Does anybody have any insights into the ray-trace preview window? I find it very useful, for tasks ranging from setting up lighting and reflections to a general check of a scene before I set Firefly running for a potentially long render. However it's recently begun crashing Poser, especially if I keep changing dials without waiting for the preview to load completely; but I get the impression it would eventually crash however gingerly I used it.

Ray-trace preview used to work fine, but I changed two things recently, and I suspect one or other of those is responsible.

1) I upgraded my video card (see Upgraded my GPU, but it won't Superfly for the gory details). As far as I know, ray-trace preview isn't reliant on the GPU, but I suppose I could have run into an issue with the driver. However the preview still seems stable in Poser Pro 2014 and Poser 13. I see that the auto-update option has been removed in Poser 13 - was it known to be a problem area?

2) I updated Poser 11 to the most recent version, 11.3.818, as part of the Superfly saga linked above. Previously I was running 11.2.something. Were earlier versions of P11 more reliable in this regard? I'm not ready to switch all production to Poser 13 yet, otherwise that would be the obvious solution.

The Raytrace preview can be finicky at times, especially if your render settings are set to medium-to-high profiles; that is the bottleneck. I found the auto-update problematic in the Material Room where small changes would trigger it. It drastically interfered with the workflow. I predominantly render in Superfly and Cycles as long as the scene isn't too complicated and texture-heavy, which would impact the preview. But, to be honest, I don't depend on the preview window that often.

hborre posted at 11:15 AM Thu, 7 May 2026 - #4506146

I predominantly render in Superfly and Cycles as long as the scene isn't too complicated [...]

I hear you - some of the Superfly render presets are so fast, especially in Poser 13, that I don't expect I'll need the preview window much in the future.

But I'm not ready to make that leap yet. Right now, Poser becomes completely unresponsive and has to be Ctrl-Alt-Del'ed. That's what I call drastic interference with the workflow!