One thing I've noticed Seliah, if I have Poser open for a long period of time, it slows down to a crawl. I once even had to reboot my laptop to get things working correctly again.
Yeah, I'm very familiar with that quirk. The simple problem is that Poser is not, and has never been a stable program for me. I save frequently, thankfully, so I don't ever lose more than a couple of minutes worth of work. But yeah, 10 times in a half hour... it wasn't open long enough to come to a crawl. It just decided it was going to throw a memory error when I tried to render, and then show my my way back to my desktop. Yanno, in case I had forgotten where it was. LOL
Yep and a cache clean helps too
I've also taken to emptying the RenderCache folder, which can be found in AppData > Roaming > Poser 10 (in your case) on a Windows machine.
Yes, I do those things on a regular basis also, whenever I have to work inside of this program. I started doing things like that all the way back at Poser 5. It does not make a difference in this case. I really think it's just a matter of Poser 10 being a 32-bit program, and not a 64-bit, but Poser has historically, always been unable to keep pace with DS for me in terms of memory management and scene weight.
But yes, I'm familiar enough to know the little hiding places to clear files out of... it does not change what will and won't render on my machine for me, though. Dusk, wearing one outfit, with his hair and skin, and a simple, flat backgrop like Dawn's stage... and that's pretty much the limit of what it will render. Much more than that, and it starts throwing black screens at me (which I learned back on P5 was a "I don't have enough memory to render this!" issue), or it will start popping up windows with memory error messages... or I'm suddenly staring at my desktop again.
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I have been back to working on this, though. Really, having to completely close the program out and re-open it every five minutes is hampering the process and slowing everything down immensely. Once I move onto fixing the poses, it should speed up the workflow in the sense that I won't have to constantly close and re-open things as much, as I won't be fiddling with materials and texture maps so much.
Anyway - I did manage to squeeze this render out of it... this looks like decent material settings for the average/distance views/renders... It looks like I will need to adjust his bumps just a tiny bit for close-up renders, but not a lot. Also, I don't think Poser needs the normal maps on him... he seems to do okay with just the bump and spec maps.
Here's the one render I did manage to squeeze out this afternoon...
Making some progress, despite the constant crashes.