rid of them as described in (a). c) Take a look at the complexity of the characters in the scene. Unlike in later versions of Poser with those newfangled injection morphs, in Poser 4 the amount of memory required to use a regular figure can jump dramatically as even a few morph targets are added. If your figure has morph targets that you are not currently using, consider using Morph Manager to make a stripped-down version of the character for use in the current scene by getting rid of any morph target set at zero (just make sure you save them under a different filename that the original). If a human character is not featured prominently in the scene, consider using a "factory default" Posette or Dork as they don't take up much memory. d) If you have background or filler objects in your scene, consider whether they need texture maps at all or if you could just set an object color for them instead. e) I've found that sometimes if I can't get a character to load from the library without them missing a limb or two, if I make a new Poser scene with just that character and then import this back into the original scene the character will appear properly. f)As a last resort consider whether there are elements in your scene that you could render separately and add-in postrender to the final image. As for helping to speed up the render time, here are some suggestions: 1) You mentioned you had the lights set at a shadow map size of 1024, which I think is pretty high. Of course it depends on what you're doing, but unless your scene is meant to be lit in a harsh way there's not much benefit in my opinion to going above 512 on the shadow setting and the effect on reducing render time should be very noticeable. 2) I may be wrong but in my experience Poser needs less memory to render an image in the workspace as opposed to rendering in a separate window. 3) If you haven't already done so, turn off the little Poser Guy that walks across the screen while the image is rendering to let you know what percentage is finished. In the PoserRuntimeScripts folder, rename the file named something like "status.avi" to "no-usestatus.avi" and the little guy (who takes up memory and calls for extra screen redraws) will go on vacation. If you miss him just rename the .avi back to its original name. 4) Think about the number of lights you are using. It is almost always better to have fewer lights that are carefully placed, and less lights equal a faster render time. Also consider whether you have any lights for which you could turn off shadows. I would guess that you probably knew most of that stuff already, but perhaps if others are having trouble too these tips might help them. Endosphere