Hi folks.

I suppose that someone must have posted this before but I couldn't find any info.  Basically I am trying to do a scene using mostly poser characters.  I am using the victorian street scene with two poser characters, one based on V3 the other on M3.  I have first tried to just import the entire scene into C5, this was a bad idea.  I got the usual exception error C5 throws out when it basically has a brain drain.  Okay I thought, lets try it a piece at a time, so I seperated the street scene from the characters and imported it into C5 Pro.  Okay that worked.  I added lighting and some more terrain elements to make for a realistic winter scene.  I did a test render at minimal settings and it looked good.  Okay now the hard part.  I tried to import the characters.  No go, C5 locks up and goes bye bye.  Okay now I am starting to get frustrated..  I decided to try something different to make sure the characters weren't corrupted.  I open them in c5 alone.  Without the scene, they load fine and without them, the scene loads fine.  Okay so now I am starting to think C5 is brain damaged.  Well, I have one more idea and I wanted to ask what you guys think.  If I were to convert the elements into the normal vertex modeler, will they take up less resources?  This is not the first time this has happened in a scene.  I m getting pretty tired of having to scale down a project so much that it is nothing like I originally intended.  Oh well, let me know what you think.

You can reduce the memory drain on C5 by switching bitmap based textures with simple textures in Poser. Then when you import them, use procedural (CPU intensive / memory low) textures in C5. There is probably nothing much you can do to simplify the character models but the sets might be able to be simplified i.e. replacing geometry with bump or displacement maps.

Unless your scene is a closeup or you intend to render at very high resolution,  you can reduce your textures.  First, find out where in your Runtime texture folder the given files are located.  My method is to create a folder called Hi Res within that folder, and I copy the textures into it, so as not to lose them.  Then I open up the original textures in Photoshop and reduce their dimensions.  If you take a skin texture that's 4000 x 3000 pixels and reduce it by two thirds and save it as a jpeg, it's going to take up a lot less memory.  Leaving the textures in the original folder will allow Poser to scoop them up and apply them when you choose the mat file.  When your render is done, you can replace the Hi Res textures to their original place.

With figures, before exporting, go into the Hierarchy editor and shut off every body part fully covered by clothing.  Fewer polygons also equates to less RAM.

For importing, I have less problems doing it one item at a time into separate Carrara documents, where I can tweak their shader settings, especially in terms of specularity and bump.  Then I merge them.  Every time you merge something in, you should immediately save, close the file, exit Carrara, then open again.  I've always found that it uses less memory this way than using the file directly after import.

If it's still too much, try rendering in stages.  Plan out where items, figures, and shadows overlap, then add as many items as you can just short of freeze-up, render and save your image, then delete unnecessary items.  Make sure you go into the edit file and choose Delete Unused Objects and Delete Unused Shaders.  Save as a sequential file, and start adding objects again.  The important thing is keeping your lighting continuous.  Then you can take your renders into photoshop, combine them into layers, and simply erase a hole in the layer above to reveal characters and objects.  You can go even further by choosing to render with an alpha layer in .tif or .psd format.  This function is enabled in the render room.

It's rather mind-numbing ardor, but such tricks will allow you to achieve some deft acrobatics without a computer farm.  Hope this info helps.

For example, if you save James low res in Poser 6 as a CS2 file it is 955KB.
If you bring that into Carrara and save as a Car file it is only 6.22KB.
(Delete the Poser file from Carrara and reimport the  saved.car file of it.)