Issue is that a scene that renders fine on four other, nearly identical, PCs, but on my fastest PC something weird happens with the firefly render. Only started a few days ago.

• IDL and SSS passes work fine
• main render slows down to a crawl when there's 30% left. CPU speed goes down to something like 10%.

Setup:

• Exact same scene works fine on four of my other PCs. Same harddrive / runtime setups. All Poser Pro SR8.
• Issue doesn't seem to do with platform. All my PCs are i7, three windows 7 two windows 10. The PC in question is a w7.
• Memory RAM seems to work fine. Loads up without a hitch.
• Only difference is that this machine is 4.2GHz Keby Lake but with W7 (others are 3.8GHz-3.4GHz). Keby Lake was supposedly designed for w10 (which is probably just marketing BS since it works completely fine on w7). Never had this issue before with Poser or any issue with other apps or games on this machine. Machine rarely if ever crashes. It did hang two months back, but that was a first.
• Did swap out a dead HD about a month ago, new HD seems to be working fine. Been rendering without issues since then... except for now.
• Scene includes animated lights (colors)
• Scene has over 15 characters, all their clothing and hair, and perhaps a hundred props.
• I did load a new prop around the time that it started occurring. Poser does sometimes throw an issue with certain props, where the render shows anomalies. Removing them, or changing the materials sometimes solves the issue. But on the other PCs this doesn't seem to be a problem.

Very random issue. Any ideas?

PS: I recommend a separate techical Poser forum, or is there one already?

There is a Poser Technical forum, and has been for years. But I don't think many people post there any more. Until recently, there were hardly any posts here, let alone in Poser Technical.

Maybe you could try to revive it?

oh sheet, so there is! Didn't notice it on the drop down.

Perhaps the moderator can move this post there?

Oh, wow, that's a different Poser Technical. I was thinking of this one:

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?forum_id=10139

They should probably combine the two.

That might be a good idea lol

randym77 posted at 1:10PM Mon, 23 September 2019 - #4363525

Oh, wow, that's a different Poser Technical. I was thinking of this one:

https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?forum_id=10139

They should probably combine the two.

Ohhh, I never knew this one existed. Most folks probably don't see it, which is why it doesn't get much use.

So I seem to have fixed the issue by replacing the Poser.ini file with a backed up file. FF renders smoothly now.

The difference between the old ini file and the new ini file, besides the expected recent files and UI details, was a line saying 'MAT_WACROS_ON' and in the old file it was set to 0 whereas in the new one its set to 1. How did that ever get set to 0 I wonder? Is there a checkbox hidden somewhere?

I just a note on this a few days ago while looking up information on the old Smith Micro site. Here is a screen shot: and the link: https://forum.smithmicro.com/topic/179/poserpython-wacros-and-scripts-wacromaterials

@tsoren: ok, that is bizarre. Replacing the ini file did the job but that was the only significant difference between the two. the rest was UI dimensions and recent file references. I cannot see how those can have any effect on Firefly's performance (then again Poser is weird that way...). Maybe the replacing of the ini file forces Poser to re-calibrate other things behind the scenes?